One week before Christmas in 1944, nearly 200 American planes raided the Chinese city of Wuhan, dropping 500 tons of incendiary bombs. Thousands of Chinese lives were lost in this incident, which has received very little attention in the intervening decades. Here is a rare account of this tragic event, by Stephen R. MacKinnon, history professor at Arizona State University and author of the book Wuhan 1938.
On December 18, 1944, the Chinese leadership in Chongqing, namely Chiang Kai-shek, Chen Cheng and He Yingqin, connected the China war with the European theater by approving the tactic of strategic firebombing of the major occupied city of Wuhan.
The vehicle was the giant new American B-29 Flying Super Fortress bombers that were brought to Chengdu expressly for the purpose of firebombing Wuhan.
The commander of the bombing raid of 92 planes was none other than the youngest two-star general in the US Army Air Force at the time, General Curtis LeMay. A few months later LeMay would become famous for directing the firebombing of Tokyo and a hundred other Japanese cities.
The firebombing of Wuhan drew little attention internationally and was censored in the Chinese press. Yet the physical destruction and loss of life was very heavy. (Chiang Kai-shek in his diary admitted to 40,000.) Hankou* was said to have burned for three days.
LeMay was transferred from Europe to Asia in the fall of 1944 with a mandate to develop strategic bombing plans for Chinese and Japanese cities. Frustrated at first by the ineffectiveness of high-altitude bombing of Japan from China, LeMay began to explore the alternative of low-altitude incendiary or fire bombing (introduced first in the European theater by the British and famously applied at the end of the European war in the destruction of Dresden on February 13, 1945). LeMay planned to use M-69 incendiary bombs, an extremely deadly cocktail of phosphorous and napalm just developed for the purpose by scientists at Harvard University.
The Japanese had been using airbases and railway lines of Wuhan in central China since its capture in October 1938, to wage war and bomb targets in central and southwestern China. Wuhan had been an especially important launching pad for the last big Japanese offensive, beginning in the spring of 1944, known to historians as the Ichigo campaign. This campaign seemed in November-December, after the fall of Guilin, to possibly threaten Chongqing.
Chinese official sources on the subject are understandably limited, but both Chiang Kai-shek’s and Wang Shijie’s diaries mention the bombing — as does the US Ambassador Hurley and others in dispatches. Clearly there was an agreement at the highest level of the Chinese government — on the military side namely Chen Cheng and He Yingqin with US commanders Wedemeyer** and Chennault***. LeMay was given the green light by General Wedemeyer and Minister of War Chen Cheng to firebomb Wuhan in order to destroy its airbases, industrial capacity and railroad lines.
On December 18, ninety-four B-29 Fortress Super bombers took off from airfields outside Chengdu on an operation with the codename Matterhorn loaded with 500 tons of incendiary bombs. For LeMay, this was his first experience with firebombing on a grand scale.
For the Chinese leadership in Chongqing, this was a strategic decision resembling earlier ones like the blowing of the dykes of the Yellow River or torching of Changsha and Guilin. A top advisor and Minister (of Propaganda) to Chiang Kai-shek at the time, Wang Shijie, who was a native of Wuhan, expressed regret in his diary; but he agreed that the bombing was necessary — regardless of cost to the city and its civilian population. Wuhan had to be sacrificed.
Five hundred tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on Wuhan at low altitude on December 18… Japanese defense was minimal. The tricity complex of Wuhan was destroyed. The city and vicinity is said to have burned for three days! [The city continued to be bombed over the three days.] LeMay was pleased, declaring this his first experience with firebombing as a tactical weapon to be a successful experiment.
The rest is history. A few months later, from the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, General LeMay famously directed the low-altitude blanket firebombing of Tokyo (over 1,500 tons of incendiaries in one raid), following up with the carpet bombing of Japan’s other major cities. The effects were devastating and human cost huge (over 100,000 civilians in Tokyo alone). The earlier connection of the firebombing of Japan to the Chinese firebombing and the destruction of Wuhan is not well-known. It remains a kind of historical secret, rarely mentioned today in Chinese sources (or Western for that matter). I have had to rely chiefly on obscure official US military sources.
The most detailed Chinese description of the firebombing of Wuhan that I have so far found is a couple of paragraphs from the Wuhan city gazetteer (my translation, P.H.):
On December 18, 1944, two hundred American fighters and bombers bombed Wuhan in waves, dropping a large number of incendiary bombs over the area between Hankou’s Yiyuan Road and Wuma Road, and from the river bank to the railroad.
An area measuring three times five kilometers became a sea of flames, and all buildings were turned into rubble.
On December 21, airplanes from the 14th Air Force in coordination with Super Fortresses dropped more than 1,000 tons of bombs on Hankou, setting off huge fires in the slum areas near the docks, spreading for about five kilometers.
On December 28, 1944, US General 兰达 (Lan-da, LeMay?) proposed in Chengdu to make US bombing raids on Wuhan the initial step in a general offensive against Japan. From then on, American air units used Chinese bases to launch repeated bombing of Wuhan. As a result, Hankou’s old government district was reduced to rubble and the densely populated area between Wangjia Alley and Minzu Road was leveled to the ground. The area from Jianghan Road northeast towards the old French and Japanese concessions were transformed into a vast landscape of broken bricks and tiles.
The historical records of Simin Bank on December 2, 1944 contains the following passage: “The horror of the bombings had a severe impact on the people’s morale, and their situation was indescribable. Fearing for their lives, the residents gradually fled from Hankou, and eventually more than one third of the city’s population had left.” “After November 18, there was a breakdown in morale, and the city stopped functioning. People left their homes, and most buildings were empty… Many homes were destroyed beyond repair, and dwellings rented out by the bank were also destroyed.”
According to the records, Wuhan suffered a total of 151,607 casualties during the entire anti-Japanese war. Of these, 96,557 were killed, while 22,389 were seriously injured, and 32,661 sustained light injuries. According to casualty statistics compiled by Hankou city in 1946, more than 20,000 were killed or injured in the December bombings of 1944… (During the war), 7,515 buildings were bombed, including 554 before the fall of the city (in 1938), and 6,951 after. Those bombed by American planes accounted for 92 percent. Compared with Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Tianjin and Qingdao, the destruction in Wuhan was considerably worse.
Did the insane American bombing in December 1944, carried out without taking the wellbeing of ordinary people into account, reflect a wish to liberate China as soon as possible? No. The motive was revenge. On December 16, after Japanese forces occupying Wuhan captured three American aviators, they pulled off their uniforms, tied them up, and dragged them through the streets, beating and kicking them on the way, in an extremely bloody spectacle.
In the end, the Japanese soldiers dragged the American aviators to a Japanese temple (outside the current Wuhan city government), where they hanged them and burned the bodies. When news of the execution reached the Americans, they were infuriated and immediately planned revenge. This was why on December 18, more than 170 American planes took off, bombing the entire area between Hankou Yiyuan Road and Huangpu Road, costing the lives of more than 20,000 residents of Wuhan!
Tremendous destruction is noted with tens of thousands of civilians killed. This Chinese source (as well as references on the Internet) suggests that the motive behind the US bombing of Wuhan was simple: revenge for the public torture and execution in Wuhan of three captured American pilots. In the US sources there is no mention of the three pilots. The Chinese and US military leadership had agreed that the strategic purpose was to blunt Japanese offensives in the southwest — and perhaps, it could be argued, this was achieved, By January 1945, the Japanese offensive had been blunted and their armies were beginning to retreat.
*One of the three major districts in Wuhan. Historically, Wuhan emerged as the conglomeration of three cities: Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang.
**Albert Wedemeyer, Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff and commander of US forces in China.
***Claire Chennault, commander of 14th Air Force in China.
Every day, on page A2, the New York Times runs an excruciating feature called “Inside the Times,” wherein one of its reporters tells us (as the feature ought to be entitled) “What It’s Like to Be Me at the New York Times.” Such narcissistic burbling is so empty, and so much less enlightening than the news we should be getting from that skimpy propaganda rag, that this feature cannot possibly have been concocted in response to readership demand (unless those readers are the Times’ reporters’ mothers). What it’s really meant to do is take up space, along with all the other fluff used to fill out those first two pages of the Times : e.g., “Of Interest” (“noteworthy facts from today’s paper”), “The Conversation” (“four of the most read, shared and discussed posts from across the NYT” ), and “The Mini Crossword,” among other trifles.
But this is not to say that we learn nothing from the me-me-me blathering in that feature. Check out what the feature told us last month in “From Refugee to Pentagon Correspondent, Helene Cooper on Covering ‘the Best Beat in Washington,’” an interview with Times employee Cooper.
First, there’s this bit of background:
“I arrived in the United States from Liberia as a refugee at the age of 14. There had been a military coup in Liberia, and members of my family were attacked and shot. I hadn’t seen it coming, too consumed by my adolescent life to pay attention to what was going on around me.
Once we got to the United States, I became obsessed with the news. I devoured the local newspaper and read back copies of The New York Times. I watched ABC’s “World News Tonight” every day, wanting any glimmer of information on what was happening in Liberia and elsewhere around the world. This was in part because I never wanted to be surprised by something again, and in part because I felt isolated in Knoxville, Tenn., where we lived. I used the news as an escape.
Then I read “All the President’s Men” and was hooked. It was for A.P. American History in 11th grade. That was when I decided I wanted to be a reporter.”
Thus we learn that Helene Cooper is a woman of color (lest we miss that point, there’s a drawing of her face above the title) and, as well,an immigrant to these United States (so take that, Donald Trump!) and, to boot, an immigrant of color who was forced to spend her teen years feeling “isolated” out among the nativist deplorables in Tennessee, where she “used the news as an escape,” hungrily absorbing what she could from “back copies of The New York Times” and “ABC’s ‘World News Tonight,’” until she “read ‘All the President’s Men’ and was hooked,” deciding she would go to work as “a reporter.”
Helene Cooper waxes poetic about the Pentagon’s latest ‘toys’
Checking out all the toys
Now read how this reporter feels about her daily beat:
“What do you enjoy most about being a Pentagon correspondent? What is most challenging about it?
The cool hardware! I love checking out all the toys the American military has. I’ve flown for hours in the co-pilot seat of a B-1 bomber, including during midair refuels. I’ve done the catapult takeoff and abrupt landing on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. I’ve been in Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters over Baghdad, Kabul and the DMZ, on the border of North and South Korea. I’ve been on an American naval destroyer in the South China Sea while it was being shadowed by the Chinese. That part of the job is just pure fun.
But covering the military also allows me to keep my hand in national security policy, about which I love writing. I think the Pentagon is the best beat in Washington.
The challenging part is the language. The military lives and dies by acronyms. Sometimes sources sound as if they don’t even want to speak English. I’m always stopping people mid-sentence to make them explain what they’re saying.”
Where to begin? As to the orgasmic thrill that this “reporter” gets from riding in those homicidal “toys,” one wonders how that would go down if Helene were H. Lane Cooper, a fat white guy with a buzz-cut, born in Knoxville as opposed to having fled there from Liberia. The fact is that such naked gushing over all that lethal hardware is perfectly okay from someone with her racial/gender/national profile, even as that hardware is now being inescapably deployed in 36 code-named military operations all over her home continent, and wherever else “our troops” are on the job (for a different take on the “pure fun” of riding high in an Apache helicopter, see “Collateral Murder”).
And now for some real challenges
And while it can’t be easy mastering all those acronyms, if that’s what Helene Cooper finds “most challenging” about her beat, she needs to check out what’s been written on the Pentagon, and/or its works, by journalists who haven’t had the time, desire or opportunity to go joy-riding in a B-1 bomber.
For example, Helene Cooper would find it “most challenging” to press her sources on the $21 trillion that the Pentagon could not account for when finally audited late last year. If Cooper were to look into that mind-boggling disappearance, and the Pentagon’s decades of stonewalling as to where their money (that is, our money) goes, it could be the “most challenging” investigation of her whole career, since the Times and all the rest of “our free press” have carefully refrained from such investigation, even as the Pentagon has, year after year, asked for still more funding by Congress (which gladly hands it over), as Dave Lindorff — who broke the news of that failed audit in The Nation — noted in an interview with FAIR:
“…[W]hat we’re learning is that one of the main reasons for these plugs in the budget is to allow the Pentagon to come into Congress and say, “Look, we spent all the money you gave us last year, and we need more.” When, in fact, they probably are not spending all the money they get each year, and then the money that doesn’t get spent, which by law is supposed to be returned to the Treasury, gets — they have a term for it — it gets “nippered” away from the category it was in, and moved to five-year money in other parts of the budget, where it gets hidden away, and becomes a slush fund that the Pentagon can use for black projects and other things that it wants to use it for without any observation.”
Or, now that the Pentagon has warned of China’s plans to “build a string of military bases” around the world (as The Guardian has dutifully reported), adding some unspecified number to the one that China operates today (in Djibouti), Cooper also might accept the “challenge” of pressing her sources to help determine just how many military bases the U.S. runs worldwide, since, as Nick Turse noted in Asia Times in 2011, “no American knows [that number]. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.” [emphasis added]
In fact, there are more than a thousand U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it’s 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure.
If even the Pentagon does not know (or claims not to know) how many military bases the U.S. runs worldwide, it is because some number of “our” bases — drone bases, for example — are maintained by the CIA (see below). Couldn’t Cooper team up with some other challenge-seeking Times reporter(s) to find out that number? They could, but only if they’d want to (and if their editors would let them).
As noted parenthetically above, the Pentagon is now running 36 code-named operations in Africa. “The code-named operations cover a variety of different military missions, ranging from psychological operations to counterterrorism,” Nick Turse and Sean D. Naylor reported on Yahoo News on May 1. The countries where U.S. special operations forces saw combat — according to Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who served at U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) from 2013 to 2105 — are Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan and Tunisia. “[Bolduc] added that U.S. troops have been killed or wounded in action in at least six of them: Kenya, Libya, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan and Tunisia.”
How is this not big news? Although Turse and Naylor mention no such operation in Liberia, Cooper might find it “challenging” to ask her sources at the Pentagon to shed more light on those three dozen U.S. warson her home continent.
It also would be very “challenging” for Cooper to investigate the scandal, noted very quietly by a few outlets since 2010, of the roughly 1,700 Pentagon employees — and an unknown number of defense contractors, some with high-level security clearances — seeking out and downloading child pornography on government computers.
The discovery of this apparent criminal network inside the Department of Defense arose from Operation Flicker, “a wider investigation conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” according to Voice of America. Since this scandal is unknown to most Americans, Cooper could perform a crucial public service by doing an in-depth report on it for the New York Times, if her editor would let her. In keeping with the Times’ obsessive #MeToo coverage — and its peculiar lack of interest in the scourge of pedophilia outside the Catholic Church — Cooper has reported on Sen. Martha McSally’s (R-AZ) claim that she was raped by her superior officer in the Air Force.
The Pentagon’s school system educates 47,000 students in this country on military bases in seven states, and 24,000 students on foreign bases in 11 countries. Sexual abuse among children there is common, if not epidemic, and the military tends to let it slide, according to an AP exposé published in March of 2018:
“A decade after the Pentagon began confronting rape in the ranks, the U.S. military frequently fails to protect or provide justice to the children of service members when they are sexually assaulted by other children on base, an Associated Press investigation has found.”
In between her jaunts on Black Hawks and Chinooks, Cooper might find it “most challenging” to follow up on that AP report, which seems to have run almost nowhere in the corporate press. (PBS NewsHour, to its credit, did a piece about it.) That the story made no splash makes it quite likely that the Pentagon has not done much, if anything, to make those children safe, so there’s probably a lot for Cooper to investigate.
Diversity as propaganda’s passport
Thus Helene Cooper’s record on “the best beat in Washington” — like that of Eric Schmitt, her predecessor in that role — makes quite clear (as if it hadn’t been quite clear for decades) that the New York Times is wholly at the service of the U.S. war machine, no less so than Stars and Stripes; although that newspaper is explicitly a propaganda outlet for the Pentagon, while the Times pretends to serve the interests of the public, or at least its (Trump-bumped) readership of urban liberals.
Back before it shrank into a full-blown propaganda rag, the Times was highly critical of the Pentagon’s grotesquely bloated budgets. In pieces like “C-5A Jet Repairs to Cost $1.5 Billion,” “Pentagon Discloses $2-Million Increase in Price of an F-14” (both 1975), and “How Pentagon Spending Is Wrecking the Economy” (1986), the Times offered tough reporting on the military industrial complex which is unthinkable today.
This is the same Times that just six weeks ago featured an opinion piece on “Why America Needs a Stronger Defense Industry” and that has Helene Cooper never questioning the U.S. military budget, or its ruinous effects on all the rest of us, but instead selling those obscenely costly “toys,” by pitching the “pure fun” of riding in them, blithely unaware of their atrocious impact down below.
That there has been no protest of that psychopathic rhapsody — no comment anywhere throughout the U.S. press throughout the weeks since that interview appeared — could mean one of two things. The more hopeful possibility is that nobody reads “Inside the Times” (or anything else on those two pages of the paper), and so nobody protested Cooper’s paean to the Pentagon’s “cool hardware” because nobody read it.
If, however, people did read Cooper’s interview, it may be her identity that’s keeping everybody mute. Just as Obama’s color (and Hillary Clinton’s gender) had liberals sitting quiet in the face of an unprecedented surge of U.S. wars, which would have been a harder sell from white-male-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush (even with the background hue supplied by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice), so Helene Cooper’s categorical identity — her status as a (female) refugee (of color) — has clearly let her get away with what some may call whoring for the U.S. war machine as eagerly as if she’d posed, all smiles, in full-page ads for Rockwell, Boeing, Sikorsky, Northrop Grumman or Raytheon.
Cooper’s propaganda function would explain the Times’ avid emphasis on her identity, rather than her expertise in military policy or practices. That campaign began on Jan. 31, 2017 with “A Washington Correspondent’s Own Refugee Experience,” Cooper’s harrowing account of what her family went through in post-coup Liberia, “where enlisted soldiers took over the government and launched an orgy of retribution against the old guard:
“My father was shot. My cousin was executed on the beach by firing squad. My mother was gang-raped by soldiers in the basement of our house after she volunteered to submit to them on the condition that they leave my sisters and me, ages 8 to 16, alone.”
Cooper then recounts her family’s flight from that anarchic nightmare to the United States: “The plane was a DC-10 … it was like we were already in America, with carpets and air conditioning and air freshener.” And then proclaims her stand against Trump’s xenohphic immigration policy:
“This country took me and my family in when we were at one of the lowest points of our lives and returned to me a feeling I had lost: that of being safe. I was so proud when I eventually took the oath of citizenship and posed for photos, waving anAmerican flag, in front of the courthouse where I was sworn in.”
The piece ends with good news about the gradual recovery of Liberia — that “it elected a female president — the first African country to do so” — and a reprise of the exhilarating moment when that DC-10 took off from Monrovia.
“I hadn’t seen my mom cry in the whole month after the coup. Not even the night she was raped. But when the plane’s engines revved and it accelerated down the runway [as] we left for the United States, her chest heaved with big racking sobs.”
So poignant is this story of deliverance (and diversity) that it could seem a little churlish to deplore the author’s hearty appetite for military rides — or to point out that the “military coup” that rocked Liberia in 1980 causing so much misery for Cooper’s family and forcing them to flee to the United States, had been covertly run by the United States.
During the presidency of William Tolbert (who was murdered in the coup), “both the CIA and the Pentagon were … prospecting for leadership change in Liberia,” according to the final report of that nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, founded in 2005 (the report has since disappeared online). That Cooper now reports so gently on the Pentagon responsible for her own family’s agony seems rather strange, to say the least.
The social justice war dance
But what all of this may tell us about Helene Cooper, and her beautiful career, matters far less than what it says about the U.S. war machine’s grand strategy — so far, a winning strategy — of using the clichés of “social justice” to sell war and coups — all over and forever.
This strategy explains Barack Obama’s rise from nowhere to front for an unprecedented seven wars at once (and maybe more), along with an unprecedented war on whistleblowers and total blackout on state operations — a record that is sure to be maintained, if not surpassed, by whichever female, black, Hispanic and/or gay exemplar of “diversity” may be anointed, and “elected,” to deliver us from Trump (right now Pete Buttigieg appears to be that person).
And that ostensible deliverance will have millions of us dancing in the streets, as other millions of us weep, and gnash their teeth — and still the U.S. war machine will just keep rolling along, killing further millions (mostly brown), and driving us still deeper into inequality and poverty.
And so it will go on and on, until the United States of America collapses, or the planet burns, unless we all wake up — and work asone to put a stop to it at last.
Insisting on squeezing the Palestinian struggle to fit the apartheid model of South Africa or black America is a double whammy:
* Firstly, presenting the Zionist entity as a normal state with a few apartheid policies that can be changed is fundamentally false:
a) what is happening in Palestine is not mere segregation and apartheid, what is going on is ethnic cleansing, wiping a country off the map and slow genocide.
b) Racism in the “Jewish state” is ideological, grounded in “sacred” texts, cultural practices and the inherent concept of “chosen-ness”, unlike South Africa in which racism was a momentary convenience, reflecting opportunistic fulfillment of self-interest of a white minority.
* Secondly, when activists are intoxicated with the deceptive mantra of “Equal rights, One State, Two People”, offered as the best formula and ideal model of solution rather than other successful models of Liberation, such as Algeria for example, that means the they participates in whitewashing and rewarding the century-ongoing Zionist crimes, such paradigm gives a lee-way to the thriving of an illegal genocidal expansionist racist entity.
Such solution would mean blessing the expansion of “israel” and granting the Zionist occupier a comprehensive and “peaceful” take over, and unrestricted control over our land and our lives.
Like North America, South Africa was conquered and subsequently ruled by white Europeans several centuries ago, i.e. before International Law adopted through the Nuremberg Principles right after WW2, explicitly prohibited land acquisition through military conquest, and clearly defined Crimes Against Humanity, amidst them Wars of Aggression and Conquest , Genocide and Instigation of Wars & Crimes Against Peace, and War Crimes to be the worst categories of crimes.
All the latter Crimes having been, and still are in even worse manner, perpetrated by Jewish “israelis”.
Furthermore, this “one-state, two people” approach fully ignores the unbalanced premise of the reality on the ground, and the implication such proposal would have – namely the finalization of the aims of the racist, expansionist and exclusionary Jewish Nationalist experiment called “israel”.
It would de facto annex all residual Palestinian post-1967 Bantustans, and attach them to what would inevitably be “israel” no matter what convoluted name would be attached to. Because indeed, there is no need to be a rocket scientist to know full well who would keep the arsenal, who would keep the apparatus of power, judicial, military, educational, political, executive, financial, etc.
All the while the demand granting equal rights to all, includes supremacists and invaders who have no historic or legal rights to the land, who are still flocking to Palestine as we speak, armed to the teeth by their support networks in US-America, in other words, these are active dangerous psychopathic criminals.
Zionist Jews did not come to Palestine with olive branches to begin with, they did not come with peaceful intentions of co-existence with the indigenous population. They gushed in like savages, terrorizing unarmed peaceful farmers and land tenders, they tortured and imprisoned, they came to destroy, “cleanse”, conquer and dominate.
A century on, their racist ideology, their use of terror, and their abominable psychopathic behaviour has only intensified, and drastically. The vast majority of that artificial “society” -and for very specific supremacist ideological reasons- are unwilling/ incapable of viewing the “other” as equal and over the passing of time they have shown to be unwilling to become modest or peaceful , let alone remain peaceful.
Would any decent human-being force a mother to marry the murderer of her child?
Would any decent human-being find it acceptable to force a child to live with his paedophile abuser?
Would any decent human-being accuse these people, child and mother of “immorality” or call them “unrealistic” for refusing to tie their future with their abusers?
Through the delusional “Equal Rights, One State, Two People” proposal, the facts on the grounds would remain unchanged, and probably aggravated, since these facts, stock and barrel, would remain in the hands of ideological supremacists.
What is wrong in “israel” as an occupation, a political system, and an artificial society if far far worse than mere segregation and apartheid… What is wrong is the IDEOLOGICAL RACISM and SUPREMACY having its roots at the core of the concept of being “chosen”, then going downhill to hell from there.
So highlighting the “undemocratic” part of that society and trying to “fix” it, when the rot is at the core is like pointing at the a long fingernail of a person dying of cancer and saying, we think it would help to show the doctor that your fingernail has overgrown and needs cutting off.
The problem is not mere lack of democracy, the problem is a disturbed mindset, resulted from multi-generational indoctrination with the illusion of superiority, the delusion of “unique suffering and persecution” and the fantasy of “entitlement”, all this by a majority of a community. (70% of “israeli Jews” believe Jews are the “chosen”).
It is not the undemocratic system that we need to focus on and to change. It is the MINDSET of a people.
By now, to the majority of the rest of the world, its pretty obvious that their perspective, education and understanding of history has been constructed on myths and lies which does not correspond to reality.
Their moral upbringing has been encapsulated in the narrowness of tribalism, instead of the vastness of universalism; the illusion of their “chosen-mess”, hence, the delusion of their intellectual and moral “superiority” and the uniqueness and special-mess of their suffering.
Their world-view and perception of the other is twisted and distorted by the scarecrow of “antisemitism” as an inherent quality in the world which necessitate ever-lasting ghettoization and separation from the “boogy-gentile” who is forever “chasing” after them because for some mysterious and inexplicable reasons the entire people of the world are born with “intrinsic hatred towards Jews” !
To their utter disadvantage they have been born into a community of many many myths, which is sad and unfortunate, but I believe that every human no matter how disadvantageous their situation might be, is equipped with inherent moral compass, therefore would be capable to break away if they so well desire and aspire.
“israelis” who claim to have understood the role of their community in the creation and continuation of Palestinian Nakba, those who claim to be disgusted with the crimes of their society, those who say they feel remorseful and repentant, if they are indeed honest, then the least they could do is to show some signs of sincerity, meaning to show the desire and determination to correct the mistakes of their “people”.
Only then their victims may investigate the fragile alleys of forgiveness or punishment. The victims should have the last say irrespective of what their judgment might be, they should not be vilified, indicted or moralized with, for they have suffered more than enough for almost a century.
The emergence of forgiveness and reconciliation requires certain conditions:
1) Stopping the crime
2) Admitting of guilt
3) Asking for pardon
4) And most importantly rectifying the wrong
None of these conditions are ever considered as an option amongst that mighty sick racist Zionist society as a collective.
Those very few individuals who show some support for Palestinians are rarely, if ever, able to accept even the return of refugees. They never go beyond calling for “equal rights”. i.e. they NEVER go as far as total restitution and reinstatement of all property and rights to the dispossessed Palestinians.
Morally blinded (by self interest) and submerged in dishonesty (due to the conflict of interest) they pretend not see that such approach is fatally flawed from its inception. For it equates between aggressors and victims. It absolves criminals from being prosecuted by laws of justice, and it absolves them from giving back real assets of land and property.
If Jewish “israeli” peace activists fail to see the lopsided morality in such approach, then they need to go back on their knees for some self-reflection and pray to see some light that might help restore their humanity.
In my entire life, I have met personally with one, only one ex-“israeli”, Gilad Atzmon, who calls himself Palestinian Hebrew. He vehemently rejects “israel” with all its aggression, violence, theft and supremacy. He took the most admirable stance by imposing exile upon himself even though he was born in a settlement near Al-Quds/ Palestine, because he morally refuses to be part of that racist criminal society.
Such is my brother, such is a person of moral rectitude who is worthy of Palestinian citizenship upon liberation of Palestine.
Make no mistake, the fate of Palestine will be the forbearing sign indicating the shape of the future of International Relationships. By failing to liberate Palestine, we forfeit International Law, and that unambiguously opens the gates to an abyss. Any predatory group equipped with some military, would be vindicated to conquer and destroy whatever they want, wherever they want, on the primitive basis of military force. Basically a staggering regression back into the Stone Age methodology, expanded globally by contemporaneous weaponry’s range and effect, which is biocidal, and instantaneous.
In conclusion, in this war-ridden era it has become a matter of acute urgency and prime importance, that Nations reconvene as a Community, to fulfill its responsibility to Restore International Law, as well as to affirm universal principles of ethics, in order to stop the bloodshed and destruction of our beautiful planet, by stopping predators and warmongers by all means necessary.
Generally unknown, ignored, dismissed and unspoken of by activists in the West, but these are the true aspirations of most Palestinians:
FULL LIBERATION of Historic Palestine. The Holy Land must be free from racists committing atrocities. A way must be found, to bring reason to the Holy Land, and there is no other way than to evict foreign criminals. Keep in mind that before the invasion by Jewish foreigners, Palestine was characterized by the harmonious coexistence between respectively a Palestinian Muslim majority, a Palestinian Christian minority and a Palestinian Jewish minority. To restore this harmonious cohesive fabric is the only way forward.
FULL SOVEREIGNTY of the Palestinian Nation over their ancestral country: Palestine, with a constitution and a political system of their own independent choice. For the sake of International Peace and Security.
PROSECUTION OF WAR CRIMINALS, plans of which should start without delay, A Palestinian judicial and immigration system, will respectively prosecute former “israeli” criminals and their associates, and/or grant or decline on an individual basis, a Right to Remain, based on criteria solely to be defined by said Immigration and Integration Services. Anyone who can prove non-participation in the ex-israeli occupation apparatus, and who has demonstrated ability and willingness to a respectable and law-abiding conduct, will probably obtain a chance to gain unrestricted Palestinian citizenship, with equal rights.
RETURN, RESTITUTION and COMPENSATIONS: Palestinian refugees have the unconditional Right of Return. Palestine and the Palestinian Nation at large, are entitled to full and unconditional Restitution of their land and property whenever possible, assorted with appropriate Compensation for more than seven decades of deprivation and slow genocide, Cultural destruction, and a whole array of atrocities and usurpation.
When we talk about RESTITUTION , we mean restoration of property and rights previously taken away, restoration of destroyed villages to the former or original state, and reparation made by giving an equivalent in current value when restoration is not possible, and compensation for loss, damage, and injury caused for the entire period of occupation since 1948.
RESTITUTION meaning:
1. The act of restoring to the rightful owner something that has been taken away, lost, or surrendered.
2. The act of making good or compensating for loss, damage, or injury; indemnification.
3. A return to or restoration of a previous state or position.
Now, the question is:
Would you or any “israeli” Jew be interested to join us in our struggle for LIBERATION as one of us, as an ex-”israeli” and a future Palestinian?
At a recent Palestine conference in Istanbul, many speakers talked of ‘the Palestinian cause’. Many also spoke of ‘solidarity’ with the Palestinians. What do these words mean?
Although I’ve been active in solidarity with the Palestinian cause for ten years, I had to admit to myself that if asked by a ‘man on the street’ in the West, I could only give a vague or even contradictory answer to the questions of what the cause is, and with what one is being asked to be in solidarity with. We all have a general idea and can point to specific rights violations, or know that Zionism itself is the problem, but a short, precise answer?
In the fight against Apartheid South Africa, internationals like myself could say the cause is ‘one man, one vote’ – a standard human rights-based democracy modeled on constitutions from all over the world. One could point to the Freedom Charter and to the broad anti-Apartheid consensus, after the offer of Bantustans was rejected, as to what internationals are in solidarity with.
In the Civil Rights struggle in the U.S., similarly, there was a clear and unanimous call for equality as citizens. And I suppose that, after most feminists had rejected various offers of partial enfranchisement, men the world over knew exactly what the cause was when they supported Women’s Suffrage.
Palestine is, of course, more complicated, both because it has been divided in addition to being conquered and because the PLO in the late 1980s and early 1990s abandoned the simple goal of national liberation. Consequently, some Palestinians support the two-state solution, some a re-unified democratic state and others a re-unified Islamic state. There is no clarity or straightforward vision.
But can a liberation movement do without a vision that is 1) inspiring and 2) simple to convey?
Which Cause, Solidarity with Which Palestinians?
For some, the cause is a sovereign state, any state, even on 15% of Palestine. This comes however at the price of leaving the diaspora in the diaspora and leaving the Palestinians in Israel to fend for themselves. The cause is: some of the rights of some of the Palestinians.
For others, the cause is getting all of the homeland back, with Right of Return as the non-negotiable key, and replacing present-day Israel and the territories occupied in 1967 with a democracy. This corresponds to fulfilling all the rights of all the Palestinians.
Perhaps this disunity on the basics is unavoidable today. But from 1918 until 1988 there actually was Palestinian unity: freedom from Britain, Zionism, and Israel, no dispossession from the land. Such a goal today would make the Palestinian cause easier to understand for the rest of the world.
It is inevitable and understandable that some Palestinians have fought long and hard enough from inside and outside of prison, have lost enough relatives and friends and will settle for the two-state compromise. This stance is to be respected, even if it is in the form of a final settlement.
It is also logical that some Palestinians balk at the sheer unfairness of the two-state solution, and have also perhaps concluded that the two-state cause has now been tried but has failed. Thus, for ethical as well as practical reasons the cause should be the single independent democratic state insisted on by all Palestine Arab Congresses and then by the PLO for 70 years. Many feel there is nothing more to lose, so why not ‘go for it’.
In any case, if we internationals want to work and argue for a Palestinian cause we must pick and choose. Which cause? Solidarity with which Palestinians? Otherwise, we are left with the dampening message that there is as yet no Palestinian consensus, and we have to revert to focusing not on a goal but on Israel’s specific misdeeds as a settler-colonial, apartheid state.
For us, this is not inspiring and even causes feelings of helplessness. In my case, discussing with the public at Palestinian events and market-place stalls, I can say that it usually led to indeterminate, anti-climactic, qualified generalities then a parting shrug of the shoulders. There was no motivating and simple vision to point to.
BDS and Right of Return
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) offers the closest thing to a vision with its call for non-violent pressure on Israel until three demands are met: return, equality within the 1948-occupied territories, and sovereignty in the 1967-occupied territories. It also calls for ‘self-determination’, but this term is vague in leaving open the question of self-determination where. In most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or in all of Palestine?
We BDS supporters can point to these 3 concrete goals as, added together, ‘the Palestinian cause’ and can claim that it is explicitly supported by many, many Palestinians.
Similarly, we can follow the brave example of the Marches of Return from Gaza, and demand one single thing: that refugees become returnees – to their homes, places of origin, and property – wherever that is all over historic Palestine. This is a clearly conveyable cause with impeccable credentials in both ethics and international law. And it involves about 7 million Palestinians.
But are any relatively simple political solutions, or end ‘causes’, implied by BDS and Right of Return?
Rights vs Solutions
Many Palestinians have recently begun arguing that one should desist from debating political solutions, of debating for or against one state or two states. One often hears the message, ‘One state, two states, five states, no state, I just want my rights.’
The choice, however, I believe, comes down to just two – one democratic state or the permanent partition – even if a bi-national federation is somewhat different from one democratic state and even if some Palestinians contemplate the ‘Jordanian option’ of adding the West Bank once again to Jordan. (Nobody seems to be advocating two states on the borders of General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947, which would make the discussion more interesting.)
Instead, these people argue, one should just argue for Palestinian rights, to whatever solution that leads. Or one should just keep fighting the (negative) fights against Israeli colonialism and ongoing ethnic cleansing and house destruction and apartheid.
In my experience, most of the Palestinians who argue against discussing solutions favor the two-state solution, but even some who focus on BDS, right of return and even one democratic state believe that the time is not ripe for settling the one-state/two-states question. I do not understand why working for rights and working for one solution or the other should be mutually exclusive, but many feel that more work must first be done against the many-headed Israeli state.
But are rights and solutions really separable? I don’t think so. Take for example BDS. The boycott would be called off when the 3 goals are fulfilled, and if they were fulfilled, what would be the result in terms of a political solution?
First, full equality would reign in the 1948-occupied territories. Second, the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be utterly sovereign. Third, if only 4 million of the roughly 7 million exiled Palestinians return, in what is now Israel there would no longer be a Jewish or a Zionist majority – something that results, as well, if only right of return is realized, without equality and without an end to the 1967 occupation.
The result of the achievement of BDS’s goals would literally be Two Democratic States. But would there be any reason not to re-unify Palestine the following morning? If this logic holds up, then BDS actually implies one democratic state.
Put the other way around, it is easy to see that the two-state solution is not compatible with either right of return or equality within Israel, for one of the two states in the two-state solution is apartheid Israel, which could not let the refugees come back or treat its Palestinian citizens equally and still be called Israel.
What to Argue for?
Those of us in international solidarity as well as people in our societies who are thinking about the issue at all, and whom we are trying to convince, naturally ponder solutions. One cannot quit thinking, or play dumb. How can one help but work out the logic of which rights fit with which solutions? Yet it is sometimes said simply to ‘leave solutions to the Palestinians’. Of course, but can we not argue for one or the other, in order to make the options clear?
Some internationals do not enter the solutions debate because we shouldn’t ‘tell the Palestinians what to do’. I find this a strange stance, because none of us are in a position to tell a single Palestinian what to do. We have no power and no Palestinian has to listen to a single word we say. We are not Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn or Cyril Ramaphosa, all of whom might be in a position to co-dictate some solution (and all of whom support the two-state solution, by the way).
After a century of Zionism’s being imposed by outsiders – and debating the Question of Palestine without any Palestinians in the room – many Palestinians understandably object to any international acting as if they were an actual stakeholder. But does this mean not arguing for a political vision?
The dilemma of the international picking amongst Palestinian causes and choosing which Palestinians to support might be to simply admit it, and say that we have picked and chosen and that we support those Palestinians who support one or the other solution. Many Palestinians have written in detail for one democratic state, and I, for instance, support them, not the Palestinian Authority.
What we should not do is claim that supporting one or the other solution is supporting ‘the Palestinians’. We can’t claim this simply because there is no unity. In fact, while Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are often polled as to their views on the best political solution, and the Palestinians in Israel as well, all Palestinians are never polled. Those in the diaspora are not even registered in a database. They are never asked, so we can only speculate on what a majority of Palestinians want.
It could be that hesitancy in coming out for one of the solutions can be explained by certain awkward consequences. Those for two states must answer the charge that they are supporting a Zionist solution, since Israel – yes, the Israel we know – would still exist, exist more safely and permanently than ever. The truncated Palestinian state, that is, has a price, and that price is both states ‘secure within their borders’.
Those, on the other hand, who support one democratic state must deal with the consequence that there would be no more Israel, no more Jewish state in Palestine. This entails navigating the minefield that has been laid around the concept of ‘destroying’ the ‘only Jewish state in the world’, of de-legitimizing Israel and denying its ‘right to exist’.
This is a huge challenge, but there are ways to defuse it: In most one-state visions the Jewish Israelis could stay as citizens. Violence is not contemplated. Most importantly during the witch-hunt over ‘anti-Semitism’, one can openly grant that Yes, a Jewish state somewhere might be justified, but not in Palestine – because it is against the will of the indigenous people and because it is at the cost of the Palestinians who had nothing to do with the European ‘Jewish problem’ in the first place. But whether Jewish, Christian or Hindu, it is any ethnocracy imposed from outside which is the problem.
A Vision
I can say from experience which internationals and which Jewish Israeli Jews are actively behind the two-state solution. They are the ones who want to save Israel’s skin. They argue pragmatically, that Zionism must give up ‘Judea and Samaria’ in order to salvage the state on some four-fifths of Palestine. Israel should stay, for historical reasons having mainly to do with European guilt. It should become nicer, but it is ‘right’ that it exists in Palestine. (Those in ‘solidarity’ supporting two states cannot, however, call themselves ‘anti-Zionist’.)
I also know from experience that next to no internationals are actually enthused about a two-state solution. They get enthused about BDS and ODS because their goals are clear and they don’t compromise even before the other side has come to the table.
The one-democratic-state vision, on the other hand, has the power to enthuse, because it contains all the rights of all the Palestinians and because it is simple and explicable. It is like other democracies on all continents. One can obviously put more energy and conviction into ‘justice for all’ than in ‘justice for some, tough luck for the rest’.
Palestinians and Internationals
I am assured by almost all Palestinians that the national liberation struggle needs outside support. Who can doubt that it would help if more and more academics, journalists, and governments would come to feel the need to pressure their governments to pressure Israel so that Palestinian rights can be fulfilled – or at least abandon their unwavering Zionism?
Internationals cannot be expected to suspend their own judgment as to what justice would entail, or to use their logic to see how the pieces of Palestinian rights fit into what solutions. We are in fact not able to simply follow and support the wishes of ‘the Palestinians’ because there is as of now no unity. I’ve seen a move towards one democratic state amongst the rank-and-file in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the U.K., for instance, even if that organization still holds back. It is something we can get behind with real feeling.
I also know many Palestinians who miss having a clear vision, shared at least by a large minority of Palestinians. A vision not only clear but inspiring. The idea of simple re-unification, democracy and right of return seems to fit this bill. I believe it would do the ‘cause’ good if advocating for this solution were accepted and its vision of combining anti-colonialism, equal rights and right of return were to crystallize into a Call like that of BDS in 2005, led by Palestinians.
– Blake Alcott is an ecological economist and the director of One Democratic State in Palestine (England) Limited. The author welcomes any information on ODS or bi-nationalism activity sent to blakeley@bluewin.ch.
As if more evidence was needed to debunk the pathetic narrative that the Russians hacked the DNC computers during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump confidant Roger Stone, currently on trial for lying during the Mueller inquisition released an important truth to the light of day on May 10th. During a court filing, Stone’s lawyers finally gave a voice for the first time in an official setting to former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney, who has been fighting to have his testimony heard by special prosecutor Robert Mueller for nearly two years to no avail.
Binney’s incredible array of forensic evidence demonstrating the impossibility of a Russian hack brings the focus back to the real motive behind Russia-Gate: The destruction of the potential alliance between Russia and a reformed USA under a non-technocratic leader.
The Story so Far
For those who are unaware, Trump advisor and long-time friend Roger Stone is under indictment for his alleged role in the broad “conspiracy to coordinate the Russian-led intervention” into the 2016 elections and for lying to Mueller. He is also pleading not guilty to accusations of obstruction of justice and witness tampering. If the facts now show that there was never any Russian hacking, it follows that the case against both Stone and President Trump should be rendered null and void.
In a nine page motion to suppress ill-gotten evidence now being used against Roger Stone, his lawyers made the point that the entire case, including all warrants to collect evidence were contingent upon the pre-supposition that the Russians irrefutably hacked the DNC computers and provided the data to WikiLeaks. The motion stated: “It is clear. . . that the government has relied on the assumptions made by a source outside of the U.S. intelligence community that the Russian State was involved in the hacking and that the data taken from the various servers were given to WikiLeaks… The government does not have the evidence, and it knew it did not have the evidence, when it applied for these search warrants.”
Bill Binney’s Voice is Finally Heard
Stone’s motion includes expert testimony by Bill Binney whose forensic evidence proved conclusively that the 49.1 megabytes per second download speed of emails from DNC servers on May 23-25th, 2016 which were uploaded to WikiLeaks could not possibly have occurred through the means of a hack of any source external to the USA but rather COULD ONLY have occurred via a thumb drive such as that which DNC staffer Seth Rich conducted and released to WikiLeaks before his murder on July 10th, 2016.
In spite of having briefed CIA Director Mike Pompeo at Trump’s personal request in October 2017, Binney has been blocked for two years from providing expert testimony during the $26 million inquisition. Binney’s affidavit states in part: “WikiLeaks did not receive the stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files that were acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive physically local to the DNC.”
Much of the evidence used in Stone’s motion was featured first by Binney, alongside his colleague Larry Johnson (former CIA analyst) in a February 13th memo “Why the DNC was not Hacked by the Russians” which provide a mountain of information overthrowing the Mueller narrative. In the memo and affidavit, Binney also demonstrates that the file information of the WikiLeaks emails includes evidence that they were registered under a FAT file system since all of the time stamps were rounded off to even last numbers. If the files were acquired via a Russian hack, Binney explains that there would be no such rounding of numbers but an equal distribution of even and odd time stamps.
Lastly, Binney points out the absurdity that anti-Russian private security firm CrowdStrike admitted that they observed that supposed Russian hackers began penetrating DNC servers on May 6th, 2016 yet chose to do nothing until June 10th, 2016. For these reasons Stone is demanding unredacted copies of CrowdStrike’s forensic reports which have never been made public. CrowdStrike had a monopoly on all DNC computers and other physical evidence at the time, which has never been made accessible to the FBI or any other government agency.
More Layers of Narrative Crumble
With the destruction of the Russia-Gate story, a yet higher, long standing and more poisonous narrative is ready to crumble. This century-old narrative states that America is the rightful heir to the British Empire and must co-rule a post-nation state world order together under an “Anglo-American special relationship”. In the 20th century this view was promoted by anglophile puppet presidents on both sides of the aisle.
While all truly nationalist American leaders from 1776 to the present have fought against the British Imperial system which has poisoned America from within since its earliest days, the unfortunate majority of American political leaders have been either witless puppets at best and outright agents of the British deep state at worst. The seeds of the deep state were established by pro-Monarchist families that chose to remain in America after the “United Empire Loyalists” ran off to set up English-speaking Canada in 1783 creating a base for British operations into the Americas ever since. Such mini dynastic clans such as the Bushes, the Mueller family, the Morgans, Duponts etc. are heirs to this unfortunate disease today (1). Every political leader who arose in defense of America’s constitutional traditions faced this British deep state cancer embedded within the Republic and many gave their lives in the fight. It is of note that eight presidents have died in office during the Republic’s short experience, and it should not surprise anyone to hear that all eight were actively opposing in various degrees; Wall Street control of finances within America and British Imperial intrigues abroad (2).
Many of America’s greatest patriots fought hard to ally America with Russia. The historic friendship of Russia and America began in the earliest days of the American Revolution with Catherine the Great’s League of Armed Neutrality and again came alive with Russia’s intervention on Lincoln’s behalf during the Civil War. Amidst a sea of British-intrigue it again congealed under the friendship of Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin who realized they had more in common with each other than either had with Sir Winston Churchill.
Now that Donald Trump and his allies are increasingly free of the shackles of the Mueller hoax, we are witnessing an incredible potential breakthrough as the June 27-28th G20 emerges where Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping will be meeting. Since the earliest days of the 2016 election campaign, President Trump has distinguished himself apart from the technocrats and neo-con puppets infecting America’s elite by stating repeatedly how “friendship with Russia and China is a good thing”, and has continued to display a policy orientation preferring a revival of America’s genuinely nationalist interests and cooperation with Russia and China in opposition to many war mongers within his own cabinet.
Although these revelations of May 10th may not appear to be a large matter, we must recall that it was a single Stone that took down Goliath.
(1) Much of this story is exposed in the 1984 book Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman by Anton Chaitkin.
(2) William Harrison (1840), Zachary Taylor (1850), Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), Warren Hardin (1923), Franklin Roosevelt (1945), John F. Kennedy (1963). Additionally, noteworthy assassinated figures include Alexander Hamilton (1804), Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) and leading Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy (1968)
Rim Banna, a famous Palestinian singer who translated Palestine’s most moving poetry to song, passed away on March 24, 2018, at the age of 51. Rim captured the struggle for Palestinian freedom in the most dignified and melodious ways. If we could imagine angels singing, they would sound like Rim.
When Rim died, all Palestinians mourned her death. Although a few international outlets carried the news of her passing at a relatively young age, her succumbing to cancer did not receive much coverage or discussion. Sadly, a Palestinian icon of cultural resistance who had inspired a whole generation, starting with the First Palestinian Intifada in 1987, hardly registered as an event worthy of remembrance and reflection, even among those who purport to champion the Palestinian cause.
Compare Rim to Madonna, an ‘artiste’ who has stood for self-aggrandising personal fame and money-making. She has championed the most debased moral values, utilising cheap entertainment while catering to the lowest common denominator to remain relevant in the music world for as long as possible.
While Rim had a cause, Madonna has none. And while Rim symbolised cultural resistance, Madonna symbolises globalised cultural hegemony – in this case, the imposition of consumerist western cultures on the rest of the world.
Cultural hegemony defines the US and other Western cultures’ relationship to the rest of the world. It is not culture as in the collective intellectual and artistic achievements of these societies, but as a set of ideological and cultural tools used by ruling classes to maintain domination over the disadvantaged, colonised and oppressed.
Madonna, along with Michael Jordan, the Beatles and Coca Cola represent far more than mere performers and fizzy drinks, but also serve as tools used to secure cultural, thus economic and political dominance, as well. The fact that in some cities around the world, especially in the Southern hemisphere, Coca Cola “flows more freely than water” speaks volumes about the economic toll and political dimension of cultural hegemony.
This issue becomes critical when a pro-Israel Madonna decides to perform in Israel, as she has done repeatedly in the past, as part of the Eurovision contest. Knowing who she is and what she stands for, her decision should not come as a surprise; after all, in her September 2009 Tel Aviv concert, she sang while wrapped in an Israeli flag.
Of course, it is essential that artists of her calibre and the contestants representing 41 different countries are reminded of their moral responsibilities towards occupied and oppressed Palestinians. It is also important that Israel is confronted regarding its unrelenting efforts to mask its apartheid and war crimes in Palestine.
Indeed, the whitewashing of Israeli human rights violations using art – also known as “art washing” – should not be allowed to continue when Gaza is under siege, where Palestinian children are shot and killed daily without remorse and the least legal accountability.
This is why such artistic events are essential for the Israeli government and society. Israel has used Eurovision as a distraction from the blood and gore that has been taking place not far from that venue. Those who laboured to ensure the success of the event, knowing fully how Israel is using the brand as an opportunity to normalise its war against Palestinians, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
But, on the other hand, should we be the least surprised? Aren’t such global music events, as Eurovision, at the heart of the western-centric globalisation scheme of cultural hegemony, which sole purpose is to enforce a capitalist view of the world, where western culture is consumed as a commodity, no different from a McDonald’s sandwich or a pair of Levi jeans?
Calling on 60-year-old Madonna to refrain from entertaining apartheid Israel can be considered beneficial as a media strategy, for it helped highlight, although momentarily, an issue that would have been otherwise absent from news headlines. However, by placing so much focus on Madonna, and whatever human rights’ values she supposedly stands for, we also take the risk of inadvertently validating her and the consumerist values she represents. More, in this Madonna-driven trajectory, we are also neglecting Palestine’s cultural resistance, the core driver behind Palestinian ‘somoud’ – steadfastness – over a century.
In response to her critics, Madonna answered, “I’ll never stop playing music to suit someone’s political agenda nor will I stop speaking out against violations of human rights wherever in the world they may be.” In the eyes of many who are ignorant of the facts, such an answer may appear as if an ‘empowered’ response to those who are trying to sway a genuine, pure artiste from following her calling.
Madonna is an expert in appearing as if morally-guided, yet never translating such morality to anything meaningful in reality. In a speech described as “powerful” by Rolling Stone Magazine, Madonna declared during a Women’s March in Washington D.C. in 2017 “to the rebellion, to our refusal as women to accept this new age of tyranny. Where not just women are in danger, but all marginalised people.”
Of course, Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian women – who have paid a heavy price for Israeli Occupation, war and marginalisation – are not to be included in Madonna’s false revolution. And the chances are, shortly after she sings and dances in a jubilant, apartheid Israel, she will once more take on many platforms as if the Rosa Parks of revolutionary art.
While it is essential that we keep the pressure on those who engage and validate Israel politically, economically and culturally, these efforts should come secondary to embracing Palestine’s culture of resistance. Behaving as if Madonna’s stage shenanigans represent right culture while ignoring Palestinian culture altogether, is similar to academics addressing decolonisation from the point of view of the coloniser, not the colonised. The truth is, nations cannot truly rid themselves from the colonial mindset without having their narratives take the centre-stage of politics, culture and every other aspect of knowledge.
“The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and, even more, without feeling and being impassioned,” wrote Italian anti-fascist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci. This entails the intellectual and the artist to feel “the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and, therefore, explaining and justifying them.”
The truth is that appealing to Madonna’s moral sense without immersing ourselves passionately in the art of Rim Banna will, in the long run, do Palestinians no good. Only embracing Palestine’s culture of resistance will, ultimately, keep the self-serving, hegemonic and cheap cultural messages of the Madonnas of this world at bay.
In 1976 the democratically elected president of Argentina Isabel Perón was ousted by a military coup d’état, beginning the military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla, known as the National Reorganization Process. The coup resulted in 30k+ people dead or missing. Both the coup and subsequent authoritarian regime were actively endorsed and supported by the United States government, with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger frequently visiting Argentina during the Videla dictatorship.
El Salvador:
In El Salvador, repressive governments under control of US interests like the United Fruit Company were opposed by peasant and worker’s revolts for many years. When Farabundo Martí’s social revolts were violently crushed in 1979, efforts to take power democratically were thwarted by US intervention. The United States provided $1–2 million per day in military aid to the government of El Salvador during the Reagan and Carter regimes, with human rights abuses extant, and mainly attributed to the US-supported government. Civil war spread in El Salvador when US-endorsed far-right governments brutally oppressed/suppressed the population.
Mexico, Francisco I. Madero:
Madero was an advocate for social justice and democracy and Mexico’s youngest president. Madero sparked the Mexican revolution and challenged Mexican President Porfirio Díaz in 1910. Henry Lane Wilson the US ambassador to Mexico was deeply involved in ousting Madero. In February 1913, a military coup led by General Victoriano Huerta, the military commander of the city, and supported by the United States, resulted in Madero’s arrest and execution, along with his Vice-President, José María Pino Suárez, on 22 February 1913, following the series of events known as the Ten Tragic Days.
Nicaragua, Augusto Sandino:
Sandino was a Nicaraguan anti-colonialist leader, revolutionary, and leader of the rebellion to end the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua, between 1927 and 1933. Sandino disarmed his troops when US Marines withdrew from the country. Sandino was subsequently assassinated in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza, a Philadelphia-educated Nicaraguan run by the US and CIA, who seized power in a coup d’état two years later. Somoza maintained Falange/fascist rule in Nicaragua for many years, while amassing a huge personal fortune.
Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman:
An elected president of Guatemala, Guzman continued the social reform policies of his predecessor, which included an expanded right to vote, the ability of workers to organize, legitimizing political parties, and allowing public debate. He authored agrarian reform law under which uncultivated land-holdings were expropriated in return for compensation, and redistributed to poverty-stricken agricultural laborers. Approximately one-half million people benefited from the decree, the majority of them indigenous. Árbenz was ousted in 1954 by a coup d’état engineered by the US Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a lackey of the US, replaced Arbenz as president. Árbenz went into exile via several countries; his daughter committed suicide and Guzman descended into alcoholism and insanity, eventually dying in Mexico. In October 2011, the Guatemalan government issued an apology for Árbenz’s overthrow.
Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic):
Rafael Trujillo was murdered In May 1961 with weapons supplied by the CIA. An investigation by the Office of Inspector General into the murder disclosed “quite extensive [CIA] Agency involvement with the plotters”. The CIA described its role in Dominican Republic regime change as a ‘success’ by transforming the Dominican Republic into a ‘Western-style democracy’ from a dictatorship. Eisenhower approved the coup when Castro deposed Batista in Cuba; Eisenhower believed that a communist regime might succeed in deposing Trujillo’s corrupt rule. Trujillo’s son hurried home to replace his murdered father, however US State didn’t like the son either. Young Trujillo was deposed and replaced by Joaquin Balaguer, who was replaced by the elected Juan Bosch. But Bosch was deemed too leftist and was deposed, again by U.S. clandestine intervention.
Chile, Salvador Allende:
The president of Chile was killed in a military coup engineered by the United States CIA, and carried out by Augusto Pinochet, on September 11, 1973. At the time, Henry Kissinger informed President Nixon that the US was not involved in the coup, however the CIA had been plotting against Allende ever since Allende came to power. Pinochet’s subsequent military rule was particularly brutal.
While the Yom Kippur War is a well known Cold War engagement between Soviet and Western aligned forces which took place in the midst of the Vietnam War, pitting the forces of a number of Arab states including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Algeria against their longstanding adversary Israel, the role played by personnel deployed from external powers remains less well known. One party which played a significant role in the conflict, the beginnings of its extensive involvement in the Middle East to undermine the Western Bloc’s regional interests which continues to this day, was the Korean People’s Army (KPA) – the armed forces of North Korea. Having waged an intensive and brutal war with the Untied States and its allies in the 1950s, where an estimated 20-30% of its population was lost primarily due to the American bombing campaign, North Korea well understood the importance of air superiority and set about rebuilding its air and air defence forces with the most capable Soviet made weapons systems available. North Korean pilots and air defence crews were tasked not only with guarding the country’s airspace in the event of a future war with the Untied States, but also of contributing to the war efforts of a number of friendly countries – which they continue to do to this day. North Korean pilots played a considerable role in the Vietnam War, and according to Korean sources downed several U.S. fighter jets over the country. As the air war over Vietnam neared its end in the early 1970s, the KPA Air Force dispatched pilots to Egypt to aid the Soviet aligned country’s own war effort.
North Korean pilots had been stationed to aid Egyptian forces in defending their airspace months before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, and according to the Egyptian Military’s Chief of Staff Saad Al Shazly, Korean assistance provided critical assistance at a time of great need. Recalling that personnel from the USSR had been flying approximately 30% of the Egyptian MiG-21 fleet and operating about 20% of the country’s surface to air missile batteries, he noted that following the departure of Soviet forces under the decree of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat the Egyptian Air Force had struggled with a significant shortage of trained MiG pilots. Regarding North Korea’s role in solving this issue, the General stated in his memoirs:
“The solution occurred to me in March 1973, during the visit to Egypt of the Vice President of the Democratic (People’s) Republic of Korea (official name of North Korea.) On March 6, while escorting their Vice Minister of War, General Zang Song, on a tour of the Suez front, I asked if they could support us – and give their pilots useful combat training – but sending even a squadron of men. I knew at that time that his country flew MiG-21s. After much political discussion, in April I went on an official visit to president Kim Il Sung to finalise the plan. My fascinating ten day tour of that extraordinary republic, an inspiring an example of what a small nation of the so called Third World can achieve with its own resources is, alas, rather outside the scope of this memoir, as is my stopover in Peking (former English name for Beijing.)
Korean pilots – all highly experienced, many with more than 2,000 hours, arrived in Egypt in June and were operating by July. Israel or her ally ( the United States) soon monitored their communications, of course, and on August 15 announced their presence. To my regret, our leadership would never confirm it. The Korean s were probably the smallest international military reinforcement in history: only 20 pilots, eight controllers, give interpreters, three administrative men, a political advisor, a doctor and a cook. Bu their effect was disproportionate. They had two or three encounters with the Israelis in August and September and about the same number in the war. Their arrival was a heartwarming gesture. I mention the story here mainly to pay tribute to them and to apologise for the churlishness of our leadership in not also doing so.”
While Egyptian forces had long claimed that the MiG-21 was poorly suited to engage the F-4E, Israel’s prime air superiority fighter, and that the Soviet jet lacked the necessary survivability against the heavier American made platform, they were proven wrong not only by the successes of North Vietnamese pilots against the United States – but also by North Korean pilots operating against Israeli Phantoms over Egyptian airspace itself. According to Israeli sources, reporting on an engagement between North Korean piloted MiGs and their own Phantoms, the Korean pilots demonstrated considerable skill and were effectively untouchable in close range engagements – taking full advantage of the MiG-21’s superior manoeuvrability to evade multiple Israeli strikes with impunity. Whether North Korean pilots downed any Israeli fighters remains unknown, though reports indicate that no Koreans were shot down by Israeli jets. A number of reports do indicate however that the poorly trained Egyptian surface to air missile (SAM) crews mistook returning Korean MIG-21 fighters for Israeli jets, and proceeded to fire upon them. This was a common error made by Egyptian SAM crews, one which cost the country a number of fighter jets.
North Korean pilots’ participation in the Yom Kippur War represented only the beginning of the country’s military involvement in the Middle East, nor the last time the country would aid Arab states at war with Israel. While Egypt pivoted towards the Western Bloc in the war’s aftermath, abandoning the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, the country would pursue a number of joint weapons projects with North Korea and continues to import significant quantities of arms from the country. The Egyptian ballistic missile arsenal has North Korean origins, and the Korean Rodong-1 remains the country’s most capable platform in service today. North Korean assistance was also commissioned to construct a war museum in Egypt commemorating the Yom Kippur War, which was based heavily on the larger Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang commemorating the Korean War. North Korean forces have since the Yom Kippur War also formed close ties to Syria and Yemen, and the KPA is involved in wars against Western aligned forces in both countries.
Korean assistance has been key to upgrading Syria’s surface to air missile network, while special forces have reportedly been deployed for ground operations. KPA personnel were also reportedly involved in the Lebanon War in alongside their Syrian allies, and were later responsible for aiding the Lebanese militia Hezbollah to construct underground fortifications key to its military success against Israel in 2006. A number of key figures in Hezbollah’s leadership, including its leader Hassan Nasraallah, reportedly travelled to Korea for military training in the 1980s. Korean assistance has been key to strengthening the missile capabilities of Libya, Syria and Yemen, as well as Iran and Hezbollah, with all these parties relying heavily on a wide variety of the country’s missile designs until today. The East Asian state has since the Yom Kippur War played a considerable role in supporting regional forces against the Western Bloc and their allies, and is set to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is supposed to be a neutral international body, without political or national affiliation. It is meant to go where the facts lead it, regardless of any pressures from powerful people and countries to produce reports that might favour their cause and exonerate their actions.
I have long suspected that it has ceased to be such an organisation. There has been an increasingly obvious pattern to alleged chemical weapons attacks, whereby an incident occurs, the Western powers — chiefly the United States, United Kingdom and France — respond, and then the OPCW later produces a report that essentially backs up their claims, but in very dubious ways.
For example, on 4th April 2017, an alleged chemical incident took place in Khan Sheikhoun in Syria. The White House released a four page intelligence report just one week later, which stated the following:
“The United States is confident that the Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons attack, using the nerve agent sarin, against its own people in the town of Khan Shaykhun in southern Idlib Province on April 4, 2017. According to observers at the scene, the attack resulted in at least 50 and up to 100 fatalities (including many children), with hundreds of additional injuries.
We have confidence in our assessment because we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence, laboratory analysis of physiological samples collected from multiple victims, as well as a significant body of credible open source reporting, that tells a clear and consistent story.”
What they didn’t state is that they had no direct intelligence on the ground, but relied on hearsay, much of it from that “open source” reporting (i.e. internet speculation). And of course there’s a very good reason why they did not have intelligence on the ground, namely that the area was (and still is) controlled by jihadist organisations. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the case against the Assad Government was at that time entirely dependent on information coming from Islamist terrorist organisations, it was apparently enough for the United States to bomb the country, which it did on 7th April 2017, just three days after the incident. Thankfully, there were few casualties as most of the 59 Tomahawk missiles fired didn’t make it to their intended targets, either being shot down or — very probably — taken off course by advanced Russian military electronic jamming equipment.
So the order of things was incident, accusations, bombing, and then release of “intelligence” based on the internet and information released by jihadists. All that was then needed to justify these actions retrospectively was the OPCW report, and this was subsequently released on 29th June 2017.
Peter Hitchens has dealt very thoroughly with that report (here), and the most crucial point about it is that it essentially broke the OPCW’s own rules by failing to establish chain of custody. Instead, the alleged evidence, rather than being gathered from the scene of the incident by the OPCW, was passed to them 2nd or perhaps even 3rd hand. And of course the reason for this is that its investigators were not able to enter the area where the incident was said to have taken place, because it was occupied by al-Qaeda affiliated organisations — the same people who presumably passed on the evidence which ended up in the OPCW’s hands.
Interestingly enough, the OPCW’s inspectors were invited by the Syrian Government to the al Shayrat airbase where the planes, which allegedly dropped chemical munitions, had taken off. But they didn’t take them up on that offer. Make of that what you will.
It is vital to the OPCW’s whole remit and credibility that they visit the sites of alleged attacks in order to secure evidence under full chain of custody. Where they are unable to do this, they should simply say so and refuse to pronounce confidently on what happened. Yet despite not having visited either Khan Sheikhoun, or the al Sharyat airbase, and despite not having full chain of custody, a subsequent report released in October 2017 did indeed pronounce confidently:
“Based on the foregoing, the Leadership Panel is confident that the Syrian Arab Republic is responsible for the release of sarin at Khan Shaykhun on 4 April 2017.”
Ignoring its own guidelines to produce such a confident conclusion is enough by itself to call into question the organisation’s impartiality and credibility. But whatever credibility the organisation still possessed after this has now been torn to shreds by the recent leak of a Fact Finding Mission (FFM) Engineering Assessment in the case of another alleged chemical attack, this time in Douma last year.
As you will hopefully recall, the town of Douma was about to be retaken by the Syrian Government from the jihadists who controlled it. Shortly before it was retaken, an alleged chemical incident occurred, in which some 35 civilians were said to have died. The Western powers immediately jumped on it, accusing the Syrian Government of responsibility, and photographs of two canisters allegedly containing a toxic substance, which it was said were dropped from Syrian aircraft, were shown around the world as if supporting the claim.
We can now be confident that the claim is false. What is more, it appears that the OPCW has known full well that the claim is false, but has said nothing publicly about it. According to the FFM Engineering Assessment dated February 2019, the scenario of the canisters being dropped by aircraft is implausible:
“At this stage the FFM engineering sub-team cannot be certain that the cylinders at either location arrived there as a result of being dropped from an aircraft. The dimensions, characteristics and appearances of the cylinders and the surrounding scene of the incidents, were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder having been delivered from an aircraft. In each case the alternative hypothesis produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.
In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft [my emphasis].”
You can read more about this by going to the site of the group to whom this report was leaked (here) and also to Peter Hitchens’s blog, where he reports on his interactions with the OPCW, which unwittingly confirm the authenticity of the FFM report (here).
The OPCW’s final report on the Douma incident makes no reference to this FFM Engineering report. Why not? The only reasonable conclusion is that it was omitted because its inclusion would have totally undermined the narrative tirelessly propagated by the Governments of the United States, United Kingdom and France, as well as the entirety of the Western mainstream media (Global Pravda), and so would have shown the actions of those countries to be utterly immoral, illegal and reckless.
And so one cannot help but think that:
A) The OPCW has been utterly compromised and/or pressurised by those same Governments and
B) A certain individual or individuals in the organisation has been disturbed enough by this to take the risk of leaking information to expose the truth.
It is a solemn and sobering fact that the reaction to the Douma incident could very well have led to a conflict between the United States and Russia. In the aftermath, when the Unites States, the United Kingdom and France were all releasing statements of their intentions, the Russian military warned in no uncertain terms that if the missiles were targeted towards their servicemen, they would not only destroy the missiles but the carriers from which they were fired. They were deadly serious. I have heard unconfirmed rumours that they had MiG-31s loaded with the new hypersonic Kinzhal missiles in the area, ready to sink the vessels firing the missiles should they feel that their military personnel were under threat.
Thankfully there are still some minds left in the Pentagon that are not intoxicated by power, and — so I hear — General James “Mad Dog” Mattis in particular, the then Secretary of Defense, was instrumental in turning what looked like it would be a massive bombardment, possibly targeting areas where Russian servicemen were located, to a much smaller 100-odd missiles, mostly token shots into non-strategic sites, the majority of which were shot down. In other words, Mattis and co may well have averted World War III, but did so in a way that allowed the warmongering leadership of the three nations to save face in their illegal action.
The OPCW’s credibility as an impartial international organisation now lies in tatters. Both the Khan Sheikhoun report with its conclusions without chain of custody, and now even more so the Douma report, which failed to include expert evidence that contradicted its public conclusions, now stand as testimony against the trustworthiness of the organisation. It hardly needs to be said that this is a great shame, not just for international relations in general, but also for those many people who work for it who are undoubtedly still committed to scientific enquiry and impartial judgement.
I cannot leave this piece without asking questions about the other major cases of late involving the OPCW, namely the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings. In both incidents, the OPCW did not release final reports to the public, but a summary of their findings, which you can find here and here. I must say I have never been particularly convinced by these documents. In both cases, the language always struck me as being somewhat evasive.
For instance, neither Summary actually names the substance involved. In fact, in neither case does it confirm the use of a nerve agent. Point one in the summary of the Salisbury case states the following:
“The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland requested technical assistance from the OPCW Technical Secretariat (hereinafter “the Secretariat”) under subparagraph 38(e) of Article VIII of the Chemical Weapons Convention in relation to an incident in Salisbury on 4 March 2018 involving a toxic chemical — allegedly a nerve agent — and the poisoning and hospitalisation of three individuals. The Director-General decided to dispatch a team to the United Kingdom for a technical assistance visit (TAV).”
Allegedly a nerve agent? Which one? Do we find out? Not a bit of it. Point number 10 states the following:
“The results of analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.”
Confirm the findings of the United Kingdom? Which United Kingdom? The Government of the United Kingdom? The intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom? The scientists at Porton Down in the United Kingdom? This is important. The fact is that none of these entities has ever stated what that substance actually is. Instead, they have continued to use the slippery word “Novichok”, but since this is simply a word meaning “newcomer”, and since it doesn’t refer to a substance but rather a group of substances, and since the group of substances falling under the “Novichok” umbrella has never been properly defined and is elastic enough to include pretty much anything and everything the accusing authorities want it to mean, it is, to all intents and purposes, meaningless.
Which is almost certainly why the OPCW not only avoids referring to it in its Summary as “Novichok”, and also why they also fail to confirm it was actually a nerve agent, referring to it throughout as a “toxic chemical”. And whilst they say that it was the same “toxic chemical” identified by the United Kingdom, because the United Kingdom has never publicly identified the substance, this is essentially circular argumentation. Indeed, it reads more like obfuscation than scientific precision.
In the summary of the Amesbury case, things get even more suspect. Again, the phrase “toxic chemical” is used throughout, and again there is no mention of “Novichok” much less the precise type. Like Salisbury, there is only one mention of the word “nerve agent”, but this time it is very odd:
“The toxic chemical compound, which displays the toxic properties of a nerve agent, is the same toxic chemical that was found in the biomedical and environmental samples relating to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Mr Nicholas Bailey on 4 March 2018 in Salisbury (S/1612/2018, dated 12 April 2018) [my emphasis].”
Which displays the toxic properties of a nerve agent? What is that supposed to mean? Isn’t this a mighty strange way of referring to an apparently identified nerve agent?
Think about it. If you tested a substance in a laboratory and found it to be sulphuric acid, and if you were then writing a report about it, would you say that “it is an acid” or that it “displays the properties of an acid?” If you were to write that the substance you had found “displays the properties of acid,” and you never actually gave it a name, my reaction would be to assume that it was something a bit like acid, but not actually acid itself.
It might be argued that since the substance was not on the OPCW database, they simply refer to it as “displaying the properties of a nerve agent.” But this won’t do. The United Kingdom assured the world that it was a nerve agent, and despite inferring that only one country possessed it, they somehow managed to identify it within a day of the initial incident in Salisbury. So why does the OPCW appear to hedge its bets and only say that it “displays the properties of a nerve agent?”, rather than “it is a nerve agent”? I may be wrong, but it seems to me that this statement is more likely the result of compromise between factions in the OPCW, than it is a statement of scientific certainty.
Another very suspect issue in the Summary of the Salisbury report is the fact that it does not mention where the OPCW team conducted its sampling. It is extremely vague, simply stating:
“The team was able to conduct on-site sampling of environmental samples under full chain of custody at sites identified as possible hot-spots of residual contamination. Samples were returned to the OPCW Laboratory for subsequent analysis by OPCW designated laboratories.”
Sites identified as possible hotspots? Such as? We aren’t told, which is very odd, because you might assume that a vital part of the mission would include establishing where the poison was located, and where it was initially placed. But for this we have to turn to the letter sent to the Secretary General of NATO by the UK’s head of national security, Sir Mark Sedwill. Here’s what he said:
“DSTL [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down] scientific analysis found that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned using a specific Novichok nerve agent. OPCW’s analysis confirmed the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical. This was found in environmental samples taken at the scene and in biomedical samples from both Skripals and police sergeant Nick Bailey, the first responder.
DSTL established that the highest concentrations were found on the handle of Mr Skripal’s front door. These are matters of fact. But, of course, the DSTL analysis does not identify the country or laboratory of origin of the agent used in this attack.”
According to Mr Sedwill, the highest concentrations of the toxic chemical were found on the handle of Mr Skripal’s front door. But crucially he states that this was established by DSTL, and he does not mention that this was confirmed by the OPCW. So did the OPCW visit the house and swab the door? If not, why not? Surely if the DSTL had already established the door handle as the place with the highest concentration of the substance, then you’d expect the OPCW to have visited the house, and that they would have included a mention of the door handle as being the place with the highest concentrations of the “toxic chemical” in their Summary. But they do not, talking instead about “possible hotspots”. On the other hand, if they did visit it, is it credible that they would have asked no serious questions about why the house had not been sealed off in the aftermath of the incident, and whether anyone had been in and out of the house after the alleged poisoning?
Had they asked that question, the honest answer would have been of course be yes, people did go in and out, and they did so unprotected. Here’s what Karen Gardner, a reporter for BBC Radio Wiltshire, said in her broadcast from outside Mr Skripal’s house on 6th March 2018 (two days after the incident):
“It’s a well-kept house, it’s got a horse shoe on the front door, beautifully presented bay trees in pots in the side of the windows. At the moment there’s quite a lot of activity. When I arrived, there were six or seven police officers and PCSOs coming out of the door. Some of those have left, a couple more have arrived. There is a visible presence outside the house, and severe frowning when I walk too close. A lot of the windows are open and I did see coffee flasks and provisions and empty boxes and things brought out, so it looks like there was a lot of activity late last night overnight [my emphasis].”
In a follow up report to mark the one year anniversary of the case, she had this to say:
“When I was here a year ago, I watched Wiltshire police officers with no or minimal protective clothing going in and out that front door. They were carrying coffee flasks. They appeared to have had refreshments in the house overnight. That was two days after the Skripals had collapsed, at the point the Met had taken over the investigation, shouldn’t those officers have been better protected?”
That last question is the wrong one. It is not “shouldn’t they have been better protected”, but rather “given that they weren’t protected, how on earth did they not become contaminated by the substance which was apparently on the door handle and which, according to the OPCW, was high purity, persistent and resistant to weather?”
Let’s not beat about the bush here. Unless the laws of science were suspended in Salisbury during the month of March 2018, the idea that a toxic chemical was placed on the door handle on 4th March, that police officers entered the house after that time, and then weeks later the substance was found at the door in high purity, persistent and weather resistant form, as the OPCW claimed, is fairyland. Perhaps this is why the OPCW report fails to mention where the samples were taken, much less that the highest quantities of the substance were apparently on the door handle and door. But it seems to me that as an organisation with a remit to investigate such incidents, it has failed to ask even the most basic questions about the aftermath, and it has failed to use precise language about the substance and the locations where it was found. One can’t help but ask why this is.
As an aside, the BBC has announced that it is to make a drama about the case fairly soon. Quite apart from anything, this is plain wrong, since the investigation into the case is still ongoing. But I must say I look forward to that bit where the unprotected officers with their coffees and takeaway pizzas manage to get into the house via the door, but without using the door handle, which as you will be aware is normally a necessary part of getting in and out of houses.
In summary, suspicions that the OPCW has now been fatally compromised, utterly politicised and cannot be relied upon to be impartial, which surfaced during the Khan Sheikhoun incident, have now been shown to be absolutely true by the Douma case. Given that this is so, and given the wishy-washy, round the houses language used in their reports into Salisbury and Amesbury, why should anyone believe that this organisation has been impartial and thorough in these cases, or that they will be so in any future cases?
Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.
Newby’s book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll’s, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island. Newby reaches this conclusion on page 224 after mentioning Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47 and otherwise avoiding it throughout the book. This is bizarre, because Newby’s book otherwise goes into great depth, and even chronicles extensive research efforts that lead largely to dead ends, and because there is information available about Plum Island, and because Carroll’s best-selling book seems to demand comment, supportive or dismissive or otherwise.
In fact, I think that, despite the avoidance of any discussion of Plum Island, Newby’s research complements Carroll’s quite well, strengthens the same general conclusion, and then adds significant new understanding. So, let’s look at what Carroll told us, and then at what Newby adds.
Less than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government makes or at least made biological weapons, including weapons consisting of diseased insects that can be dropped from airplanes on a (presumably foreign) population. One such insect is the deer tick, pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans.
Deer swim to Plum Island. Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. “Ticks,” Carroll writes, “find baby chicks irresistible.”
In July of 1975 a new or very rare disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. And what was on Plum Island? A germ warfare lab to which the U.S. government had brought former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors. After all, it was on an island. What could go wrong? Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s (when we know that the United States was using such weaponized life forms in North Korea). Even Plum Island’s indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.
By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.
Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease — and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
If Newby agrees or disagrees with any of the above, she does not inform us. But here’s what she adds to it.
The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.
Newby documents in detail Burgdorfer’s work for the U.S. government giving diseases to ticks in large quantities to be used as weapons, as they have been in Cuba in 1962, for example. “He was growing microbes inside ticks, having the ticks feed on animals, and then harvesting the microbes from the animals that exhibited the level of illness the military had requested.”
Burgdorfer published a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks. In 2013, filmmaker Tim Grey asked him, on camera, whether the pathogen he had identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease was the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he’d written about in 1952. Burgdorfer replied in the affirmative.
Interviewed by Newby, Burgdorfer described his efforts to create an illness that would be difficult to test for — knowledge of which he might have shared earlier with beneficial results for those suffering.
Newby, who has herself suffered from Lyme disease, blames the profit interests of companies and the corruption of government for the poor handling of Lyme disease. But her writing suggests to me a possibility she doesn’t raise, namely that those who know where Lyme disease came from have avoided properly addressing it because of where it came from.
Newby assumes throughout the book that there has to have been a particular major incident near Long Island Sound, either an accident or an experiment on the public or an attack by a foreign nation. Burgdorfer reportedly claimed to another researcher that Russia stole U.S. bioweapons. Based on that and nothing else, Newby speculates that perhaps Russia attacked the United States with diseased ticks, coincidentally right in the location where the U.S. government experimented with diseased ticks.
“What this book brings to light,” Newby writes, “is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on human and animals in the ecosystem.”
Another product of U.S. bio-weapons tax dollars at work, of course, was the anthrax mailed to politicians in 2001. While Newby speculates that perhaps someone was trying to demonstrate the danger for our own good, I don’t think we should forget that one purpose served — whether or not intended — by the “anthrax attacks” was a significant augmentation of the Iraq war lies. The attacks were falsely blamed on Iraq, and even if people have forgotten that, they fell for it long enough for it to matter. The one bit of truth in current public understanding of Lyme disease is that it has not been falsely blamed on some country the United States is eager to bomb. Let’s keep it that way!
The US has failed to prevent the Runit Dome temporary nuclear waste storage site from leaking into the ocean, leaving the inhabitants of Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands and cleanup workers with an array of health problems.
“There was never any lining put in that dome,” Ernest Davis, an Enewetak Atoll cleanup veteran, told RT, noting that the US government apparently had never planned to replace the temporary dome with a permanent containment structure that would be properly sealed from radiation leaks. “Nobody said anything about going back in and removing it or making it permanent. We were told that it was permanent.”
“I don’t think it was ever [the US government’s] intention to further clean up the island. It was too costly,” Brooke Takala Abraham, who lives in the Marshall Islands, told RT.
Also on rt.com Cold War ‘nuclear coffin’ leaking radioactive waste from US tests into Pacific Ocean – UN chief
The United States detonated 43 atomic bombs around the Marshall Islands in the 1940s and 50s. The highly contaminated debris left over from the weapons tests was then dumped into a 100-meter-wide bomb crater on Enewetak Atoll. US servicemen sealed it up with a concrete cap to create a structure called the Runit Dome. The work, however, was allegedly carried out without any proper safety consideration for the cleanup crew.
“Those people who were involved in the cleanup… did not receive proper protection from radioactive elements,” Abraham said.
Furthermore, the government has never even bothered to study the long-term health issues of those exposed to radiation waste.
“There was no radiation study with us. Certain ones would leave the island and they will have them fill a big jug with urine and I guess they were supposed to test it,” recalled Davis, who left just before the project was completed. “Some of the dosimeters that were given to us, the rad-badges – they just did not work. So we can’t say that any radiation study was done whatsoever.”
After a three-year decontamination process which began in 1977, the US government declared the southern and western islands in the atoll safe enough, allowing residents of Enewetak to return and the cleanup crew to go home. However, people who now live on the island say the dome began leaking almost immediately after the engineers left.
“The waste has always been leaking from the get-go. The cleanup of the entire atoll was not complete” before the native people were allowed to return, Abraham told RT.
“That is just a portion of the radiation that exists on the atoll. A large amount was dumped straight into the ocean. It was dumped into a lagoon. And it was dumped in open pits on other islands.”
Over the years, Enewetak’s population began feeling the deleterious effects of the radiation. “The radiation affects us on a daily basis. We have many illnesses in our community from cancers to weakened immune systems, and other noncommunicable diseases as well,” Abraham explained. “And they’re still struggling as well with the transgenerational effects of radiation.”
“Most of us have come up with some type of illness, whether it’s cancer… many of us have peripheral neuropathy on our feet without being diabetic,” Davis recalled, noting that many of the roughly 8,000 people involved in the decontamination process have since died. “They told us we would not be exposed to any more radiation than having maybe two or three x-rays a year, which was a total lie.”
Yesterday, the news media reported that President Trump told the acting U.S. “Defense” Secretary that he does not want war with Iran, which has caused some people to breathe a sigh of relief that the United States might yet avoid another deadly and destructive regime-change war.
Don’t be too sure. After all, if Trump really means that, then the former television reality star has two words that he could deliver to John Bolton, the old Cold War anti-communist dinosaur who remains totally committed to embroiling our nation into a war with Iran: “You’re fired!” Instead, Trump keeps National Security Advisor Bolton on his federal payroll.
Another distinct possibility is that Trump is lying and is simply playing Good Cop, Bad Cop with Bolton. That way, if Iran attacks “U.S. interests” in the Middle East, Trump can exclaim, “Woe is me! I didn’t want another war, but Iran has forced it on me.”
The Trump-Bolton model for initiating a war with Iran could easily be President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, amidst a multiplicity of lies, succeeded in maneuvering Japan into “firing the first shot,” which enabled FDR to essentially exclaim: We have been attacked! It was a surprise attack! We had no idea that this was going to happen! We have nothing to do with it! We are innocent! We were just minding our own business! This is a day that will live in infamy!
FDR was lying about the whole thing. He not only wanted Japan to attack “U.S. interests,” he actually concocted a plan to provoke Japan into attacking the United States, a plan that bears remarkable similarities to what Trump and Bolton are doing to Iran.
In his 1940 presidential campaign, Roosevelt, like Trump, told Americans that he was firmly opposed to U.S. entry into another European war. He knew that after the horrific fiasco of U.S interventionism into World War II, the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to another intervention. So, he campaigned on that premise — that he was aligned with the American people in opposition to entering the war. He told American voters:
And while I am talking to you, mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
As it turns out, however, FDR was lying. Fulfilling secret assurances he had given to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, FDR was secretly doing everything he could to embroil the United State in the European conflict.
Why didn’t Roosevelt simply intervene in the conflict, just as presidents do today? Because at that time presidents were still following the declaration-of-war requirement set forth in the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits presidents from waging war without a congressional declaration of war. FDR knew that given the overwhelming opposition to another intervention, there was no way he could secure a congressional declaration of war from Congress.
Roosevelt decided to maneuver Nazi Germany into “firing the first shot,” which would enable him to secure his declaration of war from Congress on the basis of “self-defense.” He sent U.S. vessels into the Atlantic hoping that he could provoke Germany into attacking them.
Unfortunately for FDR, however, the Germans refused to take the bait. The last thing Germany wanted was another war with the United States.
That left the wily FDR with but one alternative — to go into the Pacific and try to maneuver the Japanese into attacking the U.S. A war with Japan wouldn’t necessarily guarantee U.S. entry into the European War but it was the FDR’s best chance for a “back door” to entering that conflict.
FDR initiated steps against Japan that bear a remarkable similarity to what Trump and Bolton are doing to Iran. He placed an oil embargo on Japan that severely threatened Japan’s ability to maintain its war machine in China. Successfully squeezing Japan into “talking” with U.S. officials, FDR intentionally imposed “peace terms” that were only designed to humiliate and demean Japanese officials, just like Trump and Bolton are doing today with Iran.
Roosevelt also provided the Japanese with bait in the form of American destroyers stationed at Pearl Harbor like sitting ducks as well as a large contingent of U.S. troops in the Philippines. Roosevelt was smart enough to remove his aircraft carriers from Hawaii so that they would still be available once the war got underway.
The oil embargo squeezed Japan so tightly and FDR’s peace terms were so onerous and humiliating, the Japanese had only one possible way to break out of FDR’s ever-tightening noose: attack the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl and then take over the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies without U.S. naval interference.
Japan took the bait and attacked. Aligned with Japan, Germany declared war on the U.S. FDR then played the innocent and got declarations of war from Congress against both Japan and Germany. Roosevelt’s plan worked magnificently.
In the early years after the war, FDR acolytes, including many of the historians, maintained that FDR was innocent of having intentionally embroiled the United States in World War II. In later years, however, as evidence of guilt reached critical mass — for example, U.S. officials had broken Japanese diplomatic codes and possibly also its military codes — the FDR acolytes conceded what Roosevelt had done but justified it by saying that he saved America and the world from being taken over by the Nazis. It was okay, they say, that he intentionally sacrificed those 3,000 troops at Pearl for the “greater good” of America and humanity.
Perhaps the person who best explained the FDR/Trump-Bolton model for war was Nazi official Herman Goering, who stated during his testimony before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal:
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.…
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Former Pfizer chief toxicologist Helmut Sterz presents a critical examination of the development, approval, and global rollout of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—particularly those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech. The Vaccine Mafia details the failure of pharmaceutical companies, regulatory authorities, politicians, and international organizations to follow established scientific and ethical standards during the pandemic. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience in pharmaceutical toxicology, Sterz reveals the many ways the vaccines’ inadequate or omitted preclinical safety testing put the world’s population at risk.
Sterz demonstrates how “emergency” approvals allowed manufacturers to bypass long-standing international guidelines governing toxicity testing, especially with regard to reproductive and cancer risks. They also allowed governments and health authorities to ignore or conceal evidence of serious adverse effects that occurred, including myocarditis, reproductive harm, and other long-term health risks.
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.
Aletho News
