A group of four critical-care doctors who were recently in Gaza spoke on a UN panel about the horrors they witnessed in the besieged Strip. The doctors described multiple war crimes, horrendous injuries to children, kids dying of treatable wounds, and a shortage of supplies so severe that young patients die on the floors of hospitals without anesthetic to ease their suffering.
Addressing the UN on Tuesday, four physicians from France, the US, and Britain described the dire conditions in Gaza. “I saw the most appalling atrocities, and I saw things that I never would have expected to have seen in any healthcare setting,” Dr. Nick Maynard told the panel.
Maynard said that Israeli forces were bombing Gaza indiscriminately and intentionally attacking healthcare facilities, noting that some media outlets had uncritically repeated Tel Aviv’s assertion that it was carefully targeting Hamas. “I want to just dispel some of the narratives coming from the Israelis, [and] from some of the media,” which claimed the bombs were “only targeting Hamas.”
“I can certainly bear witness, as can any medic who’s been on the ground in Gaza in recent months, [and] dispel that notion with absolute certainty,” he continued. “There is mass indiscriminate bombing killing many, many thousands of civilians and a very clear targeting of healthcare facilities and healthcare workers.”
Maynard’s first-hand account is backed by Israeli and US sources. The White House has known for several months that Tel Aviv is bombing targets in Gaza without “solid intelligence” indicating any military value. President Biden himself previously described the Israeli onslaught as “indiscriminate,” while the Tel Aviv-based +972 Magazine detailed Israel’s intentional strikes on civilian “power targets” in what it dubbed an “assassination factory.”
Dr. Zaher Sahloul explained the toll the indiscriminate bombing has taken on the civilians in Gaza. “The number of children killed is 13,000 or so or more. Which means, one out of 100 children in Gaza has been killed and this is an astronomical number; the equivalent of that in the US would be half a million children,” he said.
“Of the 70,000 people who were injured, half of them have moderate to severe injuries. That means they will have some type of disability for the rest of their lives,” Sahloul continued before adding the numbers are likely an undercount.
Dr. Thaer Ahmad stated he was providing care to wounded Palestinians at the Nassar Hospital in Khan Younis before Israeli forces surrounded, raided, and disabled the medical center. He said aid could not enter the Strip and that doctors did not have the medicines needed to treat patients.
Extreme supply shortages have forced doctors to make “impossible decisions” at Gaza’s overwhelmed healthcare facilities, Dr. Amber Alayyan told the UN panel. Hospital officials “have to choose between whether to fully stock the operating theater, ICU, or emergency room.” She continued, “This is where you have doctors faced with horrific decisions of having to intubate and amputate children and adults without anesthetics in emergency rooms. Part of the reason for this is the lack of medications.”
At times, shortages are so severe that hospitals do not have morphine or antibiotics while doctors rewash surgical gloves.
Maynard explained the impact of the limited aid for one Palestinian girl. “One child that I’ll never forget had burned so bad you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving that,” he said. “But there was no morphine to give her. So, not only was she going to die, but she would die in agony.”
The doctor continued, “And what made it even worse was that there was nowhere for her to go and die, so she was just left on the floor of the emergency department to die. And that’s just one story; we’ve all seen multiple stories like that.”
Israel has imposed tight restrictions on aid deliveries into Gaza since October 7. While the Biden administration claims it is pressuring Tel Aviv to ease its blockade, fewer than 100 aid trucks have entered Gaza each day in recent weeks – down from 200 in January and 500 in September. The White House has refused to use its considerable leverage over Tel Aviv to persuade Israel to allow more aid into the Strip and has declined to condition future US military aid on that request.
The physicians explained that Washington’s efforts to relieve the humanitarian crisis would be ineffective, saying the real issue was distribution problems that could only be solved with an end to the fighting. Additionally, they pointed to multiple Israeli attacks on aid deliveries in Gaza, including a February 29 massacre that left more than 100 Palestinians dead.
Dr. Maynard went on to warn that an attack on Rafah would have devastating consequences for the 1.5 million people in the city. “It’ll be apocalyptic, really, the number of deaths that we’re going to see,” he said. “And of course, as we’re seeing, they’ll be told to evacuate and move somewhere safe, and there is, as we’ve heard, there is nowhere safe for them to go.”
South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor accused Israel yesterday of setting a precedent in defying the decisions of the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the UN also known as the World Court, and insisted again that Gaza is witnessing a deliberate “starvation” campaign.
South Africa took Israel to the ICJ in December, accusing it of committing genocide in the military offensive it has been waging since October. Pretoria’s move angered Israel and was condemned by the US.
Pandor pointed out that Israel has defied the ICJ’s January ruling which ordered the occupation state to do everything in its power to prevent genocide. Earlier this month, Pretoria asked the ICJ to impose “provisional measures” to put an end to the “widespread starvation” occurring as a result of Israel’s military attack in Gaza.
Pandor made her comments at a symposium at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace during a visit to Washington DC. “The provisional measures have been entirely ignored by Israel,” she warned. “We’re seeing mass starvation now and famine before our very eyes. I think we, as humanity, need to look at ourselves in horror and dismay and to be really worried that we have set an example.”
The minister noted that Israel’s actions may be interpreted by other nations that they have a licence to do what they want and will not be stopped.
She added that South Africa’s post-apartheid democracy, in going through international institutions on this issue, was “merely practicing what is preached to us every day” by the West. “The ICJ has not been respected. And the day that an African disrespects [the court] I hope we don’t go to that leader and say ‘Listen, you’re out of bounds; because you’re an African, we expect you to obey’.”
South Africa once again petitioned the court in The Hague to order measures for Israel to stop “widespread starvation” due to its attack on Gaza.
Israel denounced the petition, describing it arrogantly as “morally repugnant” and noting initiatives it is taking, including suspending aggression for humanitarian reasons.
A food security assessment backed by the UN has found that Gaza faces imminent famine, with about 1.1 million people, or nearly half of the population, suffering from “catastrophic” hunger.
No matter how brutal an event, there will be those who can justify, rationalize, or spin a positive narrative. Real and imagined injustices inspire reactions that lead to more injustice, creating a spiral of revenge. Or a group can decide that it is superior, righteous by default, and has the right to claim territory in order to thrive. Outside observers can grapple with favoring one party over others, claiming that it was a “lesser evil.” Despite any pretense or deceptions, most violent actors do the irrationally vile for little reason other than self service or with inhuman distance. Trying to argue against such irrationality with reason and rationality can be a fool’s errand. Decency and moral dignity are seldom in consideration for those who would murder on a large scale. This is the prevailing predicament for those who oppose war and injustice with principles, trying to find compassion and empathy within those who appear callous, indifferent, or even deranged.
Despite this, we often argue and appeal with reason to those who may not see the world as we do. They may understand it differently, seeking a particular utopia or a piece of the imperial pie for themselves. They do not care about how many “eggs are broken” to achieve such an omelette. So how do we find common ground?
It seems that it is only after the fact that many of the killers and their masters come to understand the demented business that they made possible; rarely do many protest and object early on. It was only decades afterwards when Robert McNamara exhibited a degree of remorse, or years later when veterans may experience moral injury that leads them to challenge their original mission. Smedley Butler’s words are often cited by anti-imperialists, though he is an example of the cynical veteran, waiting until after he served his warmasters heroically for decades to write a book about his deeds which made their imperialism possible at all. George W. Bush paints portraits of his victims while in retirement, seemingly delusional with his legacy.
Those labelled conscientious objectors or “draft dodgers” tend to be viewed as cowards, ridiculed because they would not join the brave (nearly always men) who march into the meat grinder of war. In 1918, Reverend John Kovalsky and three other men were attacked by a mob of around three hundred in the town of Christopher, Illinois. The mob violently tarred and feathered the four men, and the reverend was forced to kiss the American flag because of disloyal language. Despite being fined by law enforcement, a mob saw it fit to humiliate and punish the men for disloyalty. The four disloyal men needed to show fidelity to a government that was waging war for human rights and free expression; because the four challenged the war and government with words, both the law and a mob punished them.
“The country was in peril; he was jeopardising his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”- Joseph Heller, Catch 22
Such acts of mob violence are often looked back on as moments of group insanity. Yet time and time again the world over we see such displays of unreason and violence tear away individual rights. The mob could be heard squealing “Do the right thing” during the COVID madness, attacking those who breached curfew, who remained unmasked, or who refused a vaccination. The term Mass Formation Psychosis began floating around the internet whenever such critical dissent was not censored. In time of war it is also apparent, even if the war is not widely supported or understood. There will be elements that lean into the legitimacy of power and authority, even if they claim to be anti-power and against authority. There is nothing rational about such mobbery; it is crude and obscene, but seemingly ‘normal’ people can fall into such a frenzy.
Those who oppose the wars with consistency may notice the tourists of the cause who pick and choose their moments, depending on who is waging the war and whether it’s politically expedient or profitable to be for or against. The hypocrisy is only obvious to the principled because inconsistency can’t be used against those who lack any. They are political animals and opportunists who come and go as they please and will betray anyone. During the Cultural Revolution in China, millions of idiotically ideological youths did the deadly bidding of cunning political purists who were able to whip them into a frenzy. These mobs of youth would tear powerful party officials and elites from their positions of rule without fear, throwing China into a sort of civil war as irrationality purged the party and nation under the guise of some form of socialist purification. Millions died. As confusing as events were, and as uncertain as the victims were in the lead up of any “guilt,” the killers were certain (even if they were uncertain) as to why they should be certain at all. They killed regardless.
Now we see those who were against one war support another while wanting to prevent further war elsewhere, but are eager to make war in another spot. Outside of those who have particular geopolitical or strategic reasoning are those who claim to be antiwar in times when it suits them to claim as such. In arguing for a military action, they do not have to convince the principally antiwar; those with such consistent views are only useful when it suits them. They only need to convince themselves, their allies, and those who have no principles but think they do. Those that have no principles will reveal the truth when irrationality emerges, when with the pressure of crisis they can help fill the mob. Most can sit with a straight face and claim that they would not have been in the tarring mob in the town of Christopher, Illinois or a murderous goon in the Red Guard, yet most people have no proof otherwise in their life.
Principles only matter when they require courage. The political animal seldom has any courage or dignity; it’s how they survive and thrive. Those who lack principles may not have the ambitions of the political class but they certainly will follow them. That is how we have moments in history like the Cultural Revolution, wars that fell out of favor once attrition emerged, and the policies and mob mentality reaction to the COVID virus that infected the minds of too many. It’s in such moments that reason and rational discourse give way to emotions fuelled by lies, half truths, and fears. If you add in the bigotry of collectivism, then you have a tendency to err in the direction of a conclusion that generally leads to mass murder or injustice. Once the victims are buried, the mob and political animals move on, wiping the injustice and irrationality from their minds. From there it’s “ancient history” to be forgotten, time to let “bygones be bygones,” and so on; the lack of reflection satisfies the return to reason inside ones mind.
Albert Camus once said that “the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” That may be true for those writers who seek to challenge said civilization and by presenting it with a mirror to see its self upon. There are also those who write with such splendid prose only to satiate putrid intentions or to cover up the true nature of that which they justify. The delicate balance between admission and omission which is crucial in persuasion and propaganda dangle with the words of writers. To lie when appropriate and reveal when necessary is their job.It’s a rational choice to deceive, an awareness that a bad thing is being hidden.
When the Nazi military found the remains of murdered Polish prisoners in Katyn, evidence that the Soviet government had slaughtered thousands of unarmed men, it was revealed as a crime. The Nazi government invited neutral officials and Allied prisoners to investigate. The Nazi officials understood that it was wrong and immoral to slaughter unarmed people. The Soviets denied it as Nazi propaganda, also aware that what they had done is widely considered “wrong.” Yet, both Nazi and Soviet governments committed such atrocities en masse, only to see and reveal the evil in the other. The need to be seen as good is more important to those who are the epitome of evil, rather than to be not-evil. That is the contradiction of human beings: despite being capable of such abhorrent evil, beneath that violence lurks the warm heart of complicated creatures, many capable of love and selective kindness. Nearly all are aware of what to conceal or be justified with deceit, usually that which is understood to be evil.
Samantha Power is the author of A Problem From Hell: American and the Age of Genocide, where she argues for liberal interventionism and promotes the United States as a force for good, a shield to protect the innocent and to stop mass murder. Power recently drew criticism from Agnieszka Sykes, who works under Power in the United States Agency for International Development, and said, “You wrote a book on genocide and you’re still working for the administration: You should resign and speak out.” It’s the principled appealing to the political. It’s not that Samantha Power is necessarily a hypocrite that can be reasoned with; she is political. What principles she may have written about only exist as a means to an end, or as a validation of power and empire. For those like Power, enabling and downplaying the Israeli Defense Forces slaughter of Palestinian civilians is simply politics. A recently released White House transcript shows that President Joe Biden and his White House are aware of “thousands and thousands of innocent women and children [that have been killed],” yet his support and arms for Israel continues. It’s unlikely Power or the others will resign.
In financial markets it is understood that there is a madness in crowds or “rational irrationality.” An individual’s level of behavior tends to be perfectly reasonable, but in the case of markets and the marketplace, chaos can arise. Clearly, such a maniacal mentality exists outside of finances and with the added problem of the sociopathic and mercenary mindset. On a personal level, most understand that it is all absurd. But when expanded into the mob or nation there is a sense of helplessness even while participating in the absurdity. Is it absurd if it’s common and normalized? Maybe in the end the absurd are those who see it for what it is: insanity. Maybe the abnormal are those who remain principled and the unprincipled and irrational are normal. It seems no amount of reasonable explanation or set of principles matters to them;irrationality could end life on Earth with those doing it certain of their reasons for doing so until it’s all done.
In December last year, in the town of Beit Hanun in northern Gaza, a Jewish religious outpost was established in a partially destroyed building. It was described as the ‘first Chabad House’ in the besieged, war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
Chabad is an ultra-orthodox Jewish cult. It has many adherents in the genocidal Israeli occupation forces. Many of them wear Chabad patches on their uniforms. Here is a Zionist tank flying the distinctive Chabad flag in Gaza.
In addition, there are also Chabad Rabbis attached to the Israeli occupation forces. One notes that the genocide is actually about “rooting out evil”. Here two Chabad Rabbis erected the Jewish religious symbol, the Menorah, in Gaza.
But what is Chabad? It styles itself as a friendly outgoing Jewish movement dedicated to helping Jews reconnect with Judaism. However, in reality, it is a supremacist, hate-mongering Zionist cult.
In the past it was anti-Zionist, but back then, even as far back as 1929, its adherents in Al Khalil (or Hebron as it is called by Zionists) were involved in spying on the Palestinians for the Haganah terror militia as well as storing weapons for them.
Chabad is now so ultra-Zionist that it called in December for Gaza to be recolonized with Jewish settlers. Worse, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, its adherents believe – as laid out in the Tanya, Chabad’s key religious text – gentiles have only animal souls, not human souls.
In January, the Tanya was printed out by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. This supremacism is carried over into its attitude to the Palestinians.
Followers of a Chabad Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh are known as the ‘hilltop youth’. Two of his followers wrote the hugely controversial King Torah, which was also recommended by Ginsburg.
The book states that it is permissible to kill Palestinian children, including babies.
“There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”
It’s not just words. Ginsburg’s followers in the so-called ‘Hilltop Youth’ are said by the Zionist intelligence agency Shin Bet to be responsible for most ‘price tag’ revenge attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
In 1988, Israeli regime premier Benjamin Netanyahu famously met with the leader of Chabad in New York where the notorious Zionist cult has its global headquarters.
Netanyahu has maintained a strong relationship with Chabad ever since. Here he is seen addressing them at an event in 2014.
These are the forces – supported and aided by the United States and the United Kingdom – unleashed as part of the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.
In December, it was revealed that a Chabad group in the UK was fundraising to support the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has already claimed the lives of more than 31,700 Palestinians, 70 percent of them children and women, since October 7.
Rabbi Aryeh Sufrin of Chabad claimed back in October that the Hamas resistance movement is “worse than ISIS (Daesh)” in full conformity with Zionist entity talking points. He also disclosed that his son is a British recruit to the occupation forces and was in occupied Palestine at the time.
The Chabad appeal read “Vital equipment needed by the IDF… Funds raised will go directly to equipment needed by Aron DovSufrin’s reserve unit, up in the North of Israel, and Support Units.”
Aron DovShufrin is of course the son of the Rabbi, serving actively in the genocidal occupation forces.
Chabad-Lubavitch is an ultra-orthodox Hasidic sect that also happens to be a Zionist supremacist and genocidal cult. It originates in Liubavichi in Russia near the border with Belarus and is a global movement with more than 5,000 offices in over 100 countries and in all 50 states of the US.
The cult even has offices in seemingly unlikely places such as China, Belarus, Tunisia, Morocco and Venezuela.
It has prominent supporters in many places. For example, the new Argentinian president Javier Milei is a Chabad devotee. Donald Trump donated to Chabad, though not as much as his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who played a pivotal role in the normalization of the Zionist entity.
Obviously, Chabad has been highly organized in Ukraine and its followers were amongst those recruited to the Nazi Azov Battalion, which it is important to recall, was co-founded by a former member of the Israel occupation forces.
Press TV’s flagship weekly show Palestine Declassified previously reported how Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky bankrolled Chabad in Ukraine as well as the Nazi Azov and Aidar battalions.
Back in the UK, there are around one hundred Chabad groups or offices. It flies under the radar and is widely regarded as well-meaning if a little eccentric.
In reality, it is an extremist group that is building support for genocide in the UK.
Ironically, the Community Security Trust has aided Chabad – giving them security advice after an edition of Palestine Declassified exposed some of their activities.
The CST has ‘educating about extremism‘ as one of its charitable objectives, but it is unwilling to educate us on the extremism of Chabad.
There is a very good reason for that. Gerald Ronson, who created and runs the CST, is himself a Zionist extremist and has been supporting Chabad for more than half a century.
Here he is in 2013 as a guest of honor at one of their events.
Zionist extremists are widely scattered across the UK and form a mutually supportive network. This is a key element of the justification and support for genocide in Gaza.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
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FROM 2015: Karl Popper famously said, “A theory that explains everything explains nothing.” So what do you make of the theory that catastrophic manmade CO2-driven “climate change” can account for harsher winters and lighter winters, more snow and less snow, droughts and floods, more hurricanes and less hurricanes, more rain and less rain, more malaria and less malaria, saltier seas and less salty seas, Antarctica ice melting and Antarctic ice gaining and dozens of other contradictions? Popper gave a name to “theories” like this: pseudoscience.
TRANSCRIPT
One of the giants in the history of the philosophy of science, Karl Popper, once famously observed that a theory that explains everything explains nothing.
And, to be sure, the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change appears to explain everything.
What’s the problem here? This sounds like the perfect scientific theory. It can explain literally everything, including self-contradictory things! This means it’s absolutely perfect, isn’t it?
Well, no, not according to Karl Popper and the philosophers of science.
And within the philosophy of science, there’s something called the demarcation problem. How do you differentiate science from pseudoscience?
If you’re at all interested in this, I would suggest you read through Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations, in which he lays out his criterion for differentiating science and pseudoscience, namely falsification.
What on earth does he mean by this?
Well, he starts with a very simple but very profound observation that people are attracted to pseudoscientific theories:
“[. . . b]y their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, open your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth.”
And it occurred to him that although this is usually taken to be a good sign of a theory, “[i]t began to dawn on me [Karl Popper] that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.”
So he goes on to list his conclusions as to how we ultimately try to differentiate science from pseudoscience, and I think a couple of the most important conclusions here are:
4. A theory which is not refutable by an conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory, as people often think but a vice.
And also:
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers—for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.
And he sums it up by saying: “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.”
So, I would say that the ball is in the court of the believers of the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change hypothesis.
By what means can one falsify this hypothesis?
Let’s start with just an even less of a hurdle to come over: what set of observations over what period of time would be enough to refute the theory?
And then, furthermore, are there any actual hypotheses, any predictions that come as a result of this theory that can then be tested against the real world, or real observations?
If the answer to that is no, then . . . well, you’ve got a word for your theory, and it’s not science.
It’s pseudoscience.
So again, the onus is on the believers in the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change hypothesis to come up with some way that you can test and potentially falsify this theory.
Because if you can’t come up with any actual way to answer that question of how you falsify the theory, then you might as well just pray to your witch doctors to save you from the weather gods.
For decades the primary way environmentalists concerned about manmade global warming have advocated to slow it has been to reduce human emissions of the “greenhouse gas” carbon dioxide (mainly from burning coal, oil, and natural gas for energy). Lately they have focused increasingly on contributions from two other “greenhouse gases,” primarily from agriculture—methane (CH4) from livestock flatulence, and nitrous oxide (N2O) from chemical fertilizers.
Why? Because CH4’s forcing effect (the amount of infrared radiation, or heat, each molecule in the atmosphere impedes from escaping from Earth’s surface to space, thus warming the surface) is 30 times, and N2O’s 230 times, that of CO2, as illustrated here:
Why? Because almost all the outgoing longwave radiation (infrared) in the frequency bands CO2 can absorb has already been absorbed—by both CO2 and water vapor (H2O)—while far less in the bands CH4 and N2O can absorb has already been absorbed. So we say CO2’s bands are nearly “saturated,” while CH4’s and N2O’s are nearly “transparent.”
So, it looks like we should be much more concerned about N2O than about CO2 or even CH4. Or should we?
The rate at which we’re adding CO2 to the atmosphere is about 3000 times that at which we’re adding N2O, and 30 times that at which we’re adding CH4, as illustrated here:
Consequently—because CO2’s rate of increase in the atmosphere is so much faster than CH4’s or N2O’s—the contribution to forcing (and so to global average temperature) from CO2 is about 10 times that from CH4 and 13 times that from N2O, as illustrated here:
So, should we reduce CH4 and N2O emissions (by reducing agricultural production) to slow global warming?
As atmospheric physicist and MIT emeritus professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen put it in a talk to Irish beef farmers February 27, “shutting down emissions of CH4 and N2O globally (forget little Ireland) will have no discernible impact on the climate metric regardless of what you believe about global warming and which model you are using.”
The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says the Israeli military has systematically targeted dozens of information technology experts in the Gaza Strip, as part of its genocidal war against the besieged territory.
Euro-Med documented a list on Sunday that included several programmers, computer engineers, and experts in artificial intelligence who were killed as a result of the Israeli attacks across Gaza.
The human rights group went on to say that employees and influencers in these vital sectors were also killed as the occupying regime deliberately targeted and destroyed companies and infrastructure in Gaza.
According to Euro-Med, Haitham Mohammed Al-Nabahin a prominent programming engineer was killed along with his wife in an Israeli attack on Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza on March 14.
The organization’s list also included Tareq Thabet, the program director of the “YUCAS” technological incubator affiliated with the University College in Gaza, who was killed along with his wife, children, parents, and several family members after the Israeli military targeted his home.
Among those killed by the Israeli regime was also the software engineer Baraa Abdullah Al-Saqa, founder of the company (DITS), as well as a group of other young programmers.
Euro-Med further noted that the Israeli regime is seeking to hinder the development of the Palestinian society in Gaza and undermine its scientific, educational, and economic systems by targeting and killing Palestinian talents and elites, including doctors and academics.
The crimes committed by the Israeli regime “aim to deprive vital sectors of the Palestinian society of specialized and distinguished personnel, which are difficult to replace in the short term, in addition to creating a state of panic and coercion among the remaining talents, which might push them to migrate,” the group warned.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 31,490 Palestinians and injured more than 73,439 others.
The Tel Aviv regime has imposed a “complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
Every pundit in the West seems to be talking about rearmament at the moment, and some governments have even promised to do it. But few people have much idea of what it involves, or even what the concept really means. Here’s a quick, and highly simplified guide to what it would mean and require in practice.
To begin with, we need to distinguish between politics and reality, bearing in mind that whatever option states eventually choose will contain bits of both. At one extreme, it’s easy to see how a medium-sized government, under pressure to “rearm”, but concerned about cost and practicability, might decide to react largely politically. So it could announce increases in defence expenditure which might or might not happen and whose real-terms value would depend on factors like inflation (“increase defence spending by 20% over the next five years!”) Symbolic increases in the size of the military could be announced, even if that military could not recruit enough personnel as it was. More reserves and part-time soldiers could make up some of the difference in numbers, without adding much capability. Equipment plans already agreed and funded could be counted towards the total. A few extra aircraft and armoured vehicles could be added to the end of existing orders, to be delivered some time in the next decade. And finally, units could be renamed and repurposed (an infantry battalion becomes an “airmobile” battalion with a new badge and a few helicopters scrounged from elsewhere.) So if your government starts announcing plans of this kind, the questions to ask include: how much of this is new? How much was planned anyway? Are spending increases in real or nominal terms? Are other capabilities being sacrificed or delayed to make way for announced new ones? And so on.
But let’s assume that, politics and presentation aside, a western state decides it actually wants to rearm on a significant scale. Well, the first thing to understand is that rearmament is not, primarily, a matter of spending money and buying equipment. Money in itself can only buy what is available to be bought: demand does not inevitably and instantly create its own supply, whatever Economics departments in Universities may teach these days. And any amount of equipment sitting around in storage is useless without personnel and support.
It’s also useless unless you know what you want to do with it. One point that seems to have escaped most commentators is that the purpose of rearmament is not necessarily just (or even) to have larger and more, powerful forces, it is to have a better capability to do the things you now believe you need to do as part of your security policy in the world as it is. Oh, and that implies having a security policy which is properly worked out, and in turn generates missions and tasks, that require capabilities, that in turn are provided through procurement and other means. If that sounds complicated, well it is, and so fantastic amounts of money are wasted by nations all over the world, not because of the absence of financial controls or budgetary accountants, but because governments spend money on defence without really understanding what they are doing and why they are doing it.
During the Cold War, it was noticeable that certain countries got very good value out of their defence budgets, because they had clear security policies, and developed clear defence policies to support them. So Germany and Sweden both, in different ways, put the majority of their effort into land/air territorial defence. Similarly, the French were ruthless in their prioritising: the nuclear force first, then Africa, then everything else. The British, obsessed with maintaining a “balanced force”, tried to do everything, at a smaller and smaller scale as time passed, winding up of course in their current parlous state. On the other hand, one reason that the US has historically wasted so much of its defence budget is that there is no central control or direction of any kind in Washington, but rather endless competition between powerful organisations which each try to expand into the areas of the others, and fight viciously among themselves. This produces enormous waste and duplication, not least because political strength, rather than strategic logic, determines where the money goes.
Since the end of the Cold War, western countries have drifted away from whatever real coherence in defence planning they then had, reacting to changing fashions and technologies, and being pushed this way and that in the absence of any clear doctrine. So the first requirement now, would be a thorough-going strategic reassessment, based on how the world looks after the end of the Ukraine War, followed by clear and coherent decisions about the practical steps that need to be taken. That, of course, is something that virtually every country has failed to do over the last generation, when the world was a simpler and less threatening place: nevertheless it is an absolute requirement now, and without it, money, as such, is irrelevant. But where on earth do you start?
It will be years before the strategic situation settles down properly, but we can perhaps make a few plausible guesses, on the basis of which we can construct some rearmament scenarios. Let’s assume that at the end of the current war, the area of Russian permanent control is the Russian speaking areas in the east of Ukraine, together with the coast up to Odessa. Beyond that may be an effectively demilitarised and de-populated zone, perhaps with a formal border of some kind. Some sort of Ukrainian state will therefore still be in existence. Very well, what does a representative NATO country actually do then, by way of rearmament? For a start, it’s hard to believe that the Russians have any interest in taking more territory, and certainly not that of NATO nations. So the situation is not like the Cold War, when NATO and WP forces faced each other across fortified borders.
If we look at the map, we see that the geographical situation would scarcely have changed, except that some Ukrainian territory has become Russian. Norway, the Baltics and Finland continue to have frontiers with Russia, as they do now. Depending on where Russian forces stop, there may be some contact with Romania. The changes, in other words, will be primarily psychological, rather than geographical, which is a problem when you want to make changes to your doctrine and forces. From the point of view of Greece or Portugal, nothing will have changed at all. We can expect the overall political atmosphere to be harsh and bitter, and at least as confrontational in principle as the Cold War was, yet the two sides will not be separated by the same fundamental ideological differences. And the West itself will be riven by internal jealousies and contradictions as well as by the different and often opposed economic and political interests of its members.
Creating a collective security strategy to respond to a situation like that may seem a tall order, if not utterly impossible, but it is, in fact, essential if western nations individually are to make plans that are even minimally coherent with each other. To take an extreme case, there is no point in hard-line western countries making plans to deploy their forces eastwards in a time of crisis, unless the countries into which those forces are going to deploy already have plans in place to receive them. So at a minimum, some kind of collective western strategic concept will be necessary. It’s not clear what kind of a state NATO will be in to produce one, and its history with documents of that type doesn’t inspire much confidence, but it’s doubtful if there will be any alternative forum in which to do it. Needless to say, the complexities of trying to produce a common concept based on a “threat” which is ill-defined and at best existential, are enormous, and would tax the resources of the finest brains and the best organisation.
Now then; we are the better part of 1500 words into this text about rearmament, and all I’ve done is to talk about the minimal conditions that would be necessary for it even to take place: and these are essentially conceptual and political, rather than practical. Without a clear idea of what rearmament is supposed to accomplish, you can waste large amounts of money and resources, and achieve nothing.
Let me suggest a possible outcome to conceptual debates: it’s not one I would necessarily recommend (I’m agnostic on these issues) but it would at least have the virtues of being tolerably clear and reasonably coherent. It is an example, in my view, of the minimum acceptable outcome that would actually make some sensible kind of rearmament theoretically possible, assuming that the resources were made available and the practical problems could be overcome.
We would have to start from the recognition that the West is weak where it matters. Thirty years of drift, and a steady movement away from a capacity for intensive land-air combat, and a concentration on counter-insurgency capabilities, have left the West with small, weak conventional forces in places where they might be needed. This would not matter if relations with Russia, the major military power on the continent, were good, but they are execrable, and about to get much worse. Moreover, NATO is sending so much of its own equipment to Ukraine that it is becoming steadily weaker. The US itself now has little actual combat power deployed in Europe.
So the risk is, ironically, a return to the mental atmosphere of the late 1940s: a weak and divided Europe, confronted with a Russia that was still heavily armed. The difference this time is that the Russian economy will not have been devastated by war and that its armed forces will not be low-quality occupation troops, but professionals armed with modern weapons. Unlike in the late 1940s, it’s not clear that a US link with Europe will stabilise the situation: indeed, it might well complicate it and make it worse. Under the circumstances, the fear in Europe would be of political intimidation rather than military conflict as such. If that were the case, then one could imagine priorities like the following being agreed:
Very large increases in armoured and mechanised ground forces, with artillery and attack helicopters.
Very large increases in fighter-ground attack aircraft, capable of surviving against Russian missiles.
Infrastructure and well-rehearsed plans for moving combat forces forward in a crisis.
Substantial programme to create proper layered missile defence system.
Now I would be astonished if, in practice, anything like this were agreed. But at least it provides the absolute minimum conceptual framework for ensuring that rearmament proceeds according to some kind of logic.
This kind of thing has happened in the past. A useful example is British air rearmament in the late 1930s, which was actually built around a clear strategic concept. The British government feared another war in Europe, but also believed that the return of conscription and the despatch of large forces to Europe would not be acceptable politically. And the greatest threat to an island nation was seen as air attack. Thus, the British developed a policy of expanding the Royal Air Force, developing new bomber aircraft with longer ranges, and subsequently developing new fighter aircraft as well, together with the world’s first radar system. This involved not just a massive programme of airfield renovation and construction (some 60,000 workers were employed full-time for years), but government-funded scientific and engineering development, construction of new factories ‘(including “shadow factories” which could be converted to war production if required) as well as huge new facilities for ammunition storage and production, flying training, operational command and control and administration and accommodation. It is reasonable to say, of course, that the technical expertise and organisational capability to carry out such a program no longer exists in Britain, nor for that matter in the West as a whole. But it does give a small indication of what “rearmament” means in practice.
So let’s take these four requirements: fantasising, perhaps, that the kind of authoritative strategic guidance required for effective rearmament programmes actually existed. Now there are some general points to make first. We have assumed that some kind of strategic concept for rearmament is available, and we have seen from a real example, that rearmament means a great deal more than buying equipment. There are massive personnel, infrastructure, logistic, scientific, technological and industrial issues as well. Let’s look at a few of the consequences as they would exist today.
Rearmament in the sense of this discussion means more than replacing old equipment with new equipment: indeed, it might well mean keeping old equipment in service when it should really have been scrapped. Most of all, it means extra military units: the RAF, in various expansion plans, formed a hundred new squadrons before 1939. And the first requirement is therefore extra personnel. In practice, this will require the reintroduction of military service in some form to fill the lower echelons. At the margins, it is possible to expand peacetime militaries somewhat, by vigorous recruitment. But militaries in most western countries now struggle to attract and retain enough applicants for their small professional forces. For example, depending on definitions, 10-20% of 18-25 year olds in most European countries are severely overweight or obese. (In the United States it is worse). Many of those already have illnesses like diabetes which are linked to weight and life-style. In addition, as professional militaries contract and become ever more distant from the population, young people find a military career less attractive. And smaller militaries mean worse career opportunities, and encourage the more able to leave. Most militaries are already struggling to pay their personnel enough to retain them, given the disadvantages of service life. Likewise, it is often particularly difficult to recruit and retain the people you actually need the most. This refers not just to glamour jobs like jet pilots, but to people like telecommunications technicians and field medical staff. Yet, of course, military service, even with reserve obligations in later years, cannot provide you magically with experienced officers and NCOs in shortage areas: these you will have to recruit on the open market in any case.
So in practice rearmament will mean both the return of military service (probably selective), and a considerably expanded officer and NCO corps, which will have to be recruited from scratch, and will take a decade to have any real presence. This will, of course, mean considerably expanding the recruiting, training and administrative systems of the military, and experienced trainers will have to be found from somewhere. The general de-industrialisation of western societies is a problem here as well: during the Cold War it was possible to conscript workers from electronics factories to be radar technicians or to repair thermal imaging sights on tanks. For the most part that is no longer possible. Likewise, in most western countries the number of science and technology graduates from universities is reducing, so the pool from which technical officers can be recruited is actually diminishing. In all likelihood, it will be necessary to set up special institutions to train engineers at technician and graduate level, although where the instructors will come from is not obvious.
But let us assume that these problems can be overcome, and that between intensive recruitment efforts and the return of selective military service, there is a large enough pool to draw on to fill out whatever force structure is decided upon. So how do you get the force structure, assuming that you don’t just shrug your shoulders and buy a few more of everything you already have?
Well, let’s go back to the missions and tasks. Assume a hypothetical NATO concept for a Force capable of moving East in the event of a crisis, and that on that basis, NATO asks your country for three mechanised brigades, with more artillery and air defence assets than at present, and two squadrons of attack helicopters. (We’ll assume that permanently stationing forces forward in other countries is just too politically and financially unrealistic. In Cold War Germany, the British, US and other forces essentially remained in the former Wehrmacht facilities they had taken over as occupation forces. That’s not going to happen in, say, Poland.) But of course if it comes to fighting, you can’t leave your own country undefended, so you want to retain two mechanised brigades for home defence, as well as substantial territorial defence forces. In addition, moving hundreds of vehicles through your country, most on heavy transporters, will create traffic management and security problems the like of which you probably haven’t seen in decades. (Oh yes, there’ll have to be a massive investment in transport units, as well as in railroads, air transport and strengthening roads and bridges.)
Well, there will be negotiation, of course, but after a while your experts will come back and say, perhaps: we need three completely new mechanised brigades, one new squadron of attack helicopters and modification of a second to the attack role, more artillery and air defence generally, and a massive investment in transport infrastructure. Most of the Cold War infrastructure has been sold off, so we’ll need new barracks, new training areas, new ordnance depots, new firing ranges, new communications units and infrastructure, new headquarters; oh and lots of less glamorous stuff like accommodation for the personnel, garages and maintenance depots, and personnel for the vehicles, schools and hospitals, that kind of thing. Very large numbers of people will have to be trained to operate and repair this equipment. In the Cold War, this kind of infrastructure generally existed: now, it generally does not, and land will have to be purchased and new facilities constructed.
The next day, the air force experts report back from their negotiations with NATO. They have finally agreed to provide three squadrons of ground-attack aircraft, optimised for low-level operations, and carrying stand-off weapons. This is a capability you do not currently possess. You do, of course, want to keep your existing fighter/ground attack capability for defence of your own terrain and airspace. Your extensive Cold War infrastructure has now largely been sold off: you may need to construct a new air base, to house the new operational squadrons as well as the training units. (You will anyway need to train more pilots per year, so your existing training facilities will need expanding.) Officers and technicians need to be recruited to learn about, teach and practice the repair and maintenance of a new type of aircraft and new weapons. Somehow, you’ll need to find the land, including perhaps building a complete new air base with a main runway perhaps 2km long, with hardened aircraft shelters, and maintenance facilities for 40-45 aircraft, and all the administrative, life support and security that goes along with it.
Now, I entirely accept that that’s a rather simplified, perhaps even superficial, presentation of what might be needed. Military experts, especially logistics specialists, will shake their heads and say it will all be more difficult than that, and they will no doubt be right. But it does give some impression of what would be involved. The other two issues—arranging to be able to deploy forward in crisis, or setting up a continent-wide anti-missile screen, have problems of equal or greater complexity, but this section is long enough already.
So let’s suppose that you are confident that you will be able to conscript and recruit enough personnel of the right type, including having reserves on standby, that you are busy constructing new barracks, airfields, ordnance depots and flying training areas with land you have purchased, that you have a coherent plan for how you intend to expand your military capabilities, in conjunction with your allies, and this is translated into a force structure that you can establish, support and use effectively. Then, of course, you need the equipment.
During the phase of preparation for the Second World War, even medium-sized countries had their own armaments industries. It was therefore possible to directly invest in one’s own industry, and define exactly what was needed. During the Second World War, some of the Allied belligerents used foreign aircraft and tanks (notably, but not exclusively, from the United States) when their own production was inadequate. But it is only really with the mammoth, shareholder-driven consolidation of the defence industry over the last generation or so that we have seen the number of suppliers shrink so radically. And the companies concerned now make equipment which is so expensive that it is produced in the minimum economic quantities as slowly as possible: about one Rafale fighter is manufactured per month, for example. Any serious western-wide rearmament programme would therefore run up against capacity problems instantly. In theory, new factories could be opened and production ramped up, but that would require the massive expansion of a skilled western workforce that is now a shadow of what it once was. Moreover, even in the US, around half the value of major western systems is imported: typically, a western state might buy an airframe from one country, with an engine from a second, with armament from a third and with avionics that it has developed or adapted itself. Because production goes at the speed of the slowest, a delay in one place delays the programme as a whole.
It’s easy to say “we’ll spend what it takes,” but as we have seen money is in some ways the least of the problems. Yes, the US transformed itself into the famous “arsenal of democracy” in about three years, but the idle manufacturing capacity, the technical skills and the management expertise existed already. And the level of technology was, of course, much lower. During the worst of the Covid crisis, many people realised for the first time the sheer length and complexity of industrial supply chains. Cars, for example, are not made “in” a country any more: they are at best assembled there. Components come from many countries. With military systems it’s much worse, and there’s no point, for example, in doubling the output of your aircraft factory from, say, two aircraft per month to four, unless you also double output at the factory that makes the engines, the various factories that make the avionics, even the factories that make the tyres and the ejector seats. Many of these components or sub-assemblies will come from overseas, and so in practice, all areas of the western defence economy, as well as many non-defence areas, would need to simultaneously expand their production, and find more skilled manpower and real estate. Non-western suppliers would have to be induced to cooperate.
Finally (to avoid going on for ever and ever) there is the problem of raw materials: defence equipment is made of stuff, and Europe is in general quite poor in the raw materials needed. World War 2 was arguably an industrial production war, where the victors (The US, Russia and Britain) had access to raw materials that the defeated (Germany and Japan) did not have. Indeed, David Edgerton has plausibly argued that the British ability to rearm in the 1930s, and to survive at all between 1939-41, was essentially because its Navy was able to secure the trade routes from its colonies. It’s not too much to say that it was the Empire that saved Britain from Hitler, and indeed it was the French Empire that enabled that country to bounce back. Needless to say, the world is no longer like that. (The top three aluminium producers in the world are China, India and Russia. Hmm.)
All in all, the West is in the position of an out-of-condition skier who has gone off-piste and now finds themselves at the bottom of a slope with no obvious way up. A lot of effort will be required.
And for what? How are governments going to explain the need to conscript young people, the priority given to defence spending over, say, education, the noise and danger of aircraft flying a hundred metres over your head, the endless construction, the danger and pollution of ammunition factories ….? I have made the heroic assumption that NATO, or some substitute grouping, could reach a consensus on what the new strategic situation is, and what needs to be done, and produce coherent plans for doing it, that could be explained to ordinary people. Maybe. But in the best of cases, with no enemy on the frontiers, with weak economies and massive social problems, is the kind of programme I have sketched out above, and which would be a minimum for “rearmament”, even remotely feasible?
In 2023, hard proof emerged that American neocons provoked Russian intervention in Ukraine and blocked efforts at a peaceful settlement. This had occurred several times in the past decade after peace agreements were signed, at Minsk in 2014, Minsk 2 in 2015, Paris in 2019, and Istanbul in 2022. None of these agreements were implemented by Ukraine because they were sabotaged by American neocons via the CIA. As previous parts of this series have explained, their goal is to weaken and destroy Russia by using Ukraine to fight a proxy war.
“Bennett speaks out”; former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett; YouTube; Feb 3, 2023; • בנט מדבר
“HOW THE United States and Its NATO Allies Sabotaged Peace Between Russia and Ukraine”; Larry Johnson; November 14, 2023; https://sonar21.com/how-the-chance-wa…
MARIUPOL – Patients in the psychiatric ward of Mariupol Hospital No. 7 were not informed that a drug for rheumatoid arthritis, tested on them could potentially contribute to the growth of malignant tumors of the lymphatic and hematologic systems, documents obtained by Sputnik showed on Saturday.
The drug was tested at the commission of Western companies with the assistance of Ukrainian officials.
The documents were found in the hospital basement during reconstruction works. They mainly outlined the tests of experimental drug SB4, which suppresses the action of molecules called tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) that plays an important role in the immune system and is associated with inflammation in the joints. However, impaired biological functions of TNF-α are also known to contribute to the development of malignant tumors.
SB4 is produced by a number of pharmaceutical companies, including Biogen Idec Denmark Manufacturing ApS, Belgium’s Catalent Pharma Solutions and Fisher Clinical Services UK Limited. South Korean biopharmaceutical giant Samsung Bioepis sponsored the tests.
The documents include an investigator’s brochure on SB4 in English, printed by Samsung Bioepis and marked as confidential. It said, among other things, that a “possible risk for the development of lymphomas, leukemia or other haematopoietic or solid malignancies in patients treated with a TNF-antagonist cannot be excluded.” Children, adolescents, and young adults up to 22 years of age treated with a TNF-α antagonist were also reported to be prone to malignancies, sometimes fatal. Other tumors potentially caused by the substance include melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer, according to the brochure.
Among the documents was also a study protocol SB4-G31-RA dated November 2013, which contained the text of the information sheet and consent form offered to experimental patients in Ukrainian and Russian. In terms of possible cancer-inducing side effects, it only mentioned that “in rare cases,” up to one per 1,000 patients, another TNF-α antagonist drug, Enbrel, caused skin cancer.
The documents were compiled between 2008 and 2016. Among other things, they show that drugs were also tested on infants under the age of one year.
The findings also included boxes with numerous envelopes from logistics companies and containers for biological materials with recipient addresses in laboratories in Switzerland, the UK, and the US.
There have been some interesting developments over the past few days relating to Israel’s demonstrated subjugation of the government at all levels in the United States as well as its domination of the entertainment and news media. Nearly everyone now accepts that the current situation is not due to ordinary Americans actually liking what Israel represents and is instead rather a consequence of the US Israel lobby’s deep pockets and the corruption that can be bought by being willing to spend billions of dollars to support a single highly focused cause. And there is also the tool used frequently to keep potentially troublesome politicians in line, which is the willingness to do whatever is necessary to discredit and marginalize any and all critics of the Jewish state, to include the liberal often bogus claims of the alleged crimes of antisemitism and holocaust-denial to demonize those who are targeted.
Both current and previous Israeli Prime Ministers have boasted that they control the United States and the evidence is there that they can in fact do so. Most dispiriting in the Zionist induced sturm und drang which is a covert war of sorts directed against the United States Constitution has been the impact on the actual rights of all Americans, including freedom of speech. Last week South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate hopeful Kristi Noem boasted of new legislation in her state that would criminalize antisemitism. As criticizing Israel is considered to be ipso facto antisemitism and criminalized as a so-called “hate crime” it means, as some have observed, that Americans in South Dakota and also in Florida (thanks to Ron DeSantis) can criticize their own country, but not the self-declared Jewish state. Paul Craig Roberts puts it another way, observing that “I find it extraordinary that Jews alone among all ethnicities can control what can be said about them. The real threat is not anti-semitism. The real threat is the destruction of free speech and the rise of status based law that protects some chosen ethnicities and persecutes others. What is really needed is an alliance against those who are destroying the foundations of truth, freedom, and accountable government.”
Last week there was also an interesting vote in Congress, blocking or forcing the sale of the Chinese social media and networking site TikTok, which has become very popular among young people worldwide. What was not much discussed in the media in the lead-up to the vote, which claimed the site was a “national security threat,” was who was pushing for the bill. In reality, the story within the story was again all about Israel. “We have a major TikTok problem” complained the grotesque Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt, apparently freaking out because global youth aren’t buying Israel’s propaganda anymore since the site has something like a “memory” that directs readers and viewers to new information or videos that they had previously expressed an interest in. Many users were, per Greenblatt, interested in what is going on in Gaza and were receiving information hostile to Israel. The passage of the bill overwhelmingly, which was rushed through Congress, demonstrates yet again the Israel Lobby power. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was reportedly heavily engaged in lobbying up until the voting took place. It unfortunately demonstrates how Israel is able to decide how Americans choose to communicate and socialize with one another and the world. Summarizing the Israel Lobby’s view on the issue was the ever-delightful ex-presidential candidate Nikki Haley who responded to the legislation with “We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all and let me tell you why. For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.” And there’s even more to the damage done. The bill doesn’t just ban TikTok. It also creates a new unilateral authority for any president to ban any app or website he or she deems to be a “national security threat” if its owned or controlled by a “foreign adversary,” which includes not just China but also Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Goodbye free speech and association!
So, in return for considerable pain and nothing tangible to benefit the United States and its citizens, Israel is celebrated as “America’s best friend and closest ally” while also getting a free ride of billions of dollars from the US taxpayer and complete political protection bestowed by the clowns that run Washington no matter what it does and how much damage it actually inflicts on American people or interests. Along those lines, the biggest story recently has been Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s denunciation of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a 40 minute speech delivered from the Senate floor followed up by an X tweet.
Schumer, who is the highest ranking elected Jew in the US government, accused Netanyahu of continuing the Gaza war and running it in such a fashion so as to demonstrate that he “has lost his way to allow his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Schumer observed that Israel’s government, whoever heads it, must make “course corrections” and that “[Netanyahu] has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah” among nations, which has already to a certain extent taken place. In light of that, Schumer recommended that “At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel,” adding that it’s “a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government.”
Schumer also criticized Netanyahu for rejecting the Biden administration’s proposal to discuss the establishment of a Palestinian state immediately after the war ends. “As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7. The world has changed — radically — since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” He added that “As a democracy, Israel has the right to choose its own leaders, and we should let the chips fall where they may. But the important thing is that Israelis are given a choice. There needs to be a fresh debate about the future of Israel. In my opinion, that is best accomplished by holding an election.”
An election would not necessarily produce a change in Gaza policy, with most Israelis supporting the war by a large margin, according to opinion polls. But one survey released in January suggested that only 15% of voters wanted Netanyahu to remain in office after the conflict ends. War cabinet minister Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s rival and most likely successor, basically supports the ongoing Gaza slaughter with only minor deviations from what the prime minister is currently doing.
Many congressional Democrats praised Schumer’s speech and a follow up X tweet but Republicans in the United States and leaders in Israel quickly responded negatively to his remarks. Israel’s Likud party saying Israel is not a “banana republic” while House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement “It is highly inappropriate and simply wrong for Senator Schumer to be calling for new elections in Israel.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed with that judgment: “It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel. This is unprecedented.” Opposing the Republican onslaught, some Democrats pushed back, including Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who observed that “Netanyahu has certainly not been shy about trying to interfere in American politics.”
Schumer’s speech must be placed in context. Schumer, who has been in the US Senate for 25 years, has always been a strong and uncritical supporter of what Israel does and how it manages its security. He has described his own surname as derived from the Hebrew word “shomer” which means “protector” or “guardian” and has elaborated on that theme to declare openly that he is “Israel’s protector” in the Senate. That said, it is quite possible that Schumer does believe that Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians with no end in sight is doing grave damage to the long-term viability of the Jewish state. Many other prominent American Jews and friends of Israel like Tom Friedman of the New York Times, are likewise warning that the Jewish state is acting recklessly, not in its own self-interests. Polls suggest that Israel is the most despised nation in the world due to its torturing, starving and outright killing of Palestinian civilians. Number two in those polls is the United States, which is paying the price of being Netanyahu’s political, financial and weapons supplier, enabling the deaths and making it complicit in the conflict, much of it being done in secret by Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and covered by a series of lies.
The impact of Israeli actions with elections coming up in the US might well have motivated Schumer to speak up now while there is still time to correct course and reduce both the Palestinian death toll and the damage being done to the White House. President Joe Biden almost certainly would have approved of the Schumer speech, but he characteristically did not want to get too far in front on the issue. The trick will be making the Gaza conflict look like it is Netanyahu’s war while also establishing one’s “humanitarian” principles in a way that does not actually blame Israel. It will be difficult and there is no certainty of success, but Schumer and Biden might be smelling electoral defeat in November with the margin of difference being the Gaza war and how the Democratic Party base and independent voters have responded to it.
The White House has powerful allies, interestingly enough, in the Republican Party, which has been transformed into a hardline Israel loving propaganda machine, as well as in the mainstream media, which continues to slant its coverage of Gaza to favor Israel. Indeed, Schumer’s remarks came, not coincidentally, a day after Senate Republicans invited Netanyahu to speak as their special guest at an upcoming party retreat in Washington. Voters who are genuinely antiwar might well vote Democratic as the lesser of two evils, particularly given Donald Trump’s advice to the Israelis to “finish the job” in dealing with the Palestinians. In any event, it is likely that such possibilities are currently swirling through the heads of Biden and Schumer as well as those who are directing the Democratic Party campaign.
And make no mistake that the Administration is currently making sure that those who want to continue the struggle against what is being consistently labeled the international terrorist threat, which justifies ongoing wars, will have something to promote. Top US intelligence officials last Monday at an annual hearing on global security threats held at the Senate Intelligence Committee offices warned that the war in Gaza could embolden terrorist groups, which are aligned in their opposition to the United States for its support of Israel. “The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world. And while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” said Avril Haines, who is of course Jewish, the director of national intelligence. At the meeting Senator Tom Cotton a Republican from Arkansas and a stalwart backer of Israel, prodded CIA Director William Burns and Haines to refute critics’ allegations that Israel is ‘exterminating the Palestinian people’ with its military campaign.” Indeed, Zionist apologists like Cotton aside, no one in the room suggested that putting an end to the Israeli genocide might be the best way to put an end to the proliferating terrorism threat.
And so the beat goes on. How to do everything Israel wants without appearing to do so has plagued every White House since Harry Truman, only it has gotten harder to execute as Israel behavior has worsened and American politicians have become more corrupted and openly dependent on Jewish political contributions. It will be interesting to see if the Schumer speech will actually have some resonance or will only serve to trick the public into believing that the US government has actually regained its independence. Only time will tell but it might become an interesting run politically speaking between now and November.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
An important myth about the position of Jews in the American South during the slavery and Jim Crow eras continues to heavily influence common perceptions about the role of Jews as victims of hatred and bigotry. Fundamental to the popular legend is the belief that Jews in the South were somehow outsiders in a peculiarly evil culture and thus more prone to be victimized by the swirl of regional race hatreds. Nearly every published handling of that history is framed by the presumption that the well-known anti-Black racism of the South also extended to Jews, but the history of the American South shows that the “atmosphere” for Jews in the apartheid South was not just attractive but especially welcoming and, most of all, extremely profitable.
One of the most popular writers on twentieth-century Southern Jewry, Harry Golden, addressed a persistent theme about Southern Jewish history he was determined to debunk:
“The point I hope to establish… is that this ‘most Gentile’ section of America has provided the most favorable “atmosphere” the Jewish people have known in the modern world.”[1]
Golden was speaking specifically about the American South. The reverence that most bible belt evangelical Christians held for the “People of the Book” placed Jewish immigrants in an especially favored class. Their presence was even taken by many ignorant southern Gentiles as a sign of God’s sacred endorsement of their slave-based society. So Christians in the American South were time and again militantly protective of their Jewish population.[2]
One of the hundreds of slave advertisements in the Nation of Islam book, JEWS SELLING BLACKS
A century and a half before New York became the epicenter of Jewish American life, wealthy and cultured Jews thrived in the large elite community of Charleston, South Carolina. The city was both a major slave-trading center and the birthplace of Reform Judaism, the branch of religion with which most Jews identify today. It was also the home-base of multiple slave-trading Jews who had enthusiastically performed their sacred Southern duties as slave masters and slave dealers, and all had shared in the benefits of the African slave trade. The Jewish Encyclopedia made an astounding claim that put Jewish Americans at the heart of the slavocracy:
“[T]he cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them.”[3]
In 1841, the slaveholding Charleston rabbi Gustavus Poznanski summed up the Southern Jewish American credo:
“This [Charleston] synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will our sons defend this temple, this city, and this land.”[4]
After the Civil War Atlanta became the region’s new urban and industrial center, attracting enough of their faith to have the largest population of Jews of any city in the South. Jewish upward mobility was described by historian Albert Lindemann as “more striking in Atlanta than in most northern cities,”[5] and Jews routinely held positions of public trust in this ultra-Christian, militantly white supremacist region. At least twelve Jews held office in Jim Crow Atlanta between 1874 and 1911—considerable representation for a group that never exceeded three percent of the total population.[6]
Scholar of Southern Jewry Dr. Mark K. Bauman maintains that of all the immigrant groups, the German Jewish community particularly “exerted power beyond its size so that it wielded considerable political influence and preferment.” Jews played a disproportionate role in the city’s economy, a high proportion being merchants, wholesalers, and tradesmen. According to one scholar:
“[Jewish] business leaders owned many of the largest commercial and manufacturing enterprises that provided employment for many local citizens…”[7]
Jews were partners in their own and Gentile law firms; they sat on grand juries; they served as bank founders, presidents, and officers; and they became officials in the chamber of commerce. “From 25 to over 35 percent” of Freemasons and many of the highest officers in the Masonic order were Jews.[8] Praise of Jews by their Gentile neighbors was effusive, as in this 1890 statement from an Alabama merchant extolling the “Hebrews of Atlanta,” in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution:
“[T]here is no one element in this city’s make-up more powerful than that. Look around you in any and every business, in every walk of life, and you will see that the leaders are the Hebrews. Everybody must admire the wonderful business capacity with which the race seems imbued, and everybody who makes any study of their home life will agree with me when I say that no people in the world are happier in their homes, none are better to their kinfolk, and none are better to the poor and needy….No religion has such well organized, such sensible and such beautiful charities…”
In that same year, a Jewish man surveying his own people’s accomplishments crowed:
“Here in Atlanta, they [Jews] are found in all walks of life, and they own, I suppose, between two [to] three million dollars’ worth of property. That is a conservative estimate.”[9]
The editor of the Atlanta-based Jewish South was bursting with justifiable optimism about the fortunes of Southern Jews when he wrote in 1878:
“[A]lthough [Judaism’s] growth in all sections of this land of the free has been most prosperous, still the South succeeded in producing the loftiest of fruits, of the greatest bounty and grandeur.[10]
“The Jews in Georgia, however, did more than merely become a part of the existing Georgia tradition. In many instances, they created, shaped, and influenced both the character and course of many of those traditions and institutions.”[Emphasis ours][11]
Jews embraced the race laws of America voluntarily and encouraged their Gentile neighbors to adhere to them unquestionably. It would take the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, to end American slavery legally, but a full thirty years later in 1896 the editors of the Jewish South newspaper opined, “Negroes are intellectually, morally, and physically an inferior race—a fact none can deny.”[14]
As lynching became the white national pastime the Jewish press turned on the most vulnerable and easy target. The Jewish Sentiment editor Frank Cohen cheer-led the lynchers and wrote in 1898:
“… The white man is not only superior to the black man but will assert his supremicy (sic) at the proper time and in the proper manner…”
It only improved for Jews as they moved into the 20th century. When the home of Jewish furniture magnate Oscar Pappenheimer burned down in May of 1914, the Atlanta police formed a cordon around the house to guard it overnight. It seems that Pappenheimer’s jewelry collection was one of the most valuable in the city. Destroyed were “the finest pipe organ in a private home in Atlanta,” three Steinway pianos, and “prized violins and cellos.”[12]
In 1906, that same Oscar Pappenheimer proposed a law targeting all Blacks: “I propose the registration of negroes in the southern states 14 years of age and more… Each person so registered should possess… a certificate… in which should be entered description, date and place of birth and, at each registration, record of abode, employment, conduct and reference….Let others decide whether it be legal to pass laws bearing on this subject with reference to the colored race only…” Pappenheimer’s Atlanta proposal was nearly identical to that which Adolf Hitler enforced against Jews in Nazi Germany 30 years later.
Jews reveled in their position as leaders among the many ethnic Europeans that settled the American South. No public position was denied to them, and the positions they attained found them eagerly swearing a solemn oath to uphold the sacred tenets of the apartheid legal system. They participated in the violence and terror that framed the slave system and stood elbow to elbow with all whites as slavery’s most ardent enforcers.[13]
It is true that the corrupt forces of historical revisionism have succeeded in burying this unsavory Jewish past, but all of these uncomfortable realities are well documented throughout the Jewish historical record. The Jewish role in the establishment and growth of apartheid societies goes even further back than Christopher Columbus and is much wider in scope than just the American South. It is a testament to the skill and reach of the Jewish myth-makers that so much race-hating Jewish history has been erased from the popular American consciousness.
[1] Harry L. Golden, Jewish Roots in the Carolinas: A Pattern of American Philo-Semitism (Greensboro, NC: Deal Printing, 1955), 6. He calls the Carolinas a “completely free society” and a “300-year-old ‘laboratory of philo-semitism.’”
[4] David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 466-67.
[5] Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 230.
[6] Steven Hertzberg, “The Jewish Community of Atlanta: From the End of the Civil War until the Eve of the Frank Case,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (March 1973): 267.
[7] Steve Oney, And The Dead Shall Rise (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 7, writes that “many of Atlanta’s factories…were Jewish-owned.”
[8] Mark K. Bauman, “Jewish Community of Atlanta,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, March 15, 2004, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org: “Jews routinely held seats on the aldermanic board, the school board, and in the state legislature.”
[9] “Hebrews of Atlanta: The Important Part They Have Taken,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 12, 1890, 16.
[10] Jewish South, Feb. 8, 1878, and Nov. 7, 1879. Also, Abraham J. Peck, “That Other ‘Peculiar Institution’: Jews and Judaism in the Nineteenth Century South,” Modern Judaism 7, no. 1 (Feb. 1987): 101, 102.
[11] “A History of Jews in Georgia,” William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, http://www.the
breman.org/research/stategeorgia.htm (retrieved April 9, 2009).
[12] “Pappenheimer Home Burned to Ground with $25,000 Loss,” Atlanta Journal, May 31, 1914, 1; Atlanta Constitution, May 31, 1914, 1.
“Far from being an anomaly, Epstein was one of several men who, over the past century, have engaged in sexual blackmail activities designed to obtain damaging information (i.e., “intelligence”) on powerful individuals with the goal of controlling their activities and securing their compliance.”[1]
Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell is locked away in prison, and the thought-makers of our world seem keen to let the more explosive parts of the scandal dissipate from the public consciousness. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, Epstein and Maxwell were little more than well-connected socialites who ran a sex-trafficking ring for the rich and the powerful, and the focus has shifted instead to the criminal and civil cases seeking to achieve redress for the victims of sexual abuse.
On occasion some newspaper articles will mention the hidden cameras littered across Epstein’s properties, others the reams of CDs and hard drives found within them during the FBI raids. Altogether missing from the Netflix documentaries (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich [2020] and Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich [2022]) or the articles that spend their time narrowly focusing on the links between Epstein and Bill Gates, is the acknowledgement of the true nature of Epstein himself and the ultimate purpose of this sex-trafficking of minors — a sexual blackmail operation.
Not everyone is cowardly enough to let these controversial aspects lie untouched, as the newly released two-volume book One Nation Under Blackmail by independent reporter Whitney Webb seeks to blow wide open this media-enforced blackout. Utilizing primarily open-source information (that is, publicly accessible information such as books, newspapers articles and government reports),[2] Webb’s book delves into the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein and his deep ties to Jewish billionaires and Israeli intelligence. … continue
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