By Jonathan Turley | December 17, 2022
The December Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is out this week and Mark Penn and his colleagues have some interesting results to share. Despite the refusal of many in the media to cover the Twitter files, nearly two-thirds of voters believe Twitter shadow-banned users and engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election. Seventy percent of voters want new national laws protecting users from corporate censorship.
This week, the media continued to fulfill that common view of a de facto state media by ignoring new evidence of FBI coordination in censorship targets with Twitter in the latest news blackout.
On Friday, Twitter released additional information showing that the FBI and CIA actively pushed for censorship, supplying lists of accounts to be suspended or banned.
Journalist Matt Taibbi described Twitter as acting as a “subsidiary” of the FBI and wrote that “between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
The evidence continues to establish a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy. While the First Amendment applies to the government and not private corporations generally, it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.
Once again, however, the major networks and newspapers have largely ignored the story. There has been a full mobilization of media, political, and business interests against Elon Musk and Twitter to oppose the restoration of free speech protections at the company. The media is heavily invested in suppressing this story after years of denials of any problems of censorship. Previously, they denied censorship was occurring. When such censorship became obvious, they denied that there was any involvement of the FBI and the government. Now that such involvement is confirmed, they are simply not covering the story.
Instead, the media is “all-in” on the doxxing suspensions (which Musk has now lifted). I have been critical of Musk’s response to the doxxing controversy. In part this is due to the scope of the suspensions and the fact that they occurred only 24 hours after the new policy was implemented. I would have preferred warnings and further clarity on the issue, particularly in what constituted doxxing in some of these tweets from journalists.
Despite the overwhelming coverage, there is little explanation of the media’s approach to the underlying doxxing question. Some have said that this is a “grey area” or may be below the threshold.
For years, the media has supported suspensions due to doxxing. In this case, the location of Musk’s plane may have been used by an individual to threaten his family. Most reports omit any discussion of whether the sending of such live locations information is doxxing. If it is, it has long been banned by most sites and journalists are not exempt.
Previously, figures connected with mainstream media from CNN to the Washington Post have been accused of doxxing. Liberal groups were accused of doxxing conservative justices and others, including dangerously posting information on the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It does not seem to matter when the targets are conservative, Republican, or libertarian.
Writers who have long advocated the banning of others with opposing views are some of the loudest objecting in the wake of the doxxing controversy. The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz expressed fear that she could be next. It may not be a groundless fear since Lorenz has been previously accused of doxxing others and described the reintroduction of free speech protections for others as the opening of “the gates of hell.”
Jack Sweeney, the creator of this site (using publicly available information), has expressed shock at being sued and suspended. However, these articles continue to tellingly omit one of the critical issues. Is it doxxing to supply people with the minute-by-minute movement of the plane used by Musk and his family? That would seem relevant to weighing the merits of these suspensions.
Such slanted coverage is clearly losing its hold on the public or its view of Twitter. Indeed, the media continues to write off a large percentage of readers and viewers with openly biased coverage. The public is not buying it. It is buying Twitter. Not only are users signing up in record numbers, but a recent poll shows a majority of Americans “support Elon Musk’s ongoing efforts to change Twitter to a more free and transparent platform.”
In the wake of the latest release, the FBI issued a statement that said that there was nothing to see here and that “the FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”
The statement is notable for what it does not contain: any recognition of the seriousness of the allegations or pledge to conduct its own investigation in whether this relationship crossed over to de facto government censorship. According to some reports, as many as 80 FBI agents may have been tasked to assist in the censorship efforts. Yet, the FBI has offered little more than a shrug in the face of credible constitutional concerns.
According to the Harvard/Harris poll, the public believes that such censorship occurred and warrants action. The denials of the FBI and the dismissal of the mainstream media will only serve to magnify such calls for action.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. – The Defender – December 16, 2022
A growing number of parents oppose vaccine mandates as a precondition for public school attendance, and interest among adults in receiving COVID-19 booster shots is waning, according to a national poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
The results of the latest KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor survey, released today, show more than one-third (35%) of parents now believe they should be the ones to decide whether their children receive a slate of childhood vaccines.
The poll encompassed a nationally representative sample of 1,259 adults who were interviewed between Nov. 29 and Dec. 8. According to The New York Times, the KFF is a “nonpartisan health care research organization.”
“It’s unfortunate that it took a wave of injuries and deaths from vaccines that never should have been released into the market — much less mandated — to draw long-overdue attention to the issue of vaccine safety,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense.
Kennedy told The Defender :
“This latest poll is encouraging for those parents, physicians and scientists who for decades have been calling for an investigation into the relentless promotion by FDA, CDC and Big Pharma of inferior medical products without rigorous safety testing.
“As more parents begin to question the forced, routine administration of vaccines on healthy children, perhaps we will move closer to protecting children and holding vaccine makers and government agencies accountable for the harm these products cause.”
26% of parents today: ‘Risks of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella outweigh the benefits’
According to the KFF poll, 65% of parents of children under age 18 “think healthy children should be required to be vaccinated to attend public schools.”
This represents an 11% decline from an October 2019 Pew Research Center poll showing 76% of parents supported public school vaccine mandates.
More than one-third of parents surveyed (35%) “now believe parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children, up from 23% in 2019.”
The poll also revealed declines in support for specific vaccines. For instance, 71% of respondents said “healthy children should be required to get vaccinated for MMR in order to attend public schools” compared with 82% who supported the MMR vaccine mandate for healthy children in 2019.
Nearly 3 in 10 parents (28%) said parents should be able to choose whether their children receive the MMR vaccine, compared with 16% in the 2019 poll.
A similar percentage (26%) responded that the “risks of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella outweigh the benefits.”
A smaller decline was noted in the percentage of adults (85%) who felt the benefits of childhood MMR vaccination outweigh the risk. This represented a three-percentage-point decline from the 2019 Pew Research Center poll (88%).
These declines were driven by increased vaccine “skepticism” and a growing movement toward parental choice, on the part of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — 44% of whom responded that parents should have a choice about whether or not their children receive the MMR vaccine, up from 20% in 2019.
Only 11% of Democrats provided the same response.
Moreover, only 56% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said “healthy children should be required to be vaccinated to attend public schools,” a decline of 23 percentage points compared to 2019.
A similar divide was apparent among respondents in reference to their COVID-19 vaccination status. While 83% of vaccinated respondents said healthy children should be required to be vaccinated in order to attend public schools, 63% of unvaccinated parents said parents should instead decide.
‘Tepid’ interest in COVID ‘boosters’ and flu vaccine
Interest in the updated COVID-19 booster is “tepid,” according to the KFF poll, which showed only 1 in 5 adults (22%) surveyed said they have received the updated bivalent booster and an additional 16% said they plan to receive it “as soon as possible.”
However, 12% of respondents said they would “wait and see” before deciding whether to get the new booster, 13% said they would get it only if required and 9% said they would “definitely not” get it.
An additional 27% were unvaccinated or only “partially” vaccinated, which means they are not eligible to get the booster.
Interest in the bivalent booster was highest among adults 65 and older (39%) and Democrat voters (38%), though both figures fall significantly short of a majority. Conversely, only 12% of Republicans and 11% of young adults under 30 said they had received a dose of the updated booster.
Also, 36% of “fully vaccinated” adults 65 and older said they don’t think they need the updated booster, while a “similar percentage,” according to KFF, said they did not think the benefit of the updated booster was worth it.
Overall, fewer than half of parents of children under 18 said their child has received the updated booster or is likely to do so.
Combined with children who have not been vaccinated and who are therefore ineligible for the booster, 58% of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds and 70% of parents of 5- to 11-year-olds responded in this manner.
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, even if vaccinated, expressed skepticism toward the updated booster, with 64% stating they do not think they need it, and 61% saying they did not believe the benefit was worth it.
Even among Democrats, a majority (51%) said they were too busy or hadn’t had the time to get the updated booster, indicating it was not a high priority for them.
Even in the face of a so-called “tripledemic” of COVID-19, flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) this fall and winter, and despite the majority of parents saying they are worried their children will get sick from RSV (56%, and 73% of parents of children under the age of 5), only 34% of parents said their child has gotten a flu shot this season.
Parents’ rights movement growing in prominence
According to The Times, “The shift in positions appears to be less about rejecting the shots than a growing endorsement of the so-called parents’ rights movement.”
Dr. Sean O’Leary, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases told The Times :
“The talking point that has been circulated is the concept of taking away parents’ rights. And when you frame it that simply, it’s very appealing to a certain segment of the population.”
O’Leary said he worried that the parental rights movement might slow down compliance with state-mandated childhood immunization schedules, telling The Times “We do have a global dip in vaccine coverage. So this is not a time to be considering a rollback of these laws.”
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.
By Patrick Clarke | December 14, 2022
First we were placed under virtual house arrest. Now we are being frozen by soaring fuel bills and energy supply shortages in those same homes. Coming next, we are to be starved. All in pursuit of one of the Net Zero cults: Covid or carbon emissions. Too bleak a picture? We have only to look across the North Sea to one of our nearest neighbours, the Netherlands.
Surprisingly for such a small country (it is only about twice the size of Wales), the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world, second only to the United States. It is Europe’s largest meat exporter. Four million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chickens are reared annually. It provides vegetables to many of its Western European neighbours.
One would assume this success story would be widely cherished, especially in an era of increasing food insecurity and shortages, with other key sources such as Ukraine under serious threat due to the continuing conflict there.
Remarkably, and many would say sinisterly, the polar opposite is the case. The supposed crime of the Dutch farmers? They have fallen foul of the ‘Zero Carbon’ fixation of the Climate Change Cultists who control so much of the current political and economic agenda.
One of that agenda’s chief targets is agriculture, particularly the use of nitrogen. The Dutch are at the top of the tree for nitrogen use per hectare of cultivated land, at nearly twice the European average.
The European Commission has given strict guidelines to EU member states to reduce their use of nitrogen. To comply with this the Dutch Government introduced laws to enforce a reduction of 50 per cent in nitrogen emissions by 2030. Such draconian targets can only come with draconian enforcement measures.
Dutch farming is being strangled through an assortment of regulations, including new flood prevention regulations, bizarrely given the success of the Dutch in preventing flooding over the centuries despite the fact that large parts of the country are below sea level, having been reclaimed from the sea.
Perhaps worst of all, one of the Government’s new laws bans the children of farmers from inheriting the farm when their parents retire or die. Once a farmer stops farming, their entire family becomes banned from farming in the Netherlands again. A whole way of life plus decades, sometimes even centuries, of experience is being gratuitously thrown away.
Where regulation fails, mandatory purchasing of land by the state is feared to be the next step as farmers have so far shown little interest in selling any of their land. Around 300,000 hectares of farmland is earmarked to be converted into nature conservation areas between now and 2040. More than 1,000 farms face forcible closure.
Nor is it just the Dutch Government that the farmers are battling. A panoply of NGOs are on the case too, using the courts to pursue any part of the government at national or provincial level deemed to be faltering in enforcing these objectives.
Those of us in the UK, long weary of seeing how political charities and activist lawyers run rings round attempts to enforce curbs on immigration, will be familiar with the process.
It’s worth pointing out too that, despite Brexit, Northern Ireland still has to implement these same EU directives as part of the Northern Ireland protocol. Thanks for that one, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. So while today it is Dutch farming under siege from its own government, tomorrow it will be farming in Northern Ireland that is compelled to go through the same pain.
Interestingly, no one has yet stepped forward with a credible plan for how these vital lost sources of food are going to be replaced. The Dutch Government hopes that it will come from artificially created meat from laboratories and is investing in this technology, though how it can be sufficiently scaled up remains to be seen. Given what is already widely known about the harmful effects of eating too many processed foods instead of natural foods, such as the triggering of obesity and potential heart disease, it has to be asked whether this is a desirable course, or indeed what the further health implications for users may be.
Some would say the whole agenda is a straight forward grab by bad actors intent on taking control of the world’s food resources, for whom Net Zero objectives provide a convenient camouflage for their own lust for power, control and yet more wealth than they already have. The usual suspects certainly spring to mind.
Others argue that out-of-control digital technocrats are so conditioned to assuming they can control anything, however complex, that they can’t accept that some things remain beyond human control, such as airborne viruses and the climate.
Each failure to learn that simple lesson is leading to ever more intensive efforts to achieve that control, control that must be achieved at all costs. Either way, vicious cycles of more authoritarianism, human misery arising from absurd and seriously harmful measures, plus more setbacks in failing to reach unobtainable goals lie ahead. Unless we can shake off the grip of these technocrats on our societies and the political institutions in thrall to them, the prospect of starving to death will become our grim reality in an increasingly tyrannical world.
Think that couldn’t happen here? Just look at Sri Lanka, though as with the Dutch farmers, most of the media and nearly every politician would prefer you not to!
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | December 15, 2022
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently hosted a roundtable forum of experts challenging the science coming from federal public health agencies surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine. Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo announced the creation of the state’s new Public Health Integrity Committee, and Gov. Desantis announced he is requesting a grand jury investigation of vaccine-makers. Will other states follow?
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | December 15, 2022
The attempt to remask the public has started. And it’s rapidly moved past COVID as a reason to know of any basic respiratory illnesses. But does science justify it? Jefferey and Del break down the latest PR push surrounding masking.
By Thierry Meyssan | Voltaire Network | December 13, 2022
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been named by Time Magazine as the “Person of the Year 2022”; an obvious choice, according to the magazine’s editors. Indeed, he embodies an infectious courage that has enabled his people to resist the Russian invasion.
However, in his country, power has gradually passed from his hands to those of his deputy chairman of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, since July 25. Zelensky is concentrating on his role as spokesman for the regime, leaving Danilov to prepare the decrees he signs. Together, the two men established a regime of terror.
On July 17 and 25, three members of the Council were dismissed for numerous acts of treason reported by the officials under their command:
Speaking about those crucial days, Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine before the war, said that Zelensky had seized power, all power, under the guise of reform.
On August 26, Oleksiy Danilov revealed on the NTA channel that the Security and Defense Council had adopted a plan for the defense of the country in November 2021, that is, four months before the Russian military intervention. This document had been prepared since Zelensky rejected the plan for a Minsk-3 proposed by Paris on December 8-9, 2019. “It is a huge fundamental document that sets out the activities of all bodies without exception: who and how to act in a situation of martial law,” he said, September 7 in Left Bank.
ASSASSINATING POLITICAL OPPONENTS
Political assassinations are usually carried out by “mainstream nationalists” and not by government bodies. At any time, they can kidnap and disappear, or even execute political opponents directly in the street in full view of the public. The victims are primarily journalists and elected officials. This is not a new operation since these murders have punctuated the civil war since 2014.
One thinks of the deputy Oleg Kalashnikov, murdered with eleven bullets in the head on the doorstep of his house, in 2015. The police have never established, neither who carried out the assassination, nor who ordered it.
However, in some cases, they are the work of the SBU (security service). For example, the execution of the official negotiator, Denis Kireev, on his return from Kiev, where he had participated in contacts with Russia without success. He was killed in the street on March 6, 2022, because during the negotiations he had dared to mention the historical ties between Kiev and Moscow.
The political leaders do not publicly assume these acts, but encourage them. They say that the country must be “purified”. It is not a question of killing agents of the Russian Federation, but any bearer of Russian culture or anyone who recognizes the value of this culture.
The mayor of Kiev, boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, has commissioned the neo-Nazi group C-14 to hunt down and kill “saboteurs” among Ukrainians of Slavic origin.
Criminal proceedings have been initiated against former high-ranking state officials such as MP Yevhen Murayev, former Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov, former Prime Minister Arseni Yatsenyuk, former Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council Oleksandr Turchynov and former President Petro Poroshenko.
The SBU is henceforth arresting many civilians it accuses of collaborating with the Russians.
BANNING THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE
While, according to the Minsk II Agreements (Art. 11, explanatory note [1]) of February 12, 2015, the Donbass regions were to be able to determine their own official language, Oleksiy Danilov declared on September 1, 2022: “It is they [the inhabitants of Donbass] who must find a common language with us, not we with them. We have borders, and if someone is not satisfied with the laws and rules that apply on the territory of our country, we do not hold anyone back.
On October 21, he was more specific: “The Russian language should disappear completely from our territory as an element of hostile propaganda and brainwashing for our population.
CONTROLLING THE MEDIA
Oleksiy Danilov, said on July 20, in the midst of the Security and Defense Council crisis, that many people who used to appear on television before the “Russian aggression”, no longer appear. “We do not know where they have gone. The SBU will make strong statements about them”. He accused them of reporting the Russian point of view: “Implanting these Russian stories here is a very, very dangerous thing. Apparently we should understand what they are. Look: we don’t need them. Let them leave us, let them go to their swamps and croak in their Russian language.
The Security and Defense Council had already placed all print and broadcast media under its surveillance. In addition, it had banned a hundred Telegram channels that it had labeled “pro-Russian.”
DESTROYING 100 MILLION RUSSIAN BOOKS
The Ukrainian Book Institute, which oversees all public libraries, was tasked on May 19, that is, before the Security and Defense Council crisis, with destroying 100 million books [2].
The aim was to destroy all books by Russian authors or printed in Russian or printed in Russia. In practice, a commission was appointed within the Verkhovna Rada to ensure the implementation of this intellectual purge. It turned out that the vast majority of books in the libraries were practical books on cooking, sewing, etc. They waited for a while before being removed. They waited for a while before they were plundered, with priority given to evil authors like Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy.
BANNING POLITICAL PARTIES
The 12 opposition political parties were banned, one by one. The latest one was sanctioned on October 22 [3]. Their elected representatives were dismissed.
Only the Transcarpathian oblast (close to Hungary) refuses to dismiss local representatives of banned political parties.
CONFISCATING THE PROPERTY OF OPPONENTS AND RUSSIANS
Since the end of February, the Ukrainian Agency for Asset Research and Management (ARMA), the European Union’s anti-corruption body, has seized assets worth more than 1.5 billion hryvnias, or $41 million dollars.
One by one, the oligarchs who own media outlets were forced to hand over their assets. This is a general plan to free the country from their influence. However, they still have the right to own other types of companies.
According to the Ukrainian law of 2021, oligarchs are the 86 citizens who have at least $80 million, participate in political life and have great influence on the media. According to Oleksiy Danilov, there should be no more oligarchs at the end of the war.
The Security and Defense Council decided on November 7 to nationalize factories belonging to oligarchs, including Igor Kolomoisky, the financier of Volodymyr Zelensky. They have been placed under the administration of the Ministry of Defence and should be “returned to the Ukrainian people” at the end of martial law.
This decision applies, among others, to the Ukrainian aircraft engine manufacturer Motor Sich, which was in dispute with Chinese investors before an arbitration court in The Hague (Beijing Skyrizon case). China, which claims 4.5 billion dollars, called the nationalization “theft”. According to Beijing: “Since 2020, the Ukrainian government has continuously created problems, blamed, repressed and persecuted Chinese investors without reason, and even imposed special economic sanctions without reason, with the intention of nationalizing Motor Sich PJSC by illegal means and shamelessly looting Chinese assets abroad.”
The Security and Defense Council on October 20 seized the assets of 4,000 Russian companies and individuals in the country.
This decision also applies to Ukrainian personalities who had settled in Russia before the war, such as singers Taisiya Povaliy, Ani Lorak, Anna Sedokova and television presenter Regina Todorenko.
BANNING THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine decided on December 1, 2022 to “prohibit religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence of the Russian Federation from operating in Ukraine,” President Zelensky announced when signing Decree 820/2022 [4].
The “State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience” was tasked with seizing the
Orthodox Church buildings under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate.
Two weeks ago, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) violently searched a monastery, accusing popes of daring to describe Russia as the “Motherland.
President Zelensky believes that he respects Western human rights standards. Indeed, the European Court of Human Rights will no longer be able to register complaints from Russia since Moscow has left the Council of Europe.
CUTTING OFF ALL RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA
On October 4, President Zelensky signed a decree prohibiting any further negotiations with Russia.
On December 1, Oleksiy Danilov called for “the destruction of Russia. He clarified his statement as follows: “They just need to be destroyed so that they cease to exist as a country, within the borders in which they now exist… They are just barbarians. And when you say that you have to sit at the same table with these barbarians and talk with them, I consider that unworthy of our people. »
[1] “Package of measures for the implementation of Minsk Agreements”, Voltaire Network, 12 February 2015.
[2] “Zelensky government orders destruction of 100 million books”, Voltaire Network, 16 June 2022.
[3] “Ukraine bans last political opposition party”, Voltaire Network, 23 October 2022.
[4] Decree 820/2022 of the Presidency of Ukraine, 1 December 2022
Translation Roger Lagassé
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?
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.
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.
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.
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By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | July 2, 2025
According to American media, defense news outlets, and independent analysts, the 12-day Israeli military aggression against Iran significantly depleted the US stockpile of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptor missiles.
Citing official sources, American magazine Newsweek reported on Friday that the US transferred a substantial portion of its advanced missile defense capabilities to support the Israeli regime, an effort with questionable results and a critical impact on US strategic reserves.
THAAD, developed by Lockheed Martin arms manufacturing company, is a key component of Israel’s multi-layered air defense architecture. It is designed to intercept medium-range ballistic missiles, including those launched from Iran and Yemen.
The US-made system is capable of targeting short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, whether inside or outside Earth’s atmosphere.
THAAD uses a “hit-to-kill” method, relying on kinetic energy rather than explosive warheads to destroy incoming threats, intercepting at altitudes of up to 150 km and ranges between 150-200 km.
Operated exclusively by American personnel, the US military maintains eight THAAD batteries with an estimated 350–400 interceptors in total. The eighth battery was activated during the June 20 Israeli aggression against Iran and is capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles. … continue
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