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.
February 15, 2024 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Russia, United States | Leave a comment
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.
February 14, 2024 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
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.
February 14, 2024 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, FBI, New York Times, United States | Leave a comment
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.
February 14, 2024 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | NATO, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment
“But those [Lipid] Nanoparticles can lead to dangerous side effects, especially if a patient has to take repeated doses”
Quote from a story following an interview in 2016 with Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna
By Dr. Byram W. Bridle | COVID Chronicles | February 9, 2024
Please share this information with anyone considering taking another dose of a modified RNA shot.
Did you know that the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used to make Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots were re-purposed to serve as vaccine platforms? They were originally intended to be a delivery mechanism for drugs and/or gene therapies. The problem is that the LNPs were toxic if administered multiple times. And treatment of cancers and other diseases with LNPs containing drugs or gene therapies required multi-dosing protocols.
For this reason, several companies abandoned the use of LNPs. Moderna decided to change course and use LNPs as a vaccine delivery system. Why? Because they understood that an ideal vaccine is one that requires a single dose and then the person is protected from getting the disease for the rest of their life. If you don’t believe me, please review Health Canada’s official definition of an ideal vaccine. This is the relevant quote…
“An ideal vaccine is: safe with minimal adverse effects; effective in providing lifelong protection against disease after a single dose that can be administered at birth; inexpensive; stable during shipment and storage; and easy to administer.“
So, problem solved. A good LNP-based vaccine would require only a single dose. No multi-dosing = none of the toxicities known to be associated with multiple administrations of LNPs.
But, don’t take my word for it. Instead, I defer to a journalist that interviewed Stéphane Bancel. He is the Chief Executive Officer of the American company Moderna, which makes one of the two available modified RNA COVID-19 shots. A story was published on September 13, 2016, after an interview with him. Please heed his serious concerns about the LNPs that his company is using. Here are quotes from the story about the interview; brace yourself…
“In nature, mRNA molecules function like recipe books, directing cellular machinery to make specific proteins. Moderna believes it can play that system to its advantage by using synthetic mRNA to compel cells to produce whichever proteins it chooses. In effect, the mRNA would turn cells into tiny drug factories. It’s highly risky. Big pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.”
“Delivery – actually getting RNA into cells – has long bedeviled the whole field. On their own, RNA molecules have a hard time reaching their targets. They work better if they’re wrapped up in a delivery mechanism, such as nanoparticles made of lipids. But those nanoparticles can lead to dangerous side effects, especially if a patient has to take repeated doses over months or years. Novartis abandoned the related realm of RNA interference over concerns about toxicity, as did Merck and Roche.”
I encourage you to re-read the two quotes above a couple of times. Let them sink in. Then think about the billions of people around the world that have taken multiple doses. Isn’t it astonishing?
Why did Bancel not remind the world of these concerns in 2020 when he realized that his ‘vaccine’ was far from ideal and that multiple doses would be required.
I don’t know if it is relevant, but this is the second last sentence in Wikipedia’s description of Stéphane Bancel…
“In April 2020, with the Moderna share price rising on news of imminent phase 2 human trials for its potential COVID-19 vaccine, Bancel’s stake of about 9% became worth over $1 billion.“
Also, note that Moderna, which was a small start-up company not all that many years ago would have gone under had its attempt at a LNP-based vaccine not been successful. Moderna was ‘all in’ on this business move.
Remarkably, some people are still eager to get more doses. I have heard of some that have received at least nine doses. This is downright frightening in light of concerns identified after the interview with CEO Bancel, “especially if a patient has to take repeated doses over months or years.“
I would love to know how many legitimate doses Stéphane Bancel has taken of his own COVID-19 shot.
And journalists should ask him to explain the information he relayed in 2016, as presented in the follow-up to his interview.
More doses anyone?
How about more LNP-based shots for other problems, like disease X, in the future?
February 12, 2024 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, Stéphane Bancel | Leave a comment
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.
“Palestinian people are the most pampered in the world” — RFK Jr.
The most disappointing politician in the US.
— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) December 17, 2023
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:
- American Pravda: Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Much Riskier Targets
- Elon Musk and the True History of the ADL
- American Pravda: Why the Media Fears RFK Jr.
- Gazacaust: Placing the Blame Where It Belongs
- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
- American Pravda: Israel and the Holocaust Hoax
February 12, 2024 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
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.
February 12, 2024 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment
The WHO Overplays its Hand and Watches Support Drain Away
BY BEN KINGSLEY AND MOLLY KINGSLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 9, 2024
Cracks are forming in the World Health Organisation’s plans to secure a vast expansion of its powers and resources. Presented as a necessarily urgent response to the empirically unsupported assertion that pandemics are increasing in frequency and severity, negotiations for a broad package of amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and a new parallel Pandemic Treaty had been expected to be over by the end of 2023. Having missed that deadline, in late January the Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleaded for WHO member states to give ground so that the negotiations could be completed at all. In the same comments he sought to apportion blame for the unexpected headwinds on those who had misconstrued, or misrepresented, the benign intentions of the WHO and its key supporters (which include China and some wealthy private organisations).
Reading between the lines, it appears that Mr. Ghebreyesus and his supporters may finally have realised that the game could soon be up: the strength of opposition to the ambitions of this unelected technocratic administration has compounded rapidly in recent weeks. That opposition has become more evident not only in smaller less influential countries, but in countries which are major contributors to the WHO. Significantly this has included groups of politicians in the U.K. and the U.S. who are seriously alarmed by the vision of a WHO-centred ‘command and control’ public health system, and by the constitutional and public spending implications of these two proposed international agreements.
The Director-General has perhaps realised that his blind ambition has not only put at risk the negotiations that might have elevated his unelected advisory organisation to the status of a supra-national rule-making authority, but is also now starting to jeopardise the future status, funding and membership of the WHO.
Secrecy, opacity and delay
The original timeline presented by the WHO had envisaged a final text of the proposed IHR amendments – where many of the most contentious proposals reside – being published before January 27th 2024, with a view to their adoption taking place at the World Health Assembly meeting scheduled from May 27th to June 1st 2024, alongside adoption of the proposed new Pandemic Treaty. That timeline, although tight, would have allowed four months for negotiators to brief domestic stakeholders, for national legislatures to debate the combined proposals and for any necessary pre-adoption formalities (approvals, technical scrutiny, cost/benefit analyses, etc.) to be completed prior to a vote at the WHA meeting in May.
Yet, on its own initiative, in October 2023 the Working Group for the negotiation of the IHR amendments unilaterally moved its own goalposts so that in place of publishing a final draft text to be scrutinised well in advance of that WHA meeting, it instead committed to circulate by the end of January a copy of the original set of proposed amendments and an interim ‘working draft’ text showing the current state of play. Negotiations would then continue between February and April 2024. It was – and remains – ambiguous whether this move was compatible with the procedural legal requirements already enshrined in the International Health Regulations, but perhaps member states quietly agreed with the WHO secretariat not to look too hard at that issue.
Notwithstanding this commitment, no interim working draft of the IHR amendments appears yet to have been published, and the U.K. officials involved in the negotiations have been inexplicably reluctant to reveal the current position of the text. Indeed, to date all demands for transparency by U.K. parliamentarians have been ignored or deflected by the ministers responsible for the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO. Astonishingly the U.K. Government has refused even to confirm who is negotiating on the U.K.’s behalf.
We understand that the IHR Working Group anticipates a final text being settled only during April or possibly even into May, but there remains no official deadline for it to publish that final text. It refuses to confirm what the documents say, and it refuses to say when it will reveal those documents. If any further evidence were needed of the disregard and disrespect for democratic process and the sovereignty of national parliaments now alleged of the WHO, then surely this is it.
Out of time
That corrosive secrecy, opacity and delay has left a vanishingly narrow window for domestic public health organisations and parliamentarians to review or comment meaningfully on what may become generationally-significant changes to the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, with other countries and with the public health business community. It means Parliament will have scant opportunity to scrutinise the IHR amendments and the new international funding and resource-sharing commitments enshrined in the parallel Pandemic Treaty. Yet these are documents with the potential to impact materially on the U.K.’s ability to act autonomously, on freedom of speech and opinion, on health security and on the nature of U.K. democracy itself. They also have the potential to commit future generations to very significant public spending obligations.
Given their significance, the IHR proposals and the parallel Pandemic Treaty require a commensurate degree of examination by Parliament. The current nature of the WHO’s funding, 85% of which now comes from private commercially-interested organisations, creates an additional imperative for rigorous, investigative scrutiny. In November 2023, Human Rights Watch wrote that:
The draft [treaty] reflects a process disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry.
Without sight of any working drafts of the revised IHRs, nor of the current state of the draft treaty, scrutiny is completely frustrated. At this late stage in the process, after repetitive calls for transparency seemingly have been ignored, one is left to wonder whether this is precisely the intent of the officials involved.
Deferral is the rational solution
As the window for full, fair, candid appraisal by national democratically-elected legislatures is now all but shut, the logical and necessary solution is for member states to demand that any vote to adopt either of these two international accords is held over to the next WHA meeting in May 2025. This will allow ample time both for the conclusion of the negotiations and for member state-level scrutiny of the proposals served up by the negotiating teams.
If it is truly the case that the WHO and its member officials do not intend for national legislatures to cede rule-making sovereignty to an enlarged WHO technocracy, they will surely accept the need for state-level legislatures to control the timing of this process. Calls for deferral have begun, but more voices will be needed to press relevant political leaders and officials to accept that deferral is the only legitimate response to this situation.
A turning point
Even now, in the face of a chorus of rational legally-grounded concerns raised by U.K. parliamentarians about the substance of the proposed amendments and the opacity of the negotiations, the Government has remained steadfastly unwilling to comment on its negotiating intent and objectives, beyond vague platitudes. Efforts by members of the public, legal experts and parliamentarians to understand the current state of negotiations, and even just the arrangements within the U.K. Government to conduct the negotiations, have been stonewalled. The WHO equally has remained virtually mute and offered no meaningful evidence to support claims that its ambitions have been misunderstood.
This has served only to fuel distrust in this process, in the Government and its senior officials, in the U.K.’s relationship with the WHO, and in the WHO’s relationship with its influential funding providers.
Behaviour of this overtly undemocratic nature indicates that the WHO project has long since lost sight of its noble foundations in post-war benevolent multilateralism, and indeed of its reason for being: health for all in pursuit of global peace and security. Unfortunately, the WHO is now a symbol of all that is wrong with what has become a system of global public health patronage. This shamelessly undemocratic and chaotic power grab is also indicative of an organisation which has reached the end of its useful life, at least in its current guise. We suggest that this sorry episode should become the impetus for the U.K. to revisit its relationship with the WHO, and the relationship of the WHO with its funding providers.
The U.K. will not be an outlier if it does so, but rather a role model and – judging by the breadth and strength of international expressions of antipathy for the WHO’s ambitions – a leader of fast followers. This may well be the U.K.’s best post-Brexit opportunity to be an actor of global significance on the international stage.
Molly Kingsley is a founder and Ben Kingsley is the Head of Legal Affairs at children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Find UsForThem on Substack. Ben and Molly’s new book (co-authored with Arabella Skinner) The Accountability Deficit is available now at Amazon and other book stores.
February 11, 2024 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | UK, United States, WHO | Leave a comment
Can We Debate?
Is It Still Legal?
BY KEVIN BARRETT • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 11, 2024
This week’s False Flag Weekly News begins with the Daily Wire article “Harvard Employee Harasses Jewish Student Suing School For Anti-Semitism – Asks To Debate 9/11 Conspiracies.” The implication is that it is “harassment” to ask someone to “debate 9/11 conspiracies.” Especially if that someone is Jewish. And even more especially if they are suing their school for alleged anti-Semitism.
The Daily Wire hit piece targets Gustavo Espada, the financial and systems coordinator for Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. According to the Wire, Espada “has been active in pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories for 18 years, according to a 2006 piece in The Lowell Sun which reported he spends 10 hours a week ‘handing out literature,’ Web logging and talking with people on the street about his views on 9/11.”
The thrust of the Wire hit piece is that Espada should be fired from his university job because he wants to debate 9/11. Reading the story brought back memories of a my own experience in 2006. While teaching subjects including Folklore, African Studies, and Islamic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had begun doing 9/11 teach-ins on campus in 2004, and then gotten involved in the national and global 9/11 truth movements. In 2006 I became the focus of a concerted pushback campaign sparked by Lynn Cheney’s group ACTA and its acolytes in the Wisconsin Republican Party.
Like Espada, I repeatedly challenged my detractors to meet me in a formal debate. In September 2006, while I was under fire from the State Legislature, the UW-Madison Debate Club sponsored what was supposed to be a debate on 9/11. They arranged for me and Jim Fetzer to argue against the 9/11 Commission’s official story, and told us that a history professor and a political science professor (Donald Downs, as I recall) had agreed to defend it. But at the last minute, the two pro-official-story professors backed out. So Jim Fetzer and I were left “debating” two empty chairs.
I reiterated my debate challenge. The university Provost, Patrick Farrell, told me that he would try to have the university set up some sort of formal panel discussion or debate after the media furor died down. Student newspapers at UW-Madison and UW-Oshkosh published op-eds plaintively begging for some knowledgable professor to debate and refute me. But nobody stepped forward to defend the 9/11 Commission.
Six months of media hoopla (July through December 2006) made me unemployable at the University of Wisconsin. I was denied a tenure-track Islam-Humanities job at U.W.-Whitewater purely due to my views of 9/11, according to whistleblowing then-Dean of Humanities Howard Ross. And I was told by the late Professor Muhammad Umar Memon, then a member of the UW-Madison hiring committee for its Islam classes, that the committee was informed by the University administration that I must not be rehired for my Islam 101 teaching job for the same reason.
Rendered unemployable due to my views of 9/11, but with nobody willing to debate me and explain why my views were wrong (privately most of my colleagues I knew personally thought my views were likely right or at least plausible) I offered a $1000 honorarium to any University of Wisconsin instructor, whether professor or TA, who was willing to defend the 9/11 Commission in a formal debate. There were no takers. Years later, the offer was raised to $2000. Still no takers.
Similar debate challenges were issued at other universities. A 9/11 truth group at the University of Michigan sent letters to every professor in the Engineering department seeking someone to defend the FEMA and NIST positions on the destruction of the World Trade Center in a debate with me and Underwriters Labs whistleblower Kevin Ryan. Most didn’t respond. The few who did told the organizers, off the record, that Ryan and I were right.
Could a 9/11 Debate Have Prevented Genocide?
According to the tenets of liberal democracy, all important matters are supposed to be debated on the basis of logic and evidence, and the truth that emerges becomes the touchstone of public policy. Had a real debate on 9/11 ever transpired, the truth that would have emerged—9/11 was orchestrated not by al-Qaeda, but by the state of Israel and its American neoconservative allies—would have prevented the series of wars that has devastated the Middle East, including the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gaza.
People resist debate when they know that logic and facts are not on their side. When would-be debaters like Espada are smeared, and their livelihoods threatened, it’s obvious that those doing the smearing know that their victims are right.
Can We Debate the Ukraine War?
Another topic that’s off-limits to debate is the US war on Russia through Ukraine. As with 9/11, the neoconservative propaganda talking points—the enemy is pure evil, “they” attacked “us” for no reason, and so on—are inflated to the status of sacred public myths, and anyone who wants to debate them is a damnable heretic. Merely for exposing us to Putin’s point of view, Tucker Carlson has been attacked by the whole mainstream media. As with 9/11, the neocon Establishment’s refusal to debate on logic and evidence, and its preference for shrill vituperation and ad-hominem attacks, suggests that it knows it couldn’t win a real debate with the likes of Putin.
Cancelled Candidates
Elections are a form of public policy debate. When the side with power knows that it can’t win a fair debate—as with the Pakistani military’s stand-off with Imran Khan—it may try to cancel the candidacy…or the candidate. Khan, who was very nearly assassinated by the Pakistani establishment, currently languishes in prison despite his overwhelming popularity among the vast majority of his countrymen. The Pakistani junta’s attempt to rig last week’s elections failed, because it’s impossible to convincingly rig an election when your opponent has such high levels of support. So the man who is the people’s choice and the rightful Prime Minister, targeted by ludicrous legal assaults including an attack on the legitimacy of his marriage, remains in prison… for now.
Imran Khan’s plight, we might imagine, is typical of tinpot third world military dictatorships, but irrelevant to the affairs of advanced Western democracies. But in both the US and Germany, pro-immigration Establishments are working overtime to keep anti-immigration parties and personalities off the ballot. Like the Pakistani Establishment vis-a-vis Imran Khan, the US and German Establishments don’t want to have to debate anti-immigration populist movements. So the Democrats in the US, and the ruling elites in Germany, are using various underhanded means to try to keep Trump and the MAGA movement, and the anti-immigration party AFD, off the two nations’ respective ballots.
Donald Trump, like Imran Khan, might very well end up winning an election from a prison cell. Like Khan, Trump has been targeted by a lawfare campaign expressly designed to torpedo his political chances. And Trump’s party, like Khan’s, views itself as the victim of widespread election fraud, and those who try to raise and debate the issue are deplatformed. Though the two cases aren’t fully comparable—Khan is overwhelmingly popular while Trump is controversial, Khan’s complaints are fully justified while Trump’s are only partly so, and Khan is completely honest and ethical while Trump is not—there are enough similarities to raise questions about whether American “democracy” is any healthier than Pakistan’s.
Undebatable COVID
The notion that the truth emerges through free and fair debate took a huge hit during COVID. We were told to “trust the science” and wear masks everywhere, even though the science suggests that there is no convincing evidence that masks significantly slow the spread of respiratory viruses. The debate about COVID origins was unceremoniously quashed, and people were deplatformed for even mentioning the issue. And arguments about whether highly experimental vaccines should be mass-tested on entire populations were likewise suppressed. Only one position—the Establishment’s—was allowed.
One More Question for Debate
So in light of all the signs that liberal democracy is dead and free and fair debate no longer effectively exists, I propose one last subject for debate: Should debate itself be legal? Or to rephrase that in debate-ese: “Resolved: Debate should be criminalized, and would-be debaters should be imprisoned or executed.”
Especially if they are “anti-Semitic.”
February 11, 2024 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Germany, Pakistan, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
A Tale of Two Breadline Massacres
By Stephen Karganovic | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 10, 2024
All breadline massacres are equal, Orwell might have written, whilst adding that some breadline massacres are more equal than others. Such a thought comes to mind after February 4, 2024, when a Ukrainian armed forces projectile killed 28 residents in the city of Lysychansk, Lugansk region, and wounded several dozen. The civilian victims were standing in line in front of a local bakery, intending to buy bread.
Those with a memory that goes back longer than fifteen minutes (unfortunately neither the majority nor even a significant minority nowadays) may recall that a similar incident took place in Sarajevo, during the war in Bosnia, on May 27, 1992. The victims of that incident were also waiting in line to buy bread when a projectile landed nearby and killed several dozen of them.
There is a huge difference in the way the self-styled “international community” reacted to these two similar and equally lethal events. The status and identity of the victims and of the suspected perpetrators may have shaped that unequal response. In Lysychansk the victims were residents of Donbass, former citizens of Ukraine who in a referendum voted overwhelmingly to join Russia. From the standpoint of the Kiev regime and its foreign sponsors that act of disobedience made them fair game for retribution. The fact that since 2014 they have been indiscriminate targets of bombardment by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which so far has cost at least 14,000 civilian lives, does not count as an extenuating circumstance in their favour.
The perceived human worth and political status of the preferred Sarajevo victims in May of 1992 is defined by the fact that technically they were the cannon fodder of the Sarajevo regime, the side in the Bosnian civil war that was supported by NATO and the collective West, exactly as today the same actors are supporting, and systematically exculpating, the Kiev regime.
In consequence, and in complete contrast to the treatment of Lysychansk victims in 2024, the Sarajevo 1992 victims were copiously mourned by the collective West’s politicians and media machine, whilst the designated perpetrators were indignantly vilified. Threats were made to exact harsh retribution on the perpetrators, even before any investigation to establish the facts had been conducted. Those threats were promptly carried out by inducing the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 757, inflicting punishment on the neighbouring Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by imposing a total trade embargo, followed by what the New York Times called “the most sweeping sanctions in history.” Yugoslavia was selected for such punishment because of its support for the Bosnian Serbs, who were accused, although firm evidence was not presented, of maliciously firing the mortar shell which resulted in the fatalities.
The killings in Lysychansk, by marked contrast, have passed virtually without comment in the Western media. No indignation was displayed and the sparse mention of the tragedy was peppered with qualifiers such as “alleged,” inserted to put in doubt the incident’s veracity. No urgent sessions of the UN Security Council were convened to assess what had happened in Lysychansk nor were furious calls heard to impose punitive sanctions either on the direct perpetrators or their foreign sponsors, on the latter for having supplied the lethal devices that caused the death of civilians in that particular breadline. This time, Russia did not even bother to try to convene a Security Council session, obviously realising there was no point following the recent downing of its airplane that was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war to be exchanged, after its request for a Security Council meeting was flatly denied by the French rotating president of that body.
Nor is the 2024 Lysychansk massacre likely to have any other repercussions comparable to what followed the similar incident which took place in Sarajevo in 1992. To this day there is no conclusive proof of where the mortar shell that struck the Sarajevo breadline originated, but circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that it may have been staged by Sarajevo authorities to provide a rationale for punishing their adversaries. Nevertheless, the massacre was featured in the Hague Tribunal indictment of Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadžić. The embarrassing inadequacy of the evidence subsequently presented by the Prosecution caused that charge to be quietly passed over in the final verdict. There is no indication that the International Court of Justice, also in the Hague, is entertaining the thought of similarly calling the political and military leadership in Kiev to account for committing a strikingly analogous crime in Lysychansk, or even of undertaking a pro forma investigation to sort out what happened.
In reacting selectively to lethal wartime incidents the collective West has displayed a hypocrisy breath-taking in scope as it shamelessly and publicly adheres to double standards motivated entirely by utilitarian considerations and political favouritism. Even-handed respect for human life or international humanitarian law does not seem to play any role. Western policy and the stance of the media have followed exactly the analytical paradigm elaborated by Edward Herman and David Peterson in their seminal study The Politics of Genocide for the classification of atrocities and the distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims“:
“When we ourselves commit mass-atrocity crimes, the atrocities are Constructive, our victims are unworthy of our attention and indignation, and never suffer ‘genocide’ at our hands… But when the perpetrator of mass-atrocity crimes is our enemy or a state targeted by us for destabilization and attack, the converse is true. Then the atrocities are Nefarious and their victims worthy of our focus, sympathy, public displays of solidarity, and calls for inquiry and punishment.“ [P. 103]
The characteristic of Constructive atrocities (and presumably the mass killing of civilians in Lysychansk and more broadly in the Donbass fits that description) is that “the victims were rarely acknowledged, the crimes against them rarely punished (with only low-level personnel brought to book in well-publicised cases like My Lai)“ [p. 19] because “demonization of the real victims and atrocities management remain as important as ever and keeps the citizens of the imperial powers properly misinformed and supportive of bigtime atrocities.“ [P. 22]
“… [W]ith civilian killings largely kept off the official books,“ the authors continue, “and, even when acknowledged, treated tolerantly for these unworthy victims, such killings and bloodbaths … have been thoroughly normalized. “ [P. 37]
That, in sum, is the moral bookkeeping of the contemporary West.
February 10, 2024 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO, Ukraine | Leave a comment
Congress and the President Come Up with Another Week from the Dark Side
Mayorkas evades accountability while Netanyahu ignores Biden
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 9, 2024
Washington is a place where a clueless politician like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi can, with a straight face and providing no evidence, claim that pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States are working for Russia and/or China. She has asked the FBI to investigate. But in spite of that and for a change there was also some good news coming out of the Federal Capital though it was far outweighed by the bad things that the US government does almost reflexively, clearly with little regard for possible consequences. The good news is that Ukraine and Israel, incorrectly described by the New York Times as America’s “allies,” might not soon be getting their expected fat checks and planeloads of military equipment from Washington, which will no doubt hamper their plans to weaken Russia while also killing Palestinians. The GOP controlled House presented a unilateral standalone bill giving $17.6 billion to Israel but ignoring other alleged national security obligations being advanced by the White House. The bill was submitted “under suspension,” which is a procedural tactic that fast-tracks an item for a vote but requires a two-thirds majority to pass. It failed 250-180 in the voting last Tuesday. The House bill went down when the Democrats were able to muster enough votes to block its passage in support of White House objections, even though a formidable percentage of the House normally votes to support anything and everything related to Israel. The “no” voters argued that the GOP bill was an attempt to “undermine the possibility of a comprehensive bipartisan funding package that addresses America’s national security challenges in the Middle East, Ukraine, the Indo-Pacific region and throughout the world.”
If the bill had passed and eventually reached Biden’s desk for signature, a possibility that the White House had dismissed as a “cynical political maneuver,” he would have refused to sign it in spite of his often expressed great love for Israel. Over last weekend, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement declaring that “The security of Israel should be sacred, not a political game. We strongly oppose this ploy which does nothing to secure the border, does nothing to help the people of Ukraine defend themselves against Putin’s aggression, and denies humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians, the majority of them women and children, which the Israelis supported by opening the access route.”
It should be noted that Jean-Pierre is lying. It is the White House, not the GOP bill, which “denies humanitarian assistance” to the Gazans by supporting Israeli total control over the importation of relief supplies and food. According to the UN, 95% of emergency supplies are being blocked or interfered with by Israel, which continues to bomb civilians throughout the strip. In response to that reality, the White House has issued a national security memorandum that will require that countries receiving US military aid not impede the delivery of humanitarian assistance even during wartime, though the Thursday memorandum does not specifically mention it as applying to Israel, only to “allies and partners.” The aid recipients must also confirm in writing that they “will use any such defense articles in accordance with international humanitarian law.”
In a bid to counter the Republican efforts and advance his own agenda, President Joe Biden and whoever pulls his strings came up with their own war funding plan, which came apart and “crumbled” in a close 49 to 50 vote due to lack of sufficient support in the Senate on Wednesday night. The Democrats had the brilliant idea of tying in their offering of $14.1 billion in aid to Israel to the $60 billion to be given to Ukraine to get them through the next year plus $4 billion for Taiwan. Also included was $10 billion in humanitarian aid, but as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency program for Palestine (UNRWA) was predictably blocked from receiving any of it, the $1.4 billion allocated to Gaza would likely not actually have been delivered in any case in spite of Biden’s promotion of the “humanitarian” aspect of the legislation. If the bill had passed, one would not have been surprised to see the bulk of the humanitarian aid winding up in Israel to compensate it for its perpetual victimhood, this time allegedly meted out by Hamas!
The White House’s reasoning behind the initiative was that by wrapping all the commitments together in an omnibus Senate bill, Congress wouldn’t dare withhold money from Israel and the other aid packages could slide through the process without any serious opposition. But the Republicans were able to muster enough “no” votes from congressmen concerned about where the money was coming from to pay for the aid to block the Senate bill. A third “national security” spending bill is nevertheless now in the works, having passed through the Senate on Thursday night by a filibuster proof 67 to 32 vote. It includes the money for Ukraine and Israel as well as for Taiwan and for “humanitarian” programs, but it still has to pass through further tweaking in the Senate to satisfy Republican concerns about immigration and the border, followed by a second vote in the Senate before it then goes on to the House of Representatives for final approval before landing on the presidential desk. So at this point nobody gets anything, which is a perfect solution when one is fighting three or four technically illegal wars, one involving genocide, in which money provided to Israel plausibly involves the United States in supporting a crime against humanity.
On the same previous day as the vote in the House on the Israel aid, the GOP, unfortunately, also failed in its bid to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a vote of 216-214. Four Republicans voted against together with all the Democrats on grounds that impeaching a cabinet secretary over policy disagreements sets a bad precedent. Mayorkas’ record regarding relatively free entry of waves of literally millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico is well known, but the presumption is that he is carrying out policies under instructions from the president. The border has become known as such an easy way to enter the US that charter flights to Mexico from places like India and Africa are regularly being run to bring in the new illegals. Interestingly the failed Senate bill relating to Israel and Ukraine funding also included as a sweetener some guidelines regarding changes regarding border and migrant “security” issues, though Republicans observed that the language was such that Mayorkas would continue to have a free hand in setting policy and enforcement, meaning that there would likely be no change from the current laissez faire. Mayorkas defended himself against attacks in a Senate hearing by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who was, ironically, challenging the secretary over a pro-Palestinian employee at Homeland Security, by characteristically citing his Jewish ancestry-bestowed victimhood and the so-called holocaust. He said angrily “Perhaps he does not know that I am the child of a Holocaust survivor. Perhaps he does not know that my mother lost almost all her family at the hands of the Nazis. And so I find his adversarial tone to be entirely misplaced. I find it to be disrespectful of me and my heritage. And I do not expect an apology.”
So the utterly incompetent Mayorkas survived, But the worst news of the week has to relate to the continuing warfare going on and also escalating in the Middle East. The region has been simmering ever since Israel launched its devastating attack on the mostly civilian population of Gaza in early October. The bombing and shooting of civilians has continued in spite of a judgment by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel was engaging in actions that could be characterized as genocide. The United States, which is continuing to arm and fund Israel, could be seen, in legal terms, as an accessory to genocide given the terms of the court ruling. Israel, for its part, was warned that it must cease and desist from targeting and killing civilians, blocking food and other relief supplies to encourage both famine and disease, and destroying critical infrastructure like water treatment plants and hospitals.
The United States is responsible for escalating the conflict through its total support of Israel and its attack on the Houthis as well as the current strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq. Hypocritically the White House is at the same time boasting that it is not expanding the war because it has not yet struck Iran, as the Israelis are stridently seeking. To retaliate against a drone attack that killed three US soldiers at a base straddling the Jordan-Syria border, the United States attacked more than 85 targets in Syria, Iraq and Yemen simultaneously, killing at least forty civilians in Syria as well as a high level Iraqi militia commander in Baghdad. The multi-million-dollar cruise missiles and smart bombs being used by the Navy and Air Force are reportedly expensive and already hard to replace. And why is the White House bombing so many targets in Iraq and Syria when only one US base which may have actually been completely illegally in Syria was hit? The one site that launched the device that struck the base was reportedly among the targets, but the effectiveness of the retaliation is unknown, meaning that the US is engaged in collective punishment and killing innocent tribesman living in the deserts in western Iraq and eastern Syria as well as in the Iraqi capital Baghdad. This is itself an escalation and more will surely follow, inevitably creating new enemies who will be motivated to seek revenge against Americans at the remaining bases. The smart policy would be to shut down the illegal bases in both Syria and Iraq, as has been demanded by the local governments and people, but that would mean not being able to steal more Syrian oil. This escalation was not the right response, but no one expects Biden and his crew to be smart.
In fact, the local militia fighters wasted no time and struck back immediately, killing six US-supported Kurdish fighters by way of a drone strike on a US base in eastern Syria. The men were killed in an attack on the US facility located at al-Omar oilfield in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor province. A further 18 militiamen were wounded. Additional attacks on US bases in Syria and Iraq are likely to increase, not decrease in the coming weeks, with no end in sight. If anyone can explain why the United States continues to shoot itself in the foot both worldwide and at home it would certainly be interesting to hear a whole new series of lies to justify bad policies and performance. In 2015 distinguished journalist Robert Fisk asked what is “The difference between America and Israel?” He answered “There isn’t one. Netanyahu knows he can get away with anything in America – with the same confidence that he can support his army when they slaughter hundreds of children in Gaza.” He has now observed that the 2016 election was between a “Liberal American Zionist fascist,” and a “Conservative American Zionist fascist,” with the latter winning in 2016, and the former in 2020. And now we’re likely back to the latter in 2024.
Joe Biden is clearly getting nervous. In an impromptu speech on Thursday responding to disparaging comments made by the special counsel investigating his mishandling of classified documents, he denied suffering from memory problems. Unfortunately, in his comments he described Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi as the leader of Mexico. But he also delivered a scathing comment on Netanyahu that has resonated, saying “I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip, has been over the top. I’ve been pushing really hard, really hard, to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza. There are a lot of innocent people who are starving. There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying. And it’s got to stop.” Israel is currently bombing the Rafah area in Gaza, which is packed with refugees as Israel had previously declared it to be a “safe” zone. During Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s recent visit to Israel, he reportedly told Netanyahu that Washington wouldn’t support any “unplanned” ground operation in Rafah. The Israeli Prime Minister angrily rejected the advice and Israel escalated attacks anyway.
One has to wonder if Joe Biden is up to improving his re-electoral prospects in the nine months remaining until the election by abandoning his hitherto sordid defense of Israel’s crimes. And, if he does so, what will he do when Bibi and the Israel Lobby begin pushing back real hard on him, as they inevitably will?
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.
February 10, 2024 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Why Vaccines for Staph Infections Always Fail
By Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 7, 2024
Research into vaccines for Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), the most common type of staph infection, has led to experimental vaccines that protect mice but fail in humans. A paper published Jan. 16 in Cell Reports Medicine explained why.
When a person first encounters staph, the bacterium fools the human immune system into releasing ineffective antibodies instead of the neutralizing antibodies typically associated with robust immunity. That “trick” allows S. aureus to colonize us, usually harmlessly.
When a colonized person’s immune system is later challenged with a staph vaccine it does not make new, effective antibodies. Instead, it calls up more of the same ineffective antibodies that allowed the bug to colonize the individual in the first place.
Vaccine developers have tried at least three different approaches to S. aureus vaccination but all were met with the same issue.
The immune system is willing …
S. aureus is one of 30 Staphylococcus species in nature and 11 that colonize humans as part of the human microbiome. It is found in the nostrils, skin and other reservoirs in healthy people and is only dangerous when it enters the bloodstream, particularly in immunocompromised individuals.
Up to 80% of humans harbor Staphylococcus species.
The human immune system makes antibodies against S. aureus as it does against other microbial invaders. But instead of neutralizing antibodies that fight colonization and infection, S. aureus tricks the immune system into producing ineffective antibodies that allow the bug to continue colonizing us.
When the colonized person is challenged with either S. aureus infection or vaccination, these dummy antibodies reemerge in force but do nothing to help the patient. Vaccination amplifies this effect — which is why S. aureus infections must be treated with antibiotics.
Vaccination “only works when the initial immune response to that pathogen was actually protective,” said J.R. Caldera, Ph.D., a co-author of the paper, in a news release.
Since 80% of staph infections are caused by the invasion of the same strain colonizing the individual’s nose or skin, their “initial immune response” was not protective so subsequent responses will not be either.
“What sets SA [Staphylococcus aureus] apart is that the bacteria themselves have ways of evading the immune system from the moment they encounter us, and these evasive strategies are only reinforced by vaccination,” Caldera said.
… but the antibodies are weak
Anti-staph vaccines generate strong immune responses to vaccination and infection but those responses are directed toward bacterial features that S. aureus uses to fool its host into accepting peaceful coexistence.
This is a case of vaccine-induced immune system priming or “original antigenic sin” — the process by which a vaccine locks in the response vaccinated people make when confronted with the pathogen.
This failure eventually led vaccine researchers down another dark alley, toward vaccines targeting the S. aureus toxin instead of the bacterium. So-called “toxoid” strategies are the basis of tetanus, diphtheria and DTP vaccines.
But “remarkably, both active [vaccine-based] and passive [antibody-based] platforms of immunization against SA toxins were also met with failures,” said senior author George Liu M.D., Ph.D., professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
For example, a 2021 AstraZeneca-funded study of suvratoxumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting the S. aureus toxin, found that progression to pneumonia in staph-infected patients was no lower in treated than in untreated subjects.
Most pathogens, especially bacteria, are complex organisms carrying several different antigens. Vaccine developers usually target the most prominent antigen to trigger the strongest, most relevant immune response.
On that basis, Liu considered a third possible S. aureus vaccine strategy: targeting minor cell wall antigens on S. aureus instead of its toxins or the main antigen.
This approach would tend to induce weaker immune responses requiring high vaccine or adjuvant doses, but it fell short as well.
Antibiotic resistance leads to ‘super-bugs’
Nostrils are the main staph reservoir in humans and a significant source of infection, but the bug also colonizes the skin, perineum, vagina, throat and gastrointestinal tract.
Staph infections occur when the bacteria enter the bloodstream, joints, heart or skin, usually when the person’s immune system is weakened. Standard antibiotics usually cure staph infections.
However, over the past 70 years, bacteria that colonize humans have found ways to counter the use or overuse of antibiotics and antimicrobials designed to kill them. Some bacteria have developed resistance to these agents, making antibiotics less effective or completely ineffective.
One type of antibiotic-resistant S. aureus, “methicillin-resistant” S. aureus or “MRSA,” is of particular concern.
The most common MRSA outcome outside of hospitals is a skin infection. But serious cases can lead to pneumonia or other serious organ infections. Untreated MRSA infections can cause sepsis — an extreme, system-wide response to an infection.
Hospitalized patients are more susceptible to severe, life-threatening outcomes since they are exposed to fellow patients’ staph strains as well as the ones they carry. Surgical site infections are a significant source of serious, systemic staph infections.
The medical and social costs, direct and indirect, of antibiotic resistance in the U.S. may be as high as $55 billion per year. More than 2.8 million Americans per year have an antibiotic-resistant infection and 35,000 die. S. aureus caused nearly 120,000 bloodstream infections — the most serious kind — and 20,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2017.
Could S. aureus be beneficial?
The negative effects of S. aureus on human health are fairly well understood.
We know staph bacteria colonize us, are tolerated by the immune system and cause disease when they enter the bloodstream or invade the skin. We also know that S. aureus antibody responses do not clear the bacterium or eliminate either colonization or infection.
But the role of S. aureus as part of a normal, healthy microbiome has not been extensively investigated.
A 2022 study on components of the skin microbiome suggested that at least one Staphylococcus species, S. hominis — the bug mostly responsible for body odor — may prevent skin infections.
Another species that mainly colonizes skin, S. epidermis, is both anti-inflammatory and antibacterial.
A 2015 study found that chronic S. aureus infection prevented the development of autoimmune encephalomyelitis in a rat model of multiple sclerosis. Encephalomyelitis is inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. Although infection itself caused some types of inflammatory markers to rise it reduced the severity of nerve cell and central nervous system inflammation.
“SA [S. aureus] has been with humans a long time, so it’s learned how to be part-time symbiont, part-time deadly pathogen,” Liu said. “If we’re going to develop effective vaccines against SA, we need to understand and overcome the strategies it uses to maintain this lifestyle.”
Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
February 9, 2024 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
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How Rothschild Banking Clan Uses Its Vast Wealth to Influence World Events and Control Governments

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 15.09.2024
How powerful is the Rothschild banking family? How did they amass their fortune? Just how rich are they? Do they secretly control the world? Sputnik explores. … continue
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