Rational Policy Over Panic
An Awkward Problem
BY REPPARE | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | FEBRUARY 15, 2024
The world of international public health is in a precarious position. Current policy, resources, personal careers, and the very credibility of major organizations are aligned with the recent statement from the World Health Organization (WHO) that:
Epidemics and pandemics of infectious diseases are occurring more often, and spreading faster and further than ever, in many different regions of the world.
Focus has shifted from the highest burden diseases, and the community-based empowerment required to tackle them, to preventing, identifying, and mitigating diseases that are rare and/or of relatively low burden, or even hypothetical. Namely, a new focus on sudden outbreaks of infectious disease or, in their more spectacular rendering, ‘pandemics.’
The challenge with this approach is that a thorough review of the evidence base underpinning the WHO’s agenda, and that of partners including the World Bank and G20, demonstrates that the above statement is inconsistent with available data. The largest database on which these agencies rely, the GIDEON database, actually shows quite a contrary trajectory. The burden of outbreaks, and therefore risk, is shown to be reducing. By implication, the largest investments in the history of international public health appear to be based on misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misrepresentation of key evidence.
Weighing Truth and Opportunity
Public health policy must always address threats in context. Every intervention involves a trade-off in terms of financial, social, and clinical risk. The WHO defines health in terms of physical, mental, and social well-being, and an intervention in one of these areas can impact all three. This is why public health agencies must consider all aspects of direct cost, opportunity cost, and risk when formulating policy. It is why communities and individuals must have adequate information to make decisions in their own cultural, social, and ecological context.
To make sure policy assumptions and evidence is sufficient, it is therefore imperative to include broad information from multiple sources. Reliance on epithets, dogma, deplatforming, and censorship are therefore intrinsically dangerous. This is all, of course, meant to be coded into the normative principles of decolonization, human rights, and equity on which the WHO’s constitution is based.
So, back to the precarious position in which the WHO and the international public health community find themselves. They have staked their reputation and political standing on being the center of a centralized approach to save the global populace from urgent, impending, and recurrent emergencies; an existential threat to humanity as the G20 tells us. An objective analysis reveals that these emergencies are rarely likely to reach a level that justifies the diversion of serious resources from endemic and chronic diseases that do actually maim and kill at scale (see chart below).
Admitting such a reality, after touting the inevitability of disaster so loudly, would risk career prospects, derision, and diminished ability to monetize the post-Covid moment. Yet, to ignore wider considerations in global public health and the evidence that informs those considerations would require abandonment of basic principles and ethics. A dilemma that calls for honesty, introspection, and strength.
Major causes of death by disease globally, in 2019. Global Burden of Disease data, presented at https://ourworldindata.org/.
What the Data Actually Shows
REPPARE’s analysis of the evidence behind the WHO, World Bank, and G20 documents promoting the pandemic preparedness agenda show that recorded outbreaks, both arising within human populations and as ‘spillover’ of pathogens from animals, have increased in the decades before the year 2000, with burden now declining (graphic below).
However, it is inevitable that reporting of such outbreaks will be influenced by changes in both the capacity and incentive to report. These include the development of, and increasing access to, major diagnostic platforms including PCR and point-of-care antigen and serology tests, as well as improvements in communication infrastructure. Fifty years ago, many pathogens now readily identifiable could simply not be detected, or the diseases they cause be distinguished from clinically similar conditions. It is remarkable that this would be overlooked or downplayed by major health agencies, but this is, unexpectedly, the case.
Extract from Fig. 2 of Morand and Walther (2020-23), showing marked recent reductions in outbreak and disease numbers in GIDEON database.
The development of improved diagnostic technologies not only impacts reporting rates but has obvious implications for understanding the term ‘emerging infectious disease’ (EID). This frequently used term suggests that new threats are constantly emerging, such as the Nipah virus outbreaks of the past 25 years. However, while some pathogens have newly entered human populations, such as new influenza variants, HIV and the SARS-1 virus, others such as Nipah virus were simply not detectable without recent technological advances as they cause non-specific illnesses. We are now better at finding them, which puts us immediately in a better, safer position.
Crucially, actual mortality from these acute outbreaks has remained low for a century in contrast to other current health burdens. The much-quoted analysis of Bernstein et al. (2022) suggesting millions of outbreak deaths per year includes pre-antibiotic era Spanish flu and the multi-decade HIV event, averaging it across today’s population size.
However, as their own dataset shows, nothing like the Spanish flu has occurred in terms of mortality in the past century. As most Spanish flu deaths were due to secondary infection, and we now have modern antibiotics, it also provides a poor model for future outbreaks. With HIV and influenza excluded, pre-Covid acute outbreak mortality underlying current pandemic messaging is under 30 thousand people, globally, over the past couple of decades. Tuberculosis alone kills over 3,500 per day.
Covid-19 has, of course, intervened. It fits with difficulty into the main pandemic narrative for a number of reasons. First, its origin remains controversial, but appears likely to involve non-natural influences. While laboratory escapes can and (inevitably) will occur, the surveillance and response being proposed here is targeted at outbreaks of natural origin. Second, Covid-19 mortality occurred mainly in the elderly with significant comorbidities, meaning actual impact on overall life expectancy was far less than the raw reported mortality figures suggest (this also complicates attribution). If considered of natural origin, it appears as an outlier rather than part of a trend in the datasets on which the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 rely.
Time to Pause, Think, and Employ Common Sense
The evidence, assessed objectively, paints a picture of an increasing ability to identify and report outbreaks up to the decade 2000 to 2010 (which explains increases in frequency), followed by a reduction in burden consistent with an increasing ability to successfully address these relatively low-burden events through current public health mechanisms (which explains a lowering trajectory in mortality). This fits well with what one would intuitively expect. Namely, modern technologies and improving health systems, medicines, and economies have improved pathogen detection and reduced illness. There is much to suggest that this trend will continue.
In this context, the analyses of the WHO, the World Bank, and the G20 are disappointing in terms of scholarship and balance. A critic could reasonably suggest that a desire to address a perceived threat is driving a particularly gloomy analysis, rather than analysis objectively aiming to determine the extent of the threat. Such an approach seems unlikely to address the needs of public health.
To be clear, disease outbreaks harm people and shorten lives and must be addressed. And there are of course improvements that should and could be made to address this risk appropriately. In common with most aspects of medicine and science, this is best achieved on the basis of well-compiled evidence and scholarly analysis rather than allowing predetermined assumptions to drive outcomes.
By making claims contrary to the data, international health agencies are misleading governments of Member States down an unevidenced path with correspondingly high estimated cost and diverted political capital. This currently stands at $31.1 billion annually not including One Health measures and surge funding and at least 5 new global instruments; or about 10 times the WHO’s current annual budget. The urgency involved in the pandemic preparedness agenda is either contrary to evidence or poorly supported by it.
In view of their influence, international health agencies have a particular responsibility to ensure their policies are well-grounded in data and objective analysis. Moreover, governments have a responsibility to take the time, and effort, to ensure that their populations are well-served. It is hoped that the evaluation in the REPPARE report Rational Policy Over Panic will contribute to this effort.
REPPARE
Garrett W. Brown
David Bell
US Militarizes Space While Using ‘Russia Threat’ as Smokescreen
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 15.02.2024
Mainstream media fuss over groundless accusations of Russia deploying nuclear weapons in space is gaining steam while diverting attention from Washington’s militarization of space, Dmitry Stefanovich, a research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, told Sputnik.
The mainstream US media claimed on February 14 that there is new intelligence that Russia has developed space-based nuclear weapon capabilities designed to undermine the US satellite network.
The intelligence was reportedly briefed to Congress and even key American allies with some lawmakers insisting that it was “very serious”.
Moscow has rejected the claims as yet another attempt by the US establishment to pass a $60 billion funding package for Ukraine, amid House unwillingness to send good money after bad to the corrupt Kiev regime.
Research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Dmitry Stefanovich, drew attention to the fact that the mainstream media’s comments are highly contradictory.
“Some say that something has already been deployed [in space], some say that something is planned to be deployed, some are talking about nuclear arms, and some are speculating about nuclear power equipment,” the researcher said, adding that the comments resemble nothing more than an exercise in smoke and mirrors.
On the other hand, one could hardly imagine that Moscow would resort to deploying nuclear arms in space given Moscow’s obligations as a signatory country and, moreover, as a depositary country of the Outer Space Treaty, the expert stressed.
The Outer Space Treaty outlines that “states shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner.” The Treaty was opened for signature by the three “depository governments” – the USSR (with Russia being its legal successor), the UK and the US – in January 1967. It entered into force in October 1967.
What’s more, the use of nuclear weapons in space would destroy spacecraft indiscriminately, knocking out American and Russian satellites alike, as well as those of third countries, Stefanovich pointed out.
“Starting to shoot down satellites all in a row is quite a serious escalation,” warned the researcher.
He likewise pointed out that in the event of a large-scale military confrontation, Moscow has conventional means to disrupt an adversary’s satellite constellations without needing to resort to nuclear arms.
“One can shoot down satellites with missiles,” Stefanovich said. “The S-500 missile defense system is capable of performing such tasks. There is no doubt that satellites in low orbit can be shot down from Earth. These tests were carried out by the Soviet Union, the US, China, and India. (…) One can jam or blind satellites. We know about the Peresvet complex, that it exists, and it presumably allows [Russia] to shield its [military positions] from observation.”
“Plus there are options with orbital interception. That is, there are so-called satellite inspectors that could provide tracking [of enemy spacecraft]; there are robotic arms that can theoretically grab satellites. (…) Plus, of course, returning to non-kinetic scenarios, these are different options using electronic warfare systems, as well as cyber impact systems,” the expert continued.
According to Stefanovich, Russia’s major aim is to prevent the militarization of space, whereas the US openly proclaims a goal of space dominance.
Thus, the US created the Space Force (USSF) in December 2019 – a new branch of the US Armed Forces. While announcing the establishment of the new Pentagon unit in June 2018, former US President Donald Trump specifically underlined the need to “have American dominance in space.”
Meanwhile, the US has itself shown it is willing and able to knock out satellites.
In early 2008, the Pentagon launched Operation Burnt Frost which used a navy-guided missile cruiser to launch an SM-3 missile into space which knocked down a non-functioning National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite and showcased its capabilities in shooting down satellites.
Days before the Pentagon’s strike, China and Russia introduced a draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects (PPWT) to the Conference on Disarmament (CD), the world’s permanent multilateral disarmament treaty negotiating body. However, the US dismissed the proposal, dubbing it “a diplomatic ploy by the two nations to gain a military advantage.”
“The militarization of space began, in fact, simultaneously with the beginning of the space age,” Stefanovich said. “Space has always had a military dimension. Now the problem we are trying to solve is to prevent weapons from being placed in space. Russia’s position is that we need a legally binding document to prevent the placement of weapons in space. We need to stop the arms race in outer space.”
“When it comes to the American potential, they have created a space force and a huge satellite constellation. The main threat here is not yet in strike systems, but in surveillance systems, both systems that allow, in fact, reconnaissance activities and target designation on Earth. This is a really serious problem,” the researcher concluded.
The Climate-Industrial Complex
Foundations and journalists who channel public funds into “renewable energy”
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | FEBRUARY 14, 2024
Of all rackets, the so-called “renewable energy” racket may be the most fraudulent and nonsensical. What geologists call the “Last Glacial Period” occurred between c. 115,000 – c. 11,700 years ago. Pretty much ALL human development has occurred since the glaciers retreated. During the last Ice Age, glaciers advanced as far south as what is now the state of Missouri. They retreated at a time when human population is estimated to have numbered around 4 million.
The following chart is a visual representation of successive cooling and warming trends and the associated advance and retreat of glaciers.
The so-called greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone—comprise 0.04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. Even scientists who pay lip service to the human induced global warming theory acknowledge that for most of the last 66 million years, CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere were much higher than they are today.
In the 1970s, climatologists were concerned that modern man would soon experience another cooling trend, resulting in yet another glacial advance that would bulldoze the cities of Canada and much of the United States. In the eighties, the theory of global warming—induced by human greenhouse gas emissions—became fashionable. What really ignited this intellectual, social, and political trend was the discovery that billions of public funds could be funneled into “renewable energy” industries through the mechanism of subsidies and tax credits.
This morning I stumbled across a notable investigative report titled Secret Partnership Fueling Climate Hawk Journalism. Note that many of the foundations that are key players in the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex are also key players in the Climate-Industrial Complex.
US spies behind ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy – report
US President Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan, December 14, 2012 in Washington, DC. © Pete Souza / The White House via Getty Images
RT | February 14, 2024
The US intelligence community inappropriately used foreign allies to target Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign to set up the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy ahead of the 2016 election, according to a trio of investigative journalists.
Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag – of ‘Twitter Files’ fame – published the first part of an investigation on Tuesday, in which they claim the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ were operationalized against Trump staffers, citing anonymous sources close to the House Intelligence Committee.
According to their report, President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had sent America’s partners – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – a list of 26 Trump associates to target with data collection, misinformation and manipulation.
The Russiagate conspiracy involved multiple failures across western media networks to critically assess US intelligence claims that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. A 2018 Pulitzer prize was awarded to Washington Post and New York Times journalists for their reporting on what was later to exposed as a false story.
“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” said a committee source. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up,” the journalists claim.
Officially, the FBI only started looking into the Trump campaign that summer, after an Australian diplomat reportedly overheard an aide mention Russia. If confirmed, these findings would demonstrate that the US intelligence community had worked for months before that to set up just such a pretext.
In a statement to the investigative journalists, the FBI said it had made “missteps” in the 2016 and 2017 investigation of the Trump campaign, but has since implemented reforms to prevent it from happening again.
“The allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense,” a spokesman for the British surveillance agency said. “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag said they had never asked the GCHQ about “wiretapping.”
According to Shellenberger, there is a “10-inch binder” containing previously unknown documents about the intelligence community’s surveillance of the Trump campaign. The 45th US president had ordered these documents declassified, but they went missing instead. In a Fox News appearance on Tuesday evening, Shellenberger suggested the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort may have been related to the missing binder.
After the US intelligence community created a pretext for investigating Trump for ‘ties to Russia,’ they spied on his campaign – and then his presidency – using a falsely obtained FISA warrant. The warrant was based on the ‘Steele dossier,’ a file compiled by a British spy in the pay of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, through several intermediaries. The FBI knew the dossier was false as early as January 2017, but continued using the FISA warrant for almost a year thereafter.
The FBI lawyer who altered evidence to obtain the warrant, Kevin Clinesmith, ended up sentenced to probation and his law license has since been restored.
The Vladimir Putin Interview – Part One
Part One: The Genealogy of a Civilizational Power
By William Schryver | imetatronink | February 13, 2024
On February 6, 2024, Tucker Carlson, a popular American conservative journalist and polemicist, was granted an interview with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The interview — a two-hour-long marathon by American sound-bite / talking-point standards – was broadcast two days later.
It was initially published on Carlson’s website, and was then posted to the X social media platform. The X post alone has tallied ~200 million views. We may confidently assume that the interview video on Carlson’s website has been viewed by several million more.
It is reasonable to conclude that this interview of Vladimir Putin has been seen by a larger global audience than has ever previously watched an interview of a major national leader.
The reactions of the viewing audience have varied greatly. Western media and political leaders have almost universally condemned the interview as nothing more than what they characterize as typical Russian propaganda and mendacity. These same people have excoriated Tucker Carlson as a “Putin puppet” and a “useful idiot” who never should have afforded Putin the opportunity to speak from such a bully pulpit.
Some western political leaders and commentators even proposed to deny Carlson reentry to the United States, to deprive him of the privilege of traveling in the European Union, to sanction him in punitive ways, and even to charge him with espionage and treason.
Others who watched part or all of the interview considered it boring and tendentious.
Yet others — and my sense is that this category comprises the majority — found the interview surprisingly enlightening and came away from it with a favorable impression of President Putin.
I have now watched the video of the interview twice in its entirety, and have carefully read the transcript twice in full, and some parts additional times.
I have also, over the past two decades, viewed and/or read literally hundreds of Putin speeches, interviews, press-conferences, etc.
In my carefully considered opinion — given its context in this period of unprecedented global tensions and what is indisputably a major proxy war being waged by the United States and its NATO allies against Russia — I regard the interview as arguably the single most important such event of the post-Cold War era.
I submit further that, in my estimation, Vladimir Putin is, by a substantial margin, the single most intellectually potent and personally charismatic world leader of the past century. His knowledge and understanding of history, international relations, macroeconomics, and his manifest talent as an extemporaneous speaker are utterly unparalleled among all the national leaders of whom I have been aware over the course of my lifetime.
The interview commenced, much to my surprise and chagrin, with a mendaciously framed and deliberately disingenuous query by Carlson:
Tucker Carlson: On February 24, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?
The premise of this question is patently false. Putin’s speech of February 24, 2022 makes no mention whatsoever of the threat of a “surprise attack on our country” from the United States or its NATO allies. Carlson claimed it to be a direct quote. No such statement is present in the speech, nor anything like unto it.
At no point in the speech does President Putin attempt to justify the coming “Special Military Operation” on the threat of an imminent attack from the western powers.
Simply put, Carlson invented this quote ex nihilo, and apparently sought to bait Putin into a response which, presumably, Carlson then intended to take advantage of in some fashion.
I was frankly shocked that he had done this. I was immediately aware that the question was built upon a falsehood, for I am extremely familiar with both the major speeches Putin gave in the days preceding the launch of the Russian “Special Military Operation”.
Why did Tucker Carlson do this? Hard to say. But it evoked from Putin a brilliant reply which immediately turned the tables on whatever Carlson’s motivations were for posing a question built upon a lie.
Vladimir Putin: It’s not that the United States was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia. I didn’t say so.
Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation?
This pointed response disarmed Carlson’s ill-intentions for the time being, and knocked him back on his heels.
Putin then started a “serious conversation” on his terms, and according to his agenda. And what he did first — although it no doubt befuddled a large proportion of his audience — was not only an exhibition of erudition, but more importantly, it was a type of thing one simply does not see in our day and age, although in ancient times it would have been considered entirely normal, and even de rigueur for a great national leader to do precisely what Putin did: present, as it were, the Russian nation’s Letters Patent; its genealogy dating back over a thousand years; its historical bona fides.
Vladimir Putin is the current leader of a great “civilizational power” — a nation whose history stretches back over a millennium, and whose voluminous archives document that history. And, given the fundamental importance of that fact in the context of what is in many respects a civil war taking place in Ukraine, it was imperative that certain elements of evidence be presented as a preface to the eventual discussion of the illegitimacy and demonstrable falsehoods of Ukraine’s presumptuous claims upon portions of the longstanding “Russian nation”.
“Ukraine” is a sovereign polity created in 1991. Its geographic footprint is an artificial construction effected by exogenous powers over the course of the twentieth century. Its origins are a relatively limited and historically ill-defined cultural area previously known as “The Ukraine” — a region “on the outskirts” of its mother nation: Russia.
One needn’t search hard to discover that nineteenth century maps and encyclopedias are perfectly consonant with this reality. In the Chambers Encyclopedia my great-grandfather purchased in 1888, the following map of European Russia appears:
A smaller crop of that map which includes the area crafted into “Ukraine” in 1991 appears below:
And the encyclopedia entry for “Ukraine” reads as follows:
UKRAINE (Slavic, a frontier country or March), the name given in Poland first to the frontiers towards the Tatars and other nomads, and then to the fertile regions lying on both sides of the middle Dnieper, without any very definite limits. The Ukraine was long a bone of contention between Poland and Russia. About 1686 the part on the east side of Dnieper was ceded to Russia (Russian Ukraine); and at the second partition of Poland, the western portion (Polish Ukraine) also fell to Russia, and is mostly comprised of the government of Kiev. The historic Ukraine forms the greater part of what is called Little Russia (a name which first appears about 1654), which is made up of the governments of Kiev, Tchernigov, Poltava, and Kharkov.
– Chambers Encyclopedia, Volume VII, 1888 (abbreviations expanded)
But, as it has done in many other regions of the world, the Anglo-American empire, beginning as early as the immediate post-WW2 period, and accelerating in the post-Cold War period, sought to methodically cultivate violent national aspirations among portions of the populace of this region in order to effect a stratagem to weaken its long-time nemesis in Russia.
The western powers focused their nefarious project upon those portions of Ukraine wherein resided the heirs to the German-collaborating Ukrainian nationalists who, in direct affiliation with the Nazi SS formations, had proven to be reliable and particularly ruthless executioners of Jews, Poles, and Russians during the Second World War.
These historical facts are beyond dispute — at least in the realms of the informed. But the highly propagandized people of the so-called “western democracies” are not well-informed, and it is precisely for this reason that Vladimir Putin no doubt felt compelled to expound upon these questions in his lengthy but essential opening remarks in the interview with Tucker Carlson.
Carlson attempted multiple times to interrupt and redirect Putin’s train of thought, but to no avail. He even had the temerity to once again make reference to his initial deceptively constructed question:
Tucker Carlson: … many nations feel frustrated by their re-drawn borders after the wars of the 20th century, and wars going back a thousand years, the ones that you mention, but the fact is that you didn’t make this case in public until two years ago in February, and in the case that you made, which I read today, you explain at great length that you thought [there was] a physical threat from the West and NATO, including potentially a nuclear threat, and that’s what got you to move. Is that a fair characterization of what you said?
It is NOT a “fair characterization” of what Putin said. In fact, it is emphatically a FALSE characterization of what he said.
And yet Carlson was determined to extract an answer to this tortured misrepresentation of Putin’s own words.
Nevertheless, Putin refused to take the bait, and once again parried Carlson’s disingenuous query:
Vladimir Putin: I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: “Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?” You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.
And then he proceeded to conclude his exposition of the essential historical facts.
I will, in subsequent installments of my commentary on this important interview, highlight multiple additional instances of Tucker Carlson posing ill-formed and disingenuous questions to President Putin, and then examine how Putin skillfully countered these curious attempts to “put words in his mouth”.
Coming up in Part 2: Tucker Carlson himself, along with many other western commentators and state-controlled propaganda organizations (such as Reuters, as seen above), have attempted in the aftermath of the interview to advance the demonstrably false narrative that Putin expressed a desire to negotiate a ceasefire and a mutually acceptable end to the ongoing war. Of course, that is a highly deceptive misinterpretation and misrepresentation of what really happened.
Elon Musk Goes to Canossa
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 12, 2024
Although unknown to almost all present-day Americans, Emperor Henry IV was one of the most powerful European monarchs of his day. Under his twenty year reign, the Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages governed Germany, the Low Countries, much of Italy, and other important lands, with many considering him heir to the fabled Charlemagne.
With the arrogance that came from holding such enormous temporal power and commanding large armies, he challenged the authority of Pope Gregory VII, but the Pontiff quickly brought him low, excommunicating him from the Catholic Church and declaring that Henry’s powerful feudal vassal lords no longer owed him any allegiance. Faced with the very real prospect that he might lose his throne, the emperor traveled to Canossa in hopes of seeing the Holy Father and gaining his forgiveness, then waited three long days outside the castle walls despite the bitter cold, clad in an uncomfortable hair-shirt, and according to some accounts wearing no shoes in the frozen snow. The Pope finally allowed him to enter and granted him an audience, then accepted his capitulation and lifted the religious penalty that had been imposed. In the centuries since that famous incident, the phrase “going to Canossa” has meant the surrender of a proud, powerful figure who does penance and begs forgiveness, submitting to the forces that had humbled him.
Given this history, it’s hardly surprising that the phrase was widely circulated a couple of weeks ago when Elon Musk traveled to Auschwitz to offer his abject submission to Jewish power, donning a skullcap, promising to root out “antisemitism” on the platform he controlled, and even declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”
The two most powerful and influential figures in today’s world are surely Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But I think a reasonable case can be made that Elon Musk should be placed third on that global list.
Our current Western era is dominated by oligarchic wealth and Musk has ranked as the richest man in the world for much of the last few years. The technology industry carries enormous prestige and influence, and Musk is the owner of Tesla, the pioneering electric vehicle company, whose market value is greater than that of the world’s next five car companies combined. His very innovative SpaceX rocket company has become the central pillar of the West’s entire space program, crucial for American national security, while his equally innovative Starlink satellite company has proven itself absolutely vital to Ukraine in its NATO-backed war with Russia, inspiring imitators in China and other countries. More than a year ago, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and took the company private, giving him a media empire far greater than that of any American television network and perhaps as powerful as most of them combined. Meanwhile his own 170 million Twitter Followers provide him a personal megaphone that would be envied by any American president or top Hollywood celebrity.
What other world figure could match Musk in such global power and influence? President Joseph Biden is elderly and doddering and widely despised, very much a Brezhnevian figure from the last days of the decaying USSR and obviously someone totally controlled by his nervous aides. Although former President Donald Trump is the all-but-certain 2024 Republican Presidential nominee and stands a better than even chance of recapturing the White House, he is facing 91 felony charges in court and is detested by nearly half the American population, including an overwhelming majority of our elites; his likely victory this November would be almost entirely due to Biden’s unpopularity. Indeed, given such glaring weakness at the top of the American political hierarchy, some shrewd observers have argued that Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu probably commands greater influence in our own Congress than either Biden or Trump; but in his own country, Netanyahu’s support is at 15%, and he faces a sea of corruption charges, so he might easily end his life in a prison cell.
In our deeply-polarized society, nearly all our other politicians are admired by small devoted followings, but usually despised by many, many more, and I can’t think of any private citizen who can remotely match Musk’s wealth, technological prestige, and media reach.
Meanwhile, traditional spiritual authorities have been reduced to mere shadows of their predecessors. Some nine hundred years ago, Pope Gregory VII humbled a German emperor and even a generation or two ago, Pope John Paul II wielded great international authority, but these days our current Pope Francis only commands a tiny sliver of such influence, and no other religious leader of greater weight comes to mind. So perhaps by default, I think Musk is the most powerful figure in the Western world, and his willingness to humble himself before pro-Israel Jews at Auschwitz amidst the ongoing slaughter in Gaza provides a striking indication of the true balance of temporal and spiritual power in today’s Western world, while also demonstrating which group commands the latter.
Just a few months earlier, Musk had been riding high, having successfully dismantled Twitter’s large censorship department even as he granted an amnesty to most of the banned voices of the previous few years, notably including former President Donald Trump. Under his direction, secret documents were provided to Matt Taibbi and other investigative journalists that produced bombshell revelations of a nefarious government role in orchestrating Twitter censorship. Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter-based interview show had racked up enormous ratings, with his August Trump interview outdrawing the viewership of the official 2024 Republican Presidential debates shown on broadcast television. Musk seemed to be successfully resurrecting Twitter’s old motto that it represented “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
Most remarkably, he’d apparently seen off the challenge of the very formidable ADL, which for decades had terrified so many of the powerful. When that widely-feared censorship organization accused him of allowing “antisemitism” and “racism” to flourish on his platform and sought to intimidate his advertisers, Musk threatened to sue them for business interference, turning that weapon of “lawfare” against one of its most prolific wielders even as a #BanTheADL hashtag went viral on Twitter. The ADL had financial assets of $500 million and enormous media influence, but for the first time its leaders realized that they faced an opponent who greatly outmatched them in such resources, and fearing the risk of a multi-billion-dollar legal judgement, its leaders quickly settled, abandoning their attacks against Musk and Twitter.
However, the sudden, unexpected Hamas attacks of October 7th changed everything. Well over a thousand Israelis died, and the anger and agitation of Jewish activists in America reached an unprecedented fever-pitch. Israel soon began a merciless bombardment of Gaza in retaliation, eventually killing tens of thousands of helpless civilians, and those horrific scenes of death and devastation reached the entire world on social media, bypassing the traditional pro-Israel gatekeepers who controlled Western broadcast television and newspapers. As a result, polls shockingly revealed that younger Americans—whose information on world events came from the Internet—were quite evenly divided between Israel and Hamas or even actually favored the latter. So Jewish and pro-Israel organizations began an all-out mobilization to suppress such “antisemitic” material.
Cities and college campuses across the Western world saw large demonstrations against Israel’s televised slaughter of women and children, with Muslim immigrants naturally becoming an important element of these, causing Jewish activists to fiercely denounce those groups as “antisemitic.” For generations, Jews had overwhelmingly supported non-European immigrants, while widely praising and promoting all attacks by non-whites against white Gentile society. Most recently they had been the primary backers of the massive 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, triggered when a black lifelong career criminal died of a drug overdose while in police custody. But with “Jewish privilege” and “Israeli privilege” now suddenly coming under such hostile criticism, Jewish groups turned on a dime and demanded total censorship and suppression. Anti-immigrant right-wingers noted this rank hypocrisy in their social media posts, and in mid-November one such Tweet caught Musk’s eye, prompting him to endorse it: “You have said the actual truth” he wrote.
Those simple six words probably took Musk merely seconds to type but they may have shifted the trajectory of American history. Almost immediately, waves of Jewish and pro-Israel activists swarmed to denounce him, and many leading corporations pulled their advertising from Twitter, threatening its financial viability. Faced with such an enormous backlash, Musk traveled abroad to meet with Israel’s president, pledging to combat “antisemitism.” On that same visit, he also posed for a photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, solemnly eyeing an empty crib, which presumably symbolized the forty Israeli babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas, one of the many outrageous atrocity-hoaxes promoted by Israel and its dishonest propagandists.
In the years following Donald Trump’s upset 2016 victory, right-wingers had been heavily censored on many social media platforms, while progressives were free to run wild, but now the latter began suffering the same fate for criticizing Israel’s massacres. Since the early years of the twentieth century, Israel’s ruling Likud party and its Irgun predecessor had always used the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” promising a Greater Israel under total Jewish control and domination. But over the last couple of decades, anti-Zionist progressives had embraced those same words, advocating a unified secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. Musk now declared that latter phrase “genocidal” and warned that it would trigger an immediate ban from Twitter, even as Netanyahu continued publicly using it in its original Jewish-supremacist meaning.
A few weeks later, Musk traveled to Auschwitz, accompanied by his companion and guide, a young pro-Israel pundit named Ben Shapiro, whose own right-wing media empire had been lavishly funded by Zionist donors. This widely-covered quasi-religious pilgrimage seemingly marked Musk’s complete capitulation to the awesome power of Organized Jewry.
Musk was hardly the only prominent figure to bow down before the Jewish forces of Zionism, now fully mobilized by the Hamas attack and the ensuing Israel/Gaza conflict. When Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and first began to draw fire from the ADL, another prominent public figure was also facing that organization’s wrath. As I wrote at the time:
Perhaps by coincidence, a somewhat similar controversy had recently played out in the case of a different high-profile individual, the billionaire black rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. Although I’d previously had only the vaguest impression of him, he was apparently a towering international celebrity, as well as being among the wealthiest black Americans who had ever lived, while having tens of millions of followers on Twitter and other networks.
Apparently for some reason or other, he became angry and agitated over what he saw as the overwhelming Jewish influence in the worlds of business and media, and began loudly saying so in various venues and on his social networks. As might be expected, the media reaction was swift and devastating, portraying him as a moral leper, and thereby forcing most of his business partners to cut their ties, often at enormous financial cost. Apparently 25% of the profits of footware giant Adidas came from West’s line of sneakers, but they abandoned the longtime deal at a total cost of almost $650 million when their media masters proclaimed it as a fundamental issue of morality. At the other end of the spectrum, Goodwill Industries announced that they would no longer offer their impoverished clientele the donated cast-offs associated with such a vile anti-Semite. The rapper’s longtime bank even closed his accounts and would no longer provide a haven for his money.
The immediate result of all these coordinated blows was that the bulk of West’s large fortune suddenly evaporated, while his (Jewish) personal trainer publicly declared that if he continued his bad behavior the erstwhile billionaire might end up spending the rest of his life heavily drugged and imprisoned in a mental institution. Almost none of his fellow black celebrities rallied to his side, or if they did, I didn’t hear about it. The story soon dropped from the media, perhaps permanently taking with it the once-iconic global black celebrity.
While Musk overcame his ADL challengers, West had quickly abandoned the fight and disappeared from public attention. But the black rapper now had a new album ready for release, so he and his advisors apparently decided that only the most abject sort of public surrender to Jewish power could safeguard his music sales. Even as Israel was clearly committing the greatest televised massacre of defenseless women and children in the history of the world, outraging much of his youthful rap following, West declared his boundless love and admiration for Jews and the Jewish State, recording a 40-minute video apologizing for his past antisemitic statements and Tweeting out a shorter, similar message written in Hebrew.
Back in late 2022 I’d expressed considerable skepticism that either Musk or West would succeed in their separate challenges to Jewish power, and readers can judge for themselves the extent to which my predictions proved correct.
- American Pravda: Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Much Riskier Targets
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 21, 2022 • 3,800 Words
Although Musk has now bent his knee to the broader Zionist coalition, I’ll have to admit that he actually did surprising well against his initial ADL tormentors, even without utilizing the secret history of that nefarious organization that I’d offered him during his battle.
- Elon Musk and the True History of the ADL
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 13, 2023 • 6,900 Words
The capitulations of Musk and West hardly surprised me. But far more noteworthy has been the case of independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose total surrender to Zionism over the last several months has deeply disappointed so many of his erstwhile admirers, certainly including myself.
Although I’d only been very vaguely aware of Kennedy until 2021 and remained deeply skeptical of much of his notorious anti-vaxxing advocacy, I’d greatly admired his vocal positions on many other important issues, especially including our disastrous Ukraine proxy-war against Russia and therefore expected to give him my vote in November.
I was particularly impressed by his remarkable courage on certain historical matters of a personal nature. Several years ago, he had publicly declared that Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of his father, was innocent of the crime and should be released after more than a half-century in prison, and he further proclaimed that his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, had also died at the hands of a conspiracy. I noted that although the mainstream media ferociously vilified him on numerous other grounds, they tended to carefully avoid these sorts of “great unmentionables” because the facts were so strongly on Kennedy’s side.
- American Pravda: Why the Media Fears RFK Jr.
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 14, 2023 • 8,200 Words
And once anyone recognized that Sirhan had not fired the fatal shot, I argued that important elements of the conspiracy would have immediately suggested the true culprits behind the crime:
David Talbot’s influential 2007 book Brothers revealed that Robert F. Kennedy had been convinced almost from the first that his brother had been struck down in a conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his circle of friends that he stood little chance of tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments after winning the crucial California presidential primary. The logical assumption is that his death was engineered by the same elements as that of his elder brother, who were now acting to protect themselves from the consequences of their earlier crime.
A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan had fired a pistol at the scene and was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder. But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report revealed that the fatal bullet came from a completely different direction, while the acoustical record proves that far more shots were fired than the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Such hard evidence demonstrates a conspiracy.
Sirhan himself seemed dazed and confused, later claiming to have no memory of events, and Talbot mentions that various assassination researchers have long argued that he was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning. Nearly all these writers are usually reluctant to note that the selection of a Palestinian as scapegoat in the killing points in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman’s recent book also includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young Palestinian was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.
Kennedy seemed like an intelligent, thoughtful individual, and if he had concluded years ago that Sirhan was innocent, I assumed that the remainder of this chain of reasoning would have fallen into place, producing a high-profile Presidential candidate willing to stand up for American interests against those of Israel. But instead Kennedy recently moved in exactly the opposite direction, becoming the most egregiously pro-Zionist candidate in the race and heavily relying upon his ultra-Zionist advisors Morton Klein and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. In a recent public interview, he shockingly declared that the Palestinians were “the most pampered people in the world” even as hundreds of thousands of them were currently facing death by starvation at Israel’s hands.
Kennedy’s apparent willingness to betray his principles—and the memories of his martyred father and uncle—was hugely disheartening to me. Moreover, with both Biden and Trump known as fervent supporters of Israel, a contrary position emphasizing a ceasefire and sympathy towards the suffering Palestinians might have provided a political home for the substantial minority of voters and activists taking that position, certainly attracting huge support among college students and other youthful Americans. But it was not to be. Imagine if Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had run in 1968 as the fiercest Vietnam War hawk in the race.
Unfortunately, the total political submission of Musk, West, and Kennedy to the massed power of Jews and Zionism is hardly a new development. Indeed, they constitute merely the latest examples in a long series of such Gentile defeats and surrenders, as I had noted at the beginning of my original 2018 article on the ADL:
Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.
Musk certainly stands as the greatest of these unfortunate recent examples, but almost exactly one hundred years before his submission, a rather similar historical case occurred involving another world-famous industrialist tycoon who also sought to challenge Jewish power but ultimately apologized and abandoned the fight.
Although the name of Henry Ford remains well-known to most Americans, I doubt that more than a small fraction are fully aware of the immense global stature he had enjoyed during the early decades of the twentieth century. The assembly-line mass production techniques he pioneered at his Ford Motor Company were responsible for transforming the automobile from a mere plaything of the rich into a reasonably-priced product owned by most Americans, so his achievements completely reshaped our society and the rest of the world as a consequence. His business success established him as one of the wealthiest men in the world—one of his later biographies was entitled The Last Billionaire—but by doubling the basic wages of his ordinary workers, he also created the American middle class and became a worldwide legend.
According to some accounts, an ailing President Woodrow Wilson sought to enlist the apolitical Ford as his Democratic successor in the White House. By the early 1920s Adolf Hitler ranked Ford as one of his greatest personal heroes, but Vladimir Lenin felt much the same way, and the Bolsheviks called their Soviet industrial policy “Fordizm.” In Aldous Huxley’s famous 1931 novel Brave New World, “Fordism” had become the world’s secular religion, with the population celebrating “Ford Day,” swearing oaths “By Ford!” and displaying Christian crosses truncated into a symbol representing the Ford Model T.
But in the aftermath of the First World War, Ford became very concerned about the unprecedented growth of Jewish power in America and how the entire mainstream media was increasingly intimidated from reporting the associated crimes and abuses. He had bought his local newspaper The Dearborn Independent in 1918 and within a couple of years transformed it into a national publication with enormous circulation, seeking to rectify this situation, as I discussed in a 2018 article:
As for The Dearborn Independent, Ford had apparently launched his newspaper on a national basis not long after the end of the war, intending to focus on controversial topics, especially those related to Jewish misbehavior, whose discussion he believed was being ignored or suppressed by nearly all mainstream media outlets. I had been aware that he had long been one of the wealthiest and most highly-regarded individuals in America, but I was still astonished to discover that his weekly newspaper, previously almost unknown to me, had reached a total national circulation of 900,000 by 1925, ranking it as the second largest in the country and by far the biggest with a national distribution. I found no easy means of examining the contents of a typical issue, but apparently the anti-Jewish articles of the first couple of years had been collected and published as short books, together constituting the four volumes of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a notoriously anti-Semitic work occasionally mentioned in my history textbooks. Eventually my curiosity got the best of me, so I clicked a few buttons on Amazon.com, bought the set, and wondered what I would discover.
Based on all my pre-suppositions, I expected to read some foaming-at-the-mouth screed, and doubted I would be able to get past the first dozen pages before losing interest and consigning the volumes to gather dust on my shelves. But what I actually encountered was something entirely different.
Over the last couple of decades, the enormous growth in the power of Jewish and pro-Israel groups in America has occasionally led writers to cautiously raise certain facts regarding the untoward influence of those organizations and activists, while always carefully emphasizing that the vast majority of ordinary Jews do not benefit from these policies and actually might be harmed by them, even leaving aside the possible risk of eventually provoking an anti-Jewish backlash. To my considerable surprise, I found that the material in Ford’s 300,000 word series seemed to follow this exact same pattern and tone.
Although I somehow managed to plow through all four volumes of The International Jew, the unrelenting drum-beat of Jewish intrigue and misbehavior became somewhat soporific after a while, especially since so many of the examples provided may have loomed quite large in 1920 or 1921 but were almost totally forgotten today. Most of the content was a collection of rather monotonous complaints regarding Jewish malfeasance, scandals, or clannishness, the sort of mundane matters which might have normally appeared in the pages of an ordinary newspaper or magazine, let alone one of the muckraking type.
However, I cannot fault the publication for having such a narrow focus. A consistent theme was that because of the intimidating fear of Jewish activists and influence, virtually all of America’s regular media outlets avoided discussion of any of these important matters, and since this new publication was intended to fill that void, it necessarily provided coverage overwhelmingly skewed toward that particular subject. The articles were also aimed at gradually expanding the window of public debate and eventually shaming other periodicals into discussing Jewish misbehavior. When leading magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine began running such articles, this result was hailed as a major success.
Another important goal was to make ordinary Jews more aware of the very problematical behavior of many of their community leaders. Occasionally, the publication received a letter of praise from a self-proclaimed “proud American Jew” commending the series and sometimes including a check to purchase subscriptions for other members of his community, and this achievement might become the subject of an extended discussion.
And although the details of these individual stories differed considerably from those of today, the pattern of behavior being criticized seemed remarkably similar. Change a few facts, adjust the society for a century of progress, and many of the stories might be exactly the same ones that well-meaning people concerned about the future of our country are quietly discussing today. Most remarkably, there were even a couple of columns about the troubled relationship between the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine and the surrounding native Palestinians, and deep complaints that under Jewish pressure the media often totally misreported or hid some of the outrages suffered by the latter group.
As might be expected, Jewish organizations were ferociously hostile to Ford’s media project and they launched a fierce lobbying campaign to force him to cease his critical coverage, employing consumer boycotts, widespread vilification, and damaging lawsuits. Meanwhile, few if any prominent Americans publicly joined Ford’s efforts so several years of such relentless Jewish attacks eventually proved successful. By 1924, Ford had ended his series of articles on Jewish activities and the billionaire industrialist finally shuttered his newspaper in 1927, while also sending an apologetic public letter to the president of the ADL recanting his “antisemitic” views. Just like today’s Elon Musk, America’s greatest industrialist of the early twentieth century took his own painful trip to Canossa. Although heavily slanted against Ford, the basic facts of this story and Ford’s capitulation are provided in a lengthy section of his Wikipedia article.
By the early 1930s, Christianity had been the dominant religion of the West for nearly two thousand years and seemed so strongly rooted in American society as to be unassailable. Therefore, Huxley’s futuristic novel suggesting that it would be replaced by the secular religion of Fordism must surely have seemed an absurd possibility at the time, perhaps even constituting deliberate satire. But over the last three generations, a somewhat similar religious replacement has indeed occurred, though the doctrine elevated would surely have shocked and dismayed both Huxley and Ford.
Under the inexorable ideological pressure of heavily-Jewish Hollywood and our mainstream media organs, the traditional Christianity of the West has been steadily deconstructed and pushed aside, often replaced by the quasi-religion of Holocaustianity, which features an entirely different set of martyrs, sacred texts, and holy places. The central shrine of Holocaustianity is Auschwitz, a former Nazi concentration camp, so Musk demonstrated his complete submission to this reigning spiritual doctrine and its tenets by undertaking a pilgrimage to that hallowed ground.
In 2018, I discussed how this remarkable shift in the beliefs of the Western world, noting that even the top spiritual leaders of other global religions apparently recognized Holocaustianity as their own uber-faith, far more important in its central elements than their own.
According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.
Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.
In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media today provide the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular society, and the overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed films over Christian ones has obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our globalized world, the American entertainment-media complex totally dominates Europe and the rest of the West, so that the ideas generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds of millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully recognize that fact.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI sought to heal the long-standing Vatican II rift within the Catholic Church and reconcile with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a major media controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long been a Holocaust Denier and also believed that Jews should convert to Christianity. Although the many other differences in Catholic doctrinal faith were fully negotiable, apparently refusing to accept the reality of the Holocaust was not, and Williamson remained estranged from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was even prosecuted for heresy by the German government.
Just as the Popes of the Middle Ages deployed the sacred power of Christ and Christianity to humble even the most powerful of earthly monarchs and force them to submit, Jews and Zionists today use the power of the Holocaust and Holocaustianity in much the same way, with even the mightiest of Western figures such as Elon Musk helpless before it.
For generations, Hollywood and the media steadily nibbled away at the legitimacy of traditional Christianity, while academic scholars boldly questioned its truth and emphasized historical doubts. As a consequence, neither Musk nor any other prominent Westerner today trembles before Christian symbols nor bows down to the anointed representatives of that faith. But instead it is the Holocaust that has become inviolate, with the harshest social and economic sanctions visited upon those who question its elements or dispute its claims. Across much of the West, any such challenges are subject to severe legal penalties, including lengthy prison sentences, the present-day equivalent of once-common blasphemy laws. And that sweeping, transcendent doctrine has therefore become powerful enough to overawe Elon Musk or any other public figure. This situation has important real-world consequences.
Critics of the events now unfolding in the Middle East must recognize that the Jewish Holocaust of World War II stands as the central justification for the existence of the Jewish state and also as the universal excuse for any of its international crimes, including those currently being committed. Gaza and the Holocaust are so closely connected that they constitute two sides of the same coin.
Related Reading:
Euro-Med: Israeli army entertains settlers by allowing them to witness torture of Gazans
Palestinian Information Center – February 12, 2024
GENEVA – Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor announced receiving new shocking testimonies from recently released Palestinian prisoners revealing that the Israeli occupation army brought groups of Jewish settlers to detention centers and prisons to witness how detainees from the Gaza Strip are tortured, allowing many of them to film prisoners using their mobile phones.
The Jewish settlers enjoyed witnessing the torture rounds of Palestinian prisoners with all types of ill and inhumane treatment, the released detainees told Euro-Med Monitor.
The prisoners were detained for varying periods inside a detention center in Zikim military base on the northern border of the Gaza Strip, and another detention center near the Negev prison in the south, after they were rounded up in the Israeli occupation army’s ground incursions into the Strip.
The released detainees told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers deliberately presented them in front of Jewish settlers and claimed they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian factions, and that they participated in the Oct. 7 attack on Gaza Envelope settlements.
The Euro-Med explained that, according to the testimonies it received, groups of Jewish settlers, ranging from 10 to 20 people in each group, were allowed to watch and take photos of Palestinian prisoners who were held naked while being subjected to beating with metal batons and electric sticks by Israeli soldiers who poured hot water over their heads, amid verbal insults and threats in Arabic.
Euro-Med pointed out that this was the first time Israeli illegal practices and torture have been carried out in front of Jewish settlers inside prisons and detention centers, allowing settlers to document the beatings using their personal mobile phones while laughing at and humiliating the Palestinian detainees. This is an added crime to all crimes previously committed by the Israeli army against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, especially against prisoners and detainees who are subjected to arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearance, brutal torture, and denial of fair trial.
Omar Abu Mudallala, a 43 years old Gazan, told the Euro-Med team: “I was arrested at the checkpoint near Al-Kuwait roundabout, which separates Gaza City from Central Gaza, as part of random arrests campaign. I was subjected to torture and abuse at all stages. The arrest lasted for about 52 days,” pointing out that Israeli soldiers “brought civilians to watch our torture while we were naked.”
“The Israeli army brought a number of Jewish settlers into our detention centers while they were beating us, and they started telling them, ‘These are the Hamas terrorists who killed you and raped your women on October 7’. The settlers were filming us on their mobile phones while we were subjected to beating, abuse, and torture. They were making fun of us”, Abu Mudallala added.
“This happened five times during my detention period, once in Zikim and four times in Negev. We were blindfolded, but one of the detainees who knows Hebrew informed us that the soldiers were talking to Israeli civilians, claiming that we were fighters,” he said.
The Euro-Med Monitor wondered why the Palestinian detainees who were claimed to be resistance fighters were released, which obviously indicated that the Israeli story was false and was only used to collectively punish the Palestinian people.
The Euro-Med confirmed that the crimes of torture and inhuman treatment practiced by the Israeli army against Palestinian detainees are war crimes and mounts to crimes against humanity in accordance with the Rome Statute, condemning the behavior of transforming these illegal practices into entertainment tools for Jewish settlers because it constitutes a war crime that involves a serious assault on human dignity through humiliation and degradation of prisoners.
The Euro-Med has warned of the consequences of engaging Israeli settlers in detention centers, stressing that it perpetuates a state of extremism, fuels hatred, and inflames internal Israeli opinion towards committing more crimes and violations against the Palestinians.
The human rights organization reiterated that the vast majority of the detainees of the Gaza Strip are subject to arbitrary detention based on no charges or trials because they have been subjected to enforced disappearance, torture, and inhuman treatment, calling on the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate detention conditions of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, to expose their fate and the crimes they have been subjected to.
The Euro-Medi affirmed that Israeli practices against Palestinian detainees are clearly violating the international norms and conventions, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
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From the Archives
A superpower and “the world’s sickest warrior state”
By Paul J. Balles | March 8, 2010
Living through five or six major wars has hardened me to what I thought were the extremes of inhuman cruelty and brutality.
Two things made those extremes almost bearable: the brutality always revealed – at least according to the media coverage – the viciousness of the enemy. It was therefore quite understandable when our “brave men and women” pulverized the enemy.
Films of Japanese torturing captive Americans somehow justified holding Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II; and only a small percentage of Americans found the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unreasonably vengeful at best, at worst, depraved.
The media giants in America portrayed the North Koreans as barbaric beasts with their captives, quite unlike their southern counterpoints – our allies during the Korean War. No one ever felt the need to explain how the South Koreans were a civilized breed while the North Koreans were absolute savages, at least according to the official line.
In Vietnam, our warriors justifiably (or so the media made us believe) dropped napalm on the North Vietnamese who had the gall to hide in villages and tunnels to ravage our invaders. At least it was accepted practice until some rogue photojournalist filmed a young girl screaming down a Vietnamese road in flames. … continue
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