Russia takes national defense seriously. It suffered from several invasions by western nations over past centuries. The worst was the German invasion during World War II that nearly destroyed Russia. Every Russian today has relatives who were killed or maimed during that bloody war that cost the lives of 27 million people in the Soviet Union.
This series has detailed American threats to Russian security since the peaceful end of the Cold war. The continual expansion of NATO despite promises not to do so, all the way to Russia’s borders. The deployment of American, British, and even German combat units to Russia’s borders. The withdrawal by the United States from arms control treaties, the building of American missile bases in Poland and Romania, and the deployment of new mobile missile launchers to Europe, which may have nuclear warheads.
There were other provocations mostly ignored by western media. The freshwater flow to Crimea was cut off. The United States funded several bioweapons research labs in Ukraine. The United States built a NATO operations center in Ukraine on the Black Sea and spent millions of dollars upgrading that naval base. The overwhelming election of Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 who promised peace and an end to fighting with Russian rebels. He signed a peace agreement called the “Steinmeier Formula” in Paris, but implementation was quietly blocked by the United States.
“Judicial Watch: Defense Department Records Reveal U.S. Funding of Anthrax Laboratory Activities in Ukraine”; November 10, 2022; https://www.judicialwatch.org/dod-rec…
“Tucker Carlson Interviews Robert F Kennedy Jr”; Twitter; August 14, 2023; https://twitter.com/i/status/16912284… ; bio-weapons comments start at the 36m40s mark.
In May 2023, a powerful blast rocked the city of Khmelnitsky located in Ukraine about 200km away from the border with Poland when a Russian strike wiped out a Ukrainian ammunition depot where British-supplied depleted uranium was stored.
Dr. Christopher Busby, a physical chemist and scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, has stepped forward to address the naysayers who tried to discredit his warnings about the potentially dangerous consequences of the depleted uranium munitions depot explosion.
On May 19th I wrote an article for Sputnik about the Khmelnitsky explosion. I had examined gamma radiation data from detectors to the North West of the attack site, which showed increases in radiation from points in Poland near the Ukraine border, and through Germany. I concluded that the belief that a warehouse containing Uranium weapons supplied by the UK had been hit and that the Uranium had exploded in a huge fireball, and that the particles produced by the explosion had drifted with the wind at the time across Europe.
The article produced considerable argument on the internet, with a large number of self-described fact-checkers and “experts” weighing it to say that my conclusions were nonsense. This is how the internet is controlled these days. It was written off as a “Russian Fake” (e.g. fakenews.pl)
The fact is, that although Uranium is a weak gamma emitter, through its daughter Thorium-234, there are other situations where the gamma signal will increase at detectors, principally the natural radioactive gas, radon, which can increase during rainfall and low pressure systems. A Polish lab claimed that the increased signal was from Radon, reporting the presence of the Radon daughter Bismuth 214, as if to write off the claim of a Uranium cloud passing across Poland. But, I pointed out that there were no low pressure systems at the time that would explain the sudden increase in gamma. This is where the matter was left.
Uranium in air is not measured in Europe as far as I know, and the only data that is obtainable is the Uranium in air data from the High Volume Air Samplers (HVAS) at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston in Berkshire. These were set up in the early 1990s following a public enquiry into a child leukemia cluster near the site. The law requires AWE to measure Uranium (and Plutonium and Tritium) at regular intervals at positions near the factory but also far from the weapons factory. I have used these data before to identify Depleted Uranium from the Iraq wars that drifted to England.
So, to follow up the Khmelnitsky argument, I have just obtained Uranium data from the AWE using a Freedom of Information request. They sent me the data in an Excel File, and I used the graphical function if Excel to plot the data they sent. Fig 1 plots the filter levels for three of the offsite locations. The results show that I was right. In the May15th -June 15th Offsite Filters operating at the time, there is a very clear signal for the month following the explosion. I have also obtained data for the onsite locations, and these also all show the same footprint increase.
It may interest those who believe that the media is controlled, that the same thing happens with the scientific peer-review literature. I sent my paper on the increases in Uranium in air from the Ukraine war to two journals which have published my papers before, papers about the effects of Uranium. The first, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health totally refused to consider it. I then sent it to Conflict and Health, which sent it to a reviewer, but refused to publish it. This is astonishing, given that I supplied the raw data to both journals. I put the paper up on a preprints site where it received attention.
The graph in Fig 1 shows that the Uranium in air in South East England went up by about 600ng/cubic metre from particles released by the Khmelnitsky explosion. What does this mean? The mean size of a Uranium particle is below 1 micron. An individual inhales about 24 cubic metre a day. So, if the particles were there for a month, or 30 days we can average the lung intake as 0.432mg. Doesn’t sound much, does it? But it converts into 200 million particles per person in the area, and of course in the track of the plume in the UK. Not good, given the effects we found in Fallujah.
My study of Fallujah, published in 2010, showed that there was a huge increase in cancer and congenital malformation in babies, and general horrifying signal of genetic damage in the population after the use of Uranium weapons there in the second 2003 Iraq war. We later identified excess Uranium in the mothers of the birth defect children using hair samples and mass spectrometry, tracking the increases back to the 2003 exposures by cutting the long hair samples into sections, a kind of historic ice core way of interrogating the past.
Clearly from our studies in Iraq, the genetic and cancer health effects of Uranium particles are significant. Indeed, they are arguably the main cause of the cancer in the Hiroshima victims who were exposed to Uranium particles in the “black rain”.
Levels in Poland, Germany, and everywhere else on its journey to England, will have been much higher. But there are no measurements available.
Fig 1. 4-weekly air filter results for Uranium, offsite samplers at Aldermaston, Tadley, and Reading. Khmelnitsky Ukraine explosion was on 14thMay 2023 (1805-1506) s Normal background is 200.
The United Nations human rights chief has warned that Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in the war-torn Gaza Strip “amounts to a war crime,” as the Tel Aviv regime continues its deadly bombing campaign in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
After a Wednesday visit to the Rafah crossing, the sole crossing point between Egypt and Gaza, Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Israeli bombardments have killed, maimed and injured in particular women and children in Gaza.
“The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians,” he said, amid his five-day visit to the region.
The war started after the territory’s resistance movements waged a surprise attack on October 7 against the occupying entity, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, in response to its decades-long crimes against Palestinians.
“The latest death toll from the Gaza Ministry of Health is in excess of 10,500 people, including over 4,300 children and 2,800 women. All of this has an unbearable toll on civilians,” Turk further said, warning, “We have fallen off a precipice. This cannot continue.”
For weeks, Israel has been violently pounding almost all areas and facilities of the blockaded territory, including hospitals, schools and residential buildings, rejecting all calls for a ceasefire in the region.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the UN human rights chief demanded respect for international human rights laws and international humanitarian laws, noting that “parties to the conflict have the obligation to take constant care to spare the civilian population and civilian objects.”
“Attacks against medical facilities, medical personnel and the wounded and sick are prohibited,” Turk stressed, warning that there is an “urgent humanitarian imperative to reach the population increasingly isolated” in Gaza.
According to officials in the Gaza Strip, the occupying regime’s aggression has so far destroyed 70 percent of the coastal sliver’s electricity grid.
Israel’s airstrikes, missile attacks and shelling not only destroy hospitals, homes, and houses of worship, but also cut off fuel, electricity and water supplies.
“Blackouts have serious consequences on rescue workers struggling to find and rescue the victims of strikes, families trying to find out the status of their loved ones and to access emergency medical care, and for the situation on the ground to be monitored and documented,” Turk stressed.
The Rafah crossing, according to Turk, is a “lifeline” for 2.3 million inhabitants of the tightly-blockaded Gaza Strip. Although a trickle of aid trucks has been allowed in recently, they are just a fraction of the aid that used to be allowed.
“The lifeline has been unjustly, outrageously thin. In Rafah, I have witnessed the gates to a living nightmare,” the UN human rights chief said.
In this nightmare, “people have been suffocating, under persistent bombardment, mourning their families, struggling for water, for food, for electricity and fuel. My colleagues are among those trapped, and among those who have lost family members, suffering sleepless nights filled with agony, anguish and despair,” Turk added.
He also strongly called for a ceasefire to end the Israeli aggression.
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the war was turning the coastal sliver into “a graveyard for children.”
The UN chief said clear violations of international humanitarian law were being committed during the war, adding that the Israeli regime was simultaneously targeting “civilians, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, churches, and UN facilities – including shelters. No one is safe.”
Repeatedly targeting civilians and first responders in Donetsk with US-made HIMARS missiles was a deliberate crime, for which both the Ukrainian government and its Western sponsors will be held accountable, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council on Wednesday.
“Yesterday’s attacks killed 6 and injured 55 people, including three children,” Nebenzia said at the emergency session of the UN body, calling it “yet another flagrant violation by the Kiev regime of the norms of international humanitarian law and further evidence of its purposeful actions to destroy the civilian population of Donbas.”
The Russian diplomat laid out evidence that the Ukrainian strike amounted to a premeditated terrorist attack. The first strike hit the social services building in Donetsk at 4:25pm local time. The second followed 15 minutes later, after first responders showed up, while the third came at 6:27pm, targeting journalists that came to report from the scene, the diplomat said.
A doctor, a paramedic and a police officer were among the killed, while 23 first responders were among the wounded.
“No doubt this is a deliberate tactic,” Nebenzia told the Security Council. As further proof, he brought up the October 31 attack of another district of Donetsk, when Ukrainian artillery fired US-made HIMARS missiles to start a fire and then targeted first responders with US-supplied cluster munitions, killing two and injuring 15 people. The third strike then targeted journalists but did not cause any casualties.
“These are conscious and cynical crimes that have no statute of limitation,” the Russian diplomat said, adding that Moscow will hold responsible not just the “Kiev regime” but also “Western countries who flood Ukraine with weapons and – as we are well aware – also approve targets of the strikes.”
Nebenzia described these attacks as “strikes of despair” that make no sense from the military standpoint but represent frustration with battlefield failures and hatred of the former fellow citizens, which the Kiev government considers subhuman.
There have been more than 25,000 artillery attacks on the Donetsk People’s Republic since February 2022, with over 145,000 projectiles striking Donetsk city alone, the Russian diplomat told the UN Security Council. In that period, Ukrainian bombardment has killed 4,755 civilians – including 140 children – and wounded over 5,300 people.
That is not counting more than 20,000 civilian casualties of Ukraine’s crackdown on the Donbass since 2014, after the local population “did not accept the unconstitutional Maidan coup d’état in Kiev and stood up to defend their rights and freedoms,” Nebenzia noted.
Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu’s proposal that Israel’s Gazan problem can best be solved by nuking the inhabitants and shipping the survivors off to Ireland warrants serious discussion.
As Israeli Ministry of Defense, Yoav Galant, has clearly stated that the over-arching aim is to rid Gaza of “Hamas” and that all else is secondary detail, dropping the big one might very well be in order. When we consider that Israel, together with their Yankee buddies, are, with no sense of Holocaust-related irony, considering gassing the tunnels to cleanse them of “Hamas”, Israel’s nuclear arsenal may as well be taken out of storage, dusted down and put to good use.
As for collateral damage and bad publicity, forget about all that. You only have to spend three minutes on social media looking at all the young Palestinian toddlers, both living and dead, to see that Israel does not give a tinker’s curse for any of that. Shooting or gassing a million human Bambis? Forget about it.
As an Irish citizen, I am honoured that Herr Eliyahu has chosen us as their dumping ground rather than, say, their own Ukrainian spawning ground that the self-serving policies of Israeli ally Clown Prince Zelensky has bled dry of people. With over half of Ukraine’s population either dead or fled abroad, wouldn’t the Ukrainian rump Reich make a much better internment camp for Israel’s millions of young captives? And it is not like the Ukrainians are amateurs at dishing out tough love, something they were doing even in World War Two when Ireland’s Zionists were building golf courses for themselves while the Poles bled.
All that to one side, Ireland would, subject to some tweaks in the education department, make an excellent dumping ground. As things currently stand, little Irish children first begin being indoctrinated with the fables of Anne Frank before being moved on to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, written by some Dublin-born Jew or other. How can Irish teachers still find the Irish complicit in Auschwitz and Belsen whilst retaining their dogged pride in Israel’s Herzog’s murder gang if the place is over run with Palestinians, who might argue that they too have been gassed, shot at and slaughtered in droves and that this perennial hierarchy of victims might not quite be kosher?
Then there is the issue of citizenship and, more importantly, passports. Should the Palestinians all be given Irish passports the same way everyone else is? Although Ursula von der Leyen, Victoria Nuland and Ireland’s other leaders will eventually decide on that, there are some other issues that have to be considered. Portugal, for example, was forced under a (Jewish) Law of Return rule to grant citizenship to any Jew from anywhere on God’s earth who could convincingly pretend that their ancestors were expelled from Portugal during Inquisition times almost five centuries ago. How would opening the Irish floodgates to hordes of Palestinians impinge on all those Israelis, who collect second passports the way most kids collect postage stamps?
And, though I hate to even think it, Jews are not the only ones who have suffered in the far off past. Here, at the British Holocaust Memorial Trust, mention is also made of Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur and, as Ireland is over run with both Roma gypsies and Poles, who both also suffered Bandera’s wrath, should they also get mentioned in dispatches given, for example, that Germany never paid Poland one single, solitary dime, even though it pumped billions into Israel to smooth the path for Brooklyn, Birmingham, Bogotá and Belfast Jews, who never came within an ass’s roar of Bandera’s jackbooted thugs?
Deporting Palestinians, like the Boers before them, to Irish or other reservations might not be such a good idea not least because it smacks of Cromwell’s To Hell or to Connaught final solution to his Irish problem. Though Cromwell, as every good Jew should know, was a very good friend to England’s upwardly mobile Jews, his name remains anathema to me and every Irish person who thinks like me. Cromwell’s Irish droppings still have their safe rooms in their churches and, given the extent of their crimes and those of the self-styled Church of Ireland against indigenous aboriginals like me, they never quite know if and when the worm might turn and payback might return once more, as it did in the Great Rebellion of 1798.
The problem, then, in shipping the Palestinians off to Ireland or any other Yankee holding pen is that, even in lethargic Ireland, it might raise a hornet’s nest of protest. This would be the case even if these vulnerable armies of unaccompanied children were to be dumped in Jeffrey Epstein’s Orgy Island for Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Alan Dershowitz to have fun and games with. And the same would apply if they were plonked in England and/or France, the two countries that bequeathed the lands, goods and chattels of the indigenous Palestinians to the Brooklyn, Birmingham, Bogotá and Belfast Jews.
Although there is always the Sinai Desert and the rest of the Arab world, not only do they already have their own considerable Palestinian diasporas but their policy has been that Palestinians belong in Palestine, not on a cattle train to Belsen, Auschwitz or Algeria. And they have a point, at least in terms of natural justice.
Though a blind man can see that the Arabs have a moral point, I cannot see that Israel or any similar country that wallows in its own war crimes has any moral point at all. Perhaps the fault is mine as I am neither Jewish nor Zionist and so do not have a sense of my own inviolate superiority. What I do have is a sense of morality, a sense of black and white, right and wrong. And Israel’s current war crimes, like all of those they have previously committed, are not only wrong, but criminally and inexcusably wrong as well.
If anybody should vacate those lands, it is the Israelis like Eliyahu, Netanyahu and Galant, whose crimes have abrogated any moral right they might have had to any piece of it whatsoever. As to where they should go, as Rhett Butler so famously said, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn where these moral pariahs go or what becomes of them. But then, it is not up to me but up to the Russian government and China’s can can dancers to negotiate for and with the Palestinians, who now hold all the relevant cards, given the indefensible claptrap of these Israelis, who have revealed to the world their own bloodied and morally contagious hands.
As US President Joe Biden argued for spending another $100 billion on Ukraine, Israel and the island of Taiwan in a televised speech last week, he made a curious claim that American leadership is what holds the world together.
This statement is obviously wrong. At best, American leadership is limited to what is known as the West, which basically amounts to NATO, Australia, Japan and South Korea, as well as a small number of countries in Latin America and Africa. The West’s military might was humiliated in Afghanistan two years ago, and on the fields of Ukraine since. Its economic prestige has been shaken as well. As for culture… the less said, the better.
Biden was articulating what the Western establishment desperately wants to cling to: the delusion of a Pax Americana that supposedly arose at the end of the Cold War, some 35 years ago. Everyone was supposed to embrace liberal democracy and usher in the end of history in which the rules-based world order would reign forever.
Take it from someone who was there at its founding: Pax Americana never really existed.
The name itself is a reference to Pax Romana, the order imposed by the Roman Empire – with fire and sword – over much of Europe, North Africa and the Levant 2,000 years ago. The Romans were harsh; Tacitus famously described it in the famous epigram, stating that they created a desert and called it peace. Yet a peace it was, with lands under Roman rule enjoying technology and a level of civilization that would not be seen again for hundreds of years after the empire’s demise.
Has the American empire, such as it is, created anything of the kind? Hardly. Take the current situation in West Asia, where Washington is not only unable to stop the carnage between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but unwilling to even try. The historic Abraham Accords of the previous presidency may as well not exist at all.
Africa is in turmoil, with country after country in the Sahel rejecting the West and its never-ending anti-terrorism operations that somehow never get rid of terrorists. Latin America also seems to have spurned Washington. Venezuela has defeated the US plot to install an interim president. When El Salvador demonstrated that restoring law and order is not just possible but practical, the US NGOs actually protested about the human rights of organized criminals.
The historic nuclear deal with Iran that was torn up within a couple of years showed that the US does not keep their side of the bargain. The scramble to flee Afghanistan, as the US-backed regime crumbled before the Taliban, even before American boots were off the ground, ended up seared into the eyes of the world back in August 2021.
Russia had offered the West a partnership, but was rejected. To ensure that countries in the post-Soviet space did not get out of line, the West created “color revolutions,” once described as a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing. In reality, this was a template for winning other people’s elections.
A euphoric British reporter wrote those words about the 2004 coup in Ukraine. A decade later, the US-backed another – leading to the separation of Crimea, the rebellion in Donbass and the war that Moscow finally openly joined in 2022, when all other choices had been exhausted.
A “color revolution” was carried out in 2000, in Serbia, after NATO failed to achieve regime change with the 1999 air war. NATO occupied Kosovo and declared the Serbian province an “independent state” in 2008. Contrary to Western pronouncements, that did not resolve the conflict, nor did it make the people there more prosperous.
Then in 2003, the US led the illegal invasion of Iraq. Weakened by a decade of war, the US-backed Iraqi government then almost collapsed to ISIS, which arose on the winds of the Arab Spring – a chain of “color revolutions” in North Africa and West Asia that promised prosperity and peace, but brought only war and suffering. Just ask the Libyans and the Syrians.
The fraud of Pax Americana began in the 1990s, in the ruins of Yugoslavia – my country of birth. The US had backed the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina to reject a political deal with the Serbs and Croats, plunging that former republic into civil war. Then they repeatedly sabotaged the UN and EU attempts to broker a peace, so that NATO could make a grand entrance in 1995 and save the day like the cavalry, just like in an old Western movie.
As it turned out, the American Empire was not indispensable. It could not create peace or prosperity around the world, only chaos and strife. These days, others have taken up the job of making people’s lives better, for example the BRICS+ group, who are not so much opposed to the West as determined to leave it behind in the blood-soaked mud of its own imperial failure.
The author is a Serbian-American journalist. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn
While some American mainstream commentators express concern about the large death toll among children in Gaza, we mustn’t forget that when it is the U.S. government — and, specifically, the U.S. national-security branch of the government — that is killing large numbers of children, most U.S. mainstream commentators go into silent mode or, even worse, play supportive roles in such killings.
Who can forget the 1990s, when U.S. officials were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, with nary a concern expressed by U.S. mainstream commentators? Oh, sure, it’s true that those killings were being inflicted by economic sanctions, rather than bombs, but so what? The Iraqi children were just as dead. What difference does it make whether a child is killed by sanctions instead of bombs?
The official mindset toward the mass numbers of Iraqi children being killed by the U.S. government was perfectly reflected in the infamous response that Madeleine Albright gave in 1996 to Leslie Stahl of Sixty Minutes. Stahl pointed out that half-a-million Iraqi children had been killed by U.S. and UN sanctions, more than the number killed at Hiroshima as a result of the U.S. government’s targeting of the civilian population, including children, of that city with a nuclear bomb. Stahl asked Albright, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
Albright was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. As such, she was the official spokesperson for the U.S. government to the world. She was serving in the Clinton administration. No one within the government criticized her statement and there was little, if any, condemnation among U.S. mainstream commentators. That’s because her callous statement undoubtedly reflected the mindset of both her cohorts in the U.S. government and the mindset of the government’s loyal supporters in the mainstream press. That mindset was a classic example of Hannah Arendt’s term “the banality of evil.”
What was the “it” to which Albright was referring? The “it” was regime change, a U.S. foreign-policy concept that has been at the center of the U.S. national-security state ever since this governmental structure was brought into existence after the Second World War.
U.S. officials decided that they wanted to get rid of Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, and replace him with another U.S. stooge. But Saddam refused to budge. Thus, the purpose of the sanctions was threefold: (1) to induce Saddam to resign, after which the deadly sanctions would be lifted; (2) induce the Iraqi people to rise up in a violent revolution against Saddam’s government, which would produce more massive deaths; or (3) incite a coup in which Iraq’s national-security establishment assassinated or otherwise removed Saddam from power and replaced him with a U.S.-approved puppet.
According to a review at National Catholic Reporter of Joy Gordon’s excellent 2012 book Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, “UNICEF documented the deaths of 500,000 children under 5 from dysentery and malnutrition (Gordon says the latest figure is 880,000). All three U.S. administrations — Bush, Clinton, Bush — whenever challenged on its responsibility for an epidemic or a famine, simply blamed Hussein.”
How could they blame Saddam Hussein? They said that all he had to do to stop the killings of the Iraqi children was resign. U.S. officials made it clear that once he resigned, they would lift their deadly sanctions and, therefore, no more Iraqi children would have to die. Therefore, in their twisted and perverted logic, they said it was Saddam, not U.S. officials who were imposing and enforcing the sanctions, who was actually responsible for the deaths caused by the sanctions.
The U.N. humanitarian reports on the blockade’s effects on Iraqi children tell a grisly tale. In December 1995, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported 567,000 Iraqi children had died as a direct consequence of economic sanctions. In March 1996, a World Health Organization study released found the blockade had caused a six-fold increase in the mortality rate of Iraqi children under age five. UNICEF reported in October 1996 that 4,500 Iraqi children under five were dying every month as a result of sanctions-induced starvation and disease.
Two high UN officials, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck resigned their posts because they did not want to be part of what they labeled as genocide. In a 2021 interview, Halliday stated:
This completely undermined the water treatment and distribution system of Iraq, which depended on electricity to drive it, and drove people to use contaminated water from the Tigris and the Euphrates. That was the beginning of the death-knell for young children, because mothers were not breast-feeding, they were feeding their children with child formula, but mixing it with foul water from the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
In addition, these conflicts introduced a new weapon called depleted uranium, which was used by the U.S. forces driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. That was used again in southern Iraq in the Basra area, and led to a massive accumulation of nuclear debris which led to leukemia in children, which took three, four, or five years to become evident.
When I got to Iraq in 1998, the hospitals in Baghdad, and also of course in Basra and other cities, were full of children suffering from leukemia. Those children, we reckon perhaps 200,000 children, died of leukemia. At the same time, Washington and London withheld some of the medicines and treatment components that leukemia requires, again, it seemed, in a genocidal manner, denying Iraqi children the right to remain alive.
It’s worth mentioning that prior to the U.S. killing of Iraqi children as a way to get regime change in Iraq, Saddam Hussein had been a partner and ally of the U.S. national-security state during the 1980s. That was when U.S. officials were helping Iraqi forces to kill Iranian citizens in Iraq’s war of aggression against that country. See my articles “Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction, Part 2.”
Of course, Iran is pertinent to this discussion because while U.S. officials no longer target the people of Iraq with deadly sanctions, they continue to target people in other nations, including children, with death by sanctions. Iran, along with Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, China, and other targets of regime change, come to mind, with nary a concern expressed by most U.S. mainstream commentators.
In addition to promoting genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the Zionist regime is resorting to nuclear blackmail against the Palestinians. In a controversial recent statement, an Israeli top official admitted that using atomic bombs in the Gaza Strip is a “possibility” for Tel Aviv. These words shocked the world and showed the level of unpredictability and irrationality in the Israeli government’s actions.
The statement was made by the Israeli Minister of Heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, during an interview with local Israeli media. Eliyahu stated that a nuclear attack against the Gaza Strip “is one of the possibilities” that Israel could use in its alleged “war on Hamas.” According to the minister, “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza”, which is why all Palestinian citizens in the region should be punished by the IDF.
Eliyahu, in addition to admitting the nuclear possibility, stated that no humanitarian aid should be given to civilians in Gaza. He compared Gaza’s inhabitants to the German Nazis who killed Jews in WWII and said that the Jewish people “wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid.”
The minister’s controversial words led the government to react sharply. Eliyahu was suspended from his post by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In this same sense, his office made a post on social media “denying” his speech, “clarifying” that “Eliyahu’s statements are not based in reality” and adding that Israel’s IDF is “operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents” – which is clearly untrue, as can be seen in the massacre of civilians in Gaza.
Also, Israel’s defense chief, Yoav Gallant, condemned Eliyahu and called his nuclear threat “baseless and irresponsible words.” Expectedly, Netanyahu’s opposition also spoke out on the case, with Yair Lapid calling Eliyahu an “extremist” and hardening his criticism of Netanyahu’s administration team, making the matter a dispute between the different wings of Israeli Zionism.
Internationally, there was also strong pressure as a result of the statement. Arab countries reacted by severely condemning the ministers’ irresponsible statements. For example, UAE spokespersons said in an official report: “These statements constitute a violation of international law, as well as incitement to commit grave violations of International Humanitarian Law, such as war crimes, and raise grave concerns of an intent to commit genocide”.
The Jordanian government did something similar, releasing a statement asserting that Eliyahu’s words are a “call for genocide and a hate crime that cannot be ignored”. In the same sense, Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit declared: “Israel possesses nuclear weapons, which is an open secret (…) [The minister’s comments] confirm the truth of the racist view Israelis hold against Palestinians (…) This is the true face of the occupation government.”
Although Eliyahu has already been “punished” for his remarks, it is impossible for there to be “normality” after such declarations. There is an atmosphere of distrust regarding Israeli actions, with a real fear that Eliyahu is not the only official in Tel Aviv thinking about this type of “possibility” for Gaza. With so many war crimes committed by Israel in recent weeks and the deliberate killing of innocent civilians in a “collective punishment” plan against Gaza, it is very likely that Eliyahu’s mentality is not uncommon among Zionist decision-makers.
It is possible that the real intention behind Eliyahu’s suspension is an attempt to silence him – not for having told a “lie”, but for having said something that should not be said. Instead of simply showing that he does not think like his minister, Netanyahu could simply be responding to the pressure of criticism by suspending him. In other words, there are no real guarantees that the Israelis will not consider the “nuclear possibility” against Gaza.
From a rational and strategic point of view, it makes no sense to talk about nuclear weapons in a regional conflict occurring within such a short territorial limit. Radioactive contamination would not be restricted to the Strip but would also reach the territory occupied by Israel. However, unfortunately, there does not seem to be much rationality in the Zionist regime’s decisions.
The very initiative to launch a brutal offensive that is killing thousands of civilians seems absolutely irrational. Israel is becoming an international pariah and is being seen as a genocidal regime by a large number of countries, in addition to more and more states cutting their relations with Tel Aviv. But none of this seems enough for Netanyahu and his advisers to change their minds regarding the supposed “need” to “invade Gaza to destroy Hamas.”
Clearly, revanchism, anti-Palestinian racism and unlimited expansionism are the true guidelines of Zionist foreign policy. The decision-making process is not based on strategic calculations, which makes the situation very unpredictable and worrying. So, in practice, regardless of whether Israel is already considering using nuclear weapons or not, it is very possible that there will soon be this “demand” on the part of the most radical Zionist militants.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
In a speech in Hebrew on October 28, Netanyahu justified the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza with a biblical reference to Amalek.
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember. And we fight. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza and in all other regions in Israel, are joining the chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3,000 years ago, from Joshua ben Nun, until the heroes of 1948, the Six-Day War, the October 73 War, and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy, and to guarantee our existence in this country.
In Netanyahu’s Holy Bible, God gives his chosen people Palestine, and the same God commands them to exterminate the Amalekites, an Arab people that stands in their way. Yahweh asks Moses to not only exterminate the Amalekites, but to “blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19).
It was left to Saul to finish them up: “kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” Yahweh instructs him (1Samuel 15:8). Because Saul spared the Amalekite king Agag, Yahweh withdrew the kingship from him and drove him mad: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has broken his allegiance to me and not carried out my orders” (15:11). The holy prophet Samuel, who had a direct line of communication with Yahweh, had to butcher Agag himself (“hewed Agag in pieces,” in the Revised Standard Version). Yahweh then gave the kingship to David, who proved a more obedient exterminator, for example when he put the people of Rabba “under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2 Samuel 12:31).
Despite their complete genocide in the Bible, the Amalekites remain the eternal nightmare of Israel. Amalek came to be associated, like his grandfather Esau, with Rome and Christianity, but also with Iran, because the villain of the Book of Esther, Haman, is referred to as an Agagite, that is, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag. That is why the hanging of Haman with his ten sons and the massacre of 75,000 Persians are often conflated in Jewish tradition with the extermination of the Amalekites and the brutal execution of their king. The Torah reading on the morning of Purim is taken from the account of the battle against the Amalekites, which ends with the conclusion that “Yahweh will be at war with Amalek generation after generation” (Exodus 17:16).[1]
In a 2009 New York Times piece called “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” Jeffrey Goldberg reports that, when he asked one of Netanyahu’s adviser’s “to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran,” the answer he received was: “Think Amalek.”[2] Now Netanyahu is calling on Israelis to remember Amalek while their army shells Gaza, men, women, children, infants and livestock included.
Netanyahu has not gone insane, as I explained earlier. He is simply possessed by the Bible, because Israel and the Bible are one. Netanyahu’s insanity is rooted in the Bible. His obsession with Amalek is a collective one, shared by Zionist religious Jews around the world. Let us, for example, listen to this lecture by Rabbi Eliyahu Kin, delivered in 2009, on the question: “Why must Jews destroy Amalek?” Let me summarize it for you. The Amalekites deserved their fate because they opposed the will of God. The will of God is good, and opposing the will of God is evil. So exterminating Amalek is good, while saving just one Amalekite, as Saul did, is evil. In fact, since God is good, exterminating Amalek is the expression of his goodness. And since “the best way to love what Hashem (God) loves is to hate what Hashem hates,” hating Amalek is loving God. The reason why the Amalekites hate the Jews is not because the Jews want to exterminate them. “What bothers Amalek is that the Jew believes in mussar, morality, ethics, being good, being nice.” The Amalekites are also evil because they oppose the Torah — in which God orders them to be exterminated. Ultimately, Rabbi Kin summarizes, “we are cruel to Amalek because we need to be. Because that is exactly what they would do to us if they had the chance.” Why? Because Amalek “is a concentration of hatred.” And Jews must hate hatred — except the hatred of God for Amalek, which they must love as an expression of God’s love. How do you deal with such collective madness?
More to the point: what’s wrong with Netanyahu quoting the Bible? It is the Holy Bible, isn’t it? The Word of God! We, Christianized peoples, have been taught too that in ancient times God chose the Jews, gave them Palestine, and commanded them to exterminate the Amalekites (and the Midianites, and many other peoples, seven nations in all). What can Christians possibly object to the rabbi? That God was hot-blooded in those days, but has now cooled down? That the Amalekites are no longer around, or now have the right to oppose the biblical project? (Because, you know, we are Israel now). Enough with all this hand-wringing! After all, God, the creator of the universe, does order, in our Christian Bible, to exterminate Amalek, men, women, children and babies (and cattle, for Yahweh makes no difference). It is undeniable, indisputable, irrefutable.
Let us face it: the God of the Old Testament is a bloodthirsty devil. Some people have known that for a long time, and tried to warn us. Bakunin, for example, who saw the Jewishness in Marxism, stated in God and the Statethat of all the gods adored by men, Yahweh “was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.” To quote from John Kaminski, “Yahweh gave the Jews the right to steal the lands of others (Deuteronomy 6:10-13, 6:18-19, 7:1-2). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to commit genocide, to totally annihilate the peoples whose lands they had the God-given right to take as their own (Deuteronomy 7:16). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to ‘destroy them (other peoples) with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed’ (Deuteronomy 7:23). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to murder and plunder other races of their property (Exodus 3:20-22). Yahweh has made the Israelites a ‘holy’ people, a master race among other races (Deuteronomy 7:6).”
Bakunin was among those insightful intellectuals who, in the nineteenth century, woke up to the realization that Israel had been the creation of the most evil deity from the beginning. But most people didn’t hear them, because Israel was, for Christians, an abstraction, a story, a holy legend from mythological times. But today, Israel is real, and its hellish character is plainly manifested for everyone to see. Never before has the realization of Israel’s evil soul been so accessible. We are living in a time of revelation, and we’d better not miss it.
“The Palestinians have unwittingly sacrificed themselves for the purposes of enlightening the entire planetary civilization to the profound evil and satanic nature of the Zionist State of Israel,” wrote the Armchair Prophet.[3] A profound statement. Gaza is Christ, and Israel is Israel.[4] But Gaza is also Amalek. Amalek was Christ from the beginning, but we didn’t see it, because we were told that Christ was Yahweh’s son, and one with him. Now we can begin to see our tragic mistake. This is our wake up call. Let us face the truth about Yahweh and the chosen people he created in his image (or the other way around).
Why have Christians never noticed that, when he promised Israel domination over the nations on the condition of exclusive worship, Yahweh was the very same devil that later appeared to Jesus and “showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor [and] said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage’” (Matthew 4:8-10). After all, Satan is just an “angel of Yahweh” in the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 22 and 32), indistinguishable from Yahweh himself in 1Chronicles 21.
Netanyahu is opening our eyes, and I am eagerly awaiting his next Bible lesson. After mentioning Amalek, he referred to the biblical Joshua as a “Jewish hero”. Please read the Book of Joshua to understand what he means, and what all Israelis who applaud him mean. Joshua committed genocide after genocide on the order of Yahweh, killing “men and women, young and old” (6:21) In the whole land, he “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40).
Three days before that speech, Netanyahu declared to his people: “We shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah.” You may recall from your Sunday school that Isaiah prophesied a time when all nations “will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles” (Isaiah 2:4). But go back to your Bible, and read the full prophecy to understand what Netanyahu means. Isaiah is about a time when “the Law will issue from Zion” and Israel “will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples” (2:3-4). Here is more from Isaiah: “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). “Yahweh’s sword is gorged with blood, it is greasy with fat,” says Isaiah on the occasion of “a great slaughter in the land of Edom [Amalek’s grandfather]” (34:6).
One man, in the second century AD, saw clearly that Jesus could not possibly be the son of Yahweh, that he was instead his archenemy. His name was Marcion. Scholars call him a Gnostic, because he taught that Yahweh was an evil demiurge, and Christ the good god coming down from Heaven to save us from Yahweh. Most texts we call Gnostics promoted this view, in one form or another. In the Apocryphon of John, also from the second century, Yahweh (or Yaltabaoth) is the first of a series of demonic entities called archons, who usurps the position of God by proclaiming: “I am a jealous god, there is none other than me.” Yaltabaoth and the other archons attempt to imprison Adam in the Garden of Eden, a false paradise. But Christ, who is the first aeon, sends Eve to Adam to release the light trapped in him, and lead him to eat the liberating fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Modern scholarship has established that Gnosticism arose within Judaism, probably in Samaria. In the highly regarded opinion of Gilles Quispel, Gnosticism was a Jewish heresy before it was a Christian heresy. During the first three centuries there were Christian Gnostics and anti-Christian Gnostics, but all are Jews.[5] As a Jewish heresy, Gnosticism can be seen as a rejection by spiritual Jews of the materialistic and sadistic nature of Yahweh. Gnostics, however, still took their Torah too seriously and accepted the premise that, before becoming the god of Israel, Yahweh had been “God”, the creator of the world. In that sense, they were still under a biblical delusion.
In the Jewish infancy of Christianity, there was a struggle between Gnostic Christians and anti-Gnostics Christians. Marcion wrote the first evangelium and established the first organized ekklesia. It was still very strong in the early third century, according to Tertullian, who also tells us that the Gnostic teacher Valentinus almost became bishop of Rome (Against Marcion). Gnostics, relying on Paul’s teaching, believed that Jesus’s new covenant freed them from Moses’s covenant, but their enemies insisted on continuity, and claimed that the New Covenant (or Testament) fulfilled rather than contradicted the Old one. The anti-Gnostics ultimately prevailed, and the Jewish Tanakh became part of the Christian canon. That might have been a wise political move as long as the purpose was to convert Jews. But as Christianity became a Gentile religion, it resulted in Gentiles worshipping Yahweh along with Christ.
Christianity has given us the powerful story of Christ, the man who wanted to free Jews from their evil, ethnocentric god, and was martyred for it. But Christianity also became Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into Gentile civilization. The spirit and the teaching of Christ came to us mixed with the spirit and the teaching of Yahweh. The spirit of Yahweh is the spirit of mass murder: “The spirit of Yahweh came upon him (Samson), and he went down to Ashkelon, where he killed thirty of their men and despoiled them” (Judges 14:19). The spirit of Yahweh is in all Israel, now, stronger than ever before, fed by a century of bloodbaths orchestrated by Zionists.
In a book written under the pen-name Seymour Light, The Marcion Thesis, Revisited,which I recommend, Nick Kollerstrom (also author of the memorable Terror on the Tube) points out that, if we had to draw Yahweh’s portrait, he would have to be a dragon: he “rides through the heavens” (Deuteronomy 33:22) with his wings (Psalm 17:8, 36:8, 91:4), while “smoke rises from his nostrils, and from his mouth devouring fire” (Psalms 18:8 and Samuel 22:9). Yahweh also shares with the evil dragons of lore his lust for gold which he hoards in his dwelling place: “Mine is the silver, mine the gold!” (Haggai 2:8). (According to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was “666 talents of gold”). Like dragons, Yahweh is also a consumer of young virgins: thirty-two of them were offered to him after the slaughter of the Midianites, presumably burnt as holocausts together with the oxen, donkeys and sheep that were also part of Yahweh’s share (Numbers 31).
In the episode of Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal, Yahweh’s devouring fire is given as the definite proof that he is God: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed” (1Kings 18:24). How spiritual! It is Yahweh’s devouring fire that is now unleashed on Gaza.
You better realize it now: Yahweh, the god of Israel, is Satan.
For more evidence, read my other Unz Review articles:
[1] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 122-125, 4.
[2] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” New York Times, May 16, 2009, on www.nytimes.com
[3] The Armchair Prophet, “What’s happening in Gaza right now is beyond biblical…beyond apocalyptic,” State of the Nation, November 2, 2023, on https://stateofthenation.co/?p=193985
[5]Gilles Quispel,Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica. Collected Essays of Gilles Quispel, edited by Johannes Van Oort, Brill, 2008. Also Attilio Mastrocinque, From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism, Mohr Siebeck, 2005.
The lethal role of ventilation in treating Covid-19 is a hot topic again after Elon Musk raised it in conversation with Joe Rogan on his recent Spotify podcast:
‘Well, 80 per cent of the people they put on ventilators died . . . what I’m hearing from Wuhan is that they made a big mistake in putting people on intubated ventilators for an extended period . . . this is actually what is damaging the lungs, not Covid. The cure is worse than the disease.’
There is a deeper, more disturbing, story about the origins of ventilation as a policy response to the ‘pandemic’ that we are not being told. Likewise, the known risks involved with ventilation (reported here in TCW), as well as the legal and ethical violations associated with such a response, are largely undebated.
Was China responsible for US ventilation policy?
In this article, lawyer and writer Michael Senger says that tens of thousands of Americans died after being placed on mechanical ventilators in 2020. He points out that early data from China had suggested that ventilators would need to be used widely in the treatment of covid-19 patients and this led to a major rush to procure ventilators worldwide. Further, he laid the blame for ventilation policy at China’s door: ‘This practice of extended intubation was apparently consistent with early guidance coming from China.’
Is this true? Can we really blame China for this policy? If not, then where did it originate?
It may come as a surprise that despite China being the first to make widespread use of ventilators, evidence suggests that the Chinese may have been following US policy.
Mass ventilation for respiratory distress is a key component in the US, and international, repertoire of what is known as ‘disaster medicine’, which covers pandemics as well as bioterrorism events.
Disaster medicine’s history goes back to at least 1991 when Heller et al use the example of the first Gulf War chemical attacks on Israel to argue that in the event of a chemical attack, hospitals will need to quickly deploy mechanical ventilation systems to deal with mass casualty events.
By 2005 the infrastructure was in place with Rubinson et al reporting on the ‘Working Group on Emergency Mass Critical Care’. On ventilators they say: ‘The Working Group believes that provision of a basic mode of mechanical ventilation (e.g., assist-controlled or pressure-controlled ventilation) for large numbers of patients should be a priority in these conditions. Mechanical ventilators in this setting need not be state of the art but should be rapidly available and portable, should provide adequate gas exchange for a range of clinical conditions that warrant mechanical ventilation, should be safe for patients (disconnect alarm capabilities), should be safe for staff (reduce staff time in patients’ rooms if disease is contagious) and should allow for efficient use of staff.’
Notice that one of the supposed benefits of ventilation is that it reduces the time staff spend in patient’s rooms if the disease is contagious (as we know during covid-19 staff were made highly anxious and fearful of catching the supposedly novel and deadly virus).
Modelling and planning for pandemics was in full swing by 2006, and that included tracking and managing ventilator stockpiles.
Risk, ethical and legal issues
Disaster medicine is primarily focused on treating patients in pandemics and bio-terror events, but it also covers ethical standards of care and legal liability of those operating ICUs.
In 2008 Branson et al at the University of Cincinnati did a literature review covering respiratory failure, disaster preparedness, pandemic influenza and mass casualty care. They cite a number of events where manual ventilation was necessary, but they reported that during hurricane Katrina, the Copenhagen polio epidemic of 1952 and the sarin gas attacks in Japan, there was a lack of available equipment.
In a crucial warning they note that: ‘There is little historical or empirical evidence upon which to base decisions regarding mass casualty respiratory failure and augmenting positive-pressure ventilation capacity.’
Ventilation was therefore being recommended with NO consideration of the risks, and with little to no real evidence to support it.
In an editorial for the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness by Rubinson and Christian, published in 2013, they report on the allocation of mechanical ventilators during medical catastrophes:
‘To best use scarce resources, managing medical catastrophes requires deliberate transition from individual-centered to population-focused critical care. In the United States, the federal government provides neither permission nor definitive guidance for such modifications in care delivery. Although the federal government has oversight for practices related to health care, relevant federal statutes . . . and civil rights protections, most health professionals’ clinical activities are overseen by states. In recognition of the states’ role, the New York State Workgroup developed a process to fairly and justly transition to population-focused care.’
A number of hugely contentious legal and ethical red flags are being raised here, including the suspension of individual rights with priority being placed on collective protection via population-focused care.
Furthermore, they add that their efforts have been influenced by the legal aftermath from hurricane Katrina:
‘In the wake of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the post-event lawsuits and prosecutions have become a significant concern for health care professionals for future disasters. A major advantage of a statewide effort rather than isolated local planning is the greater possibility for protection from criminal and civil liability for health professionals and institutions that implement the guidance.’
(For context the events they are referring to occurred at the Memorial Hospital Center in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Hospital and toxicology tests were performed on 41 bodies, and 23 tested positive for one or both of morphine and the fast-acting benzodiazepine sedative midazolam. Following an investigation into these deaths, the local district attorney decided there was sufficient evidence to charge three medical staff with four counts of second-degree murder. Charges against two were dropped in exchange for testimony.)
In 2015 New York State issued its policy on ventilator allocation, strongly suggesting that they expected a shortage of ventilators. The accompanying detailed guidelines run to 266 pages showing there was a well thought out and extremely detailed plan for the use of ventilators including a ‘solid’ ethical and legal basis for their use.
However, Michael Senger believes that, even though the public health authorities were obviously well aware of the legal and ethical risks, the information coming from China might excuse them from responsibility or blame: ‘Regardless of how much harm was done, it’s simply too difficult to prove that the procedure violated the emergency standard of care given the information coming from China at the time.’
Disaster Medicine (literally)
There can be no doubt that the well-established US disaster medicine plans were implemented in the ‘pandemic’ despite the known very high risks presented by ventilation and the acknowledged profound legal and ethical issues in enforcing a ‘collectivist’ approach in the form of ‘population-focused’ care.
There is absolutely no evidence to support the assertion that ventilation use was reactive and adopted in a panic, or mis-applied en masse. On the contrary, the expectation was that ventilation was the default, and sole, reaction to a respiratory medical emergency, be it from a natural virus or a bioweapon.
Mass ventilation formed a central plank of the US’s planned response to the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. It was built into the protocols, procedures and plans, from national to state level. Likewise, given the technological leadership exerted by the US, it would not be surprising that other countries, such as the Nato, EU and Five Eyes nations, would follow their lead.
It is therefore not too much of a stretch to assume that, to demonstrate the technological power of the party, that the CCP and China would adopt the same approach. In fact, evidence strongly suggests that the Chinese may have been following – rather than leading – US policy in this critical matter.
Co-authored with 𝗗𝗿 𝗝𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗛𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘁 and 𝗗𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗿
There are a number of reasons people do not tell the truth. They might look to those around them and think they all believe something different and they do not want to become an outlier. They might fear they are wrong and will be humiliated. They might fear it will upset someone in power who might cause deliberate harm to them as a consequence.
Let’s take each of those in turn and show how weak and dangerous those arguments are.
Fear of becoming an outlier
The idea of the wisdom of crowds is a myth. In reality, groupthink goes terribly wrong where there are no correction mechanisms in place. Each of us is part of that correction mechanism. A crowd can only hope to be wise when it is listening to all voices. Examples of where groupthink led to very dark places is not hard to come by: the Salem witch trials, frontal lobotomies, the Stanford prison experiment. It is utter cowardice to not speak the truth simply because you want to blend in.
Psychological experiments have shown that individuals often conform to the behaviour of the majority, even if that behaviour seems obviously wrong or harmful. A classic example is the ‘bystander effect,’ where individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when others are present. In experiments where a person appears to collapse in a public space, many bystanders often hesitate to help, waiting for someone else to take the lead. Yet, once one person steps forward, it acts as a trigger for others to spring into action. This is a clear demonstration of the power of the individual in breaking the chains of groupthink. It underscores the importance of taking initiative, being the first to stand up for what’s right, and not waiting for others to lead the way. In reality, where that is the main issue, someone who speaks truth first may well find allies readily appearing, who had been just waiting for someone else to take the first step.
Fear of humiliation
There is an easy excuse of saying I cannot speak the truth because I might be wrong, I do not know everything for certain. Of course you don’t! No one is omniscient! If everyone thought like that the only people who would speak would be the psychopaths who are not afraid of lying and then where would we be?
Yes, you might be wrong. Yes, some people might take great pleasure in that. Your ego is less important than telling the truth. If everyone set ego aside and spoke, the truth would reveal itself rapidly. All of us would be wrong along the way but at least we would start travelling towards the truth together.
Cancel Culture
Inconvenient truths upset people in powerful positions. There might indeed be consequences of speaking and you might well show me examples where the consequences for others have been severe. Silencing people through fear in this way is authoritarianism. The only antidote to that is to have the multitude speak the truth. You are a part of us getting to the point where the truth cannot be repressed through fear. The dam is about to break, the risk from speaking now is far smaller than it was earlier on. Take the risk for the sake of your children’s future.
Start small
Creating a social media profile and broadcasting to the world is not for everyone. Speaking the truth to your family, your friends and your colleagues is a fine place to start. In fact those conversations are worth many times more than communication through any screen.
If you’re uncomfortable going too far too fast then start with questions, express uncertainty, seed some doubt.
“A land without a people, and a people without a land” is how the relationship between Palestine and the Jewish people was described by Christian writers in the 1800s. And the 20th-century history of the Middle East has largely been written through these eyes.
But this film from Al Jazeera Arabic looks at Palestine from a different angle. It hears from historians and witness accounts, and features archive documents that show Palestine as a thriving province of Greater Syria and the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the 20th century.
The evidence suggests that its cities had a developing trade and commercial sector, growing infrastructure, and embryonic culture that would enable it to meet the challenges of the decades ahead. However, the political ramifications of the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Conference and British Mandate set in motion a series of events that profoundly affected this vibrant, fledgeling society and led to the events of 1948 and beyond.
This film is the other side of the Palestinian story.
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