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Israel’s culture of rape and child abuse

By Vanessa Beeley | The Wall Will Fall | April 9, 2024

“We Israelis are the biggest Holocaust deniers – The Jewish state learned that it can commit its own Holocaust in Gaza and deny that it exists” – Jonathan Ofir for Mondoweiss.

Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa reports from her visit to Gaza:

The reality on the ground is infinitely worse than the worst videos and photos that we’re seeing in the West.

People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses,” Abulhawa writes. “Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.”

“What I see is a holocaust.” she summarizes. “The incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.”

What has underpinned this wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians and children in Gaza – the 7th October Hamas “atrocities” that include the media-amplified claims of “mass rape”?

Claims led by the discredited ZAKA organisation whose founder has a history of rape and pedophilia. ZAKA is reminiscent of the CIA/MI6 White Helmet propaganda productions in Syria from 2013 onwards, designed to criminalise the Syrian government. You can read my archive of investigative work exposing this organisation here.

I am not going to focus on the debunked claims made by the Zionist Hasbara industry. You can read and watch the multiple investigative reports that have dismantled the genocide-justifications here – 1234567891011121314.

Two leading Palestinian media organizations, The Palestine Chronicle and Friends of Palestine Network, conducted a joint investigation, based on media reports, in addition to historical and political analyses.

I recommend following this X account to also have real-time updates on the collapse of the Zionist propaganda mill.

Journalist and researcher, William Van Wagenen, has also covered much of what actually took place on October 7th. Van Wagenen includes the “baked baby” narratives that were circulating shortly after the 7th October Resistance operations.

Eli Beer, founder and president of another rescue organization, United Hatzalah, made similar false claims.

While attending the Republican Jewish Coalitions’ Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas on 28 October, he claimed that “A little baby in the oven – These bastards put these babies in the oven and put on the oven … We found the kid a few hours later.”

Like all the other atrocity tales, this was also walked back and mocked on social media by the majority of independent media outlets who saw through the fabrication immediately.

2013 in Adra Industrial City, north of Damascus, Syria – extremist factions including Al Qaeda (Nusra Front) burned civilians alive in a bread furnace. The same extremist factions supported by Israel to overthrow a pro-Palestine Syrian government.

In 2014, a frail 16 year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was burned alive by Israeli extremist settlers amidst a number of Zionist settler kidnappings of young Palestinian boys.

… the preliminary autopsy report states that the remnants of a burned substance (soot) was present in Muhammad’s respiratory passages and lungs, indicating he had inhaled the substance while being burned alive.

Hussein Dawabshe with grandson Ahmad in 2016

In 2015 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four, only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.

At the preliminary court hearing in Lod, terrorist Zionist settlers chanted:

“Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill”

From the article in Mondoweiss :

In December 2015, a video showing dozens of wedding guests celebrating the arson went public via Channel 10. The guests are seen dancing with Molotov cocktails, knives and guns, and stabbing a photo of baby Ali Dawabsheh.

Literally 24 hours after the October 7th Resistance operation, on various interviews I recommended avoiding the rush to judgement being rammed down our throats by a Zionist-partisan media crush. I was absolutely correct to have cautioned thus and consider myself vindicated by the last six months of investigation into the Zionist hysterical claims.

Claims that only the Palestinian Resistance was responsible for all deaths on the day that unleashed genocide upon Palestine – or rather the intensification of a genocide that began 100 years ago under a malign British Mandate.

The reality of thousands of children horrifically burned, eviscerated, incinerated, executed, abused and tortured by the sadistic IOF forces since October 7th is something that cannot be eclipsed by the lies peddled by the genocidal maniacs intent on the extinction of Palestinians.

Euromed Monitor – Euro-Med Monitor’s field team documented the Israeli army’s field execution of 13 children near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The majority of them were with their families, following the Israeli military’s instructions to evacuate their areas, when they were shot dead.

Israel’s Rape Culture

In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the goal of acquiring land led to the use of brutal tactics aimed at the dispossession and elimination of the indigenous population. Colonizers embraced sexual terrorization as an instrument for achieving this strategy. – Tamam Mohsen

The “only Democracy in the Middle East” is reported to be a hub of sexual abuse, rape and ritual pedophilia cases. According to the Berghahn Journals :

Sexual violence is a common phenomenon in Israeli society. Despite its frequency, it is still kept silent in the public sphere. The last few years have seen a rise in awareness on the topic of sexual abuse and harassment; however it is a crime with a very low percentage of incident reports. This is for a variety of reasons, the main reason being that we live in a society that tends to blame the victim, which causes them feelings of shame and humiliation preventing them from reporting the incident.

Israel is a Pedophile Haven

Israel is a haven for pedophiles escaping prosecution in other countries. Perhaps the best known case is that of Malka Leifer. A former ultra-Orthodox Jewish school Principal sentenced to fifteen years for child sex abuse.

Israeli author and public speaker Alon Mizrahi went on X to point out Israel’s harbouring of this criminal serial abuser of children:

This lovely lady, from a prestigious Hasidic family, was the principal of an ultra-orthodox Hewish school in Melbourne, Australia who in 2008 “faced trial on 70 sex offense charges laid by Victoria Police, with accusations from at least eight alleged victims” (from Wikipedia).

All victims were her former underage pupils.

To cut a long story short, lovely Malka fled to Israel in 2008, where she comfortably lived, thanks to generous help from senior politicians, psychiatrists, and extremely helpful judges, until 2021, when the scandal was making international news, with high-ranking Australian politicians intervening on behalf of the victims.

In March of 2023 Leifer was found guilty of 18 counts of sexual abuse, including rape, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

But for 13 years, Israel refused to extradite Leifer to Australia, and she was allowed to lead her normal life in a West Bank settlement. And that’s how much Israel cares for (Jewish!) victims of sexual abuse.

In 2020 Jerusalem Post ran the headline – Tens of Thousands of Pedophiles Operate in Israel every year.

Annually there are 100,000 victims of pedophilia in Israel according to one monitoring organisation.

While indigenous Palestinians are denied the right to return to their homeland, a number of pedophiles in Israel are “Jewish” immigrants who have exploited the law of return (whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship) to seek refuge from prosecution for their heinous crimes.

Mainstream media in the US is reporting on the Jewish American pedophiles who “hide from justice” in Israel after subjecting children to abuse and rape. Jewish Community Watch says the majority of its cases originate from modern Orthodox to Ultra-orthodox Jewish enclaves in the U.S., but that it happens across the wider Jewish community.

Even Hollywood’s accused sexual predators are seeking refuge in Israel. Hollywood filmmaker Brett Ratner fled to Israel after six women accused Ratner of sexual assault and sexual harassment in 2017. A report in Haaretz describes Israel as a “hot spot for foreign Jewish sexual predators”.

Another Haaretz report in 2016 cites Manny Waks, the chief executive officer of Kol v’Oz, a newly formed nonprofit that aims to prevent child sexual abuse in the global Jewish community:

“Sex offenders tend to move from country to country to avoid jail, but what makes Israel unique is the Law of Return, which essentially grants unhindered access to anyone who is Jewish to come here without any real screening,”

The same story was covered by the UK’s Independent. This phenomenon cannot be dismissed as “conspiracy theory”, it is fact.

More Haaretz investigations can be found at these links – 12,

From the American Psychological Association:

This study explores thought patterns of Jewish Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox pedophiles in Israel and how they resolve the contradiction between their commitment to Jewish Law and having committed sexual offenses against minors.

In 2022 Haaretz reported that 100 rabbis, teachers and other figures who have been accused, charged or convicted of sexual abuse overseas have already found refuge in Israel.

Also in 2022 The Jerusalem Post reported that the rate of sexual abuse of kids is highest among religious Zionist sector. “A new study by the Ne’emanei Torah Va’avodah movement reveals dramatic data on sexual abuse victims from the religious Zionist (Tzioni Dati) sector.” The abused often become abusers. How many of these abused children (majority male) are the IOF forces of tomorrow?

More Jerusalem Post investigations (one Times of Israel ) can be found at these links – 1234.

A Haifa psychologist was arrested in 2021 for ‘indecent acts on children in his care’.

In March 2024 almost 6 months after October 7th, an Israeli male nurse, Oren Hananaiev, had his medical licence revoked after being ‘convicted of severe indecent acts without consent and possessing and publishing inappropriate content featuring underage children.’

From the analysis of Hananaiev’s correspondence, many conversations were found with Yaakov, in which he advised him to use sedatives to “prevent resistance” during sexual assault. Furthermore, the investigators found correspondence between the two where Hananaiev suggests certain children’s games where one might sexually exploit kids while they still think that it is part of the game.

According to the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (2011):

The number of incarcerated sex offenders in Israeli prisons, which may be related to the total number of sex offenders, has been steadily increasing, from 350 offenders in 1997, to 1300 in 2009.

About 60 percent of convicted sex offenders in Israel have committed offenses against children under the age of 13.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is rife with accusations of sexual offences against minors. Pedophiles seek refuge in Israel for a good reason. They are in “good” company.

How many of the Brooklyn, New York, Haredi cult accused of sexual abuse have sought refuge from exposure and justice, in Israel?

A far-right Israeli lawmaker accused Israel of trying to normalise pedophilia as recently as May 2023, only a few months before Israel was accusing the Palestinian Resistance of “mass rape”. As many have stated on social media “an accusation is a confession”.

Israel has failed in almost every way in treating sexually abused children, says a report by a committee of experts aiming to change social norms, treatment and government policy on the issue. – Haaretz

Jerusalem Post reports that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, around 56,000 Israelis have been forced to flee their homes and live in hotels throughout the country.

These hotels are allegedly a “ticking time bomb of crime” – Cases included indecent exposure, crimes against children, and rape amongst other violent incidents. Even Israeli settlers are prey to the overt sexual predation that pervades their society.

The Limited Times :

Zion Vanuno, 64, is suspected of committing indecent acts against children in a hotel with evacuees in the center of the country. According to the suspicion, Vanuno lured the children with candies to go to different places in the hotel, where he committed indecent acts on them.

Israel – a history of rape as a weapon of terror

In his article “Israel and Rape” journalist Robert Inlakesh goes into some detail about the cases of rape and sexual harassment within the IOF armed forces.

There have also been credible claims by a female soldier that she was raped by a fellow serviceman during the ongoing brutal military assault on Gaza.

Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israel’s armed forces. According to a Haaretz report, “a third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].”

In 2020, the Israeli army’s sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.

It has been reported that a growing sector of Israeli society rape Israelis, they rape tourists, they abuse and rape children, they rape their own evacuees. How these predators (especially in the IOF) react to Palestinians that have routinely been dehumanised and reduced to legitimate targets for an inherent predatory sadism is naturally expected to be a hundred times worse. And it is.

The Tantura Massacre 22nd – 23rd May 1948.

On the night of 22-23 May 1948, a week after the declaration of the State of Israel, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura (population 1,500) was attacked and occupied by units of the Israeli army’s Alexandroni Brigade. During the Nakba or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 some 400 villages were razed and occupied by Zionist forces.

Tantura was one of the tens of Palestinian villages and towns inside and outside the boundaries of the UN-envisaged Jewish state specifically targeted for capture under the notorious Plan Dalet, the Haganah master plan for the military establishment of Israel on the largest area possible of Palestine.

Palestinians were caged in makeshift cages and mowed down by machine-gun fire. Schoolchildren were ruthlessly shot even if they had raised their hands in surrender. Civilians were burned alive, buried in communal graves. Young girls were raped.

How different is this to what the IOF are doing in Gaza for the last six months but on an unprecedented scale.

Sabra and Shatila in 1982 witnessed the massacre of an estimated 3,500 Palestinians by Christian militiamen enabled and presided over by the Zionist forces. As journalist Robert Fisk said:

They (Israel) had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance – the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila – and they had established military liason with the murderers in the camps

According to multiple reports rape was also a feature of the Phalange militia on their genocidal rampage through the Palestinian community.

Fisk’s horrifying description of what he saw is haunting – here were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.

No different to the descriptions of decomposing bodies in and around Al Shifa Hospital or the corpses crushed beneath the tracks of a Zionist tank or bulldozer, children shot, their bodies left next to the white flag they were carrying. The terrified elderly man shot dead because he was dehydrated and couldn’t keep moving.

The merciless Zionist bloodlust has only grown in strength since the first days of dispossessing Palestinians of their lands and their lives.

Rape and the threat of rape is systematically used in Israeli prisons for Palestinian women, children and men. A web search will reveal countless reports on the degrading and inhumane treatment of female prisoners forced to endure humiliating body searches and threatened with rape if they do not comply.

The crimes committed by the IOF in Gaza since October 7th replicate the crimes committed during the Nakba and in the 75 years of Zionist occupation of Palestinian territory.

Female detainees were submitted to sexual violence, torture, inhuman treatment, strip searches, sexual harassment, and rape threats while being arrested and held by Israeli army forces according to testimonies collated by Euromed Monitor.

A UN report published in February 2024 said experts were appalled by reported (Israeli) human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls.

“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,”

Palestinian prisoners that had been stripped naked and were tortured allegedly became entertainment for the Israeli spectators that were brought in by the IOF to watch the sadistic process. They were given permission to film the torture on their mobile phones.

In 2010 a report was submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. It involved the Zionist sexual assault or threatened sexual assault of Palestinian children aged between 13 and 16. The torture was used to obtain confessions from the children, admitting to stone throwing. Read more herehere and here.

The depositions sent to the UN report direct attacks, including squeezing boys’ testicles, pushing a blunt object (a club or rifle stock) between the chair and a child’s buttocks, and repeated threats of “I’ll screw you if you don’t confess you threw stones.”

Of course the Zionist censorship machine moved to shut down the NGO, Defence for Children Palestine, that dared to expose the sexual abuse of minors by Israeli forces and security sectors. In October 2021, the DCIP was designated a terrorist organisation by Israeli authorities along with five other Palestinian NGOs.

Khan Younis in Gaza – History repeating itself?

An account (described by Zionists as fiction) from 1956 describes the slaughter and rape carried out by the Zionist forces in Gaza, in particular in Khan Younis.

According to the accepted Palestinian narrative, about 275 Palestinians were killed in the Khan Yunis massacre, while some 111 people were killed in Rafah. Rape was allegedly permitted to control the rebellious Palestinians.

The following letter was sent by a Golani Brigade soldier to his girlfriend on November 6, the day after the Sinai Campaign concluded, which is kept in the IDF archive. It is no different to the rhetoric we hear from IOF savages now inside Gaza or from the extremist Zionist settlers in West Bank:

Only the Arabs are to blame for all this and at every opportunity I take revenge on them,” he wrote. “I am not satisfied with the amount [of people] I have already killed; we killed hundreds but for me it is not enough. At every opportunity I take revenge on them, and opportunities are not lacking, especially these days when I am among thousands of Arabs. They are under curfew, and this is a great opportunity to do anything we want to them. And I’m doing just that, and I won’t stop until I am on my way home, I swear.

Palestinian memory holds years and dates close.

The Nakba was in 1948, the Naksa in 1967, Sabra and Shatila September 1982, the Intifada ‘87. November 3, 1956, however, does not live in infamy. Despite being one of the greatest massacres of Palestinians, the Khan Yunis massacre that brutally took the lives of hundreds of Palestinian men and boys, has only received a footnote in history- a mere few lines in a UN report. (Article in Palestine Chronicle )

The massacre of Khan Yunis in 1956 reached twice the number of the Dier Yassin massacre and lasted longer than the massacre that took place at Sabra and Shatila. Read more here.

Rape is a weapon of terrorists

In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has always been carried out with maximum brutality. The colonizers trained by the British relished sexual terrorism as one of their most potent instruments of power and subjugation of an unruly, justifiably resistant population.

It can be argued that rape or the threat of rape was a primary reason that many communities fled their villages and homes in 1948. The present day oppression of Palestinian women in the Resistance or political movements challenging the Zionist entity is dependent upon rape and sexual abuse to coerce female prisoners into confessions, sometimes even into collaboration.

The freed Palestinian prisoner, Rasmea Odeh, publicly spoke in an American court about how she was raped by Israeli intelligence interrogators. Odeh, who was arrested in 1969 at the age of 19, reported that during her interrogation, she was beaten with wooden sticks and metal bars, and was left naked in a blatant violation of her sexuality.

Odeh was sexually tortured with electric shocks. Wires were attached to her genitals, breasts, abdomen, arms, and legs, and in that disoriented state, she was raped with a stick while her father was forced to watch. (Mondoweiss )

Prominent Israeli Rabbis like Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu have advocated for rape in wartime. A leading Israeli professor, Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, explicitly called for the rape of Palestinian women to deter the Palestinian resistance during the unrest of the summer of 2014.

Later, in 2016, Rabbi Colonel Eyal Qarim of the Israeli Military Rabbinate also echoed the same notion, making allowances for the rape of Palestinian women by Jewish Israeli soldiers “out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors.” (Mondoweiss )

The apartheid Zionist state passed a sexual terrorism law in July 2023. The law was condemned for allowing Jewish Israelis to have a far lesser punishment for rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment than Palestinian citizens.

The law directly targets Palestinian citizens of Israel who are accused of sexually assaulting or harassing Jewish women if authorities deem the motive as “nationalistic”.

The irony should not be lost on you.

Rape by the Zionist military, intelligence or police forces is not restricted to children and women. Men are also submitted to horrific torture practices including rape.

Mustafa Dirani was abducted by an Israeli “elite force” from inside Lebanon in 1994. He was finally released in 2004. Dirani claimed compensation for alleged rape by a Shin Bet interrogation expert.

The ritual humiliation of women is also not confined to within prison walls. Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada on September 28 2000 until July 2006, 68 pregnant women had to give birth at checkpoints, 34 infants and 4 pregnant women died on these checkpoints.

Israel and Abu Ghraib

When the images of prisoners taken by the IOF in Gaza emerged, men stripped down to their underwear in winter, beaten by metal pipes or guns, urinated on by their monstrous captors – it was likened to scenes from Abu Ghraib. As the inhumane abuse expanded across Gaza and included women, the comparisons increased.

Journalist W Van Wagenen wrote about the Israeli involvement in Abu Ghraib, in particular at Facility 1391:

But the “creative” torture techniques focusing on sexual humiliation and rape have a clear origin.

Israeli interrogators were teaching US contractors and MPs torture techniques that Israel has long used against Palestinians and other Arabs.

In November 2003, as Cambone was lauding Israel for its assistance in Iraq, the Guardian published a report detailing the torture Israel subjected prisoners to at a secret prison known as ‘Facility 1391.’

“I was barefoot in my pajamas when they arrested me, and it was really cold,” says Sameer Jadala, a Palestinian school bus driver. “When I got to that place, they told me to strip and gave me a blue uniform. Then they gave me a black sack,” for his head.

Other former prisoners at Facility 1391 have described how they were stripped naked for interrogation, blindfolded, handcuffed, and threatened with rape. (emphasis added)

There can be no denying that Israel has a culture of rape and abuse of those it considers ‘untermensch’. It is engrained in their psyche and has been for almost a century because they believe they are not only “chosen” but “untouchable”. The British spawned a Frankenstein’s monster and they have lost control of the rapacious entity that is committing crime after crime against Humanity, not only in Palestine.

Britain forced Zionism on the population by allowing mass ‘immigration’, by arming the zionists while disarming the Palestinians, and by using all other weapons available to an occupying power to crush resistance. Thousands of Palestinians were killed when they rebelled in the 1930s,  all attempts to reason with the British having failed.

Executions and the collective punishment of whole villages were part of how Britain lived up to its ‘sacred trust of civilization.’  The leadership needed for the coming stages of confrontation with the zionists was largely decapitated. The British did their dirty work for them. (Jeremy Salt)

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence [them] absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.” Judith Lewis Herman – Trauma and Recovery: the aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror.

An illegal settler colonial entity built on genocide, rape, torture, apartheid and oppression will always fail eventually. It is only a matter of time before the truly depraved and rotten Zionist core will surrender to its own internal moral decay and implode.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

UK says will keep selling arms to Israel anyway

Press TV – April 9, 2024

Despite growing pressure on the United Kingdom to end its arms sales to Israel, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron says London’s position on exporting arms to the occupying regime remains “unchanged.”

At a press conference in Washington alongside US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, the top British diplomat said the UK government would keep shipping arms to Israel after reviewing advice from the nation’s lawyers.

His remarks came as a majority of Britons have called on London to no longer give arms to Israel, whose military has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7.

They fear that Israel may be using British-made weapons in military actions that violate international law in the Palestinian territory, which has also been blocked by Israel from having access to water, food, and electricity.

“I have now reviewed the most recent advice about the situation in Gaza and Israel’s conduct of their military campaign. The latest assessment leaves our position on export licenses unchanged. This is consistent with the advice that I and other ministers have received,” Cameron said.

However, he refused to elaborate on what legal advice London was given when assessing whether or not to restrict arms sales to the Israeli regime.

Early this month, Israel’s deadly strikes on the NGO World Central Kitchen (WCK) in central Gaza drew worldwide condemnation. Three of the WCK aid workers killed by Israeli airstrikes were Britons, who were all UK military veterans working on its security team.

Last week, three former senior British judges joined over 600 members of the British legal profession in calling for London to stop arms export to Israel.

Britain supplied 42 million pounds ($53 million) of arms to Israel in 2022.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Killing humanitarian workers as a strategy: Israel’s endgame in Gaza

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | April 9, 2024

Israel described its clearly deliberate killing of seven humanitarian aid workers in Gaza on 1 April as a “grave mistake”, a “tragic event” of a kind that “happens in war”. Obviously, Israel was lying. In fact, this entire so-called war in Gaza — which is in reality a genocide — has been based on a series of lies, some of which Israel and its supporters continue to peddle.

For some in the mainstream media, it took months to accept the obvious fact that Israel has been lying about the events that led to its military offensive and the objectives of its constant targeting of hospitals, schools, shelters and other civilian facilities. As such, it was only logical for the occupation state to lie about killing the six internationals and their Palestinian driver working with the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity. Notwithstanding an event as atrocious as this undoubtedly was, it is implausible for Israel to start telling the truth now.

Fortunately, few seem to believe Israel’s version of the WCK incident or, indeed, its ongoing massacres elsewhere in Gaza. The state “cannot credibly investigate its own failure in Gaza,” said the US-based NGO on 5 April.

The issue of targeting these internationals, however, has to be placed within a larger context.

Israel was hardly secretive about its intentions to deny Palestinians even the most basic necessities of survival in Gaza, epitomised in the words of Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant way back on 9 October: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, no water, everything is closed.”

This statement, like many others, was understood at the time to be due to Israel’s desire to punish Palestinians for the 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by resorting to its usual tactic of collective punishment. Based on statements made by other Israeli officials, though, it soon became clear that the occupation state wanted to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the enclave altogether.

The Israeli stratagem was rejected immediately by EgyptJordan, other Arab countries and, eventually, governments around the world. Israel, however, persisted. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza as the “right humanitarian solution”. Benjamin Netanyahu concurred. “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans [sic], and we are working on it,” said the Israeli prime minister.

However, for ethnic cleansing to take place, several prerequisites had to be fulfilled. For a start, the bulk of Gaza’s 2.3 million people had to be forced to the south, as close to the Egyptian border as possible. This has been achieved. Then everything conducive to life had to be destroyed throughout Gaza, including all hospitals and clinics.

Thus, we saw the grisly massacre at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on 17 October, for example, and the bloodbath and eventual total destruction of Gaza’s largest medical complex, Al-Shifa, on 1 April. When the Israeli military pulled out of the Shifa area, troops left behind one of the most tragic scenes in the history of modern warfare. Hundreds of bodies were hurriedly buried in mass graves amid charred buildings and indescribable destruction. Limbs of children stuck out of the dirt, and whole families were tied together and executed; and there were other crimes that will take the world a long time to fathom, let alone explain. And yet former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett claimed nonchalantly that “not one civilian” was killed in Al-Shifa. Another blatant lie.

Most civilian shelters, bakeries, markets, electricity grids and water generators also had to be targeted so that the hapless population, especially in northern Gaza, would understand that life there would simply be unsustainable. Becoming fully aware of Israel’s ultimate plan of inducing a famine in Gaza, though, the Palestinians fought back. Their counterstrategy was predicated on ensuring that as many of them as possible remained in northern Gaza, and that those concentrated in Rafah were not pushed into the Sinai desert.

Aside from the ongoing battle between the Israeli army and Palestinian resistance movements in Gaza, there was thus another deadly struggle taking place: Israel’s push for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the latter’s desire to survive and remain within the nominal borders of their land.

This is why Israel has killed countless Palestinians involved in the life-sustaining work in northern and central Gaza.

According to the UN, prior to the killing of the six internationals on 1 April, Israeli troops had already killed 196 humanitarian aid workers in the Palestinian territory. This figure does not include doctors, medical staff, civil defence workers, police chiefs and officers, and anyone else contributing to day-to-day life in areas that Israel wanted to empty of its inhabitants.

Even when, under international pressure, the rogue state allowed limited aid to enter northern Gaza, its army killed and wounded Palestinian civilians on a number of occasions as they gathered in desperation hoping to get some life-saving supplies. According to a 4 April report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has killed 563 Palestinians and injured 1,523 by bombing and shooting people waiting for aid at designated spots in northern Gaza, or when it bombed distribution centres and workers responsible for distributing the aid. The Kuwait roundabout area in Gaza City alone witnessed the murder of 256 starving refugees, while 230 others were killed on Al-Rashid Street elsewhere in the city.

Israel’s bombing was not random, as it also targeted and killed 41 police officers who had worked with volunteers from various Gaza clans to help the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to distribute aid among the famine-stricken population. Even the clans themselves were targeted in equally merciless bombardments.

On each occasion, just as happened after the attack on the WCK workers, the entity responsible for the aid would declare that it would no longer be involved in aid distribution. This is how Gaza’s hunger turned into famine. It was Israel’s very deliberate strategy.

The killing of the internationals in Gaza served the same goal of ensuring that no aid distribution mechanism was in place, because Israel would not allow it. Ironically, the involvement of World Central Kitchen was itself the outcome of a US-negotiated agreement that would deny the Gaza authorities and even UNRWA any role in the distribution of aid.

The apartheid state of Israel must be stopped at any cost. Moreover, that cost must include Israeli war criminals being held accountable for one of the worst genocides in modern history.

See also:

Drone footage shows Gaza turned to wasteland since start of Israeli offensive

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Hundreds of corpses recovered from vicinity of Al-Shifa Hospital

The Cradle | April 9, 2024

The bodies of hundreds of Palestinians killed by Israel have been recovered from the vicinity of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, in the north of the strip.

The medical facility was destroyed in a massive Israeli operation inside and around the hospital, which spanned two weeks.

“The bodies of 409 martyrs – some of them decomposed – have so far been recovered by civil defense teams from the Al-Shifa Medical Complex and its surroundings in Gaza City,” Palestinian news agency WAFA reported on 9 April.

Israeli troops raided Al-Shifa Hospital on 18 March – for the second time since the start of the war – carrying out what it said was an operation against Hamas leaders in the facility. During the onset of the attack, Brigadier General Fayeq al-Mabhouh, Gaza’s chief of police and overseer of aid distribution in the north of the strip, was assassinated by Israeli forces.

The army withdrew from Al-Shifa Medical Complex on 1 April. Following the withdrawal, videos on social media showed the full extent of the damage inflicted on the hospital by Israel’s army and aircraft.

The complex’s entire buildings were ravaged, and hundreds were killed in the two-week attack. The hospital has been sheltering thousands of displaced Gazans since the war began. Dozens of Palestinians, among them children, were executed by Israeli forces around the hospital throughout the operation.

Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza also reported massive damage and unprecedented numbers of dead bodies in the strip’s southern city of Khan Yunis on 9 April. Israel had been operating in Khan Yunis since early December in an attempt to dismantle the presence of Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades – which it failed to do.

Following the army’s large-scale withdrawal from Gaza over the weekend – which has left a limited number of troops inside the enclave – families returning to Khan Yunis witnessed scores of bodies, many trapped under rubble.

Dozens of young men have also been reported missing, according to what returning families told the civil defense.

The city “smells of death,” one mother said as she was returning, adding: “We don’t have a city anymore – only rubble. There is absolutely nothing left.”

The civil defense has urged the international community to provide specialized equipment to remove the bodies from underneath the rubble.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestine’s Sacrifice

By Paul Larudee | Dissident Voice | April 8, 2024

Years ago, I made the statement that Palestinians had not sacrificed enough. It was meant to be a shocking statement, but it wasn’t a judgmental one. What I meant was that all of the terrible sacrifices that Palestinians had made up until that time had failed to liberate Palestine, and that we would know when adequate sacrifice had been made by the standard of whether liberation had been achieved.

I believe that we are reaching a vantage point where this accomplishment is now within view, or at least just over the horizon. If so, it is utterly astonishing, but the greatest part of the sacrifice is yet to come. We call it genocide, and although we are in the midst of it, we have not yet seen the worst.

Israel, which has spent its entire history building its image and cementing its relationships – security, technological, academic, economic and cultural – with the rest of the world, now perceives that it must allow itself to become a reviled international pariah in order to commit horrors that will preserve itself as a Zionist exclusivist enclave on stolen territory. Israel, in its desperation, has given up on all civilized pretenses and most links to the outside world, except its lifeline with the only superpower that can single-handedly transfuse enough arms and wealth to maintain its ability to wreak havoc upon its unwanted subjugated population and instill fear in its neighbors.

It has come down to this: From Israel’s perspective, it must commit genocide in order keep the Zionist dream of a Jewish state alive. There will be no de Klerk-Mandela moment, no integration, no truth commission, no mutual acceptance. The Israelis who believed in good will and mutual respect do not exist anymore, and their dream was a fantasy in any case, depending as it did upon tolerance in a society that required racist credentials for admission. Roughly a million of them emigrated in the decade prior to October 7th, 2023, and another million in the six months after. In the remaining Israeli population, fanaticism rules. It is the future of Israel, to the extent that it has any. Like the crusader castle at Acre, it will be a fortress that remains until it is no longer viable, losing its body of the faithful, unwilling to keep it going.

That is the future. At present, it is a fearful, enraged beast, ready to commit all manner of atrocities in order to resist the inevitable. As it makes no visible progress against its armed foes in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon, it is now seeking to widen the war, with direct superpower military engagement. Although the US remains unlikely to take the bait, it is also ruled by a similar siege mentality, especially at the highest levels of government, which are impervious to popular will, and are wedded to interests that largely determine its composition, regardless of the party “in power”. One of those interests is the Israel lobby, which not surprisingly maintains especially strong control over US policy towards Israel. The practical implications are that, regardless how unpopular a government or its policy may be, it will not waver in its support for Israel – in effect a sock puppet with a teleprompter.

These factors will raise the cost of the Palestinian victory. Yet even those who are the victims of the greatest crime of this century refuse to accept a return to life in the concentration camp that was Gaza. Indeed, the ranks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are swelling with more recruits than they can accept at present.

Will the crescendo of the world’s voices and actions prevent the worst from happening? Will the ships of aid and volunteers change the outcome? The demonstrations? The suspension of trade and exchange agreements? The isolation of Israel as a pariah? The alienation of Jewish youth from Zionism? I would like to think so, but as far as I can tell, none of this has any impact upon the thinking – much less the decisions – in Israel or the US. Our predictions for the future are projections of the past and present, and I see nothing in those projections that will avert the course of genocide. I would love to be wrong.

Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Seeks to Sell Weapons Used in Gaza Slaughter

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | April 8, 2024

Israeli weapons markers are selling some weapons platforms that have been utilized during the onslaught in Gaza. Tel Aviv’s arms industry has found buyers among several Asian countries as Washington tries to make allies in the region, preparing for a future war with China.

Last week, several Israeli arms markers hosted delegations from multiple Asian nations at their booth at the Singapore arms expo. Jon Ostrower, editor-in-chief of The Air Current, explained, “They’ve come to demonstrate their power.”

Axon Vision CEO Roy Riftin said in an interview with Asia Nikkei that his company was coordinating with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza to refine its military AI tech and then export it abroad.

Some of the weapons platforms featured in Singapore have been used in Gaza. Over the past six months, Israel has killed at least 33,000 Palestinians. Most of the dead are women and children. Several international rights experts have warned that Israeli operations amount to genocide.

In coverage of the Singapore arms event, Haaretz notes that some of the drones touted by the Israeli arms dealers were used by Azerbaijan in Nargano-Karabash. Last year, the Azeris completed an ethnic cleansing of the region by forcing the enclave’s last 100,000 residents out of the Republic of Artsakh and into Armenia.

An Israeli official said it was primarily seeking clients who did not buy Chinese arms. “Ultimately all the countries in the region are threatened by the Chinese,” a senior figure in one of the Israeli defense companies on hand told Haaretz. “Here at the airshow they don’t buy fighter jets from China.”

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel sells the most arms to India and the Philippines. The US has tried to include both New Delhi and Manila in its Asia-Pacific alliances, with the aim at fighting a future war with China. The US has frequently sanctioned other countries over alleged war crimes and human rights abuses while ignoring the rampant abuses committed by Israel in Gaza.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Fauci’s Inquisition Against Safe and Effective Anti-COVID-19 Drugs

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null | Global Research | April 6, 2024

A question needs to be asked. Were the novel experimental drug treatments for SARS-CoV-2 viral infections that Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA advocated for and funded responsible for worsening the contagion and countless deaths?

However, at that time there were plenty of studies confirming there were pre-existing safe, inexpensive medications known to have highly effective antiviral properties to treat Covid-19 patients. Among these were ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).

There were also specific nutrients such as vitamin D and zinc, known to strengthen the immune system against viral infection and yet there was no recommendation from the government about the benefits of proper nutrition. So why did Fauci along with other federal health officials choose to intentionally ignore the scientific evidence and rather condemn these repurposed drugs? In Fauci’s case, over a year and half into the pandemic, he continued to lie outright on CNN that “there is no clinical evidence whatsoever that [ivermectin] works.”[1] And could millions have been saved if these generic medications were prescribed rather than the feds doing nothing but recommending social isolation and quarantines as the world awaited an experimental Covid-19 vaccine to enter the market?

To date, between ivermectin and HCQ alone, there have been 670 published studies, analyses and papers involving over 9,800 scientists and over 682,000 patients supporting the use of these drugs over and beyond those the FDA has approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) statutes. Despite this, four years later, the FDA continues to fiercely deny ivermectin’s and HCQ’s efficacy and safety under proper administration. Why this blatant cover-up?

Every CDC effort to approve a novel drug treatment for SARS-CoV-2 infections has been a dismal failure. Aside from monoclonal antibody therapy, only three anti-Covid-19 drugs have been approved under an EUA in the United States. None met their promised expectations from either the manufacturer or our federal health agencies.  With their poor efficacy rates, safety profiles and a black box warning slapped upon Pfizer’s anti-Covid-19 drug Paxlovid, the CDC is scrambling to find new viable alternatives in the pharmaceutical pipeline. Bloomberg amplifies the fake Covid-19 treatment crisis by lamenting that repurposed drugs such as ivermectin are gaining global popularity as “the world needs effective Covid drugs.”[2]

Shortly after the pandemic was formally announced, the FDA recommended the cheap over the counter anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine but then quickly reversed its decision after Fauci publicly announced the future arrival of Gilead Sciences’ novel intravenous drug Remdesivir. The FDA’s and European Union’s approvals of Remdesivir baffled many scientists, according to the journal Science, who questioned its therapeutic value and kept a close watch on the drug’s clinical reports about a “disproportionally high number of reports of liver and kidney problems.”[3] Even an earlier Chinese study published in The Lancet found that remdesivir had no impact on the coronavirus. The Science article notes that the “FDA never consulted a group of outside experts that it has at the ready to weigh in on complicated antiviral drug issues.”[4] Six months before remdesivir received EUA approval, Anthony Fauci had already hailed the drug as a major breakthrough that would establish a new “standard of care” in Covid-19 treatment.[5]

Today, remdesivir is being increasingly recognized as a debacle in antiviral therapeutic care. Even the WHO released a “conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, as there is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.” An Italian study observed a 416 percent increase in hepatocellular injuries among hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with Remdesivir.[6]  And a smaller Taiwanese study of hospitalized unvaccinated patients reported a 185 percent higher mortality during late remdesivir treatment.[7]

Earlier this year, Pfizer’s novel oral Covid-19 medication Paxlovid was given an FDA black box warning for clinically significant adverse reactions that can potentially be fatal. Because the company does not permit independent random-controlled trials to investigate its drug, other than retrospective studies, we only have Pfizer’s own data to rely upon. Nevertheless, The Lancet published a study by a team of Chinese scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong School of Medicine that managed to look at Paxlovid’s use among critically ill patients hospitalized with Covid-19. The study reported a 27 percent higher risk of the infection progressing, a 67 percent increased risk in requiring ventilation, and 10 percent longer stays in ICU facilities.[8]

Paxlovid is a combination of a novel SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor and the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir. The FDA approved Paxlovid under a EUA with the claim it was safe. However, on the government’s HIV.gov website for ritonavir it is clearly stated that the drug “can cause serious life-threatening side effects. These include inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), heart rhythm problems, severe skin rash and allergic reactions, liver problems and drug interactions.”[9] Perhaps due to the drug’s serious side effects, it is no longer used solely against HIV, but rather is given in smaller doses as a booster for AZT-related drugs. Being highly toxic, ritonavir is also not recommended for pregnant women and has been shown to interfere with hormone-based birth control efficacy. 

Paxlovid only received FDA EUA approval in May 2023. At that time, the agency claimed there was no evidence that patients who were treated with the drug rebounded and came down with Covid. However, shortly thereafter this was determined to be untrue.[10] A Harvard analysis found that 21 percent of Paxlovid recipients will remain contagious and likely succumb to a viral rebound compared to only 1.8 percent who did not take the drug.

Merck’s anti-Covid-19 drug molnupiravir (Lagevrio) also has an FDA black box warning for potential fetal harm when administered to pregnant women. Why the drug was ever approved under an EUA seems to be an enigma. The drug’s antiviral activity is based upon a metabolite known as NHC, which for many years has been known to create havoc in an enzyme crucial for viral replication by inserting errors into the virus’ genetic code. The theory is: produce enough errors and the virus kills itself off. However, molnupiravir can cause hundreds of mutations thereby “supercharging” the manufacturing of new Covid-19 viral strains. Moreover, according to a Forbes article, the drug’s mutagenic powers may also interfere with our own body’s enzymes and DNA.[11] Another Forbes article points out that Merck’s clinical trial only enrolled around 1,500 participants, which is far too “small to pick up on rare mutagenic events.”[12]

Molnupiravir has a poor efficacy rate across the board including viral clearance, recovery, and hospitalizations/death (68 percent).[13] One trial, funded by Merck, concluded the drug had no clinical benefit.[14] More worrisome, the drug also has life-threatening adverse effects including mutagenic risks to human DNA and mitochondria, carcinogenic activity and embryonic death.[15]

Each of these drugs have been outrageous cash cows for their manufacturers. Remdesivir is priced at $3,120 per treatment and earned Gilead $5.6 billion in sales for 2021.

Pfizer’s Paxlovid is priced at $1,390 per treatment. Last year, the company’s revenues for its Covid products—Paxlovid and the Comirnaty vaccine—came in at $12.5 billion, and, according to Fierce Pharma, Pfizer wrote off an additional $4.7 billion on its overstocked Paxlovid inventory.[16] Merck’s molnupiravir’s sales for 2022 cashed in almost $5.7 billion. Despite their profits, none of these drugs have been shown convincingly to have measurably lessened the pandemic nor the spread of SARS-CoV-2. 

Despite all the attention and medical hype about novel experimental antiviral drugs to treat Covid-19, Anthony Fauci and other federal officials had full knowledge that other FDA-approved drugs existed that could have been quickly repurposed at minimal expense to effectively treat Covid-19 infections. Repurposing existing drugs to treat illness is a common occurrence. The antiparasitic and antiviral drug Ivermectin best stands out. Its effectiveness was observed to be so remarkable and multifaceted that researchers started to investigate its potential.  

The mainstream media, including many liberal news sources who pride themselves on their independence, continue to channel the voices of Anthony Fauci, the CDC and FDA to demonize ivermectin and other generic drugs for treating Covid-19 and to reduce hospitalization and deaths. This propaganda campaign, however, has completely ignored the large body of medical literature that shows ivermectin’s statistically significant efficacy against symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-2 infections.

Originally developed for veterinarian use, in 1987, the FDA approved ivermectin for treating two parasitic diseases, river blindness and stronglyoidiasis, in humans. Since then an enormous body of medical research has grown showing ivermectin’s effectiveness for treating other diseases. Its broad range of antiviral properties has shown efficacy against many RNA viruses such avian influenza, zika, dengue, HIV, West Nile, yellow fever, chikungunya and earlier severe respiratory coronaviruses. It has also been shown to be effective against DNA viruses such as herpes, polyomavirus, and circovirus-2.[17]

Unsurprisingly, ivermectin’s inventors Drs. William Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

It has been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Given its decades’ long record of in vitro efficacy, it should have been self-evident for Fauci’s NIAID, the CDC and the WHO to rapidly conduct in vivo trials to usher ivermectin as a first line of defense for early stage Covid-19 infections and for use as a safe prophylaxis.

For example, if funding were devoted for the rapid development of a micro-based pulmonary delivery system, mortality rates would have been miniscule and the pandemic would have been lessened greatly.[18] Repurposing ivermectin could have been achieved very quickly at a minor expense.[19] However, despite all the medical evidence confirming ivermectin’s strong antiviral properties and its impeccable safety record when administered properly, we instead witnessed a sophisticated government-orchestrated campaign to declare war against ivermectin and another antiviral drug, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), in favor of far more expensive and EUA approved experimental drugs. Unlike the US, other nations were eager to find older drugs to repurpose against Covid-19 and protect their populations. A Johns Hopkins University analysis offered the theory that a reason why many African countries had very few to near zero Covid-19 fatalities was because of widespread deployment of ivermectin. In February 2020, the National Health Commission of China, for example, was the first to include hydroxychloroquine in its guidelines for treating mild, moderate and severe SARS-2 cases. Eight Latin American nations distribute home Covid-19 treatment kits that include ivermectin.[20] Why did the US and most European countries swayed by the US and the WHO fail to follow suit?

Early in the pandemic, physicians in other nations where treatment was less restricted, such as Spain and Italy, shared data with American physicians about effective treatments against the SARS-2 virus. In addition, there was a large corpus of medical research indicating that older antiviral drugs could be repurposed. Doctors who started to prescribe drugs such as ivermectin and HCQ, along with Vitamin D and zinc supplementation, observed remarkable results. Unlike the dismal recovery and high mortality rates reported in hospitals and large clinics that relied upon strict isolation, quarantine, and ventilator interventions, this small fringe group of physicians reported very few deaths among their large patient loads. Even reported deaths were more often than not compounded by patients’ comorbidities, poor medical facilities and other anomalies. 

Very early into the pandemic, medical papers indicated ivermectin was a highly effective drug to treat SARS-2 infections.

In April 2020, less than a month after the WHO declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic, Australian researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity published a paper demonstrating that a single ivermectin dose can control SARS-CoV-2 viral replication within 24-48 hours.[21] Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia had also published an early study that ivermectin destroyed SARS-2 infected cell cultures by 99.8 percent within 48 hours. But no American federal health official paid any attention.

As of March 2024, a database for all studies and trials investigating ivermectin against Covid-19 infections records a total of 248 studies, 195 peer-reviewed, and 102 involving controlled groups reporting an average 61 percent improvement for early infections, a 39 percent success rate in treating late infections, and an 85 percent average success rate for use as a preventative prophylaxis.[22] Moreover, prescribing ivermectin reduced mortality by 49 percent, compared to remdesivir’s 4 percent, Pfizer’s Paxlovid’s 31 percent, and molnupiravir’s 22 percent. Even hydroxychloroquine well outperforms these drugs mortality risk for early treatment at 66 percent. 

A noteworthy study conducted in Brazil and published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science prescribed ivermectin in a citywide prophylaxis program in a town of 223,000 residents. 133,000 took ivermectin. The results for a population of this size are indisputable in concluding that ivermectin is a safe first line of defense to confront the pandemic. Covid mortality was reduced 90 percent. There was also a 67 percent lower risk of hospitalization and a 44 percent decrease in Covid cases. Garcia-Aquilar et al reports a Mexican in vitro analysis showing a definitive interaction between ivermectin and the SAR-CoV-2 spike protein, which would account for its high efficacy in Covid-19 cases.[23]

The All India Institute for Medical Science (AIIMS) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), two of India’s most prestigious institutions, acted against the WHO and launched an ivermectin treatment campaign in several states. In Uttar Pradesh there was a 95 percent decrease in morality (a decline from 37,944 to 2,014). The Indian capital of New Delhi witnessed a 97 percent reduction. During the same time period, the state of Tamil Nadu, which followed the WHO’s ban on ivermectin, had a 173 percent increase in deaths (from 10,986 to 30,016 deaths).

There have been many concerted efforts to discredit ivermectin and other repurposed drugs’ effectiveness. Most notable is the large TOGETHER Trial Brazil study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that concluded both ivermectin and another repurposed drug fluvoxamine showed no beneficial signs for treating Covid-19 patients. The study was widely reported in the mainstream media. However, a Cato Institute analysis discovered the study in fact showed its benefits and the results were in agreement with 87 percent of other clinical trials investigating ivermectin. The Cato analysis identifies many odd anomalies in how the trial was conducted including an unspecified placebo—although it is suspected it was Vitamin C, which has itself been shown to be mildly effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and protocol changes as the study was underway including inclusion/exclusion criteria. By his own admission the TOGETHER Trial’s principal investigator Dr. Ed Mills at McMaster University in Ontario “designs clinical trials, predominantly for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”[24] In a McMaster University press release, the Gates foundation is listed as a funder for the study to debunk ivermectin and fluvoxamine.[25] Oddly, Gates is nowhere listed among the several funders in the NEJM study’s disclosure. In addition, TOGETHER Trials is owned by the Canadian for profit startup Purpose Life Sciences, founded by Mills; legal documents showed Mills’ PLS is largely funded and controlled by Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX who invested $53 million into the project. Administrators of FTX’s bankruptcy are suing PLS for fraud.[26]

In short, the ivermectin/fluvoxamine TOGETHER Trial was a complete medical sham and intentionally designed for one single purpose: to fuel media disinformation in order to undermine ivermectin’s superior efficacy and safety profile to Big Pharma’s more profitable designer drugs. 

In 2004, the US Congress passed an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act known as Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). This piece of legislature legalized an anti-regulatory pathway to allow experimental medical interventions to be expedited and bypass standard FDA safety evaluations in the event of bioterrorist threats and national health emergencies such as pandemics. At the time, passage of the EUA amendment made sense because it was partially in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks and the US’s entry into an age of international terrorism. However, the amendment raises some serious considerations. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, EUAs had only been authorized on four occasions: the 2005 avian H5N1 and 2009 H1N1 swine flu threats, the 2014 Ebola and the 2016 Zikra viruses. Each of these pathogen scares proved to be false alarms that posed no threat of pandemic proportions to Americans. The fifth time EUAs were invoked was in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, which at the time seemed far more plausible. 

Before the government can authorize an EUA to deploy an experimental diagnostic product, drug or vaccine, certain requirements must be fulfilled. First, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must have sufficient proof that the nation is being confronted with a serious life-threatening health emergency. Second, the drug(s) and/or vaccine(s) under consideration must have sufficient scientific evidence to suggest they will likely be effective against the medical threat. The evidence must at least include preclinical and observational data showing the product targets the organism, disease or condition. Third, although the drug or vaccine does not undergo a rigorous evaluation, it must at least show that its potential and known benefits outweigh its potential and known risks. In addition, the product must be manufactured in complete accordance with standard quality control and safety assurances. 

When we look back at the government’s many debacles during the Covid-19 pandemic, other EUA requirements warrant the spotlight. On the one hand, an EUA cannot be authorized for any product or intervention if there is an FDA alternative approved product already available, unless the experimental product is clearly proven to have a significant advantage. Moreover, and perhaps more important, EUAs demand informed consent. Every individual who receives the drug or vaccine must be thoroughly informed about its experimental status and its potential risks and benefits. Recipients must also be properly informed about the alternatives to the experimental product and nobody should be forced to take it.

Finally, an EUA requires robust safety monitoring and reporting of adverse events, injuries and deaths potentially due to the drug or vaccine. This is the responsibility not only of the private pharmaceutical manufacturers but also the FDA, physicians, hospitals, clinics and other healthcare professionals. 

Obviously important cautions must be considered after approving a medical intervention under the EUA requirements. Foremost are the inherent health risks of any rapid response of experimental medical interventions, especially novel drugs and vaccines. As we observed during the FDA approval process and roll out of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 jabs, no long-term human trials were conducted to even estimate a reliable baseline of their relative efficacy and safety. The American public has blindly placed its trust in our federal health authorities decision-making. It is expected that under a national health emergency, the authorities would be completely transparent and act only by the highest ethical standards. However our institutions betrayed public trust and either ignored or transgressed cautions underlying EUA approved medical interventions in every conceivable way. Moreover, conflicts of interests have been discovered to have plagued the entire EUA review process.  

Although the EUA amendment provides some protections to authorized drug and vaccine manufacturers, it was the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) in 2005 that expanded liability protections. In addition to protecting private corporations, PREP also shields company executives and employees from claims of personal injury or death resulting from the administration of authorized countermeasures. The only exceptions for liability are if the company or its executive offices are proven to have engaged in intentional and/or criminal misconduct with conscious disregard for the rights and safety of those taking their drugs and vaccines. 

During the pandemic, the FDA issued widespread EUAs with liability immunity for the PCR diagnostic kits for SARS-2, the mRNA vaccines and the anti-Covid-19 drugs. Curiously, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act on February 4, 2020 giving liability protections; this was over a month before the pandemic was officially announced, which raises serious questions about prior-planning before the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China. 

From the pandemic’s outset, Fauci embarked on the media circuit to promise Americans that federal health agencies were doing everything within their means to get a vaccine on the market because there was no available drug to clear the SARS-2 virus. As we have seen with respect to ivermectin alone, this was patently false. Rather the government placed an overriding emphasis on vaccination with a near total disregard for implementing very simple preventative measures to inhibit viral progression. Once mass vaccinations were underway, we were promised that the SARS-2 virus would be defeated and life would return to normal. In retrospect, we can look back and state with a degree of certainty that American health authorities and these products’ corporate manufacturers may have violated almost every EUA requirement. Everything that went wrong with the PCR kits, the experimental mRNA vaccines and novel drugs could have been avoided if the government had diligently repurposed effective and safe measures as pandemic countermeasures. Very likely, hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions, would have been saved. 

Similarly the FDA issued a warning statement against the use of ivermectin. Even ivermectin’s manufacturer Merck discredited its own product. Shortly after ridiculing its drug, the Alliance for Natural Health reported, “Merck announced positive results from a clinical trial on a new drug called molnupiravir in eliminating the virus in infected patients.”[27]

And still the FDA considers these novel patented drugs to be superior to ivermectin. Favoring a vaccine regime and government-controlled surveillance measures to track every American’s movements, American health officials blatantly neglected their own pandemic policies’ severe health consequences. Ineffective lockdowns, masks, social isolation, unsound critical care interventions such as relying upon ventilators, and the sole EUA approvals of the costly and insufficiently effective drugs brought about nightmares for tens of millions of adults and children. This was all undertaken under Fauci’s watch and the heads of the US health agencies in direct violation of the EUA requirements to only authorize drugs and medical interventions when no other safe and effective alternative is available. Alternatives were available.

The 4-year history of the pandemic highlights a sharp distinction between dependable medical research and pseudoscientific fraud. The CDC adopted a common Soviet era practice to redefine the very definition of a vaccine and the parameters of vaccine efficacy in order to fit economic and ideological agendas. This explains Washington’s aggressive public relations endeavors to silence medical opponents. According to cardiologist Dr. Michael Goodkin’s private investigations, several of the most cited studies discrediting ivermectin’s antiviral benefits were intentionally manipulated in order to produce “fake” results.[28] These studies were then widely distributed to the AMA, American College of Physicians and across mainstream media to author “hit pieces” to demonize ivermectin and other repurposed drugs. The government’s belligerent and reactive diatribes, brazenly or casually advocating for censorship, were direct violations of scientific and medical integrity and contributed nothing towards developing constructive policies for handling a pandemic with a minimal cost to life. The consequence has been a less informed and grossly naïve public, which was gaslighted into believing lies. 

The FDA’s EUAs for the Covid-19 vaccines and novel experimental drugs were in fact an attack on the amendments and PREP directives. Neither the vaccines nor drugs warranted emergency authorization because effective and safe alternatives were readily available. No doubt a Congressional investigation would uncover criminal misconduct and conscious fraud. Moreover, these violations of the PREP Act may have the potential to lead directly into medical crimes against humanity as outlined in the Nuremberg Code.

Although the Nuremberg Code has not been officially adopted in its entirety as law by any nation or major medical association, other international treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (which is not legally binding), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects incorporate some of Nuremberg’s main principles that aim to protect people from unethical and forced medical research. Although the US signed the ICCPR as an intentional party, the US Senate never ratified it. The ICCPR’s Article 7 clearly states, “No one shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” which can legally be interpreted to include forced medical experimentation implied as cruel, inhuman treatment. Other ICCPR articles, 6 and 17, are also applicable to medical experimentation to ensure ethical conduct, obtaining proper informed consent and the right to life and privacy. For a moment, consider the numerous senior citizens in nursing homes and hospitals who were simply administered experimental Covid-19 vaccines without full knowledge about what they were receiving. And now how many children are being coerced by the pseudoscience of health officials’ lies to be vaccinated without any knowledge of these mRNA products’ risk-benefit ratio?

The US is also a signatory to the Helsinki Declaration, which, although not directly aligned with Nuremberg, shares much in common. The Declaration shares some common features with the EUA amendment and PREP Act. These include voluntary informed consent—which is universally accepted, adequate risk and benefit information about medical interventions, and an emphasis on the principle of medical beneficence (promoting well-being and the Hippocratic rule of doing no harm). It also guarantees protections for vulnerable groups, especially pregnant women and children, which the US government and vaccine makers directly violated by conducting trials on these groups with full knowledge about these vaccines’ adverse events in adults. In addition, weighing the scientific evidence to assess the risk-benefit ratios between prescribing ivermectin and HCQ over the new generation of novel experimental drugs conclusively favors the former. This alone directly violates the ethical medical principles noted above. 

However, the failure to repurpose life-saving drugs is less criminal than the questionable unethical motivations to usher a new generation of genetically engineered vaccines that have never before been adequately researched in human trials for long term safety. This mass experimentation, which continues to threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, is global and can legally be interpreted as a genocidal attack on humanity.

If the emerging data for increasing injuries and deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccines is reliable—and we believe it is—the handling of the pandemic can be regarded as the largest medical crime in human history. In time, and with shifting political allegiances and public demands to hold our leaders in government and private industry accountable, the architects of this medical war against civilization will be brought to justice. 

*

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow.

Notes

[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/29/dr-anthony-fauci-ivermectin-covid-19-sotu-vpx.cnn

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-24/the-world-needs-effective-covid-drugs-as-ivermectin-persists

[3] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/very-very-bad-look-remdesivir-first-fda-approved-covid-19-drug

[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext

[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/dr-anthony-fauci-says-data-from-remdesivir-coronavirus-drug-trial-shows-quite-good-news.html

[6] https://www.dldjournalonline.com/article/S1590-8658(21)00923-3/fulltext

[7] https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2023/12290/the_association_between_covid_19_vaccination_and.45.aspx

[8] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-6065%25252823%25252900012-3

[9] https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/drugs/ritonavir/patient

[10] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/13-things-to-know-paxlovid-covid-19

[11] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/01/supercharging-new-viral-variants-the-dangers-of-molnupiravir-part-1/

[12] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/02/harming-those-who-receive-it-the-dangers-of-molnupiravir-part-2

[13] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.20.23284849v1.full.pdf

[14] https://evidence.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/EVIDoa2100044

[15] https://c19early.org/waters.html

[16] https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-gets-walloped-56b-write-down-covid-sales-continue-disappoint

[17] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7290143/

[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/

[19] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7564151/

[20] https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/8-latin-american-governments-distributed-ivermectin-sans-evidence-to-treat-covid

[21] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7129059/

[22] https://c19ivermectin.com

[23] https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/22/16392

[24] https://empendium.com/mcmtextbook/interviews/perspective/236226,covid-19-to-treat-or-not-to-treat-platform-trials

[25] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/855535

[26] https://c19ivm.org/tallaksen.html

[27] https://anh-usa.org/fda-ensures-pharma-profits-on-covid/

[28] https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/are-major-ivermectin-studies-designed-for-failure

April 6, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel takes dangerous step in the conflict by attacking Iranian diplomats

By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 5, 2024

Attacking embassies, consulates and diplomatic personnel is an intolerable crime under international law. The inviolability of diplomatic buildings is a global principle that enables the elementary conditions necessary for international relations. Even in situations of total war and high-intensity conflicts, respect for diplomacy must be observed by the belligerent sides to prevent even worse escalations of violence from occurring.

Israel, however, appears unwilling to respect any international norm. Recently, the Zionist State bombed an Iranian diplomatic building, close to the Iranian Embassy in Damascus. At least seven Iranian citizens were murdered in the operation, including diplomats and a senior Revolutionary Guard commander. As expected, Tehran has promised retaliation and is already mobilizing its military forces for a possible conflict situation.

In fact, the act of bombing diplomatic installations can be considered terrorism, as it deliberately aims to kill civilians, without any military objective. As we know, attacks against civilians have become increasingly frequent in the Zionist war strategy. The Israeli regime simply appears to see all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as legitimate targets, which leads the IDF to destroy all of the city’s civilian infrastructure and generate an ever-increasing number of non-military casualties among local residents.

However, it appears that Israel is also expanding its attacks on civilian targets to the international level. The destruction of one of the buildings of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus was certainly one of the most serious moves ever made in the current conflict. To make matters worse, Israeli officials have promised to carry out more attacks against Iranian and Shiite public figures, regardless of where they are located. Apparently, from now on Tel Aviv will openly adopt a rhetoric of “hunting” against Iranians.

Obviously, this situation will only generate more escalations. Israel is accustomed to attacking targets with little power to react, such as the stateless Palestinians or Syria, which is recovering from a brutal civil war. Iran, however, is a country in a different position. Tehran is the largest military power in the Middle East, having impressive weapons production and combat mobilization capabilities. The country controls the production of the main current military equipment, with modern long-range missiles and drones among its main tools of war.

Furthermore, Iran has more than only its military and Revolutionary Guard, controlling a complex network of anti-Zionist movements across the Middle East – the so-called “Axis of Resistance”. Armed organizations such as Hezbollah, the Iraqi Resistance, Syrian Shiite militias, the Houthis and the Palestinian guerrillas themselves are members of the Axis and are willing to fight a war in favor of Iran at any time. Even if Israel strives to destroy targets linked to regular Iranian forces, it will be difficult to neutralize the top leaders of all these organizations at the same time.

An open war between Iran and Israel would be catastrophic for the region from all points of view. Analyzing the military power of both countries, it is possible to say that Israel is militarily weaker. However, Tel Aviv has nuclear weapons. The possibility that Iran also has such weapons cannot be ruled out, but at least publicly there is no information to prove this. What is known, however, is that the Iranians already have full uranium enrichment capacity and control the industrial process that could lead to the production of an atomic bomb.

In a war scenario, Iran would also be favored by its complex geography. As a large country and with mountains that protect some of its important cities and industrial centers, Iran is less vulnerable to collapse in the face of foreign incursions than Israel. Furthermore, Tehran would mobilize the Axis of Resistance militias to attack Israel on several flanks, quickly making the Zionist state unable to fight given the existence of multiple fronts. In this scenario, Israel would be forced to choose between two fates: surrender or the use of its extreme arsenal.

However, history shows us that Iran has a great capacity to achieve military objectives without generating collateral damage. The country is used to asymmetric warfare, responding with patience and high precision to the provocations suffered, without escalating the regional situation into total war. Tehran will certainly do its best to retaliate against Israel without a formal declaration of war. It is possible that there will be more Axis of Resistance attacks against occupation forces in the coming days, just as it is possible that Israeli and American targets will be destroyed in high-precision raids.

It is not yet certain that there will be an open war, but it is absolutely clear that there will be a serious escalation. Israel is making a serious mistake by thinking that it will go unpunished after attacking the greatest military power in the Middle East.

You can follow Lucas on X and Telegram.

April 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

New Report: Killing starving Palestinians, targeting aid trucks is deliberate Israeli policy to reinforce famine

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor | April 3, 2024

Palestinian Territory – A new Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report titled “Killing starving Palestinians and targeting aid trucks: A deliberate Israeli policy to reinforce famine in the Gaza Strip” reveals the killing of 563 Palestinians and the injury of 1,523 more due to Israel’s targeting of people waiting for aid, distribution centres, and workers responsible for organising, protecting, and distributing aid.

According to the report, between 11 January and 23 March 2024, 256 people were killed in the Kuwait Roundabout area, in the southeast of Gaza City, 230 on Al-Rashid Street, in the southwest of the city, and 21 due to the targeting of aid distribution centres. Documentation also shows that 41 police officers and People’s Protection Committee members who were in charge of overseeing aid distribution were killed, along with 12 aid distribution workers, two of whom were from UNRWA.

The report concludes that Israel’s policies, and the collective punishments it imposes on the Gaza Strip, directly and explicitly aim to starve the Strip’s entire Palestinian population. Israel’s policy of deliberate starvation is not only an attempt to ethnically cleanse the enclave and apparent weapon of war—a war crime in itself—but is intended to expose Palestinian civilians to the risk of actual death. These actions are a crucial component of the genocide that Israel has been committing against the people of the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023.

The use of starvation as a weapon has been an official political decision from the first day of the war, as declared by the Israeli Minister of Defense, and was implemented in integrated stages, which have included tightening the siege and closing the border crossings; preventing the entry of commercial goods; destroying all components of local production and food sources; increasing the Gaza Strip population’s reliance on humanitarian aid; and turning it into their main source of food.

Israel has been a major obstacle to humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip, targeting aid in storage and distribution facilities as well as on trucks. It has also targeted people waiting for the aid and those in charge of distributing it. All of these actions have been taken on a regular and severe basis.

This has prevented the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from receiving aid, even just to the extent necessary to satiate their hunger or reduce their risk of dying from it.

Additionally, Israel’s targeting of personnel involved in overseeing and securing aid distribution, along with its refusal to cooperate with international organizations, has led to a persistent state of chaos and internal conflict. These actions, coupled with Israel’s attempts to dissolve UNRWA, the primary international organization responsible for introducing and distributing humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, have exacerbated the situation, further deepening the famine in the Strip.

The report states that while Israel has permitted some aid to enter the Strip, it has placed restrictions on the amount of aid, kind of aid, and locations of entry, and has targeted starving civilians waiting for humanitarian aid and those working to distribute, secure, and protect it.

According to the report, Israel also uses starvation, aid restrictions, and the killing of hungry individuals as part of its forced displacement crime against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, especially the northern Gaza Strip. As a result, famine has spread throughout northern Gaza, where nearly all food supplies have run out in the markets, resulting in a rise in the number of fatalities from starvation, malnourishment, dehydration, and related illnesses, particularly among children and infants.

In the midst of intense attacks, raids, and bombardment across the air, land, and sea—during which Israel’s army has used thousands of tons of explosives—the Israeli army methodically started targeting every aspect of life in the Gaza Strip and has not stopped. This includes bombing mills, bakeries, grocery stores, shops, and markets; destroying crops and agricultural lands; killing livestock; and targeting boats and fishing equipment, water tanks, and their extensions; i.e. completely denying access to food resources and potable water to all 2.3 million residents of the Strip, half of whom are children, and depriving them of their already limited ability to produce food locally. This comes amid a complete closure of the border crossings, which were closed for weeks before being partially reopened under harsh Israeli conditions on 21 October following the application of international pressure.

The report includes seven parts: The first deals with the number of humanitarian aid convoy victims, while the second reviews the most prominent crimes involving the targeting of starving civilians waiting for humanitarian aid. The third examines the Israeli targeting of humanitarian aid distribution centres, while the fourth sheds light on crimes related to targeting humanitarian aid convoys. The fifth deals with the targeting of workers distributing humanitarian aid, the sixth sheds light on the targeting of those responsible for securing and protecting humanitarian aid, and the seventh deals with Israel’s attempts to evade responsibility for the massacres. The report also presents a set of conclusions and recommendations.

Euro-Med Monitor’s report concludes by highlighting the significance of facilitating the entry of necessary humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip without delay in order to stop the famine from spreading there. It stresses that Israel, as the occupying power, bears the primary responsibility for supplying food, medical supplies, and other necessities to the Strip’s residents in accordance with international law.

The report also urges the international community to fulfill its legal and moral obligations to the people residing in the Gaza Strip, ensuring that international law, as well as the rulings of the International Court of Justice, are respected and implemented, and to halt the genocide that the Court declared likely to have occurred in Gaza in January, which has been ongoing for nearly six months. It calls for immediate international pressure to be put on Israel to stop its starvation campaign against the people of the Strip, the complete lifting of the siege on the Strip, and the establishment of appropriate mechanisms to ensure the safe, effective, and rapid arrival of humanitarian supplies.

The report also demands the opening of an independent investigation into the killing of starving people, especially the horrifying massacres which Israel has tried to evade responsibility for.

​Full report here

April 5, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

201 Russian civilians killed by Ukraine in 2024

RT | April 5, 2024

Indiscriminate Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory have killed more than 200 civilians, including almost a dozen children, since the start of 2024, with hundreds of others injured, a senior Foreign Ministry official has said.

Speaking at a media briefing on Friday, Moscow’s ambassador-at-large for Ukraine’s crimes, Rodion Miroshnik, said that data gathered by Russian authorities indicated that Kiev’s strikes resulted in 922 civilian casualties between January 1 and March 31, 2024. “Of this number, 721 people were injured. 201 civilians were killed,” he stated.

There have also been 59 casualties among Russian children, the diplomat continued, adding that 11 of them were killed. The youngest of them was only four months old, Miroshnik said.

Between early January and late March, Kiev has fired at least 22,000 rounds of ammunition – most of which was supplied by the West – at Russian civilian facilities, the diplomat said. “It is almost 250 shells a day, or ten shells an hour.”

Miroshnik also said that the spike in Kiev’s attacks directly correlated with its defeats on the battlefield. Meanwhile, he added, Ukraine’s Western backers are choosing to “turn a blind eye” to the use of their weapons against facilities that enjoy protection under international law.

Ukrainian forces have for months been launching artillery, drone, and rocket strikes on Russian border regions, with officials in Kiev insisting that they should be stepped up to demoralize the country’s population.

One of the deadliest attacks on Russian territory came in late December when a Ukrainian barrage on Belgorod killed 25 people and left more than 100 wounded. Another major strike on the city in February left seven more people dead.

The conflict has also claimed numerous civilian lives in other Russian regions. According to official data, as of September 2023, a total of 4,703 civilians were killed in Donetsk Region since the start of large-scale hostilities in February 2022. Meanwhile, at least 65 civilians were killed in neighboring Lugansk Region in 2023, according to official data as of October.

Both Lugansk and Donetsk regions have been under constant Ukrainian shelling since 2014, when hostilities first erupted in the area after a Western-backed coup in Kiev. Both territories, along with two other former Ukrainian regions, overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in the autumn of 2022.

April 5, 2024 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Time to talk about US role in aiding terrorism

By Uriel Araujo | April 5, 2024

Peter Smith, Lucas Webber, and Colin P. Clarke, writing for The Diplomat, argue that ISIS and ISKP terrorist groups “have viewed Moscow as their enemy since the group’s inception” largely due to the Kremlin’s role in Syria. I recently wrote about the Russian role in fighting terrorism in the Levant and Central Asia, and much is being (finally) said about that in the aftermath of the violent Crocus City Hall terror attack near Moscow. It is about time, however, to talk about the hypocrisy pertaining to Washington’s role in Syria and elsewhere and in the evolution of ISIS itself and Islamic terrorism in general.

It may be a politically incorrect truth, but the fact remains that Hezbollah as well as Iranian and Russian forces have been playing a major role in fighting ISIS in Syria for over a decade as well as in guaranteeing the safety of Christians and other minorities in a region where Wahhabi extremists were beheading, enslaving and kidnapping them. Meanwhile, American military aid to insurgents in Syria is a well established fact.

It so happens the weapons provided by Washington to rebels there “ended up” in ISIS hands, according to more than one Amnesty Report. It could be just a coincidence, but, in fact, it is not far-fetched at all to say the United States played a key role in the evolution of ISIS both in Iraq and Syria – and much has been written on it. In any case, this is far from being the only instance of the world’s Atlantic superpower sponsoring terrorism – mayhem and civil war. Already in 1991, Graham H. Stuart, who was Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Stanford University, wrote on how the terrorism of the American enemies even paled in comparison to Western sponsored terror. This remains true to  this day. The case of Libya is emblematic in this regard and it is worth having a look at it.

One may recall that, after seeing reports of Gaddafi’s capture and brutal assassination on her Blackberry device in between interviews, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said, while cheering, “We came, we saw, he died” – paraphrasing Julius Cesar’s “Veni; vidi; vici” (“I came; I saw; I conquered”). She had been in Tripoli (Libya) earlier that same week for talks with Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) leaders. The reporter then asked her whether the Libyan leader’s death had anything to do with Clinton’s surprise visit to the country. She firstly replied “no”, but then added with a chuckle while rolling her eyes, “I’m sure it did!”

The Roman statesman and general, according to Appian of Alexandria, used the aforementioned phrase to report to the Roman Senate his swift victory in the war against  Pharnaces II of Pontus in modern-day Turkey. Clinton’s paraphrasing of it in turn was basically a top US official cheering the obscene assassination of a sovereign country’s head of state by the hand of American proxy terrorist bandits in Libya. These rebels stripped and tortured the deposed leader and joyfully filmed it before killing him. A video appallingly shows the man being stabbed or poked in the anus with what appears to be a stick or a bayonet, which ensued a scandal throughout the country. The rotting body, later placed in an industrial freezer, was publicly displayed for days by the rebel authorities.

Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called for an independent autopsy and investigation, to no avail. Whether one likes or not Gadaffi and his authoritarian rule, the hard fact is that slavery has literally made a comeback in post-Gaddafi Libya, with Black Africans being sold as slaves in open markets. The American-aided “spring” basically turned Libya into a ruined nation – Gaddafi’s Libya was no paradise, but one should keep in mind that the country for years had the highest Human Development Index in Africa before the civil war, and boasted of significant gender equality.

I’ve written before on the hydropolitics of the American intervention in Libya and the NATO bombing of the “Great Man-Made River” project. Besides dropping bombs on over 100 targets in Libya, together with France and its other NATO allies (which resulted in the deaths of civilians, including babies), Washinton provided covert military assistance to the rebels who toppled Gaddafi, despite the presence of Al-Qaeda and other terror groups amongst them. Sometimes it was not so covert: an American Predator drone took part in the airstrike in Muammar Gaddafi’s convey just moments before his death, and the whole matter was hailed by Washington and enthusiasts as a “new kind of US foreign policy success”, with an unnamed US official describing such policy as “leading from behind”. According to former CIA officer Bruce Riedel: “There is no question that al Qaeda’s Libyan franchise, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, is a part of the opposition. It has always been Qaddafi’s biggest enemy and its stronghold is Benghazi.”

It is no wonder ISIS-Libya (ISIS-L) emerged in the aftermath of the country’s civil war and is active there to this day. One group of Liybians who had fought against Gaddafi went to Syria to join the anti-government rebels there, by forming the Battar Brigade in 2012, which later pledged its loyalty to US-aided ISIS. Many Battar Brigade veterans then returned to Libya in 2014, to create the  Islamic Youth Shura Council faction.

To sum it up, time and time again one will encounter Washington authorities directly or indirectly involved in the aiding and arming of the most vicious terrorist groups in North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, as admitted by US top officials themselves. It is part of the core of its foreign policy. And it is about time to stop pretending it isn’t.

April 5, 2024 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

More Deaths in Gaza

Lies and deception by Joe Biden to cover-up Israel’s war crimes must end

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 4, 2024

You know that the Administration of President Joe Biden has reached a new low when it takes the initiative to lie for Israel even when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is accepting some blame for the targeted killing of six foreign national aid workers and a Palestinian translator belonging to Chef Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen humanitarian “feed the hungry” charitable organization. Bear in mind that that the Israeli army has killed without any regrets expressed at least 196 aid and relief workers in its onslaught on all living creatures located in Gaza, as well as nearly every journalist that crosses its path and doctors and medical staff in hospitals attempting to save lives and treat the injured and dying. On this rare occasion, however, Netanyahu realized that the calculated way in which the predominantly foreign victims had been killed with three separate drone strikes directed against three well-marked and easily identifiable World Central Kitchen vehicles following a route pre-approved and declared to be safe by the Israeli army itself would heighten the already legitimate extreme loathing of the Jewish state and all its works worldwide. Make no mistake these seven workers were deliberately targeted, hunted down and murdered. And it was no accident or a case of poor communications as this was all carried out by an Israeli military unit under the direct control of senior officers in a bid to hasten the starvation of the Palestinian population by driving away relief organizations.

Not surprisingly, this disdain for Israeli behavior is even surging in the United States, where polls measuring dislike for Israel’s actions continue to rise and, as Netanyahu knows, total unblinking support from a Biden or a Trump is essential for furtherance of his Palestinian-genocide agenda, a program that also requires a steady stream of dollars and weapons to carry out. Joe Biden, who reportedly is angry with Netanyahyu, only last Sunday, the day before the incident, approved a $15 billion package of new weapons for Israel, including 25 F-35 fighter jets, and additionally the highly controversial 2,000-pound bombs which have been known to kill indiscriminately in Gaza when deployed by the Israeli air force. As has been true over the past six months, the White House acted unilaterally and did not clear the transfer through congressional review, as required by law, claiming that it was an emergency as good friend and close[est] ally Israel urgently needs the weapons.

President Biden apparently did realize that the deaths in Gaza, which made him feel “outraged and heartbroken,” following so soon on the recently concluded siege and devastation of the last remaining major hospital in the enclave Al-Shifa, might be a political problem for him. Preliminary reports from the hospital, which was completely destroyed, suggest that over 1,500 Palestinians may have been killed, injured, or are reported missing as a result of the massacre. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller nevertheless asserted that the slaughter at the medical center was legitimate as “There were Hamas fighters hiding in Al-Shifa Hospital. Do not believe that this attack was on the hospital. The attack was on the Hamas fighters that are hiding inside a hospital.” Other Administration figures have claimed that the deaths in both the hospital and among the aid workers were not “deliberate,” which is, of course a lie as it was orders through the Israeli chain of command that initiated the killing in both instances. White House spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre also added her profound but utterly predictable insights into who was to blame, “So look, Hamas should not be operating out of hospitals, we have said that over and over again, and putting civilians at risk.”

And to be sure, while destroying the hospital was an exciting change of pace for the world’s “most moral army” as its snipers summarily executed doctors and patients, as it picked off children looking for food when they crossed into unposted “kill zones,” and as its engineers used bulldozers to bury alive prisoners who were shackled and could not move, it did represent a problem vis-à-vis the international perception of Israel. So Netanyahu, understanding that a little fence mending was in order for PR reasons, quickly admitted that there had been something of a “mistake” made leading to the killing of the seven aid workers which was “tragic” while the army itself is engaged in a desperate cover-up, describing the incident, as a “grave mistake… that followed a misidentification, at night, during the war, in a very complex condition. It shouldn’t have happened.” Per Netanyahu’s official statement on the incident “This happens in war. We are conducting a thorough inquiry and are in contact with the governments. We will do everything to prevent a recurrence.”

National Security Adviser John Kirby, who has taken on the role of chief liar for the Biden regime, was “outraged” by the deaths while adding that “this incident is emblematic of a larger problem,” though he failed to describe just what that problem might be apart from the fact that Israel likes to kill people, including or perhaps particularly foreign charity workers as the clear intention is to let the Palestinians starve to death. Kirby also repeated the lie that the murders by Israel were “not deliberate” and insisted there would be no cutting back on aid to Israel in spite of the mishap, observing that the US would continue to support the Israel military as it has since Hamas “started the war” through its attacks last October. “They’re still under a viable threat of Hamas. We’re still going to make sure they can defend themselves and the 7th of October doesn’t happen again.” Admiral John stopped just short of “let’s kill them all so they will never do anything naughty again”, but fortunately there are some Republicans standing around willing to take up John’s call to arms more literally.

I have noted previously that it is the Republicans who are seeking to become Israel’s new best friends largely in hopes of diverting their way the many millions of dollars that Jewish donors will likely be spending on the upcoming national elections. Leading Jewish groups headed by no less than the formidable and untouchable American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) are already well advanced on raising hundreds of millions of dollars as a war chest to defeat any and all congressional candidates who are soft or critical on the issue of Israel. In the 2020 congressional election AIPAC boasted how it had endorsed and supported through its Super PAC 198 House and Senate candidates, including 131 incumbents, all of whom won reelection.

Republican Congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan takes the prize for echoing the calls being made by some Israeli politicians to use nuclear weapons on the Palestinians, though he is now claiming that that was not his intent. He said “I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to defeat Hamas and Iran and Russia, and probably North Korea’s in there, and China, too, with them helping Hamas — we shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick. The same should be in Ukraine. Defeat Putin quick.” First of all, anyone who calls Israel “our greatest ally” is an idiot since it is actually our greatest liability, unless Walberg is referring to the apparent mutually supportive relationship to carry out the genocide of entire nations that we dislike. One has to wonder who the Democrats put up to run against someone like Walberg who apparently does not have two brain cells to rub together.

Another Republican Congressman Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee has put it more bluntly by calling on Israel to “… kill them all… Everybody in Hamas,” while others including Donald Trump have urged the Israeli government to “finish the job.” And then there is GOP Senator Rick Scott of Florida who said on Sunday that it is imperative that Israel goes into Rafah to “destroy” the Palestinian militant group Hamas. “Number one, [Israel] needs American support; they have to go into Rafah to destroy Hamas,” Scott said during a completely predictable interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Scott, who is being spoken of as a possible GOP vice presidential candidate, has just returned from a trip to Israel, where he met with Israeli Netanyahu and assured him of unlimited US support in his war to get rid of the 1.5 million or so pesky Palestinians starving and awaiting their fate in Gaza.

But my prize for Congress’s ugliest critter in the metaphorical sense has to go to Brian Mast of Florida who recently appeared in the Congressional Office Buildings wearing his Israeli army uniform. He represents a heavily Jewish district in Florida – whose governor Ron DeSantis has boasted to be the most pro-Israel state in the US. He explained his gesture on Twitter, writing that “As the only member to serve with both the United States Army and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), I will always stand with Israel.” Interestingly, one might interpret “always stand with Israel” as including when it is contrary to US interests. Mast reportedly served in the US Army in Afghanistan and then did a tour as a volunteer with the IDF. He is believed to be a Christian Zionist and some have wondered how he got a security clearance, but hey when something like 70% of the top-level folks in the Biden Cabinet are Jewish and many are suspected of having dual loyalty or perhaps singular loyalty to Israel, who’s asking?

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.

April 4, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment