BETHLEHEM – The Israeli army continues killing unarmed Palestinian civilian protesters with snipers and live ammunition in the besieged Gaza Strip, with the approval of Israel’s Supreme Court, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
More than 18 years since October 2000, when the Israeli police killed 13 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Israel and since the findings of the Or Commission of Inquiry, that was nominated by the Israeli government to investigate the events, concluded that “It should be unequivocally clear that live fire, including by snipers, is not a means for the police to disperse crowds.”
Adalah said that this past Friday, Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians, including two children aged 12 and 14, and injured at least 257 others in Gaza, of whom 163 were shot with Israeli live ammunition.
Adalah released a statement demanding Israel to immediately halt the shooting of civilian protesters with live ammunition and to allow Palestinians to exercise their right to protest and to freedom of political expression.
In October 2000, Israeli police and special sniper units killed 13 unarmed Palestinians, including 12 citizens of Israel and one Gaza resident, and wounded hundreds more when Palestinian citizens of Israel participated in mass demonstrations throughout the country to protest Israel’s oppressive policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) at the beginning of the Second Intifada.
However, 18 years later not a single Israeli police officer, commander or politician responsible for the October 2000 killings has been held responsible for their actions.
Adalah along with the families of the 13 killed civilians continue to demand that those responsible for the crimes of October 2000 be prosecuted.
Adalah said “Eighteen years have passed and despite the clear recommendations of the Or Commission, the Israeli armed forces have not changed their practices but continue to use excessive force and fire live ammunition at unarmed Palestinians in contradiction of both Israeli and international law, this time at protesters in Gaza.”
Since the start of “The Great March of Return” protests in Gaza on 30 March, “Israeli troops have killed 151 people – including 30 children, one woman, two journalists, three paramedics, and three persons with disabilities, according to figures from Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. Israeli troops also wounded 10,234 persons, including 5,814 – among them 939 children and 114 women – with live fire.”
Additionally, in April, Adalah and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to order the Israeli military to immediately halt its use of snipers and other live weapons against unarmed protesters.
The petition emphasized the absolute ban on opening fire on demonstrators with live ammunition and noted that the norms applicable to confronting civilian demonstrations are based in international law governing “law enforcement and order.” These same norms have also been adopted into Israeli law, including via Or Commission report.
“These universal norms apply equally and without discrimination to citizens and non-citizens alike, regardless of the content of the protest, their slogans, their location, their organizational affiliation, and the ethnic and national affiliation of the participants.”
The Israeli Supreme Court rejected the petition by Adalah and Al Mezan, who responded by saying “This ruling, which justifies the shooting of protesters, contradicts the conclusions and preliminary results of international human rights organizations and United Nations bodies documenting and evaluating the events in Gaza. The Supreme Court’s ruling gives full legitimacy to the illegal actions of the Israeli military, which has led to the killing of more than 100 people and the wounding of thousands of protesters, including women, children, journalists, and paramedics. Of those killed, 94 percent were shot by Israeli troops in the upper body.”
The casualties figures mentioned above were from May 25th 2018.
Adalah added “Israeli armed forces backed up by the Supreme Court’s ruling, continue to target unarmed Palestinian demonstrators with snipers and live ammunition today in Gaza just as they killed Palestinian citizens of Israel protesting in October 2000.”
The statement added that the center “will continue to defend Palestinians’ right to protest, to support the struggle against racism and occupation, and to demand accountability for the victims of these gross human rights violations.”
Adalah also urged the international community to take strong measures to ensure respect for international law, to provide protection for demonstrators and all civilians in Gaza, and to support the work of the independent UN Commission of Inquiry into the 2018 Protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The moment long feared is fast approaching in Gaza, according to a new report by the World Bank. After a decade-long Israeli blockade and a series of large-scale military assaults, the economy of the tiny coastal enclave is in “freefall”.
At a meeting of international donors in New York on Thursday, coinciding with the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank painted an alarming picture of Gaza’s crisis. Unemployment now stands at close to 70 per cent and the economy is contracting at an ever faster rate.
While the West Bank’s plight is not yet as severe, it is not far behind. Countries attending the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee were told. Gaza’s collapse could bring down the entire Palestinian banking sector.
In response, Europe hurriedly put together a €40 million aid package, but that will chiefly address Gaza’s separate humanitarian crisis – not the economic one – by improving supplies of electricity and potable water.
No one doubts the inevitable fallout from the economic and humanitarian crises gripping Gaza. The four parties to the Quartet charged with overseeing negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians – the United States, Russia, the European Union and the UN – issued a statement warning that it was vital to prevent what they termed “further escalation” in Gaza.
The Israeli military shares these concerns. It has reported growing unrest among the enclave’s two million inhabitants and believes Hamas will be forced into a confrontation to break out of the straight jacket imposed by the blockade.
In recent weeks, mass protests along Gaza’s perimeter fence have been revived and expanded after a summer lull. On Friday, seven Palestinian demonstrators, including two children, were killed by Israeli sniper fire. Hundreds more were wounded.
Nonetheless, the political will to remedy the situation looks as atrophied as ever. No one is prepared to take meaningful responsibility for the time-bomb that is Gaza.
In fact, the main parties that could make a difference appear intent on allowing the deterioration to continue.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ignored repeated warnings of a threatened explosion in Gaza from his own military.
Instead, Israel is upholding the blockade as tightly as ever, preventing the flow of goods in and out of the enclave. Fishing is limited to three miles off the coast rather than the 20-mile zone agreed in the Oslo accords. Hundreds of companies are reported to have folded over the summer.
Intensifying the enclave’s troubles is the Trump administration’s recent decision to cut aid to the Palestinians, including to the United Nation’s refugee agency, UNRWA. It plays a critical role in Gaza, providing food, education and health services to nearly two-thirds of the population.
The food budget is due to run out in December, and the schools budget by the end of October. Hundreds of thousands of hungry children with nowhere to spend their days can only fuel the protests – and the deaths.
The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, headquartered in the West Bank, has no incentive to help. Gaza’s slowly unfolding catastrophe is his leverage to make Hamas submit to his rule. That is why the Palestinian Authority has cut transfers to Gaza by $30 million a month.
But even if Mr Abbas wished to help, he largely lacks the means. The US cuts were imposed primarily to punish him for refusing to play ball with US President Donald Trump’s supposed “deal of the century” peace plan.
Israel, the World Bank notes, has added to Mr Abbas’s difficulties by refusing to transfer taxes and customs duties it collects on the PA’s behalf.
And the final implicated party, Egypt, is reticent to loosen its own chokehold on its short border with Gaza. President Abdel Fattah El Sisi opposes giving any succour either to his domestic Islamist opponents or to Hamas.
The impasse is possible only because none of the parties is prepared to make a priority of Gaza’s welfare.
That was starkly illustrated earlier in the summer when Cairo, supported by the UN, opened a back channel between Israel and Hamas in the hope of ending their mounting friction.
Hamas wanted the blockade lifted to reverse Gaza’s economic decline, while Israel wanted an end to the weekly protests and the damaging images of snipers killing unarmed demonstrators.
In addition, Mr Netanyahu has an interest in keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, if barely, as a way to cement the geographic split with the West Bank and an ideological one with Mr Abbas.
The talks, however, collapsed quietly in early September after Mr Abbas objected to the Egyptians. He insisted that the Palestinian Authority be the only address for discussions of Gaza’s future. So, Cairo is yet again channelling its energies into a futile attempt at reconciling Mr Abbas and Hamas.
At the UN General Assembly, Mr Trump promised his peace plan would be unveiled in the next two to three months, and made explicit for the first time his support for a two-state solution, saying it would “work best”.
Mr Netanyahu vaguely concurred, while pointing out: “Everyone defines the term ‘state’ differently.” His definition, he added, required that not one of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank be removed and that any future Palestinian state be under complete Israeli security control.
Mr Abbas is widely reported to have conceded over the summer that a Palestinian state – should it ever come into being – would be demilitarised. In other words, it would not be recognisable as a sovereign state.
Hamas has made notable compromises to its original doctrine of military resistance to secure all of historic Palestine. But it is hard to imagine it agreeing to peace on those terms. This makes a reconciliation between Hamas and Mr Abbas currently inconceivable – and respite for the people of Gaza as far off as ever.
Joe Rogan Experience #1175 – Chris Kresser & Dr. Joel Kahn – September 27, 2018
Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac is a globally recognized leader in the fields of ancestral health, Paleo nutrition, and functional and integrative medicine. Dr. Joel Kahn is one of the world’s top cardiologists and believes that plant-based nutrition is the most powerful source of preventative medicine on the planet.
For a brief period, the New York Times added a column to their best-seller book list. It identified the percentage of people who finished reading the book. As I recall, the outright winner for lowest percentage was Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rosewith only 6%. It is an excellent and fascinating book if you understand the Catholic church, its theological disputes, know much about medieval mythology, understand Catholic religious orders, and are familiar with the historyof Italy in the Middle Ages. As one reviewer wrote, “I won’t lie to you. It is absolutely a slog at times.” This phrase struck me because it is exactly what a lawyer told me after reading my book “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”
I told himit was a slog to research because it required reading all the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a task that few, certainly fewer than 6%, ever achieve, including most of the people involved with the production. This is the tragedy. There are so many people with such strong, definitive views, including among skeptics and the general science community who have never read the Reports at all. The challenge is made more difficult by the deliberate attempt to separate truth and reality from propaganda and the political agenda.
In media interviews or discussions with the public, the most frequent opening challenge is; “But don’t 97% of scientists agree?” It is usually said obliquely to imply that you know a lot, and I don’t understand, but I assume you are wrong because you are in the minority. I don’t attempt to refute the statistics. Instead, I explain the difference in definitions between science and society. Then I point out that the critical 97% figure is that at least 97% of scientists have never read the claims of the IPCC Reports. How many people reading this article have read all the IPCC Reports, or even just one of them? If you have, it is probably the deliberately deceptive Summary for Policymakers (SPM). Even fewer will have read the Report of Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis. Naively, people, especially other scientists, assume scientists would not falsify, mislead, misrepresent, or withhold information. It is worse, because the IPCC deliberately created the false claim of consensus.
I wrote earlier about the problem of communications between groups and the general public because of the different definition of terms. Among the most damaging, especially in the public debate, is the word consensus. Exploitation of the confusion was deliberate. On 22 December 2004, RealClimate, the website created to manipulate the global warming story, provided this insight;
We’ve used the term “consensus” here a bit recently without ever really defining what we mean by it. In normal practice, there is no great need to define it – no science depends on it. But it’s useful to record the core that most scientists agree on, for public presentation. The consensus that exists is that of the IPCC reports, in particular the working group I report (there are three WG’s. By “IPCC”, people tend to mean WG I).
In other words, it is what the creators of the Reports consider a consensus. This is classic groupthink on display. One characteristic of which says they have,
“…a culture of uniformity where individuals censor themselves and others so that the facade of group unanimity is maintained.”
The source of the 97% claim in the public arena came from John Cook et al., and was published in 2013 in Environmental Research Letters. It wastitled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.” I acknowledge to people some of the brilliant dissections of this claim, such as Lord Monckton’s comment, “0.3% consensus, not 97.1%.”If I have time, I explain how the plan to exploit the idea of consensus was developed by the same people and corrupted science exposed in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009.
Harvard graduate, medical doctor, and world-famous science fiction writer, Michael Crichton provides an excellent riposte.
“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
The attempt to deceive and divert was built into the structure, format, and procedures of the IPCC. Few people know that a major part of the deception is to identify all the problems with the science but only identify them in the Report of Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis. They know most won’t read or understand it and can easily marginalize the few who do. In 2012 I created a list of several of these acknowledgments, but only one is sufficient here to destroy the certainty of their claims about future climates. Section 14.2.2. of the Scientific Section of Third IPCC Assessment Report, (2001) titled “Predictability in a Chaotic System” says:
“The climate system is particularly challenging since it is known that components in the system are inherently chaotic; there are feedbacks that could potentially switch sign, and there are central processes that affect the system in a complicated, non-linear manner. These complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamics are an inherent aspect of the climate system.”
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (My emphasis).
This is not reported in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) that is deliberately different. David Wojick, an IPCC expert reviewer, explained,
“What is systematically omitted from the SPM are precisely the uncertainties and positive counter evidence that might negate the human interference theory. Instead of assessing these objections, the Summary confidently asserts just those findings that support its case. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment.”
He should add, it is deliberate advocacy, as the RealClimate quote shows.
The SPM receives scant attention from the media and the public, except for the temperature predictions and then only the most extreme figure is selected. The Science Report receives even less attention, but that is by instruction because it is released months later. All of this is why I quoted German physicist and meteorologist Klaus Eckart Puls (English translation version) on the cover of both my books.
“Ten years ago, I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.” “Scientifically it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob.”
The real challenge of the 97% consensus claim is to get more of the 97% to do what Puls did, read the Reports and find out what the IPCC did and said. They need to do it because the misuse and loss of credibility of science aren’t restricted to the climate deception. As I read and hear from all sectors of science and society, it is endemic (fake news) and potentially devastating. I think one of the most important achievements of my successful trial with Andrew Weaver was to go beyond the defamation charge, against my lawyer’s advice, and show that the misuse of science will and must elicit passionate reactions. So, next time you are confronted with the 97% oblique charge, simply ask the person if they have read any of the IPCC Reports. Just be prepared for the invective.
The “step-by-step” disarmament of North Korea should be gradual and should be accompanied by measures that would build trust, the head of North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said.
“Our position dictates that the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula should be implemented in combination with the settlement of peace in accordance with the principle of simultaneous gradual steps, beginning with the things that we can do by giving priority to the measures that would build trust,” the head of North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, Ri Yong-ho, said during his speech at United Nations General Assembly.
The official also stressed in his speech that the sanctions that the United States was imposing on North Korea would only augment distrust of the US instead of bringing the Asian state to its knees.
“The US insists on the principle of ‘denuclearization first’ and increases the level of pressure to achieve its goal by coercion… The notion that sanctions will bring [us] to the knees is a constant dream of people who know nothing about us. The problem is that the continuation of sanctions increases our distrust,” Ri said.
He emphasized that North Korea did not see reciprocal steps from the United States to moves of Pyongyang taken in the spirit of goodwill.
“We do not see any corresponding steps from the United States. On the contrary, instead of sharing the concern about the lack of peaceful regime on the Korean Peninsula, the US insists that we [should] first carry out denuclearization, and increases pressure through sanctions,” the minister said.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that peace on the Korean peninsula was only attainable through diplomacy and denuclearization.
On Wednesday, the US State Department announced that Pompeo has accepted an invitation to visit Pyongyang next month that was extended to him by North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho during a meeting in New York.
On June 12, US President Donald Trump and Kim held their first official summit in Singapore. Upon the conclusion of the talks, the two countries signed a bilateral agreement outlining their joint commitment to work toward the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. However, the agreement did not specify steps or deadlines as to when would denuclearization be achieved.
Russia warns the Zionist entity against any potential strikes on Lebanon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday, stressing that this would be a gross violation of international law.
“This would certainly be a gross violation of international law and we would be very much against such any action,” Lavrov said.
“We warn against any violation of the [UN] Security Council resolutions, and attack and actually even the use of Lebanese air space is a violation of the resolutions of the UN Security Council,” the diplomat stressed.
DNA is supposed to be the gold standard of evidence. Supposedly so distinct it would be impossible to convict the wrong person, yet DNA evidence has been given far more credit than it’s earned.
Part of the problem is that it’s indecipherable to laypeople. That has allowed crime lab technicians to testify to a level of certainty that’s not backed by the data. Another, much larger problem is the testing itself. It searches for DNA matches in samples covered with unrelated DNA. Contamination is all but assured. In one stunning example of DNA testing’s flaws, European law enforcement spent years chasing a nonexistent serial killer whose DNA was scattered across several crime scenes before coming to the realization the DNA officers kept finding belonged to the person packaging the testing swabs used by investigators.
The reputation of DNA testing remains mostly untainted, rose-tinted by the mental imagery of white-coated techs working in spotless labs to deliver justice, surrounded by all sorts of science stuff and high-powered computers. In reality, testing methods vary greatly from crime lab to crime lab, as do the standards for declaring a match. People lose their freedom thanks to inexact science and careless handling of samples. And it happens far more frequently than anyone involved in crime lab testing would like you to believe.
An op-ed about the failures of crime lab DNA testing at the New York Times — written by Boise State Professor of Biology Greg Hampikian — discusses this ongoing problem using some science of his own: a recently-released NIST study. (h/t Grits for Breakfast)
Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology gave the same DNA mixture to about 105 American crime laboratories and three Canadian labs and asked them to compare it with DNA from three suspects from a mock bank robbery.
The first two suspects’ DNA was part of the mixture, and most labs correctly matched their DNA to the evidence. However, 74 labs wrongly said the sample included DNA evidence from the third suspect, an “innocent person” who should have been cleared of the hypothetical felony.
This is already a problem. People’s lives are literally on the line and crime lab testing is more likely to make the wrong call on evidence than the correct one. What’s truly disturbing is this study was completed in 2014, but the report was apparently buried by the scientists it implicated. As Dr. Hampikian states in his op-ed, the study’s results may still be unpublished if it weren’t for forensic scientists publicly complaining about the burial.
Four years have passed since the study’s completion and it appears no improvements have been made. The study notes testing protocols vary widely and very little effort is being made to improve error-prone procedures. In addition, the study [PDF] comes with a disclaimer meant to dissuade litigants from challenging DNA evidence by quoting the study’s findings.
The results described in this article provide only a brief snapshot of DNA mixture interpretation as practiced by participating laboratories in 2005 and 2013. Any overall performance assessment is limited to participating laboratories addressing specific questions with provided data based on their knowledge at the time. Given the adversarial nature of the legal system, and the possibility that some might attempt to misuse this article in legal arguments, we wish to emphasize that variation observed in DNA mixture interpretation cannot support any broad claims about “poor performance” across all laboratories involving all DNA mixtures examined in the past.
This certainly doesn’t raise the reader’s confidence in crime lab DNA testing. Instead, it gives the impression the four-year delay between completion and public release was for wagon-circling purposes as crime lab forensic scientists looked for ways to mute the impact of the study’s findings.
But there are also problems with the study itself. The authors of the study appear far too willing to cut crime labs slack for their failures. Rather than point out the problems originating from a lack of standardized processes, the study uses them to excuse the failures, as if unintentionally nailing the wrong person for the crime was somehow worthy of gold stars for effort. Here’s Hampikian’s take:
It is uncomfortable to read the study’s authors praising labs for their careful work when they get things right, but offering sophomoric excuses for them when they get things wrong. Scientists in crime labs need clear feedback to change entrenched, error-prone methods, and they should be strongly encouraged to re-examine old cases where such methods were used.
The study confirms much of what has been exposed earlier: DNA evidence may be based on hard science, but any small variable — including the inevitable tainting of DNA samples — has the ability to throw things off. And when it’s used as evidence in criminal trials, it has the potential to destroy lives. This study shows — at least indirectly — the labs handling DNA evidence aren’t taking it nearly as seriously as they should.
GAZA – Hamas dubbed Mahmoud Abbas’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly delivered on Thursday evening a redundant reverberation of his unproductive policies regarding the Palestinian cause and anti-occupation struggle.
In his speech, Abbas just repeated his demands to the international community, complained about the negligence of the U.S. administration and its bias, and expressed his disappointment over the refusal of the Israeli occupation to fulfill its due commitments pledged in PA-Israel agreements that led to catastrophic consequences on the Palestinian cause, Hamas said in a statement.
The movement said Abbas’ speech is an explicit announcement of the failure of his policies and a straightforward confession that settlement path will never bring about just solutions or any other accomplishment for the Palestinian people.
Regarding his question about the borders of the Israeli occupation, Abbas would have posed the same question before entering into Oslo Accords and recognizing the Israeli Occupation, added Hamas.
According to the resistance movement, Abbas overlooked the Great Return March in his speech and the great sacrifices the Palestinian people has made to resist the occupation. He also turned his back on the Gaza Strip and its people in his words before the General Assembly.
Abbas deepens the Palestinian rift, paves the way for the Israeli occupation to perpetrate more crimes and killings, and facilitates the implementation of the deal of the century, the movement warned.
The confirmation of Mahmoud Abbas that he is committed to the negotiations with the Israeli occupation after hundreds of rounds and conferences held to that end is just a reverberation of failure and an out-of-charge chance of which the occupation will always take advantage to expand its illegal settlements, judaize Islamic holy sites, and infringe the Palestinian right of return by dismantling UNRWA, the statement read.
Hamas noted that while all of the above violations are currently in place, Mahmoud Abbas maintains security collaboration with the Israeli occupation and steps up crackdowns both the Palestinian resistance and people.
Hamas strongly condemned Abbas’ designation of the Palestinian resistance as “terrorist militias” while standing before the UNGA, saying it is a “sharp stab” to the Palestinian people.
Hamas said Abbas used a UN platform to announce his isolation of the Gaza Strip and the launch of new punitive measures. Such threats endanger the Palestinian reconciliation. Abbas should have rather announced a decision to lift the sanctions imposed on the Gaza Strip. We do hold Abbas responsible for the upshots of his measures against the besieged enclave.
In light of the aforementioned challenges, Hamas said it believes that it is necessary for Abbas to repudiate the Oslo Accord which has inflicted overwhelming repercussions on the Palestinian people. In addition, Abbas should reconsider the unilateral policy he is pursuing and listen to the Palestinian people and factions.
Hamas added that Abbas should work on reuniting the Palestinian people and rearranging the internal political scene on the basis of a real partnership aiming to retrieve Palestinian rights. To those ends, Hamas maintained, all forms of security cooperation with the Israeli occupations should be immediately brought to a halt.
More than 60 Palestinian civil society organisations yesterday sent a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stating that the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s President Mahmoud Abbas “had lost his legitimacy”.
According to Safa news agency, the Palestinian organisations attributed their claims to article 36 of the Palestinian Basic Law of 2003 and its amendments in 2005.
The law’s article states that “a president’s term in office lasts for four years and the president has the right to run for a second term.”
Based on the Palestinian Basic Law, the rights institutions stressed, Abbas has to run for another presidential election to be able to renew his legitimacy or hand over the leadership to his successor.
“Abbas has continued to hold the leadership on an illegal basis and with the support of the international community and the Arab states,” the letter read, adding that Abbas was now “powerless”.
Abbas should have left office a decade ago however he had returned on a “de facto” basis, they said.
“This has contributed to deepening the division between Palestinians and strengthening the constitutional and legal crisis that has raged on the Palestinian political scene,” the civil organisations explained.
The sudden death of Pope John Paul I, exactly 40 years ago today, stunned the world. The ‘Smiling Pope’ had only served for 33 days. His demise and replacement by John Paul II marked an important turning point in the old Cold War.
The year 1978, as I argued in a previous op-ed, was the year today’s world was made.
There was nothing inevitable about the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher, the rise of groups like Al-Qaeda and IS, and the downfall of the Soviet Union. The neoliberal, neoconservative world order and its associated violence came about because of key events and decisions which took place 40 years ago. The Vatican was at the heart of these events.
The drama which unfolded there in the summer of 1978 would have been rejected as being too far-fetched if sent in as a film script. In a space of two and a half months, we had three different Popes. There was no great surprise when, on August 6, the first of them, Pope Paul VI, died after suffering a massive heart attack. The Supreme Pontiff, who had served since 1963, was 80 and had been in declining health. But the death of his much younger successor, John Paul I, a radical reformer who wanted to build a genuine People’s Church, has fuelled conspiracy theories to this day.
Cardinal Albino Luciani, the working-class son of a bricklayer (and staunch socialist), from a small town in northern Italy, was a Pope like no other. He refused a coronation and detested being carried on the sedia gestatoria – the Papal chair. He hated pomp and circumstance and pretentiousness. His speeches were down to earth and full of homely observations, with regular references to popular fiction. He possessed a gentle humor and always had a twinkle in his eye. He was by all accounts an incredibly sweet man.
But there was steel there, too. Luciani was determined to root out corruption, and to investigate the complex financial affairs of the Vatican’s own bank, and its connection to the scandal-hit Banco Ambrosiano.
While he had declared communism to be incompatible with Christianity, his father’s egalitarian ethos stayed with him. “The true treasures of the Church are the poor, the little ones to be helped not merely by occasional alms but in the way they can be promoted,” he once said. At a meeting with General Videla of Argentina, he made clear his abhorrence of fascism. “He talked particularly of his concern over ‘Los Desaparecidos’, people who had vanished off the face of Argentinian earth in their thousands. By the conclusion of the 15th minute audience the General began to wish that he had heeded the eleventh-hour attempts of Vatican officials to dissuade him coming to Rome,” noted David Yallop in his book ‘In God’s Name’.
One cleric, Father Busa, wrote of John Paul I: “His mind was as strong, as hard and as sharp as a diamond. That was where his real power was. He understood and had the ability to get to the centre of a problem. He could not be overwhelmed. When everyone was applauding the smiling Pope, I was waiting for him ‘tirare fuori le unghie’, to reveal his claws. He had tremendous power.”
But John Paul I never lived to exercise his “tremendous power.” He was found dead in his bed on the morning of September 28, 1978. The official story was that the ‘Smiling Pope’ had died from a heart attack. But it wasn’t long before questions were being asked. John Paul I was only 65 and had appeared to be in fine health. The fact that there was no post-mortem only added to the suspicions. “The public speculation that this death was not natural grew by the minute. Men and women were heard shouting at the inert form: Who has done this to you? Who has murdered you?” wrote David Yallop.
David Yallop revealed that on the day of his death, the Pope had discussed a reshuffle of Vatican staff with Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot, who was also to be replaced. Yallop claimed that the Pope had a list of a number of clerics who belonged to the Freemasons, membership of which was strictly prohibited by the Church. The most sinister of these Masonic lodges was the fiercely anti-communist Propaganda Due (P2), which held great influence in Italy at this time, being referred to as a “state within a state.” The murky world of P2, and its leaders’ links with organized crime, the Mafia and the CIA is discussed in ‘In God’s Name’.
Another writer, Lucien Gregoire, author of ‘Murder by the Grace of God’, points the finger of blame squarely at the CIA. He notes a seemingly strange coincidence, namely that on September 3, 1978, just 25 days before the Pope himself died, Metropolitan Nikodim, the visiting leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, who was later revealed to have been a KGB agent, fell dead at John Paul’s feet in the Vatican after sipping coffee. He was only 48. Gregoire says that the CIA dubbed John Paul I ‘the Bolshevik Pope’ and was keen to eliminate him before he presided over a conference the Puebla Conference in Mexico. “Had he lived another week, the United States would have been looking at a half a dozen mini-Cubas in its back yard,” he writes.
While there’s no shortage of suspects if you believe that John Paul I was murdered, it needs to be stressed that despite the contradictory statements made about the circumstances of his death, and the strange coincidences, no evidence has yet been produced to show that his death was not a natural one. What we can say though is that there will have been quite a few powerful and influential people in Italy and beyond who were relieved that the ‘Smiling Pope’ had such a short time in office.
His successor, the Polish Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, who took the name ‘John Paul II’ as a homage to his predecessor, made it clear that investigating the Vatican’s financial activities and uncovering Freemasons was not a priority. As a patriotic Pole, his appointment was manna from Heaven for anti-communist hawks in the US State Department. “The single fact of John Paul II’s election in 1978 changed everything. In Poland, everything began… Then the whole thing spread. He was in Chile and Pinochet was out. He was in Haiti and Duvalier was out. He was in the Philippines and Marcos was out,” said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, John Paul II’s press secretary.
The way that Pope John Paul II spoke out against what he regarded as communist repression, not only in his native Poland but across Eastern Europe and beyond, saw him being toasted by the neocon faction. It might not have been just words either, which helped undermine communist rule. There was a rumor that ‘God’s Banker’ Roberto Calvi, who in 1982 was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London, had sent $50mn to ‘Solidarity’ in Poland on behalf of the Pope.
In May 1981, John Paul II was shot and wounded by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca. Neocons in the US promoted the narrative that it was a communist plot (organized by Bulgaria), but Sofia denied involvement. In 1985, Agca’s confederate, Abdullah Catli, who was later killed in a car crash, testified that he had been approached by the West German BND spy organization, which promised him a large sum of money “if he implicated the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB in the attempt on the Pope’s life.”
Martin Lee, writing in Consortium News, also notes that in 1990, “ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman disclosed that his colleagues, under pressure from CIA higher-ups, skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the contention that the Soviets were involved. ‘The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the plot,’ Goodman told the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
In 2011, a new book entitled ‘To Kill the Pope, the Truth about the Assassination Attempt on John Paul II’, which was based on 20 years of research, concluded that the CIA had indeed tried to frame Bulgaria, in order to discredit communism.
The great irony of course is that after the Berlin Wall came down, Pope John Paul II became a strong critic of the inhumane ‘greed is good’ model of capitalism which had replaced communism. In Latvia, he said capitalism was responsible for “grave social injustices” and acknowledged that Marxism contained “a kernel of truth.” He said that “the ideology of the market” made solidarity between people “difficult at best.” In Czechoslovakia, he warned against replacing communism with materialism and consumerism.
Having enlisted the assistance of the Vatican in helping to bring down ‘The Reds’, the neo-liberals and neo-cons then turned on the Church. The Church survived communism, but it hasn’t fared too well under consumerism. The Vatican is nowhere near as influential as it was in 1978. The US, meanwhile, unconstrained by a geopolitical counter-weight, threw its weight around the world after 1989, illegally invading and attacking a series of sovereign states.
One can only wonder how different things might have been if the ‘Smiling Pope’ had lived.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
Two weeks ago the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) gave a landmark ruling against the UK government’s mass surveillance program, stating that it violated human rights and offered “no real safeguards” to the public. This surveillance programme, according to the Strasbourg court, allowed the British intelligence agencies’ to violate the right to a private and family life with “insufficient oversight” over which communications were chosen for examination. Of equal importance the ECHR found that the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), also known as the Snoopers’ Charter, did not give enough protection to journalistic sources which would violate the rights to freedom of expression guaranteed in UK and EU laws and would discourage whistle-blowing. In its judgment of the case, Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom (applications nos. 58170/13, 62322/14 and 24960/15), the court concluded that police and security services had breached citizens’ right to privacy by intercepting communications data in bulk, with little oversight of when these powers could be used, just as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had revealed.
In its judgment, the ECHR expressed concern that “intelligence services can search and examine ‘related communications data’ apparently without restriction’ – data that identifies senders and recipients of communications, their location, email headers, web browsing information, IP addresses, and more.” This means that Internet service providers must store details of everything we do online for twelve months and render it accessible to dozens of public bodies to include everything from browsing records to data on private citizens, search engine activity, to every phone call to text message and geographical location we have held in any of our electronic devices. The IPA also requires that tech companies hand over the data that they possess to intelligence agencies.
Yet, what does this mean for those of us who just use our computers for work and our mobiles for texting friends to meet up for drinks? Surely, this does not affect us, right? Wrong.
The catch is that we are all implicated, to include the simple text message to confirm dinner plans. Do you use a social media account? Do you have photos on your mobile and laptop that you have or have not posted online? Did you rate a restaurant on Google? All this information to include your list of Facebook friends are being mined by the government along with all the tracking information that your many apps provide, your bank, credit card and financial details, biographical information, your resume, your medical records, and all the information in the world that you store on these devices which you might even deem harmless. In this day and age there is no such thing as harmless information. At that, there is no such thing as privacy when the government believes it has already rewritten the IPA in measure with the previous court’s instruction.
As many are concerned with the interception of personal data and parents are reading online privacy and safety guide for kids, the government’s secret interception, processing and storing data of millions of people’s private communications, should alarm each and every one of us. The current form of the IPA means that any information that you have in the UK can be shared with secret intelligence agencies like the CIA, and well beyond. With which other countries does the US also share information under similar secret legal frameworks? Also important to consider here are the impediments to tech development that are under threat such as when then Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to ban Snapchat, WhatsApp, and any other encrypted messaging services unless these companies provided the government with backdoor access to user data. Such measures actually deter technology since most tech companies are aware that the minute they undermine their users’ privacy, their company will not last.
In short, by stripping away our privacy, the government is undermining everything that keeps us free: our expression, our right to protest and to fair trials, our legal and patient confidentiality, our free press. And one can argue our individuality is at stake whereby everything we do, consume, record, and say is potentially up for monitoring and scrutiny, as are those with whom we interact. As Edward Snowden stated, “Because privacy isn’t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. That’s who you are.”
We need to prize our privacy and human right not to be spied upon in this day and age where governments are pulling out the “terrorism” card in order to goad its citizens into surrendering one of the qualities which makes us most human.
A commission established by North Carolina to investigate that state’s role in a CIA torture campaign is urging authorities to launch a criminal probe of a state-based airline used to transport Muslim terror suspects, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Thursday.
The ACLU press release summarized a report by the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture dubbed “Torture Flights,” which found that a company named Aero Contractors that was employed by the CIA used a state-owned airport as a base to fly terror suspects to US-run “black sites” around the world following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“The [North Carolina Commission] report concluded that given the national policy of de facto impunity for US torture, North Carolina should have long since opened a criminal investigation into Aero’s substantial role in it,” the release said. “In collaboration with local law enforcement, Governor [Roy] Cooper can and should deploy the State Bureau of Investigation.”
Aero Contractors was — and still is — headquartered at a government-owned airport near the North Carolina capital of Raleigh, the report noted.
The Commission also identified 15 torture victims not previously named in a US Senate report — excluded because they were flown incognito to other countries for torture by local officials instead CIA operatives, the report said.
The history of ideas provides us with the names of those few men and women who challenged the boundaries of tolerance. Professor Robert Faurisson was one such man. Faurisson, who died last Sunday at age 89, was a French academic who didn’t believe in the validity of parts of the Holocaust narrative. He argued that gas chambers in Auschwitz were the “biggest lie of the 20th century,” and contended that deported Jews had died of disease and malnutrition. Faurisson also questioned the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank many years before the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright to the famous diary “alerted publishers that her father (Otto Frank) is not only the ‘editor’ but also legally the ‘co-author’ of the celebrated book” (NY Times ).
In the France of the late 1960s-1970s Faurisson had reason to believe that his maverick attitude toward the past would receive a kosher pass. He was wrong. Faurisson may have failed to grasp the role of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish politics and culture. And he did not grasp that Jewish power is literally the power to silence opposition to Jewish power.
In 1990 France made holocaust revisionism into the crime of history denial. Faurisson was repeatedly prosecuted, beaten and fined for his writings. He was dismissed from his academic post at Lyon University in 1991.
I am bothered by the question of why Jews and others attached to their politics are desperate to restrict the story of their past. This question extends far beyond the holocaust. … continue
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Yet, what does this mean for those of us who just use our computers for work and our mobiles for texting friends to meet up for drinks? Surely, this does not affect us, right? Wrong.
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