I am thinking of a certain industry. See if you can guess what it is.
This industry is huge, constituting a large portion of the nation’s GDP. Millions of people earn their living through it, directly or indirectly. The people at the top of this industry (who operate mostly behind the scenes, of course) are among the super-rich. This industry’s corporations lobby the nation’s government relentlessly, to the tune of billions of dollars per year, both to secure lucrative contracts and to influence national policy in their favor. This investment pays off richly, sometimes reaching trillions of dollars.
The corporations supplying this industry with its materiel conduct advanced, highly technical research that is far beyond the understanding of the average citizen. The citizens fund this research, however, through tax dollars. Unbeknownst to them, many of the profits gained from the products developed using tax dollars are kept by the corporations’ executives and investors.
This industry addresses fundamental, life-or-death issues facing the nation. As such, it relentlessly promotes itself as a global force for good, claiming to protect and save countless lives. However, it kills a lot of people too, and the balance is not always a favorable one.
The operational side of this industry is emphatically top-down in its structure and function. Those who work at the ground level must undergo rigorous training that standardizes their attitudes and behavior. They must follow strict codes of practice, and they are subject to harsh professional discipline if they deviate from accepted policies and procedures, or even if they publicly question them.
Finally, these ground-level personnel are handled in a peculiar manner. Publicly, they are frequently lauded as heroes, particularly under declared periods of crisis. Privately, they are kept completely in the dark regarding high-level industry decisions, and they are often lied to outright by those at higher levels of command. The “grunts” even significantly forfeit some fundamental civil liberties for the privilege of working in the industry.
What industry am I describing?
If you answered, “the military,” of course you would be correct. However, if you answered “the medical industry,” you would be every bit as right.
In President Eisenhower’s farewell speech of January 17, 1961, he stated that “…in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Sixty-three years on, many Americans understand what he was referring to.
They see the endless cycle of undeclared wars and decades-long foreign occupations that are undertaken on nebulous or even outright false pretenses. They see the ever-hungry mega-industry that produces super-expensive, high-tech killing devices of every imaginable form, as well as the steady stream of traumatized soldiers that it spits out. War (or, if you prefer its Orwellian nickname, “defense”) is big business. And as Eisenhower warned, as long as those profiting from it drive the policy and the money stream, it will not only continue, it will continue to grow.
Other mega-industries – the medical industry in particular – have generally fared better in public perception than the military-industrial complex. Then came Covid.
Among its many harsh lessons, Covid has taught us this: if you substitute Pfizer and Moderna for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and swap the NIH and CDC for the Pentagon, you get the same result. The “medical-industrial complex” is every bit as real as its military-industrial counterpart, and it is every bit as real a problem.
As a physician, I am embarrassed to admit that until Covid, I possessed only an inkling that this was so – or more accurately, I knew it, but didn’t realize how bad it was, and I didn’t worry about it too much. Sure (I thought), Pharma engaged in dishonest practices, but we’d known that for decades, and after all, they do make some effective drugs. Yes, physicians were increasingly becoming employees, and protocols were dictating care more and more, but the profession still seemed manageable. True, healthcare was far too expensive (gobbling up a reported 18.3 percent of the US GDP in 2021), but healthcare is inherently expensive. And after all, we’re saving lives.
Until we weren’t.
By early-to-mid 2020, it became obvious to those paying attention that the Covid “response,” while promoted as a medical initiative, was in fact a military operation. Martial law had effectively been declared approximately on the Ides of March 2020, after President Trump was mysteriously convinced to cede the Covid response (and practically speaking, control of the nation) to the National Security Council. Civil liberties – freedom of assembly, worship, the right to travel, to earn one’s living, to pursue one’s education, to obtain legal relief – were rendered null and void.
Top-down diktats on how to manage Covid patients were handed down to physicians from high above, and these were enforced with a militaristic rigidity unseen in doctors’ professional lifetimes. The mandated protocols made no sense. They ignored fundamental tenets of both sound medical practice and medical ethics. They shamelessly lied about well-known, tried-and-true medicines that were known to be safe and appeared to work. The protocols killed people.
Those physicians and other professionals who spoke out were effectively court-martialed. State medical boards, specialty certification boards, and large healthcare system employers virtually tripped over each other in the rush to delicense, decertify, and fire dissenters. Genuine, courageous physicians who actually treat patients, such as Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Scott Jensen, Simone Gold, and others, were persecuted, while non-practicing bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci were hailed with false titles like “America’s Top Doctor.” The propaganda was as nauseating as it was blatant. And then came the jabs.
How did this happen to medicine?
It all seemed so sudden, but in fact it has been in the works for years.
Covid taught us (by the way, Covid has been such a harsh tutor, but haven’t we learned so much from her!) that the medical-industrial complex and military-industrial complex are deeply connected. They are not just twins, or even identical twins. They are conjoined twins, and so-called “Public Health” is the tissue shared between them.
The SARS CoV-2 virus, after all, is a bioweapon, developed over a period of years, funded by US tax dollars in a joint effort between Fauci’s NIH and the Department of Defense to genetically manipulate the transmissibility and virulence of coronaviruses (all done in the name of “Public Health,” of course).
Once the bioweapon was out of the lab and into the population, the race was on within the medical-industrial complex to develop and market the supremely profitable antidote to the bioweapon. Cue the full-on military takeover of medicine: the martial law lockdowns, the suppression of cheap and effective treatments, the persecution of dissidents, the ceaseless propaganda and anti-science, and the unabashed whoring of most hospital systems for CARES Act money.
We know the rest. The ill-conceived, toxic, gene-therapy antidote, falsely billed as a “vaccine,” was foisted upon the population by blackmail (“the vaccine is how we end the pandemic”), the effective bribery of medical authorities and politicians, as well as other Deep-State directed psyops designed to divide the population and scapegoat dissenters (“pandemic of the unvaccinated”).
The end result even sounds like the aftermath of a gigantic military operation. Millions are dead, many millions more are psychologically traumatized, economies are in tatters, and a few warmongers are fantastically rich. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel (who, incidentally, oversaw the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology years ago) is a freshly minted billionaire. And not one of those who caused all the mischief are in prison.
At this writing, virtually all the major healthcare systems, specialty regulatory boards, specialty associations, and medical schools are standing at attention, still in lockstep with the received – and by now, clearly false – narrative. Their funding, after all, be it from Pharma or the Government, depends upon their obedience. Barring dramatic change, they will respond in the same fashion when orders come down from above in the future. Medicine has been fully militarized.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower said something else that I believe is most prescient here. He described that a military-industrial complex fostered “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”
Enter Disease X.
C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
January 31, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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The Israeli military granted CNN a three-hour tour inside the Gaza Strip to view the destruction of Palestinian cemeteries. The outlet explained that the evidence presented by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) did not confirm Tel Aviv’s claims about tunnels under the graveyard. Across Gaza, Israel has damaged over a dozen cemeteries.
An IDF general gave CNN’s Jeremy Diamond a guided tour of the Bani Suheila cemetery. Israel claimed it needed to dig up the bodies buried at the graveyard because a Hamas tunnel ran under it. However, the IDF was not able to show CNN evidence supporting that claim.
Diamond explained the evidence presented by the IDF actually suggested that there was no tunnel beneath the cemetery. The IDF invited Diamond into Gaza after he reported that the Israeli military operations in Gaza had damaged 16 Gazan cemeteries. Palestinian officials report that 2,000 graves in the Strip have been damaged or destroyed by the Israeli military.
Janina Dill, co-director at Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told CNN that the desecration of burial sites could be evidence of genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled last week it was plausible that Israel was committing a genocide against Palestinians.
Throughout the Israeli war on Gaza, Tel Aviv has attempted to justify destroying civilian infrastructure by claiming below the buildings, Hamas has dug tunnels. Similar to the Bani Suheila cemetery, the IDF has been unable to produce conclusive evidence that the tunnel networks existed.
Still, Washington has not condemned the destruction of hospitals, cemeteries, and universities. The White House has even repeated Israel’s unproven claims regarding the tunnels. President Joe Biden backed the assertion that the Shifa Hospital was above a Hamas headquarters. Additionally, State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller suggested the IDF conducted a controlled demolition of Israa University in Gaza because a tunnel was under the building.
January 31, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said the Israeli occupation refuses to disclose any information about detainees taken from Gaza, Quds Press reported.
In a statement issued yesterday, the rights group said the Israeli occupation is carrying out “the crime of enforced disappearance” against Gaza detainees, following a number of military orders and laws specifically enacted for them.
The Israeli Knesset has recently ratified regulations depriving “Gaza detainees” of meeting with a lawyer for another four months.
Images from Gaza show Palestinian men being rounded up from shelters, stripped to their underwear and made to wait in the cold while naked and blindfolded. They are later seen being taken away on trucks to undisclosed locations.
Those who have been released bear signs of torture, exhaustion and malnourishment.
January 31, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Iran says the world public opinion is witnessing the moral decline and collapse of the West in the Gaza Strip after the discovery of tens of decomposing bodies of blindfolded Palestinians dumped inside a schoolyard in the northern besieged territory.
“The bodies of many Palestinian civilians have been discovered among the debris and garbage in northern Gaza, where the Israeli occupation forces tied their hands and eyes and then executed them,” Spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry Nasser Kan’ani wrote in a post published on X, formerly known as X, on Wednesday.
In the poignant tableau of Gaza, the global audience bears witness to the decline and moral collapse of the West, the Iranian diplomat pointed out.
Palestinian media outlets reported that the bodies of at least 30 Palestinians were discovered at the grounds of the Khalifa bin Zayed elementary school in Beit Lahia after Israeli forces withdrew from the area.
The bodies were reportedly discovered under a mound of rubble with videos showing several of the body bags tied with white plastic zip ties, normally used for tying cables together.
It remains unclear when the Palestinians were killed; but the school had served as a shelter for thousands of displaced Palestinians before it was bombed and besieged by Israeli forces in early December.
Hamas urges rights groups to document execution of blindfolded Palestinians
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has called on international human rights organizations “to document the horrific crime” of killing of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinians in Beit Lahia.
It said in a statement that the discovery attests to a massacre against civilians as the victims were killed in execution-style after being tortured.
The Gaza-based group further noted that Israel is continuing to “exterminate” Palestinian people in defiance of the decisions of the International Court of Justice, “which demanded that they stop the crime of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
Palestinian foreign ministry demands probe after discovery of mass grave
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also called for the formation of an international investigation team to look into the gruesome discovery.
“They were killed while blindfolded and with their hands tied, as clear evidence that they were executed… in the most horrific forms,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The Ministry believes that the discovery of this mass grave in this brutal form reflects the scale of the tragedy to which Palestinian civilians are exposed, the mass massacres and executions of even detainees, in flagrant and gross violation of all relevant international norms and laws,” it added.
The Israeli war in Gaza has killed at least 26,900 people, most of them children and women. Another 65,949 individuals have also been wounded.
January 31, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine |
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‘Many are also pledging not to take donations from Big Pharma’
More than 100 candidates for public office and nearly as many current officeholders across 35 states have publicly declared that they believe the COVID-19 vaccines should be “immediately discontinued” in the interest of public safety, according to a group of medical freedom advocates.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an otolaryngology and sleep medicine specialist who is also president of the group Americans for Health Freedom (AHF), announced Sunday that the tally of public figures who have signed their COVID declaration is up to “106 candidates, 103 elected officials and 1 Surgeon General [Dr. Joseph Ladapo of Florida] from 35 states.”
“Many are also pledging not to take donations from Big Pharma,” she added. “Over 17,000 physicians stand behind them.”
She shared the list of the newest signatories in her announcement post on X (Twitter). Most were state-level candidates, though three are currently running for Congress.
The complete list of signatories can be found at AHF’s website, which also contains the declaration itself.
“We declare, and the data confirms that COVID-19 experimental genetic therapy injections must end,” it reads. “All COVID-19 and other modified mRNA ‘vaccines’ must be immediately discontinued. We demand that Covid-19 vaccines be removed from the pediatric vaccine schedule […] We declare injury from COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ must be recognized. Compensation must be provided for those injured by these injections. Funding must be allocated to the study of these syndromes and the development of diagnostics and treatments should be pursued.”
“We declare Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech, Janssen, Astra Zeneca studies were severely flawed, and they withheld safety and efficacy information from patients and physicians. They should face legal consequences for their dereliction of scientific duty which resulted in countless unnecessary disability and deaths,” the declaration also says. “We declare governments, media, global regulatory bodies, and medical agencies, such as CDC, FDA, NIH, NIAID, MHRA, NHS, TGA, SAPRA etc., and unelected international bodies including but not limited to WHO, WEF, UN, GAVI, and EcoHealth Alliance must be held accountable for mandating policies and procedures, and directing funding for reckless gain of function research that resulted in massive harms.”
The public health establishment has been overwhelmingly averse to investigating problems with the mRNA-based COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President (and likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee) Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, yet concerns persist thanks to a large body of evidence affirming they carry significant health risks.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 36,986 deaths, 213,536 hospitalizations, 21,335 heart attacks, and 28,052 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of December 29, among other ailments. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers despite common insistence to the contrary.
Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
A 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS’s) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of under-reporting, the VAERS website offers only that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).
In 2021, Project Veritas shed light on some of the reasons for such under-reporting with undercover video from inside Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a facility run under HHS’s Indian Health Service program in which emergency room physician Dr. Maria Gonzales laments that myocarditis cases go unreported “because they want to shove it under the mat,” and nurse Deanna Paris attests to seeing “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the COVID shots, but “nobody” is reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”
Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
Leading COVID shot manufacturer Pfizer donated more than $8.5 million to political candidates, leadership PACs, trade associations, and party committees representing both parties in 2022, fueling suspicion as to why only a handful of nationally prominent GOP officeholders, such as U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, are opposed to the company’s vaccine.
January 30, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Maryland-based Emergent BioSolutions this month signed a new contract with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to supply the U.S. military with its BioThrax anthrax vaccine over at least the next five years, Fierce Pharma reported.
The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract, announced Jan. 11 by the company, has a maximum value of $235.8 million. According to Yahoo Finance, “The vaccine is intended for use by all branches of the United States military as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for anthrax disease.”
Under the contract, Emergent is guaranteed a $20.1 million purchase, with future orders of an estimated $20 million or more for each of the remaining years of the initial five-year term.
After the initial term, the contract has an option for an additional five-year extension, potentially extending the deal to 2033, according to Fierce Pharma.
BioThrax is the only vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for pre-exposure prophylaxis and post-exposure prophylaxis of anthrax disease, Yahoo Finance reported. Another anthrax vaccine in the company’s portfolio, Cyfendus, is used only for post-exposure prophylaxis in adults 18 and over.
According to Yahoo Finance, anthrax is an infectious disease caused by Bacillus anthracis. It occurs naturally in soil, and commonly affects domestic and wild animals.
People can contract anthrax if they come in contact with infected animals or contaminated animal products, through skin contact, ingestion and inhalation, The Defense Post reported. It can cause organ damage, inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, and death.
In a statement, Paul Williams, senior vice president and products head at Emergent, praised the deal.
“As a part of our mission to protect and enhance lives, Emergent is proud to continue supporting and preparing our nation’s service members who have a high risk of exposure to anthrax bacteria by supplying BioThrax vaccine,” he said.
“This new contract award is a testament to the importance of Emergent’s medical countermeasures portfolio, and we look forward to delivering on our commitments to the U.S. DoD,” Williams added.
But some anthrax experts questioned the deal and the safety of the company’s two anthrax vaccines.
Dr. Meryl Nass, a widely recognized bioterrorism and anthrax expert and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory board, told The Defender that neither vaccine is safe.
“Neither has been shown to be effective against inhalation of anthrax,” she said.
According to Nass, the DOD may say “they needed to maintain a ‘warm manufacturing base’” as a justification for the new contract.
University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender the U.S. government may have proceeded with the contract based on a biological warfare risk it is aware of.
“It does seem to me that the Pentagon is gearing up to fight biological warfare with anthrax. That’s the only reason for that massive contract as I see it,” he said. The U.S. government still maintains stockpiles of Amerithrax, Boyle said, which he described as “super weapons-grade anthrax” that “survives for decades.”
In June 2014, as many as 75 scientists working at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) laboratories were treated — and vaccinated — after possible exposure to live anthrax bacteria which, according to The New York Times, “were supposed to have been killed.”
The laboratories were “unequipped to handle” the samples, the Times reported.
“There’s no reason for all these labs to have all this anthrax unless they’re getting ready to use it for biowarfare purposes,” Boyle said.
In October 2022, the Biden administration announced an $88 billion National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan outlining planned responses to future pandemics, public health emergencies and biological threats.
Precedence Research estimates that the global biodefense market size, which totaled $15.5 billion in 2022, will surpass $32.09 billion by 2032, while a 2021 estimate by The Insight Partners stated that the U.S. biodefense market is expected to reach $8.35 billion in 2027, up from $4.11 billion in 2019.
Boyle said that such government programs and spending violate the 1989 act he authored, which “was intended to stop the abuse of DNA genetic engineering and other forms of biological warfare weapons.”
Anthrax vaccines have caused fetal harm, ‘death and disability’
According to Nass, there is no need for an anthrax vaccine because antibiotics can be used as a treatment for exposure.
Nass told The Defender in July 2023 that if someone has a serious anthrax exposure, they typically die within several days if not treated with antibiotics.
“You can’t be sprayed with anthrax and then get vaccinated and then patiently wait a month to develop immunity. You’d be dead by then,” she said at the time, adding that the FDA requirement that the vaccine be given jointly with antibiotics is a tacit admission by the agency that the vaccine “doesn’t work.”
In an October 2020 talk, Nass said that after the 2001 anthrax letter exposures, “thousands of people took antibiotics while only 198 agreed to receive the anthrax vaccine.”
“Not a single person who was exposed to the anthrax letters who took antibiotics for prevention came down with anthrax,” she said at the time.
The FDA’s package insert for BioThrax also indicates several adverse reactions, including arm motion limitation in 63.7% of recipients. Six deaths and 62 serious adverse events were reported in clinical trials for BioThrax.
The insert also notes that Cyfendus, which has the same active ingredient as BioThrax, “can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant individual.”
“In an observational study, there were more birth defects in infants born to individuals vaccinated with BioThrax (a licensed anthrax vaccine with the same active ingredient as CYFENDUS) in the first trimester compared to infants born to individuals vaccinated post pregnancy or individuals never vaccinated with BioThrax,” the insert states.
Cyfendus uses two adjuvants, an aluminum adjuvant and a new synthetic adjuvant — CPG7909. And the vaccine contains a saline solution containing formaldehyde and benzethonium chloride as preservatives.
Aluminum adjuvant is a known cytotoxic and neurotoxic substance used to induce autoimmunity in lab animals.
As a result, “Cyfendus can be assumed to have more side effects,” Nass told the Defender.
In July 2023, the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) exercised a $75 million option for the purchase of new doses of Cyfendus. The FDA approved Cyfendus in July. It had previously been available since 2019 under an emergency use authorization (EUA).
Boyle told The Defender that anthrax vaccines were proven during the Gulf War to be deadly.
“I wouldn’t even call them vaccines. I would call them frankenshots,” he said. “The bottom line is that of 500,000 U.S. forces were inoculated with the previous anthrax and Botulism frankenshots, it killed 11,000 and disabled 100,000 members of the U.S. armed forces,” noting figures he cited in his 2005 book, “Biowarfare and Terrorism.”
“And those are lowball figures because the Pentagon still lies about the death and disability from the Gulf War anthrax shots, because they know they committed a Nuremberg crime on their own troops,” Boyle added.
Nass told The Defender in July that she does not believe much has changed with the currently available anthrax vaccines. Referring to Emergent, she said, “Given the history of the company’s many failures, and the lack of proper safety or efficacy testing of prior anthrax vaccines, one can only expect problems.”
One such example arises from controversies connected to Emergent’s manufacture of the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) COVID-19 vaccine. In 2021, the company made headlines when it lost a $600 million federal contract after millions of vaccine doses were ruined.
An ingredient mix-up at Emergent’s Baltimore plant may have resulted in the contamination of 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, which were discarded, according to an April 2021 FDA report, which also identified a series of other problems at the Baltimore facility.
In May 2021, a U.S. House of Representatives panel investigation revealed taxpayers paid Johnson & Johnson vaccine manufacturer, Emergent BioSolutions, $271 million under vaccine contracts despite “serious deficiencies” at the Baltimore plant.
Nass also told The Defender in July that anthrax vaccines have been tested only on animals, as there are too few anthrax cases worldwide to study its efficacy in people.
Anthrax vaccines may be linked to Gulf War syndrome
A 2002 commentary Nass authored for the American Journal of Public Health also noted a possible connection between anthrax vaccines and Gulf War syndrome.
“The anthrax vaccine was never proven to be safe and effective. It is one cause of Gulf War illnesses, and recent vaccinees report symptoms resembling Gulf War illnesses,” she wrote at the time, adding that “The vaccine’s production has been substandard.”
Peer-reviewed research published in Neuromolecular Medicine in 2007 linked the aluminum adjuvant in the existing anthrax vaccine to Gulf War syndrome, with symptoms including muscle aches, joint pain, dizziness, memory lapses, headaches, fatigue, insomnia, emotional disorders, posttraumatic stress reactions, headaches and memory loss.
It also noted that anthrax adverse reactions were very similar to Gulf War illness symptoms and that many veterans reported the vaccine as the cause of this illness, which they also reported in congressional hearings, according to Nass.
During her October 2020 talk, Nass said, “The vaccines were given to at least 150,000 soldiers,” during the Gulf War, while “about 25% of soldiers sent to the Gulf developed Gulf War syndrome.”
“While it was never proven what caused this, questions were raised about the role of vaccines both in the U.S. and the U.K. Several studies showed that the more vaccines a soldier received, the likelier they were to develop Gulf War Syndrome … but these studies were ignored in the post-Gulf War push to make troops impermeable to biological warfare,” Nass said at the time.
Boyle agreed that there is a connection between the anthrax vaccines and Gulf War syndrome.
Noting that the U.S. military had mandated the vaccine at the time for its service members, he said, “I still get calls today from veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome and asking me for advice where they can get, because they can’t get proper treatment at the Veterans Administration Hospital because they get lied to. It’s that simple.”
“They really have to go into the private sector to get proper treatment,” Boyle added.
‘Odd relationship’ between Emergent, DOD
Emergent works with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, BARDA, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to develop “countermeasures,” such as vaccines and therapeutics, for “public health threats.”
Primary purchasers for its anthrax vaccine are the CDC, which buys it for the Strategic National Stockpile, and BARDA. Those contracts alone have yielded at least $1 billion for the company.
According to Fierce Pharma, “Emergent has been a long-time supplier of anthrax countermeasures to the U.S. government. Its procurement deals have included a CDC contract worth up to $911 million in 2016 and a $258 million contract modification from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in 2020.”
And according to Yahoo Finance, “Emergent derives a substantial portion of its revenues from sales of its anthrax and smallpox vaccines to the U.S. government, which the latter procures for the strategic national stockpile,” while also selling vaccines to domestic and international non-governmental organizations and foreign governments.
Nass told The Defender, “There has been an odd relationship between this company and the DOD since the company was formed in 1998 as BioPort and was given a full indemnity by the Secretary of the Army the day before the company purchased the Michigan anthrax manufacturing facility.”
“The company has been allowed higher profits and worse quality than other products purchased by the military,” Nass added.
Investigative reporter Whitney Webb previously discovered a direct link between Robert Kadlec, who served as the top bioterror advisor to the Pentagon prior to the 2001 anthrax attacks, and Emergent BioSolutions, the Strategic National Stockpile, the 2001 anthrax attacks and the Dark Winter simulation of an anthrax attack.
Kadlec participated in the June 2001 Dark Winter simulation, helped establish the Strategic National Stockpile and has directly advised Emergent BioSolutions, among other Big Pharma companies.
Emergent was founded in 1998, originally as BioPort, to distribute and produce the anthrax vaccine for the U.S. military, taking over the assets of the state-owned Michigan Biologic Products Institute.
The anthrax vaccine was developed and in limited use in the military since 1970.
Emergent reached its financial zenith early in the pandemic after earning lucrative contracts to produce Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
Nass told The Defender in July that in 1997, the DOD made the vaccine compulsory as part of the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program (AVIP) for all 2.5 million military service members — including active duty and reserve personnel and civilian contractors. The DOD subsequently implemented AVIP in 1998.
Reports of adverse reactions and dissent on the part of service members led to congressional hearings and in early 2000, the House Committee on Government Reform recommended halting the mandatory program, although it was not officially halted.
As of 2000, more than 500,000 service members had received at least one dose of the vaccine, which was designed to be administered in six doses.
The plant where the government produced the anthrax vaccine faced a series of regulatory issues and was closed in 1997, according to Nass.
When BioPort acquired the plant from the state-owned Michigan Biologic Products Institute in 1998, it rebuilt it, but it was not FDA-authorized to produce the vaccine. So for a period, the vaccines were unavailable.
Then, starting on Sept. 18, 2001 — a week after the 9/11 attacks — media outlets began reporting that a sophisticated, weaponized and fatal form of anthrax had been sent via mail to numerous news outlets and American politicians. These letters continued to appear over the next six weeks.
Subsequently, the media and figures such as John McCain linked the anthrax to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 2008, the FBI accused U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins of being responsible for the attacks, although Ivins took his own life before he could be prosecuted. The FBI’s claims are widely doubted and its evidence has been questioned.
The Government Office of Accountability (GAO) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicines also found that the FBI lacked data to back its claims.
Yet, fears arising from the anthrax letters helped inspire the Patriot Act and led to calls to continue producing the anthrax vaccine and administering it to military service members.
In 2002, shortly after the FDA approved BioPort’s new vaccine plant, the GAO issued a report to Congress on the AVIP, noting a significant number of adverse reactions to the vaccine — more than double the rate reported by the manufacturer — along with a mass exodus of military pilots and other military personnel who refused the mandate.
From 2000 to 2018, the military anthrax mandate was challenged several times in court for lacking FDA approval and licensure, and for lacking proven potency against fatal inhalation of anthrax. During this time, the DOD restricted the anthrax vaccine to a smaller group of “at-risk troops” and halted and resumed the program several times.
Prior to 2001, the DOD concluded that biological agents such as anthrax were not a threat for mass casualties due to the limited number of countries with the expertise and sophistication required to weaponize and disseminate anthrax.
According to an investigation by Webb, the 2001 anthrax attacks also rescued Emergent, then BioPort, from certain financial ruin.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
January 30, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | United States |
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Synthetic assembly method posited in 2022 paper found in DEFUSE draft
There’s a great scene in the 1986 film Manhunter in which the protagonist—an FBI behavioral sciences profiler named Will Graham—correctly postulates that the fingerprints of a remarkably twisted serial killer will be found on the corneas of his female victim. The Bureau and the guys in the latent print lab are skeptical and think that Will is himself being a weirdo, and are then astonished to discover that he is right.
To put Will Graham’s character in Jungian terms: he is an excellent detective because he possesses a keen understanding of the Shadow—that is, the archaic, aggressive, lustful, power-hungry side of human nature that lurks in all of us. All humans are capable of evil, above all those who walk around with the smug, unexamined belief that they never would be.
I was reminded of this scene today as I read an extraordinary report by “Right to Know” investigative reporter, Emily Kopp, who obtained early drafts of the DEFUSE grant proposal, authored by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak et al., and submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018.
I highly recommend reading Kopp’s report, titled US scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. The following passage goes to the heart of the matter:
The documents reveal for the first time that a virologist working with the Wuhan lab planned to engineer new spike proteins – in contrast with the collaboration’s public work to insert whole spike proteins into viral backbones. Language in the proposal indicates this work may have involved unpublished viruses, generating unpublished engineered spike proteins.
This American virologist, University of North Carolina Prof. Ralph Baric, was set to engineer twenty or more “chimeric” SARS-related viral spike proteins per year of the proposal, and two to five full-length engineered SARS-related viruses. Documents previously reported by U.S. Right to Know show that some of the experimentation could secretly occur in Wuhan at a lower biosafety level than specified in the grant, apparently to save costs.
The proposal for Professor Baric to perform Dr. Frankenstein work on SARS-related viruses will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with his seminal papers on creating chimeric SARS-related viruses using gain-of-function procedures. The real fireworks revelation in an early draft of the DEFUSE proposal is the following passage:
The passage highlighted in blue is PRECISELY the assembly procedure posited by Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen in their 2022 paper titled Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. Daszak et al. even propose purchasing the same restriction enzyme that Valentin et al. hypothesized was used in the lab synthesis of SARS-CoV-2. (Valentin’s Twitter commentary on the draft proposal fascinating and entertaining).
At the time Bruttel et al. published their paper, it was met with ridicule by prominent virologists Edward Holmes and Kristian Anderson, who called it “confected nonsense” and “kindergarten molecular biology.” Holmes and Anderson would say this, wouldn’t they? With stunning criminal energy, they have been key players in concealing the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 since February 2020.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, I was not all surprised to read about this development. As a true crime author, I’ve spent the last twenty-five years studying criminal behavior, conspiracies, and criminal investigations. For years, Peter Daszak and his virologist compadres have obviously been in the business of modifying and enhancing bat coronaviruses in order to make them infectious and pathogenic to humans. I suspect the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and its accidental or deliberate release from a lab will eventually be regarded as the greatest true crime story in history.
It’s going to take a while for our dummy politicians and knucklehead mainstream media journalists to recognize it, “but at the length, truth will out.”
January 30, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, Darpa, EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, United States |
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GAZA – Israeli occupation forces this evening stormed the courtyards of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the southern Strip, amid heavy shelling and shooting.
Israeli forces demanded at gunpoint displaced persons and PRCS teams to evacuate, said PRCS.
PRCS teams and the displaced are currently in severe danger, warned the Society in a post on the “X” platform.
The Society reported that forces destroyed the external wall of the PRCS headquarters and targeted with gunfire and smoke bombs the displaced people, its crews, and the front door of its building and the hospital, causing fire to break out in several makeshift tents where the displaced are taking shelter.
Earlier today, a woman was killed and others were injured in the ongoing Israeli targeting of the vicinity of Al-Amal Hospital. The occupation’s armored tanks shelled areas near the Al-Amal hospital and the PRCS headquarters in Khan Yunis, where thousands of displaced persons are seeking refuge, killing a woman and injuring nine others, reported the Society.
January 30, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman has strongly condemned the assassination of Palestinian patients by Israeli forces in a hospital in the occupied West Bank, calling on the international community not to remain silent in the face of the “terrorist act.”
Nasser Kan’ani made the remarks in a statement on Tuesday, after a unit of undercover Israeli special forces fatally shot three young Palestinians inside Ibn Sina Hospital in the west of Jenin earlier in the day.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman went on to say that such brutal action can pave the way for normalization of “organized terrorism” in the world, urging the international community not to remain silent and condemn the Israeli regime’s “barbaric behavior.”
Kan’ani further noted it is regrettable that the Israeli regime’s supporters are silent in the face of such obvious crimes in medical centers and the continued activity of the Zionist genocide machine.
Palestinian media outlets reported on Tuesday that members of the Israeli hit squad dressed as doctors, nurses, and even civilians went up to the third floor of the Ibn Sina Hospital and shot three young Palestinians dead with guns equipped with silencers before escaping the building.
“This morning three young men were martyred by the bullets of the occupation [Israeli] forces who stormed the Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin and shot them,” the Ministry of Health in Ramallah said.
One of the slain Palestinians was undergoing treatment in the hospital for some three months since he was injured by the Israeli army.
There was no apparent attempt to arrest the Israeli assailants.
The Israeli military later claimed that the three Palestinians were members of a team affiliated to the Hamas resistance movement planning to carry out attacks against the regime.
Hamas said in a statement that Israel’s “crimes will not go unanswered,” adding that the killings are a “continuation of the occupation’s ongoing crimes against our people from Gaza to Jenin.”
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also condemned “in the strongest terms the occupation forces’ assassination of the three young men.”
Israel has ramped up its aggression in the West Bank since its genocidal war on Gaza began in early October.
Nearly 350 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since October 7, when Israel waged the war on Gaza after Hamas carried out a historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Israeli aggression has so far killed at least 26,637 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 65,387 others in Gaza. The Tel Aviv regime has imposed a “complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
January 30, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Human rights, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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Several Israeli cabinet ministers and members of parliament, including Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, attended the Return to Gaza Conference in the occupied city of Jerusalem on 28 January.
The conference – organized by the extremist Nachala settler organization and Samaria Regional Council in the occupied West Bank – calls for the reestablishment of the 22 Israeli settlements in Gaza that were evacuated under the Disengagement Law in 2005, as well as the construction of six new settlements.
At the conference, a map was displayed showing where the evacuated settlements once stood and where the organizers wish to establish six new ones. The map includes settlements in Gaza City, north of the strip, and in the southern city of Khan Yunis – which have been ravaged by Israel’s assault on the enclave.
Over a million Palestinians have been displaced from north, central, and south Gaza and pushed towards the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, where they remain stranded. Israel is actively pursuing this policy, as thousands more were ordered to evacuate Khan Yunis on Sunday.
“The only humane solution for Gaza is the mass deportation of its inhabitants … If we don’t want another October 7, we need to return home and control the land,” Ben Gvir said at the conference.
Twelve Israeli ministers, including several from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, signed a pledge for permanent annexation and settlement in Gaza during the event.
“Israel has not abandoned its wanton plan to ‘return to Gaza’ meaning the permanent acquisition of occupied territory and its colonization. Organizers of the … conference enjoy generous public funding, and represent the proliferation of ideological zealotry,” said Itay Epshtain, a Senior Humanitarian Law and Policy Consultant.
Ephstain also noted that many of the ministers attending the conference were those listed by South Africa in connection with public incitement to genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
“That Israeli officials would convene a high level meeting to plan an act of aggression – the acquisition of occupied territory and its colonization – is an early indication of intent to breach the provisional measures order by the ICJ,” he added.
An Israeli settler explained during the conference that “the location of the planned settlements for Gaza has been strategically chosen to allow greater military control of the territory.”
Israel has been actively driving Palestinians out of their homes and towards Egypt, and is now reportedly planning an operation to seize the Gaza side of the Egyptian border, a strip of land known as the Salah al-Din Axis or Philadelphi Corridor.
Tel Aviv is also pursuing plans for a permanent Israeli buffer zone in Gaza.
Netanyahu recently said that Israel does not wish to maintain a permanent presence in Gaza after the war, but has expressed the need for indefinite Israeli security control.
Hamas, whose military wing remains active across the strip, has vowed that Gaza will be the “cemetery” of Israel’s plans.
The Israeli military withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 under the Disengagement Law, approved that year by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The following year, Hamas emerged victorious over the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Fatah party in elections, and in 2007 assumed internal control over the enclave, while the Israeli military retained external control.
The Disengagement Law also resulted in the dismantling and evacuation of 22 Israeli settlements in Gaza, referred to as the Gush Katif settlement bloc.
In October, a leaked Israeli intelligence document revealed Tel Aviv’s detailed plan to reoccupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza – with the goal of pushing its entire population into Egypt’s Sinai desert.
Nearly half of the Israeli population support resettlement in Gaza, according to recent polling.
Last month, unnamed western officials told The Times of Israel that Israeli reoccupation of Gaza is the most likely scenario.
January 29, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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In finding there is a plausible case against Israel, the International Court of Justice treated with contempt the argument from Israel that the case should be dismissed as it is exercising its right of self-defence. This argument took up over half of Israel’s pleadings. Not only did the court find there is a plausible case of genocide, the court only mentioned self-defence once in its interim ruling – and that was merely to note that Israel had claimed it. Para 41:
That the ICJ has not affirmed Israel’s right to self-defence is perhaps the most important point in this interim order. It is the dog that did not bark. The argument which every western leader has been using is spurned by the ICJ.
Now the ICJ did not repeat that an occupying power has no right of self-defence. It did not need to. It simply ignored Israel’s specious assertion.
It could do that because what it went on to iterate went way beyond any plausible assertion of self-defence. What struck me most about the ICJ ruling was that the Order went into far more detail about the evidence of genocide than it needed to. Its description was stark.
Here Para 46 is crucial
The reason this is so crucial, is that the Court is not saying that South Africa asserts this. The Court is saying these are the facts. It is a finding of fact by the Court. I cannot emphasise too strongly the importance of that description by the court of the state of affairs in Gaza.
The Court then goes on to detail accounts by the United Nations of the factual situation, quoting three different senior officials at length, including Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of UNRWA:
This of course explains why the immediate response to the ICJ ruling was a coordinated attack by Israel and the combined imperialist powers on UNRWA, designed to accelerate the genocide by stopping aid, to provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court.
The Court works very closely with the UN and is very much an entrenched part of the UN system. It has a particularly close relationship with the UN General Assembly – many of the Court’s cases are based on requests from the UN General Assembly. In a fortnight’s time the Court will be starting its substantive hearings on the legal position in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, at the request of the UNGA. There are five specific references to the UNGA in the Order.
The Court spent a great deal of time outlining the facts of the unfolding genocide in the Gaza Strip. It did not have to do so in nearly so much detail, and far too little attention has been paid to this. I was equally surprised by how much detail the court gave on the evidence of genocidal intent by Israel.
It is especially humiliating for Israel that the Court quoted the Israeli Head of State, the President of Israel himself, as giving clear evidence of genocidal intent, along with two other government ministers.
Again, this is not the Court saying that South Africa has alleged this. It is a finding of fact by the Court. The ICJ has already found to be untrue Israel’s denial in court of incitement to genocide.
Now think of this: the very next day after President Herzog made a genocidal statement, as determined by the International Court of Justice, he was met and offered “full support” by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.
When you take the detail of what the Court has found to be the actual facts of the case, in death and destruction and in intent, I have no doubt that this is a court which is currently minded to find Israel guilty of genocide once the substantive case comes before the Court.
All of Israel’s arguments were lost. Every one. The substantial effort Israel put into having the case dismissed on procedural grounds was brushed aside. So was self-defence. And in its findings of the facts, the Court plainly found to be untrue the Israeli lies about avoidance of civilian casualties, the responsibility of Hamas for the damage to infrastructure, and the access of relief aid to Gaza.
Those are the facts of what happened.
Do not be confused by the absence of the word “ceasefire” from the Court order. What the Court has ordered is very close to that. It has explicitly ordered the Israeli military to stop killing Palestinians.
That is absolutely clear. And while I accept it is tautologous, in the sense it is ordering Israel to obey a Convention which Israel is already bound to follow, there could be no clearer indication that the Court believes that Israel is not currently obeying it.
So what happens now?
Well, Israel has responded by killing over 180 Palestinian civilians since the Order was given from the International Court of Justice. If that continues, South Africa may return to the Court for more urgent measures even before the ordered monthly report from Israel is due. Algeria has announced it will take the Order to the UN Security Council for enforcement.
I doubt the United States will veto. There has been a schizophrenic reaction from Israel and its supporters to the ICJ Order. On the one hand, the ICJ has been denounced as antisemitic. On the other hand the official narrative has been (incredibly) to claim Israel actually won the case, while minimising the coverage in mainstream media. This has been reinforced by the massive and coordinated attack on UNRWA, to create alternative headlines.
It is difficult to both claim that Israel somehow won, and at the same time seek to block UNSC enforcement of the Order. My suspicion is that there will be a continuing dual track: pretending that there is no genocide and Israel is obeying the “unnecessary” order, while at the same time attacking and ridiculing the ICJ and the wider UN.
No matter what the ICJ said, Israel would not have stopped the genocide; that is the simple truth. The immediate reaction of the US and allies to the Order has been to try to accelerate the genocide by crippling the UN’s aid relief work. I confess I did not expect anything quite that vicious and blatant.
The wheels of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The ICJ having flagged up a potential genocide so strongly, it may well fall to judges in individual nations to restrain international support for the genocide. As I explained in detail, the Genocide Convention has been incorporated into UK law by the International Criminal Court Act of 2001.
There will, beyond any doubt, have been minutes issued by FCDO legal advisers warning of ministers being at risk of personal liability in UK law for complicity in genocide now, should arms shipments and other military and intelligence cooperation with the Israeli genocide continue. In the US, hearings started already in California on a genocide complicity suit brought against Joe Biden.
Of course I wish this would all work faster. It will not. The UN General Assembly may suspend Israel from the UN. There are other useful actions to be taken. But this is a long slog, not a quick fix, and people like you and I continue to have a vital role, as everybody does, in using the power of the people to wrest control from a vicious political class of killers.
This was a good win. I am pleased that this course for which I advocated and lobbied has worked and increased pressure on the Zionists, and that my judgment that the International Court of Justice is not just a NATO tool like the corrupt International Criminal Court, has been vindicated.
It cannot help the infants killed and maimed last night or those to die in the coming few days. But it is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
January 28, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | ICJ, Israel, Palestine, United Nations, Zionism |
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The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its Order yesterday (26 January 2024) on the South African case against Israel involving possible genocide in Gaza.
Predictably, the coverage of the Order in the mainstream media in the West aims to spin the story in ways that are most favorable to Israel, which means minimizing or omitting those elements of the story that make Israel look bad and emphasizing that the ICJ did not order Israel to cease all military operations in Gaza.
Hardly anyone expected the ICJ to rule that Israel would have to stop all military operations in Gaza, since it is at war with Hamas, and the court cannot order Hamas to cease its military operations against Israel. What the ICJ did tell Israel, however, is that it must focus its offensive on Hamas, and not target the civilian population. After all, the genocide charge revolves around what Israel is doing to the civilian population in Gaza, not Hamas.
What really matters in the Order is what it says about Israel committing genocide. How could it be otherwise? Genocide is the crime of all crimes.
The Order clearly states that there is: 1) plausible evidence that Israel has the intent to commit genocide; and 2) there is plausible evidence that Israel is committing genocide.
In response to that dire situation the court ordered Israel to stop committing those acts that appear to be genocidal, and to preserve any evidence that bears on this matter, obviously for the trial ahead.
In short, the ICJ did not make a final decision on the charge of genocide against Israel, but said there is sufficient evidence at this point to believe there is a “real and imminent risk” of genocide, and therefore Israel must fundamentally alter its conduct of the war in Gaza.
I think this is a stunning outcome, especially when you consider the votes among the 17 members of the ICJ.
There were six separate votes on six provisional measures that Israel was instructed to obey.
Four of the votes were 15-2.
Two of the votes were 16-1.
Amazingly, the Israeli judge — who was recently appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu — voted in favor of two of the measures.
The American judge, who is also the head of the ICJ, voted in favor of all 6 of the measures.
The only judge who voted against all six measures is from Uganda.
I watched the ICJ proceedings on 11-12 January 2024, and they were conducted in a professional and fair-minded manner.
Both the Israelis and the South Africans sent their “A” teams to the proceedings, and each took over three hours to lay out its arguments systematically and comprehensively.
Finally, I have read the ICJ’s 27-page Order, and it is an impressive document, which is not to say one must agree with all its conclusions.
This was not a kangaroo court.
It seems clear that yesterday was a black day for Israel, as the ICJ Order will leave a deep and lasting stain on its reputation.
January 28, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | ICJ, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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