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Israel’s opposition to criticism exposes its colonial violence

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | December 15, 2022

The Times of Israel ran a lengthy article this week pinpointing the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s criticisms of Israel, notably her use of the term “Jewish lobby” – a reference from 2014, years prior to her appointment by the UN. Yet, what stands out in the article is that Israel resents being called out for its colonial existence and violence, which have been extensively documented, even though the UN is too entrenched in its complicity with Israel to call for the decolonisation of Palestine.

For example, one criticism directed against Albanese is her refusal to normalise Israeli colonialism as a “conflict”. Undoubtedly, normalising decades of Israel’s colonial enterprise as a conflict has been profitable not only for Israel, but also for the UN. The imaginary equivalence between the coloniser and the colonised does not lend itself to Palestinian rights as an emphasis on decolonisation would. Each time Israel is faced with a prominent figure calling out its inherent violence, suddenly diplomatic endeavours weave their way into opposing the individual, despite the fact that Israel’s only concern with diplomacy is maintaining its security narrative and impunity.

As the article portrayed, any criticism of Israel is considered unsuitable, whether it pertains to the Israeli presence in the occupied West Bank, Zionist colonial expansion, mentioning Israel’s war crimes, which have also been considered as such by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and disputing Israel’s security narrative within the wider colonial framework of violence and Palestinian legitimate armed resistance. The UN itself recognises the right of the colonised to resistance by all means, even if in practice the UN has supported Israel against the Palestinians. Yet, the clause exists, and Palestinians are within their rights to anti-colonial resistance. It is the UN that is in the wrong by denying Palestinians the political support they need.

Another contention the article raised is Albanese’s disagreement with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) non-legally binding definition of anti-Semitism, which has been exploited by Israel and pro-Israeli entities to stifle criticism of Israel and silence the Palestinian narrative. One such instance is the IHRA’s description of: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” as anti-Semitism. If Israel practices apartheid based on its colonial origins and expansion, why would such criticism be classified as anti-Semitism? Why not turn attention towards Israel’s colonial enterprise and manipulation of the Jewish religion to sustain its settler-colonial existence?

If Israel continues to express outrage or irritation at criticism of its colonial violence, it must look at itself, not its critics. How much of its historical colonial violence has Israel concealed within its archives? How much of it has been exposed, documented and proven? While on opposite ends of the spectrum, both that which is known and hidden testify to the brutality unleashed upon Palestinians through the Zionist paramilitary organisations prior to Israel’s establishment. Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their land, their villages destroyed and their people massacred. The means have changed, but the intent to expand across all of historical Palestine has not. In light of Israel’s historical and current violations, what security concerns would the settler-colonial state be facing if it made more of its archives accessible?

December 15, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel crushes water pipelines with bulldozers in occupied West Bank

MEMO | December 15, 2022

The Israeli occupation army destroyed the main water pipelines in the village of Al-Auja, in the north-east of Jericho, reported Wafa news agency.

The destruction is seen as being part of the apartheid state’s efforts to control all water sources in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Local residents said that occupation soldiers forced their way into the village and welded-shut the sole pipeline which supplies water to more than 1,200 people and used a bulldozer to crush it beneath the land.

In recent years, Ein Al-Auja villagers have suffered from Israeli demolition and persecution campaigns and repeated attacks and violations by illegal settlers and soldiers.

The supervisor of the Al-Baidar Organisation for Defending the Rights of the Bedouins, Hasan Mleihat, said the community is one of the largest in the West Bank and is a target of frequent assaults and violations by the Israeli soldiers and settlers.

He also noted that such assaults are intended to displace the community and seize their water and land to make room for colonial settlement construction.

Israel violates international law by destroying and pillaging water resources in occupied Palestine. It then uses stolen water to increase the supply to illegal Israeli settlements, which have a much higher demand and consumption rate. The state discriminates blatantly by not boosting or even protecting water supplies to Palestinian communities.

Mleihat noted that Israel’s restrictions force Palestinians to buy water directly from the occupation state, even as it prevents them from constructing their own wells or engaging in other projects to enhance access to fresh water.

Like hundreds of other Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, Al-Auja village is located in ‘Area C’ according to the Oslo Accords, putting it under full Israeli military and administrative control.

December 15, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Leave a comment

How Lockdowns Made Us Sicker

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | December 13, 2022

Early during lockdowns in 2020, when the whole of the media marched in lockstep with the most appalling reach of public policy in our lifetimes, two doctors from Bakersfield, California went out on a limb and objected.

Their names: Dan Erikson and Artin Massihi from Accelerated Urgent Care. They held a press conference in which they claimed that lockdowns would only delay but not finally control the virus. Moreover, they predicted, at the end of this, we would also be sicker than ever because of our lack of exposure to endemic pathogens.

You could say they were brave but why should it require bravery simply to share conventional wisdom that is part of every medical background? Indeed, the idea that reducing exposure to pathogens creates more vulnerability to disease is a point every generation in the last hundred years has learned in school.

How well I can recall the outrage! They were treated like seditious cranks and news media blasted their comments as somehow radically heterodox, even though they said nothing I had not learned in 9th-grade biology class. It was utterly bizarre how quickly lockdowns became an orthodoxy, enforced, as we are now learning, by media and tech platforms working closely with government agencies to warp public perceptions of science.

Among those warpings was an incredible blackout concerning the basics of natural immunity. My goodness, why did this happen? It’s not conspiracy to draw an obvious reason: they wanted to sell a vaccine. And they wanted to push the idea that Covid was universally deadly for everyone so that they could justify their “whole-of-society” approach to lockdowns.

Here we are three years later and the headlines are all over the place.

And so on.

Isn’t it time to give these doctors some credit and perhaps regret their vicious treatment at the hands of the press?

Video link

Meanwhile, it’s time we get clear on some basics. There is no one better to lay it out other than the greatest living theoretical epidemiologist, Sunetra Gupta. I think one way to understand her contribution is to see her as the Voltaire or the Adam Smith of infectious disease. The very essence of liberal political economy and liberal theory generally from the Age of Enlightenment to the present is the observation that society manages itself. It does not need a top-down plan and the attempt to centrally plan the economy or culture always produces unintended consequences.

So too for the issue of infectious disease. Dr. Gupta’s observation is that we evolved with pathogens in a delicate dance in which we share the same ecosphere, both suffering and benefiting from our entanglement with them. Disturbing that balance can wreck the immune system and leave us more vulnerable and sicker than ever before.

Writing in the Telegraph, she says “I am used to viewing infectious disease from an ecological perspective. Therefore, it did not come as much of a surprise to me that some non-Covid seasonal respiratory diseases almost immediately started to take a knock on the head during lockdown. Many took this to be an indication that lockdowns were working to stop the spread of disease, forgetting that the impact of lockdowns on already established or ‘endemic’ diseases is completely different to the impact on a new disease in its ‘epidemic’ phase.”

She explains that society-wide pathogenic avoidance creates an “immunity debt,” a gap in the level of protection that you have developed from previous exposure. There is a “threshold of immunity in the population at which rates of new infections start to decline — known as the herd immunity threshold. If we are below this threshold, we are in immunity debt; if we are above it, we are in credit — at least for a while.”

With normal diseases, we experience immunity debt in winter and so the herd immunity threshold rises. That’s when we experience more infection. As Fr. Naugle points out, this reality is reflected in our liturgical calendar during the winter months when the message is to look out for danger, stay healthy, be with friends and family, and intensify your concern for issues of life and death.

However, this period of conventional sicknesses gives rise to an immunity surplus as we move into spring and we can go about our lives with more confidence and a carefree attitude, and hence the symbolism of Easter as the beginning of new life. And yet the months of sun and exercise and party time gradually contribute to building up another immunity debt in the population which will be paid again in the winter months.

Notice that this pattern repeats itself in every year and every generation, all without the help of government public health agencies. However, writes Gupta, “disturbing this order can have a profound impact on an individual’s ability to resist disease. More than anything, it is clear that we are experiencing an entirely predictable perturbation in our finely balanced ecological relationship with the organisms which are capable of causing serious disease.”

Lockdowns changed nothing about these seasonal and natural processes except to make our immunity debt deeper and scarier than ever. To be sure, lockdowns in the end did not stop the pathogen that causes Covid. Instead, they only forced one group to be exposed earlier and more often than other groups, and this allocation of exposure took place entirely based on a politically scripted model.

As we saw, the working classes experienced exposure first and the ruling classes experienced exposure later. The policies entrenched a grim and medieval-style political hierarchy of infection. Rather than encouraging the vulnerable populations to shelter and everyone else to gain immunities through living normal life, lockdown policies pushed the working classes in front of the pathogen as a protection scheme for ruling classes.

And yet now, the results are in. Those who delayed infection for as long as possible, or otherwise tried to game the careful ecological balance with newly invented shots, not only eventually got Covid but made themselves even more vulnerable to diseases that are already endemic in the population.

What Gupta has explained with such erudition was actually the common understanding of previous generations. And nothing about the dangerous innovation of lockdown ideology has changed these natural processes. They only ended up making us sicker than ever. So there is some irony in reading stories of alarm in the high-end media. The right response to such alarm is simply to say: what else did you expect?

The Bakersfield doctors were right all along. So was my mother, her mother, and her mother before her. Together they had far more wisdom about infectious disease than Anthony Fauci and all his cohorts.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Former Twitter CEO Takes Responsibility for Social Network’s Political Censorship

Samizdat – 14.12.2022

Co-founder and former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that he was the one responsible for the company’s susceptibility to government and corporate influence.

“Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. Only the original author may remove content they produce. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020,” he wrote in his personal blog.

Dorsey said he realized that companies have become “far too powerful” once Twitter suspended the account of former US President Donald Trump in January 2021.

His biggest mistake was investing in the development of tools allowing the company “to manage the public conversation,” instead of “building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves,” Dorsey added. This, according to the former CEO, “burdened the company with too much power” and made it susceptible to “outside pressure.”

Twitter’s new owner, US billionaire Elon Musk, has reportedly given access to internal papers to a few independent journalists to investigate politically-motivated censorship in the company before his takeover. Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi presented their findings in threads tweets earlier this month.

Weiss said she found that Twitter allegedly used to have a special team instructed to “build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics.” Taibbi alleged that prior to the 2020 US presidential elections, Twitter deliberately took measures to downplay the scandal around the laptop of US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The laptop reportedly had evidence of Hunter Biden’s participation in tax-related crimes, drug use, money laundering and illegal business dealings in foreign countries including Ukraine and China.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

How to Trash a Movie in Support of a Lie

The cover-up of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians during the Nakba continues

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • DECEMBER 13, 2022

Israel’s new government is planning to give de facto operational control of the national police and heavily armed border police to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of a party of right wing, racist extremists. It can perhaps be regarded as the prelude to the last phase in the uprooting and displacement of the Palestinian people. Those who resist will be killed and not a single Israeli soldier or policeman will be punished for carrying out what the Benjamin Netanyahu government will frame as a war against terrorists blessed by Yahweh in support of his “Chosen” people.

The Zionist view of what should be done to the indigenous inhabitants of a place once called Palestine has been unflinching since the founding of the state of Israel. The Zionist historic boast that a Jewish homeland would be built on “A land without a people for a people without a land” ignored the fact that Palestine already had plenty of inhabitants and a well-established economy where Jews were a distinct minority, less than 20% of the population in the 1930s.

The solution to correct the numbers was to compel the natives to leave by one means or another. Israel’s founding father David Ben Gurion early on endorsed a policy of removal by force if necessary the Christians and Muslims. The fighting that followed in 1948 after the United Nations’ partition of the country into two separate states left the mostly unarmed Palestinians helpless before the well-armed Jewish militias, which quickly expanded their zone of control well into the area that was granted on paper to the Palestinians. It is estimated that 15,000 Palestinians were killed outright by the Zionist forces while 800,000 more were driven from their homes, to which nearly all were denied any right to return. Four hundred Palestinian occupied villages were “ethnically cleansed” and in some cases physically destroyed.

The de facto seizure of the remainder of historic Palestine outside the borders of the Jewish state after the June 1967 Six Day war gave Israel direct control of all key strategic areas as well as land in Syria and Lebanon. Since that time, successive Israeli governments have pursued an ethnic cleansing policy both in Israel itself and on the West Bank consisting of gradually forcing the remaining Palestinians to leave to be replaced by all-Jewish towns and settlements. The Palestinians know that the final push is indeed coming and have begun to resist, though having few weapons they are helpless against the heavily armed Israel Defense Force (IDF), which has killed 195 Palestinians, mostly teenagers, in the past eleven months.

A recent killing captured on surveillance video shows an Israeli border policeman shooting a young man dead after an encounter on the main street of a West Bank town. Far-right Otzma Yehudit Party leader and incoming National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, praised the policeman who did the shooting as a “hero,” citing his “Precise action, you really fulfilled the honor of all of us and did what was assigned to you.”

The Palestinians refer to their dispossession and killing at the hands of the Jewish soldiers in 1948 as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” which has sometimes been popularized as the Arab version of the so-called holocaust. I have recently watched a controversial film called Farha, made in Jordan by a woman filmmaker of Syrian descent, which views the Nakba through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old village girl. She, the eponymous Farha that gives the film its title, was preparing to go off to advance her education, presumably in Jerusalem, when Israeli soldiers attacked her village. The Israelis used loudspeakers to announce that all residents must leave immediately. Anyone seeking to remain would be killed. In a panic, the girl’s father, the village chief, locked her into a storage shed for safety as he tried to figure out what to do, but he then disappears from the tale and it might be presumed that both he and the rest of the family were killed.

Farha has only a crack in the door to witness what is going on outside. In a particularly dreadful sequence, a Palestinian man and his family who are trying to escape but are apparently confused regarding what way to go are detained by an Israeli officer and his men. After some perfunctory questioning, the father, mother and two children are lined up against a wall and shot dead. A newborn baby was left lying on the ground, alive, crying for its mother. The officer tells one of his men to kill it, but adds “Don’t waste a bullet on it.” The soldier prepares to stomp on the baby’s head to carry out the order, but cannot bring himself to do it and walks away. The baby continues to wail until later that day it stops, presumably dead from exposure or other factors.

Eventually Farha escapes from her prison and the movie concludes with her walking away in tears to an uncertain future. The film is very powerful, with excellent acting, cinematography and direction and it is based on a true story as handed down by Director Darin J. Sallam’s mother’s best friend, but I ended up wishing that it were stronger in its depiction of the savagery exercised by the Israelis, perhaps recreating an actual major massacre of Palestinian civilians, like occurred at Deir Yassin, where 107 Arabs, including many women and children, were shot dead by Israeli militiamen from the Irgun and Lehi groups. Other massacres took place in hundreds of villages across Galilee as well as in cities like Haifa or Akka, all far worse than what is revealed by the film. For those who are interested, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine describes, in detail, the brutality of what Israeli forces unleashed on the largely unarmed Palestinian people during the Nakba.

But even though the film deliberately avoided cliched scenes of mass violence, it has proven very powerful with supporters and critics lined up along the completely predictable political lines. The Israelis have in particular come down hard on the film and they and their many friends in the United States, have reacted in their usual tribal fashion, attacking Netflix, which is streaming Farha on its network including in the United States and Europe. The Israel firsters are advocating striking back against Netflix for its temerity by canceling the service and attacking the decision to air the film at all. Ironically though not surprisingly, Netflix has hitherto been a leader in obtaining and streaming Israeli films and even television series.

In Israel, the government has declared war on the film, also a characteristic of that nation’s circle-the- wagons paranoid response to anything that might even suggest that Jews are just as capable of evil as anyone else. Last month ultra-nationalist Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman moved to block scheduled screenings of the film in Jaffa, saying that “Israel is a place to present Israeli and international works, but is certainly not the place to slander IDF soldiers and the security forces who are acting day and night to defend and protect all the citizens and residents living here.”

Lieberman, a Russian Jew known for his ethnocentric and essentially racist views, apparently does not believe that soldiers and security forces should actually protect Palestinians and afford them at least some measure of free speech, which is only allowed to Jews. Israel’s ironically titled Culture Minister the oddly named Chili Tropper also attacked the film for its so-called “false plots against IDF soldiers” denouncing how their actions were presented as similar to “behavior of the Nazis in the Holocaust.”

Former IDF soldier and current right wing apologist, Yoseph Haddad also tweeted, “I saw the movie ‘Farha’ and I can tell you that it is much worse than you think. The IDF soldiers are presented there as inhuman with unimaginable evil, all they care about is murdering and slaughtering without mercy (which is the exact opposite of the truth). This is a blood libel that will certainly increase antisemitism and incitement against Israel. If you haven’t canceled your Netflix subscription yet – do it now.”

In an Instagram post, Israeli model Nataly Dadon also demanded that Israelis and their supporters internationally should drop their Netflix subscriptions in an Instagram post, claiming that Farha’s “sole purpose is apparently to increase anti-Semitism against the Jewish people.” Mondoweiss also reports how “author and photographer Laura Ben-David tweeted a photo of her cancellation message with the streaming app and wrote, ‘Buh-bye Netflix! Supporting the false and anti-Israel film Farha is unacceptable.’”

So Israel, which is passionate about its rejection of the non-violent pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) economic pressure movement, is united in its desire to punish Netflix’s bottom line. And the old reliable anti-Semitism tag is being liberally attached to how the argument is being framed. Former Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed Shihab-Eldin suggested to the Middle East Eye that “The pacing of [all the negative posts] reveals it was coordinated. With each passing hour, dozens and dozens of vapid and vile reviews would appear, making wild accusations trashing the film. It was clear people had not seen the film, and only wanted to damage its reputation.”

Finally, it would not be about Israel and Jews if there were not space in The New York Times to twist and spin the story. A review of the film by one Beatrice Loayza, a Peruvian-American film critic based in Brooklyn, describes the movie oddly as a “brutal coming-of-age-story.” At one point, Farha discovers an old handgun wrapped up within a sack of lentils. She eventually uses it to shoot the lock and escape the storage room. But this is how the Times reviewer describes the sequence: “She finds a gun buried inside a sack of grains — was the threat present all along? One day, a scene of great barbarity plays out before her tiny window.” Aha! So those crafty Arabs actually were potentially using the old handgun among the lentils trick to threaten the friendly Israel soldiers who just happened to drop by to shoot to death a Palestinian family, which is dismissed as a “scene of great barbarity” without any suggestion of what that might have been. In truth, the garbage being peddled by the Times as a review of a story of an atrocity committed by Jews is actually achieved without having to include any context or feature any Jews at all. “Remarkable” is all I have to say in conclusion.

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.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Film Review | , , , , | Leave a comment

Interview 1771 – The Freedom Convoy Commission with the JCCF

Corbett • 12/07/2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Today James is joined by Rob Kittredge and Hatim Kheir of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms to discuss their participation in the Public Order Emergency Commission in Canada (aka the Trucker Commission). We discuss the commission itself and how it was run, the evidence that was (and was not presented), why Mr. Kittredge is now known as a “tow truck aficionado,” what Trudeau and others testified to during the hearings, and what Kittredge and Kheir expect to come from this process.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack / Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES

Canadian Government Delays Mandatory Traveler Quarantine – #SolutionsWatch

Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms homepage

The Justice Centre at the POEC

Public Order Emergency Commission homepage

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invokes Emergencies Act

Trudeau announces mandatory vaccination for federal workforce, federally regulated transportation sectors

CSIS told government Freedom Convoy was no security threat

Trudeau backs right to protest in China as anti-government demonstrations sweep across country

Justin Trudeau calls anti-vaxxers racists and misogynists

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Video | , , | Leave a comment

And Just Like That… It Was All Gone

Zero Covid is deemed surplus to requirements

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 13, 2022

Newsflash from China: the world’s last bastion of Zero Covid has finally given up the pretence. “Covid China cracks”… this is a message that seems to have penetrated even the mainstream media’s coverage.

What is not, however, entirely clear is how brave BBC reporters can travel around the world to capture footage in the Far East, but were blind to peaceful protests closer to home. Those voices of reason who have been ignored for almost three years have found the cognitive dissonance more than a little unnerving. How can it simultaneously be true that lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in UK are bad, selfish and unscientific, while lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in China are brave and pushing back against regime oppression?

Even in their dissonant apostasy, the media cheerleaders still struggle with fundamental misconceptions due to their alignment with the crumbling narrative and blindness to the obvious: “the main challenge is ensuring the inevitable uptick in infections does not lead to mass deaths” claims the BBC. Really? With almost three years of data now to hand, is it now not blindingly obvious that the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance was absolutely correct when he stated on 16 March 2020 that “this is a mild disease in most people”?  If these brave reporters want to investigate ‘mass deaths’, how about some hard-hitting investigative reporting on iatrogenesis instead?

This unpalatable (and hard to ignore) charade aside, can we at least hope that this is the end of an era? Can the Zero Covid chapter be closed for good?

Let us hope so. Humanity may – finally – have rid itself of Zero Covid policies, but what of its erstwhile supporters – what new hair-brained schemes are they now supporting? Whether the chaos they were involved in creating was by accident or design is arguably immaterial: how can society protect itself against future periods of collective self-harm?

The precautionary principle “emphasises caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous”.

Winding back the clock almost three years, it was for this reason that many of us had a principled objection to draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, i.e. lockdowns) from before they were enacted. While this view is now fashionable, many supported these policies at the time and then did not want to back down from this shibboleth. But why was it ever acceptable to deploy this combination of hand grenades to crack a nut? Why did society go along with a perverse inversion of the anti-precautionary principle: “panic; shout ‘fire’, abandon detailed disaster planning and then implement the precise opposite, botch the implementation, shut down constructive debate and then vilify those that challenge the new orthodoxy”?

It is instructive to observe the flailing attempts by vocal proponents of Zero Covid and its associated policies (school closures, rules of six, masks, vaccine mandates) to post-rationalise and excuse their mistakes.  This is where lessons will be learned (and not, incidentally, from the preposterous attempts by those who piloted the ship onto the rocks to shift blame onto others or to claim that the right decisions were made “based on all the information available at the time”).

We have previously outlined clear evidence of what was common knowledge by mid-March 2020. Chief Scientific Advisor Vallance, quoted above, went on to state: “Epidemics are like a pole vaulter taking flight: the outbreak starts slowly, takes off rapidly, reaches a peak and then comes back down to earth”.  No different to what had happened in previous months on the Diamond Princess, in Wuhan and in Bergamo. This was a known quantity well before the UK launched itself, lemming-like, off the cliffs on 23 March 2020.

From hereon in it was one-way traffic for much of the next two years. Dissent was essentially criminalised, and the full force of far-from-benign authoritarian state machinery was turned against its citizens. Rational discourse was squashed (why would authorities collude with the media to stifle calm voices of reason such as Professor Jay Bhattacharya and instead promote shrill panic-mongers?); the media controlled via carrot (advertising) and stick (OFCOM diktat); dissenters were made an example of. None of this was necessary, and a normally-functioning society and fourth estate could have led us quickly back to balanced rationality, avoiding much of the human cost and unnecessarily-wrought collateral damage of the Coronapanic debacle.

They might prefer us to forget, but we must not. Thankfully, public records exist that will serve as a salutary reminder to future generations of what our own home-grown Zero Covid zealots wanted to perpetrate. For example, in the dark days of February 2021, 47 MPs from Opposition parties tabled an Early Day Motion promoting Net Zero. This Motion – as well as its stated (and implicit) underlying assumptions – has not aged well, the most egregious claim being that harsher draconian measures might avoid “putting huge additional strain on the NHS” – tell that to those on the now-gargantuan waiting lists for essential treatment. Most of the 47 signatories on this Motion are Labour MPs… Labour is currently riding high in the polls. They might well now criticise the UK Government’s handling of the last few years, but it was Labour – and their union paymasters – who were consistently pushing for more and more restrictions. Voters should be careful what they wish for.

So good riddance to Zero Covid, but have we learned any lessons? Unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence to show that society has the strength to resist the siren calls of the next Zero Policy fiasco… for example, could it be that Net Zero is an unholy hysteria rather than a holy grail? We would do well to look a bit more closely before we leap into deindustrialised pauperisation.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and in the interests of protecting all that we hold dear, we can only encourage everyone to keep constructively challenging and critiquing the official narrative.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Pandemicism and the Foreknowledge of the Virus Planners

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 13, 2022

When I write of the pandemic response as a basically undirected social and institutional contagion, the same question always comes up: What about Event 201, and the 2017 SPARS exercise, and all those other creepy prophetic pandemic wargames? Don’t they indicate some of kind of unified plan? How else to explain the foreknowledge of the planners?

I’ve given partial replies here and there, but I’ve never laid out all of my ideas in one place. I think these strange exercises seem much less bizarre when considered against the broader backdrop of the pandemicists and the beliefs they share. You might call their most central article of faith pandemicism, which is the doctrine that pandemics represent a serious threat to human health, and that they can be prevented or substantially ameliorated with the right scientific interventions.

Aspects of pandemicism are as old as 1918, but the proximate origins of this mind virus are much more recent. Tellingly, they don’t lie with any kind of pandemic at all, but rather with the WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox. This started in 1967, and it took ten years to complete. Any institutionalised enterprise that persists for a full decade will acquire institutional momentum, such that it can’t simply be turned off when the mission is over. Just as the push for trans rights and trans acceptance owes a lot to the institutional forces accumulated by the gay rights movement since the 1970s, pandemicism became the next stage of advocacy for the smallpox eradicators after they had put themselves out of business. All the careers, institutions and grand funding schemes that had been thrown at smallpox needed a second act.

The smallpox eradicators began their transition to a post-smallpox world by fantasising that the virus they had killed off would someday return. Donald Henderson, director of the eradicators, founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in 1998, a key pandemicist think tank that was later rechristened as the Center for Health Security, and that went on to hold a series of notorious and well-publicised pandemic war games. The earliest of these – Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm – were funded by the US Department of Defence and involved elaborate fictional scenarios of smallpox biowarfare. Later on, with the rise of billionaire philanthropy and the ever waning cultural significance of Variola, the Johns Hopkins pandemicists began peddling horror scenarios of other pandemic pathogens. Event 201 was their first major tabletop exercise featuring a pathogen other than smallpox that entered humans via a natural spillover event.

There are, then, two pandemicist eras – an early period, fuelled by Defence funding and devoted primarily to biowarfare scnearios, with curious parallels to the 1995 film Outbreak; and a later period driven by banal third-worldist philanthropy, that is more heavily focused on natural pathogens and reflected in the film Contagion. The Hollywood resonances are no accident; the pandemicists are above all interested in publicity and fundraising, and they try hard to make their mark on popular culture. The earliest wargames were at base morality tales intended to convince the US government to increase its smallpox vaccine stockpiles. The second era of pandemicist thought owes a great deal in turn to the SARS outbreak of 2003. Vaccine development at this stage becomes the central concern, and the pandemicist mission expands with novel projects to predict and preempt the emergence of novel human-infecting viruses. The old roots were still there, and the Defence Department funds were a major part of this new research.

The primary problem of pandemicism, is that there just aren’t very many pandemics, which means that most of the time the pandemicists don’t have anything to do. Wargaming attracts publicity and the interest of fundraisers, and it gets scary viruses into headlines in the absence of any reason for them to be there. Pandemicist wargames feature what we should think of as “fundraising viruses.” These are either fictional pathogens with very high infection fatality rates (often modelled on SARS), or real viruses like Nipah that are extremely deadly but not very contagious. The pandemicists almost never bother to wargame the most common pandemic virus, namely influenza, because nobody finds it particularly scary. As founding pandemicist Larry Brilliant said in 2007:

Last year, six hundred thousand people died and we didn’t notice. That’s a little bit of the reason you find so much hyperbole in the whole question of pandemic flu. Because a lot of public health people are saying, oh goody, we have something that’s going to frighten rich people, let’s use it as a chance to build up the public health system.

Fundraising viruses are a fictional threat. Any viral pathogen adapted to spread widely via direct person-to-person contact in human hosts will cause nothing more than influenza-like illness, with mortality well within the familiar range for seasonal respiratory viruses. This important difference, between what grabs attention and what is actually biologically likely to occur, is one reason I think that most scientists, and the pandemicists in particular, ignore the broader behavioural patterns of viruses and the evolutionary pressures to which they’re subject. Looking too deeply into these questions threatens to turn up evidence that we don’t really need the pandemicists at all.

Formally, it seems that this bland pandemic theatre is supposed to familiarise “stakeholders” and “decision-makers” with the expected mitigationist response. As late as Event 201 in Fall 2019, this response consisted of not doing very much. Before Corona, the pandemicists didn’t like the idea of travel restrictions or lockdowns. These might be used to contain very local outbreaks, but once a virus had achieved pandemic status, closures were considered counterproductive and likely to increase poverty and disease in the developing world. The pandemicists preferred things like travel advisories and fast-tracking vaccine development. The idea of mass containment emerged in the wake of SARS; it was never a part of Western pandemicist doctrine, though brief lockdowns were trialled in Mexico in 2009 against the nothingburger Swine Flu, and again in 2014 against Ebola.(1)

As I never tire of typing, what happened in the West was a hybrid response. Via China and pressure from the WHO, mass containment came to be added at the very last minute to the standard mitigationist playbook that the pandemicists had been peddling for a generation. This is why the messaging shifted so suddenly after February 2020. Until that date, we were in the standard world of Event 201, and authorities talked down the risk of the virus in an effort to prepare us all for the inevitable infections and deaths. Mass containment, adopted with the Italian lockdown in March, required a vastly more hysterical and overblown messaging strategy, in an effort to convince all of us to hide at home.

All that wargaming about how we’d stay open didn’t matter very much in the end, because well-publicised pandemic wargames aren’t actually planning exercises and have very little strategic importance. They’re for fundraising and publicity.

Probably the most obtrusive feature of pandemicist material – and the least discussed – is its extremely low quality. This is above all why I have a hard time buying theories that these events reflect any nefarious plan. They are just so, so stupid, it is actually hard to put into words. While earlier wargames were fairly textured and elaborate, there’s been a steady decline, worsened by the arrival of Big Philanthropy. I strongly advise that you not waste your life watching the extremely insipid Event 201 videos. Far more digestible is the SPARS pandemic exercise, which is often cited as another ominously prophetic document, particularly for its lengthy discussions of anti-vaxxers and pro-vaccine public health messaging. There are some parallels to recent events, but if you read carefully, you’ll see that the whole thing is firmly rooted in vintage 2016 anxieties about social media disinformation. And, again, it’s just really, really dumb. Every chapter concludes with tiresome questions for discussion by “public health risk communicators,” whoever they are. It feels like a weird textbook written for virusphobic primary school children in an alternate reality, where the hot new social media platform is called ZapQ and the big antivaxx disinformationist is a “science blogger” named EpiGirl and public health officials recruit a “hip hop icon” named BZee whose fictional tweets get fewer retweets and likes than mine do (see the figures on p. 25).

Nevertheless, the SPARS scenario and others like them have their moments of foreknowledge. I would never exclude malfeasance outright, but the general explanation for this phenomenon is that we get the virus freakouts we plan for. Virus fantasies like Event 201 and SPARS reflect a prior epidemiological interest in specific pathogens, and they serve to focus the attention of the public health brigade further on specific viral species. Monkeypox and the 2009 Swine Flu show that pandemicist attention alone – in the absence of any serious mortality – is enough to generate widespread hysteria. These are prophecies, but they are mostly self-fulfilling ones. That is also why the laboratory origins of SARS-2 are such a big piece of this puzzle.

What’s missing from all these planning scenarios – what every last one of them fails to predict – is the steely biomedical dictatorship that emerged to ruin all of our lives in 2020. Nobody in any of these wargames is ever locked up in their homes. Public health officials respond to the off-message EpiGirl with press releases, not threats and deplatforming. There are no green passes. The unvaccinated are never deplored or fired. Part of the reason is that, before 2020, lockdowns had never been part of the plan, and they gave public health bureaucrats a chance at overt and direct repression, which they’d never counted on before. But it’s also true that the basic project of pandemicism has authoritarian and repressive elements baked into it, which I think the pandemicists themselves never really noticed. They’re just not the most intelligent or introspective people.

(1) In the years after SARS, some public health bureaucrats and pandemicists played with ever more restrictionist mitigation regimes, contemplating school closures and work-from-home orders, but their focus remained firmly mitigationist. The purpose was only to slow infections to spare the healthcare system. Mass containment, by contrast, is eradicationist in outlook, aiming not to slow infections but to stop the virus altogether.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Government Has Been Planning to ‘Lockdown and Wait for a Vaccine’ Since 2007

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 13, 2022

More and more evidence is coming to light that the ‘lockdown and wait for a vaccine’ strategy unleashed in 2020 was being cooked up inside the U.S. Government for decades before COVID-19 appeared and gave too many people an excuse to put the dreadful plan into action.

Recently the role of CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in producing key lockdown guidance for America in March 2020 came to light.

Now, a pandemic plan from 2007 produced by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and currently hosted on the CISA website has emerged.

The plan contains the original list of pandemic ‘essential businesses’ that was used by CISA in 2020 to lock down America. The 2007 plan (which was itself based on a Department of Homeland Security plan from the previous year) clearly states the intention to ban large gatherings “indefinitely”, close schools and non-essential businesses, institute work-from-home, and quarantine exposed and not just sick individuals. The aim is simple and clear: to slow the spread to wait for a vaccine.

During a pandemic, the goal will be to slow the virus’ transmission; delaying the spread of the virus will provide more time for vaccine development while reducing the stress on an already burdened healthcare system.

Here’s the relevant section of the 2007 NIAC plan in full.

2006 and 2007 were a turning point in U.S. biodefence planning. Prior to 2006, such planning had been focused on biological attacks, but after that point major mission creep set in and the new draconian ideas were applied wholesale to general pandemic planning. This controversial switch in focus so riled leading U.S. disease expert D.A. Henderson, who had been involved with the project up to that point, that he issued his famous riposte objecting in the strongest terms to the new ideas. He and his fellow dissenters wrote, presciently:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

I’m told by someone who was involved with the programme in the early days that the original biodefence planning in 2002-2003 assumed a targeted biological weapons attack with smallpox as the viral case and anthrax as the bacterial case – both considered worst case scenarios. It was recognised that the old smallpox vaccine was too risky to try to use on a wider population to protect them if such an attack occurred, thus the effort for a new vaccine. But very quickly, within a year or two (not least due to the SARS outbreak in 2003), there was a massive expansion of the original mission and suddenly every infectious agent, whether dangerous or not, was cast into the web of biodefence.

Outside the U.S. there was more resistance to this kind of totalitarian nonsense. However, even the 2019 World Health Organisation pandemic guidance bears many of its marks. While this guidance commendably did not recommend “in any circumstances” contact tracing, border closures, entry and exit screening and quarantine of exposed individuals, it did make conditional recommendations for use of face masks by the public, school and workplace closures and “avoiding crowding” i.e., social distancing.

The purpose was also the same: to ‘flatten the curve’ to wait for a vaccine, as illustrated in the diagram below. The WHO guidance states: “NPIs are often the most accessible interventions, because of the time it takes to make specific vaccines available”; “specific vaccines may not be available for the first six months”; NPIs are “used to delay the peak of the epidemic… allowing time for vaccines to be distributed”.

These untested ideas, which the WHO’s own guidance rightly admitted had no good quality evidence to support them, have now become a terrible orthodoxy for global pandemic response. This is despite them utterly failing to achieve any of their goals – a point that no one who backs them seems to have noticed.

Somehow, the world must learn the right lessons from this debacle. Yet it keeps threatening to learn all the wrong ones.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Social media’s history of suppressing Palestine content

By Kathryn Shihadah | Israel-Palestine News | December 12, 2022

For years, social media have been making it difficult for Palestinian and their allies’ voices to be heard – even as Israel’s stranglehold on Palestinians has grown stronger, and as increasing amounts of US tax money have been sent to Israel and to various countries for Israel’s direct benefit.

Social media users, especially Palestinian human rights advocates, have reported puzzling occurrences on the major platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – especially during times of Israeli crackdowns.

Users who shared information on the situation in the Palestinian territories described posts being deleted as “hate speech or symbols,” or “violence,” inexplicably losing followers and views of their content, or having entire accounts abruptly frozen or deleted.

One rights group documented over 700 instances of social media networks restricting or removing Palestinian content in May 2021 alone, during a time of especially heavy Israeli state violence.

Another group reported that nearly half of the Palestinian-themed content that disappeared off of Instagram during this time period

occurred without the company providing the user a prior warning or notice. In an additional 20 percent of the cases, Instagram notified the user but did not provide a specific justification for restricting the content.

When users appealed the censorship, often their content or account would be restored, with a message that it never should have been deleted to begin with. But by the time this resolution came, the opportunity to inform and influence readers was past.

For example, in May 2021, during a time of escalating Israeli violence, Twitter restricted the account of Palestinian-American journalist Mariam Barghouti, who had been posting photos and videos of the violence in Jerusalem. It later restored Barghouti’s account and apologized for the suspension, saying it was done “by mistake.”

A long report on social media actions regarding Israel-Palestine in the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out: “Some of those who have been covering such issues for years don’t think these kinds of things are a mistake; rather, they believe social networks are deliberately censoring Palestinian content.”

Barghouti explained the significance of Twitter to the Palestinian rights movement:

It’s our only avenue for speaking with the world from under a military occupation that controls all our entry and exit points. We’re left to share through soundbites of 280 characters. If even that is taken away, we’re looking at the slaughter of Palestinians in silence.

Social media suppression is particularly critical since mainstream media tend not to cover Israel and Palestine with the kind of accuracy and context that would enable Americans to understand the issue.

In essence, social media have been preventing the victims of Israeli violence from sharing their experiences or building support for their plight.

Excuses

Although owned by two different companies, the three platforms, Twitter and Facebook/Instagram, have offered duplicate “explanations” for what has happened, including glitches that just happened to affect posts and hashtags about Israel, and  “widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic.”

One Facebook spokesperson stated,
While these [glitches] have been fixed, they should never have happened in the first place. We’re so sorry to everyone who felt they couldn’t bring attention to important events, or who felt this was a deliberate suppression of their voice. This was never our intention – nor do we ever want to silence a particular community or point of view.
Human rights advocates familiar with the years-long social media battle were not convinced.

TRT World reported another case in which Twitter restricted information on Palestine:

Pro-Palestinian activist Hebh Jamal’s Twitter was targeted with complaints over a post detailing an emotional conversation between her husband and his little cousin in Gaza. The young cousin admitted to wanting to brush his hair before sleeping for fear that the Israeli fire may kill him in his sleep. He said he wanted to look good in case he died. Hebh’s post was flagged for deletion, and restricted by Twitter.

Since the German government has implemented legal measures to make social media companies accountable to users, Twitter later confessed to Hebh that the complaints against her post were baseless. Under German law, Twitter has to inform the user if their post or account is being investigated. This only applies because Hebh and her family reside in Germany. For most Palestinians hailing from Gaza City, there’s a different set of rules, and a radically different set of rights.

TRT reports: “Hebh now faces a video review for every post she makes. She’s also been reported on TikTok as well, with her account deleted before.”

Journalist Bayan Ishtaiwi explained: “For Palestinians sealed-off in open-air prisons like Gaza, social media is all they have. Whoever uses words like occupation or martyr, is penalized for three days at least, which happened to me, or face a ban on live videos for a month.”

Whistleblowing

A group of Instagram employees confirmed the human rights activists’ suspicions when they protested the platform’s blocking of pro-Palestinian content during Israel’s violence in May 2021 – even after the issue had already been reported.

An employee circulated an internal document, which was later shared with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in which he asked,

Can we investigate the reasons why posts and stories pertaining to Palestine lately have had limited reach and engagement, especially when more people than ever from around the world are watching the situation unfold?

Other employees added comments, including,

I’d really like to understand what exactly is breaking down here and why. What is being done to fix it given that this is an issue that was brought up a week ago?

Soon after, nearly 200 Facebook employees signed on to an open letter demanding that Facebook address the allegations of censorship.

Israel calls the shots

Foreign Policy reports:

“Since 2015, the Israeli Justice Ministry has operated a Cyber Unit that has issued tens of thousands of content removal requests to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, mostly alleging violent incitement or support for terrorism.

Technically, these requests are voluntary. They are not legally binding and are therefore not tracked in the transparency reports that technology companies use to disclose formal government censorship orders.

Nonetheless, social media companies have complied with the Cyber Unit’s requests roughly 90 percent of the time.”

Israel’s infamous Cyber Unit patrols social media, searching for “incriminating” content, passing along thousands of requests to social media administrators to remove what the unit finds unacceptable.

In 2016, the Israeli government and Facebook agreed to collaborate on ways to combat what Israel considers “incitement to violence” on the platform.

Then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked noted that at the time, Facebook’s compliance with Israel’s requests to take down content was up to 95%, but expressed hopes that the plan would result in even more censorship.

Neither Israel nor the platforms have been transparent about this practice.

In 2020, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs issued a report on allegedly “phony” online profiles that put out content critical of Israel.

Within a day, Twitter “suspended dozens of Palestinian and pro-Palestine accounts,” claiming the information they circulated violated its terms of service.

It may be noteworthy that both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk have had private audiences with top Israeli leaders.

Israelis abound in Silicon Valley, with about 60,000-100,000 in the Bay Area, and Israel partisans are also ever-present. A recent photo of Musk shared on Twitter was of him with his friend Ari Emanuel, son of a former Irgun terrorist and brother of Rahm Emanuel, who once volunteered with the IDF.

One Palestinian activist summed up the situation:

Rather than being some kind of enabler of democracy, social media has come to be the epitome of political silencing and repression as tech giants have collaborated with various oppressive governments, including the Israeli government, to censor and delete content that exposes their true oppressive character.

Facebook, Instagram report card

Facebook’s Oversight Board recommended that Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) undergo an evaluation of its treatment of Palestinian content in May 2021. Meta hired the consulting company Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) for the work.

Jewish Currents summarized BSR’s final report in an article entitled “Human Rights Due Diligence of Meta’s Impacts in Israel and Palestine”:

The report underscored heavy-handed content moderation by Facebook and Instagram, which Palestinian social media users claim censors critics of Israeli repression.

These restrictions have undermined Palestinian users’ effort to use social media to document Israeli human rights abuses.

BSR contrasted Meta’s over-enforcement of Palestinian social media posts with its under-enforcement of Hebrew-language posts, which the report attributes to Meta installing an algorithmic “hostile speech classifier” for Arabic, but not for Hebrew.

The report concludes that Arabic language content is over-regulated because Hamas, the ruling, elected party in Gaza, is on Facebook’s blacklist, so it was standard to remove posts that appeared to “praise, support, or represent” that group or others on the list.

Other reasons for the interference lie in the fact that the Palestinian content was not reviewed by Palestinian dialect speakers of Arabic, nor was the algorithm developed with the proper “linguistic and cultural competence.”

Internet policy experts summed up the situation at Facebook and the other platforms:

Social media companies have] shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.

“Unintentional”? Really?

BSR’s report speculated that the impact of Facebook’s actions – Palestinian users’ loss of rights to expression – was unintentional. Rights groups disagreed.

Dozens of groups signed a public statement in response to BSR’s report, insisting that they had been

calling Meta’s attention to the disproportionately negative impact of its content moderation on Palestinians for years, [so] even if the bias started out as unintentional, after knowing about the issues for years and not taking appropriate action, the unintentional became intentional.

Looking ahead

The BSR report ends with 21 recommendations to Meta, some of which Meta has committed to, either fully or in part.

Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for a digital rights group, had mixed feelings:

The report validates the lived experiences of Palestinians… They cannot tell us anymore that this is a system glitch. Now they know the root causes…

But regarding Israel’s interference in content restriction, he added,

We’ve wanted more clarity on this because Meta refuses to provide answers. Users deserve transparency on whether their piece of content has been removed as a result of the Israeli government’s request.

Bottom line

Social media have for years – and for various reasons – repressed content about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

In some particularly egregious situations, like Israel’s aggression in May 2021, the companies have offered excuses and apologies. But impartial analysis has proven these excuses false and the apologies hollow.

Not only are social media platforms inherently skewed to over-regulate Palestinian voices, but they are influenced by a powerful foreign government (and no doubt, its US lobby) to an extent we can only imagine.

And Palestinians continue dying.

A report in Foreign Policy by Emerson T. Brooking and Eliza Campbell described the situation with rare eloquence:

The 4.8 million residents of the occupied Palestinian territories live in two simultaneous and vastly different realities. In the physical world, Palestinians are captives, crammed into Gaza or West Bank enclaves and blockaded by Israeli military checkpoints…

But on the internet, the checkpoints disappear. Palestinians can converse with family from whom they are separated by barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. They can share their stories with observers and sympathizers around the world.

In doing so, Palestinians can call themselves citizens of a sovereign State of Palestine: one recognized by 138 countries and admitted in 2012 as a non-member observer state to the United Nations. This second, digital Palestine represents a fulfilment of the internet’s optimistic and largely forgotten promise to give voice to the voiceless and illuminate the darkest corners of the world.

It is also under threat of being extinguished. This is due to a confluence of three forces. The first is the expansive police and surveillance apparatus of the State of Israel, which is used to track, intimidate, and imprison Palestinians in the occupied territories for their online speech.

The second is a network of formal and informal institutions used by the Israeli government to target pro-Palestinian expression across the globe.

The third—and most surprising—force is that of American social media companies, which have shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.

Together, these forces demonstrate how it is possible for an ostensibly democratic government to suppress a popular online movement with the acquiescence of ostensibly liberal Silicon Valley executives. The playbook being pioneered against Palestinians will not stay in the Middle East forever. In time, it may be deployed against activist communities around the world.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli sniper kills 16-year old Palestinian girl in West Bank raid

Jana Zakarneh, 16, was killed by Israeli forces in Jenin. (Photo: via WAFA)
MEMO | December 12, 2022

The Palestinian Health Ministry said a girl child was killed by an Israeli sniper last night in Jenin City, north of the Occupied West Bank, The Palestinian Information Centre reports.

According to local sources, 16-year-old Jana Zakarnah was found dead on the roof of her home after an Israeli sniper targeted her and fatally injured her in the head.

The incident happened after Israeli soldiers from a special unit stormed the eastern neighbourhood of Jenin City on Sunday night.

Fierce armed clashes reportedly took place in the area between the soldiers and resistance fighters.

The Health Ministry said that one citizen was moderately injured during the protests, while the Red Crescent said that its ambulance crews provided assistance to three citizens after they suffered bullet injuries in their lower extremities.

In a statement, Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas affirmed that a group of its fighters and others exchanged fire with undercover soldiers from the Duvdevan unit in Al-Bayader area in Jenin City and targeted them with explosive devices.

Meanwhile, local sources reported that the Israeli Occupation Forces kidnapped three young men, including two brothers, from Jenin City during the same raid.

The Hebrew media claimed that one of the detainees was intending to carry out operations against Israeli targets.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Kiev Seizes Assets of Russian Orthodox Clerics

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | December 12, 2022

Ukraine ratcheted up its campaign against a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church with ties to Russia. By the orders of President Volodymyr Zelensky, seven senior clerics from the Russian Orthodox church will have their assets seized and are subject to a ban on economic and legal activities.

During his nightly video address on Sunday, the Ukrainian president said, “by decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, sanctions were applied against seven people.” Zelensky added, “we are doing everything to ensure that the aggressor state does not have a single string of Ukrainian society to pull.”

According to Reuters, the sanctions led to seven clerics having “their assets seized and are subject to a ban on a range of economic and legal activities as well as a de facto travel ban.”

The vast majority of Ukrainians belong to Eastern Orthodox churches. Many Ukrainians worship in parishes that take direction from the Moscow Patriarchate. On December 1, Zelensky announced Kiev would attempt to push all religions with ties to Russia out of Ukraine. He said this will make “it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.”

He went on the claim that the Russian Orthodox Church was a threat to Ukrainian culture, saying “[w]e will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul.” Zelensky additionally denounced Ukrainians continuing to attend the parishes as failing to overcome “the temptation of evil.”

Kiev has conducted a series of raids on Russian Orthodox parishes and claims to have uncovered clerics attempting to subvert the Ukrainian government. Last week, Kiev sanctioned ten top clerics of the church.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , | Leave a comment

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