By Francis Martin – Church Times – August 19, 2022
The Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East has condemned a “flagrant” raid on the premises of its church in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, in the early hours of Thursday morning.
In a statement released by the diocese of Jerusalem later on Thursday, the actions of the Israeli forces involved in the incident are described as “a violation of international law and a terroristic act against the entire community”.
It was revealed later that the focus of the raid was the offices of Palestinian NGOs that rent space in the church compound, including the human-rights organisation Al-Haq. [NOTE: read more about the raids here.] In October last year, Al-Haq was classified as a terrorist organisation by the Israeli government, a move that was criticised by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
A spokesperson for the US State Department has also expressed “concern” about the raid on the NGOs.
The Rector of St Andrew’s, Ramallah, the Revd Fadi Diab, told Agence France-Press : “The soldiers came into the premises around 3 a.m. and we started hearing shots and banging on the doors.”
The diocesan statement details how the door to the church complex was smashed, and the entire building — including the sanctuary and rectory — occupied for two hours. “The sound of gunshots, stun grenades, and the smashing of doors caused terror among the families living inside the compound,” the statement says.
The Guardian reports that the Israeli forces took equipment from the offices and sealed the doors, leaving a notice saying that they had been closed for “security reasons”. But later on Thursday, staff from Al-Haq removed the barriers and vowed to continue its work.
In a statement issued on Thursday, Al-Haq urged the international community to “take concrete measures, such as trade restrictions and arms embargoes, to ensure that Israel is held internationally responsible for its ongoing systematic inhumane acts of apartheid, including the persecution of Palestinian human rights defenders.”
Also on Thursday, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship Palestine/Israel Network condemned the attack as “illegal”. Under international law, Israeli forces require the permission of the Palestinian Authority to operate in Ramallah.
The diocese of Jerusalem asserts: “Places of worship and church compounds should be sanctuaries for communities to feel safe to practice their faith and ministry.” It is calling for a “speedy and impartial investigation into this incident, followed by serious disciplinary action against the offenders”.
August 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Human rights, Israel, Jerusalem, Palestine, West Bank |
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The failure of the CDC to manage Covid-19 was baked in from the first moments of its response. A government agency was never going to mitigate much less get rid of this sort of pathogen. This is because the virus never cared a whit about prestige degrees, job descriptions, big budgets, high-end connections, media agitprop, or polls. It went on its merry way, hit everyone, and immune systems adapted as they always have done.
The great experiment was an enormous flop.
The costs of the experiment we know: it is the catastrophe that Donald Henderson predicted it would be in 2006.
Thus does it make sense that the present overlords of the agency have admitted at least partially to have made some errors. The question is what were these errors. From the latest news concerning some impending shakeup, I see no evidence of any serious rethinking of the crazed and cockamamie lockdown orders it issued from March 2020 onward. Not even preposterous mandates like plexiglass at retail counters, two years of school closures, “six feet of distance,” one-way grocery aisles, band members in bubbles, mask mandates, and limits on how many people you can have in your home have prompted remorse.
Instead, every indication is that the CDC believes the real problem was that it did not have a high-enough budget and enough power. Plenty of lawmakers are willing to go along – not that anyone is asking them. Therefore, its tremendous pandemic powers need to be tweaked and invested mainly in a division known as the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, or ASPR.
Says The Washington Post :
The Biden administration is reorganizing the federal health department [HHS] to create an independent division that would lead the nation’s pandemic response, amid frustrations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Joy!
The new head of this high-level division (same level as FDA/CDC) is Dawn O’Connell who has a background in literature (Vanderbilt) and law (Tulane), not science or medicine. She is a political appointee who took the reins as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response, as confirmed by the Senate in 2021. She is now elated to report that her division will be elevated to become just as important as the CDC and the FDA.
Here is her memo to the staff:
ASPR Team:
As you know firsthand, ASPR is at the forefront of many of HHS’s and the Biden-Harris Administration’s top priorities. Whether your work involves strengthening our core preparedness and response capabilities, tackling new and emerging challenges, or providing essential support services to the team, please know that the work that you do matters and that it is making a big difference.
In recognition of the tremendous value this team brings to the Department and the American people – and due to the increasing size and scope of what we do – I asked Secretary Becerra to consider making us an Operating Division and I am pleased to report that Secretary Becerra has made the critically important decision to elevate our team from a Staff Division to an Operating Division (OpDiv)!
This change allows ASPR to mobilize a coordinated national response more quickly and stably during future disasters and emergencies while equipping us with greater hiring and contracting capabilities. As an OpDiv, we are now in the same category as other large HHS teams with core operational responsibilities such as CDC, NIH, FDA, CMS, and ACF. This change is an important next step for our organization which has continued to grow and evolve since its creation in 2006 – the pace of which has quickened over the past year. This change is also a recognition of the good work you all have been and continue to do on behalf of the American People…
Along with this reclassification, moving forward we will be known as the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR). The adjustment to our name signals our elevation to an OpDiv, while maintaining the equity and brand recognition we have built with key internal and external stakeholders, particularly over the course of the pandemic.
Thus must we ask: what the heck is going on here? The Biden administration has no idea. Indeed the Washington Post reports that “some senior Biden administration officials said they were unaware of the plan to reorganize the department, which was approved by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and has been held close by his deputies.”
This point is crucial. This is how the administrative state works. It cares nothing for the elected officials who come and go. It moves on its own, fueled by money baked into the budgets and with power hardly anyone dares to challenge. There is never any accountability. There is only one path forward: more power. Elections be damned.
The most important part of the memo here is the idea of mobilizing a “coordinated national response.” It drove these people utterly bonkers that during the pandemic, several states went their own way. South Dakota never shut down. Georgia opened a month after the shutdowns. Florida and Texas were next. Finally all the states with Republican governors opened while most states with Democratic governors remained closed to some degree.
The empirical results are incredibly obvious. The open states performed as well and often better on disease demographics. Meanwhile their economies did not suffer nearly as much. The kids stayed in school. The churches functioned. There were live musical performances. The museums, libraries, and playgrounds opened. People are less traumatized.
The migration of people from blue to red tells the whole story. Masses of people fled the lockdown states for the open states.
A “coordinated national response” would make such federalist solutions impossible. Forget the 9th and 10th Amendments. These agencies and these people care nothing for them, nor actual science which would encourage a plethora of experiments in the management of a pathogen. These bureaucrats in Washington think they have all the answers, and they demand complete compliance.
Meanwhile, the CDC itself is being reorganized. But don’t be fooled by any appearance of contrition. They still have a legal appeal in process that would put a mask back on your face when traveling. The new agency to which some of its pandemic responsibilities will be transferred will have a 1,000-person staff to start, people paid the big bucks to sit around coming up with new ways to whip up disease panic and start another crackdown.
A better solution would be to abolish the CDC. States can handle all its responsibilities. It did not even exist until 1947. Its purpose was mosquito control, spraying a now-banned chemical (DDT) everywhere. These days we handle that by going to Home Depot.
The CDC as an agency grew out of the 1944 Public Health Services Act that permitted nationally ordered quarantines for the first time. The legislative history of that thing remains a mystery to me. Regardless, it is nowhere justified in the US Constitution. This act needs to go too. So too all the federal agencies to which it gave rise. This is the only real solution.
Certainly creating a new agency is not the answer. And note that ASPR has its roots in 2006 as an outgrowth of the Bush administration’s obsessive panic over bioterrorism. It was also the first year that anyone imagined that lockdowns could be an appropriate path for any free society. It was the year that “social distancing” was invented by a cabal of computer scientists with zero experience in infectious disease.
These fanatics need to be out of power completely, and the regulations, laws, and agencies that enabled them to ruin the country and its freedoms must be ended. This is what any responsive government in a modern society would do. It would see failure and call it and then do something about it. It certainly would not go in this new direction and reward the disease planners with more power and money!
We must learn real lessons and act on them.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
August 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, HHS, Human rights, United States |
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The United Nations Human Rights Office today expressed alarm at Israel’s arbitrary closure of seven Palestinian human rights and humanitarian organizations and called on Israel to immediately reverse these decisions, reiterating the High Commissioner’s call to revoke the designations of the organizations as “terrorist” and “unlawful.”
At dawn today, Israeli occupation forces broke into, searched and sealed the offices of seven Palestinian human rights and humanitarian organizations in Ramallah. Their property was confiscated and destroyed. Israeli forces left copies of military orders to close the offices of the organizations.
“The closure orders are a step to enforce previous Israeli declarations of these organizations as “unlawful” and as “terror organizations” in 2021,” said the Human Rights Office in a statement. “Despite offers to do so, Israeli authorities have not presented to the United Nations any credible evidence to justify these declarations. Several Member States have also stated that the evidence shared with them does not justify the designations. As such, the closures appear totally arbitrary.”
The UN office said the shutting down of the organizations represents the latest in a series of attacks that are further drastically shrinking space for human rights and humanitarian work in the occupied Palestinian territory, affecting all institutions working on human rights, including the UN Human Rights Office. “Human rights defenders must be immediately protected from these unjustified attacks,” it said.
The organizations affected are Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association; Al Haq; Bisan Center for Research and Development; Defense for Children International – Palestine; Health Work Committees (HWC); Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC); the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC).
August 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Says they’re extremists who want to overthrow the government
Getty Images
A top German official has trashed people who may be planning to protest against energy blackouts as “enemies of the state” and “extremists” who want to overthrow the government.
The interior minister of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Herbert Reul (CDU), says that anti-mandatory vaxx and anti-lockdown demonstrators have found a new cause – the energy crisis.
In an interview with German news outlet NT, Reul revealed that German security services were keeping an eye on “extremists” who plan to infiltrate the protests and stage violence, with the unrest being planned via the Telegram messenger app, which German authorities have previously tried to ban.
“You can already tell from those who are out there,” said Reul. “The protesters no longer talk about coronavirus or vaccination. But they are now misusing people’s worries and fears in other fields. (…) It’s almost something like new enemies of the state that are establishing themselves.”
Despite the very real threat of potential blackouts, power grid failures and gas shortages, Reul claimed such issues were feeding “conspiracy theory narratives.”
However, it’s no “conspiracy theory” that Germans across the country have been panic buying stoves, firewood and electric heaters as the government tells them thermostats will be limited to 19C in public buildings and that sports arenas and exhibition halls will be used as ‘warm up spaces’ this winter to help freezing citizens who are unable to afford skyrocketing energy bills.
As Remix News reports, blaming right-wing conspiracy theorists for a crisis caused by Germany’s sanctions on Russia and its suicidal dependence on green energy is pretty rich.
“Reul, like the country’s federal interior minister, Nancy Faeser, is attempting to tie right-wing ideology and protests against Covid-19 policies to any potential protests in the winter.”
“While some on the right, such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), have stressed that the government’s sanctions against Russia are the primary factor driving the current energy crisis, they have not advocated an “overthrow” of the government. Instead, they have stressed the need to restart the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, end energy sanctions against Russia, and push for a peaceful solution to end the war.”
Indeed, energy shortages and the cost of living crisis are issues that are of major concern to everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum.
To claim that people worried about heating their homes and putting food on the table this winter are all “enemies of the state” is an utter outrage.
As we highlighted last week, the president of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Stephan Kramer, said energy crisis riots would make anti-lockdown unrest look like a “children’s birthday party.”
“Mass protests and riots are just as conceivable as concrete acts of violence against things and people, as well as classic terrorism to overthrow it,” Kramer told ZDF.
August 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | AfD, Germany, Human rights |
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Britain appears to be turning into Italy, and not merely because it is seemingly impossible – or illegal – to stop the Boat People Invasion in either country. We also share the Italian habit of having unstable government.
Italy, of course, was until recently ruled by a technocrat. A manager with no real political convictions beyond the ruling ideology. This is the norm.
Apart from the spasm of direct democracy that was Brexit, British politics has consistently worked to exclude anyone from power with genuine political motivation.
Five years on and there is not much left of Brexit. The lesson to be learned is that even when you don’t lose, you will not be permitted to win. Brexit was a bloody nose to the metropolitan establishment which runs the country against the interests and opinions of the people it governs.
The number one issue amongst people was immigration, and it will certainly still be in the top three. The cost-of-Covid crisis should be number one – were anyone to ask.
If this cost took into account the massive transfer of wealth to the rich from the ordinary, the destruction of our ancient liberties and the compulsion to take injections which have become the leading cause of tragic coincidence, then the next question should be whether Argos does guillotines.
There is no way of knowing how the other real issues which threaten the survival of the nation play with the electorate – because these questions are simply never asked.
Migration, low birth rates, the insane cult of white hatred which demands ‘decolonisation’ (destruction) of everything of value. Does anyone get questioned on their feelings about our vanishing population? Is everyone perfectly happy that in London – and increasingly in other cities – your children will be an ethnic minority in their own schools?
Why should anyone have to worry about their children being given a bawdy sex show by a middle-aged man dressed as a woman? This is a legitimate concern, and not one which features on opinion polls.
Do people really think they should pay far higher fuel bills to subsidise some Net Zero entrepreneur, who had the lucky connections to government to help himself to our money? If they care about the planet, why are the rivers all polluted and the seas full of plastic?
Perhaps we could hope to discuss these issues freely on the major discussion platforms of the day. Simply saying this sounds either sarcastic or hopelessly naive. To engage with people on a digital platform is to be policed by zelotic Liberal extremists, whose job it is to compel you to entertain every opinion but your own.
Most of the time you know where the line is – beyond which you will be banned. This is a bit like the Overton Window, that frame which is used to describe what is politically acceptable to mention at any time.
It is never politically acceptable to mention any issue which might actually improve the lot of the nation and its people. It is slogans, grandiose talk, and the same programme regardless. Why is this?
The centrist settlement – Blairite, neoliberal, consumerist – marches under the rainbow flag and does nothing to preserve family, culture or nation. It promotes aggression abroad and dissolution at home.
The consumer angle is obviously hand in glove with the anti-natalist and sexuality-based lifestyle current, as people who produce no children have more to spend on the trash that stimulates growth.
Ask yourself whether any of these wars have done you any good. The Bush wars, the Blair wars, the one on now and the one to come – how have these wars made anything better for you?
How’s the local school looking? Is it safe to let the kids out? Why does Britain share with Sweden the highest rates of rape in Europe? These questions are never on the polls. No one in politics is going to do anything about them.
In 2006 the Euston manifesto was signed by journalists, academics – Liberals – setting out the neoliberal consensus which is the armature of our political settlement.
It talks about rights a lot, and supports military action to promote democracy and freedom abroad. Elections and consumerism are seen as the pinnacle of human aspiration. There is nothing better than Liberalism, which is why we all have to have it, like it or not. Even if it kills you.
The consumer economy is an addiction economy. Is any politician going to do anything about that? Buying endless trash, being horribly fat, being on what my Nana used to call ‘tablets’ – these are your patriotic duty.
The consumer economy promotes compulsive buying, insatiable appetite, mental illness and the dependence on drugs legal and otherwise. Everything is a condition to be treated with a tablet – this is called ‘medicalising’ behaviour – because tablets are a product on sale. The market, however, is not fixing us.
Would you prefer to live in a nation than in a market? No politician will ask this question, either. That is the kind of question to which we would have to turn to answer the problem of the Brexit vote.
What is the future of Britain – of Northern Ireland – outside of the European Union? It is to ask a serious question about the health of the nation and what that might mean, but we have no serious people to ask it. Instead, late-empire corruption, a scramble for the spoils, and the chaos of extreme individualism in crazy identity politics. Madness is mainstream. Politics is all about the grift.
We have managers, media performers, careerists with contacts in the press. Practically everything these people do is some kind of stunt which gestures to their voter base.
Anti-woke, pro-trans – these issues of the so-called culture war are symptoms of an insanity in our politics where nothing can ever be realistically done to prevent national suicide. The question on the ballot paper is how much tax you will pay to fund it.
August 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, UK |
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Political power advances like a car with a manual gearbox. Normal motion is forward, going through the gears, but occasionally reverse gear is engaged. Sometimes the electorate react against policies going too far, or being taken on a ride not of their choosing. Such was the impetus for Brexit and Donald Trump, both portrayed by the establishment as populist regression that risked undoing social and economic progress. Fearing further democratic shocks, progressive leaders got back into the driving seat and put their foot down in the direction of one-world government.
As rather too confidently anticipated by US medical administrator Anthony Fauci on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, there was ‘no doubt’ the incoming president would be confronted with a ‘surprise’ infectious disease outbreak.
Looking back, there are strong indications that certain people knew what was coming, whatever the plausible deniability. A pandemic would enable a giant stride towards a highly regulated society, with the traditional social structures of faith, flag and family obliterated, and citizens neutered. A ‘new normal’ would be instilled, disingenuously justified by a public health emergency. Mortal fear would have more immediate impact than the other contrived crisis of climate change.
And so it came to pass. With remarkable speed World Economic Forum leader Klaus Schwab wrote a book on how to ‘build back better’ from the contagion. In The Great Reset, published in June 2020, he enthused that ‘the pandemic represents a rare but narrow opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’.
Anybody undecided about the masterplan of the WEF, which our politicians and mainstream media either ignore or deride as conspiracy theory, should read its blueprint Future Focus, published in June 2022. The Executive Summary asserts that ‘societies, the global economy and the planet face unprecedented challenges and disruptions that remain urgent and require an unprecedented transformation of the world’s economic, environmental and social systems’. The future is encapsulated in a terrifying hub-and-spoke diagram, in which every aspect of our lives revolves around digital identity: education, health, banking, food and travel. The tentacles of the WEF monster are spreading all over us.
The three missions of Future Focus are a fairer society, sustainability and harnessing technology for the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, all themes of Schwab’s The Great Reset. Almost three years after Covid-19 was unleashed on an unsuspecting world, we can assess how far the globalist project has advanced.
By ‘fairer society’, the WEF means collectivisation, removing people’s rights, property and privacy, as depicted by the slogan ‘you will own nothing, and you will be happy’. A basic universal income will ensure dependence on the state. Despite globalists’ concerns about overpopulation, the WEF is keen on mass migration from poorer regions to the West, thus abandoning border controls when it suits (contrast the strict Covid regime for citizens with the unimpeded crossings of the English Channel and the Mexican border). So-called refugees are not only cheap labour, they are less likely to resist radical policies.
The UK population rose significantly in the ‘plague’ year of 2020, when police stopped Nigel Farage from reporting the dinghies arriving in Dover. The relentless influx may seem contradictory to the second theme of sustainability, until it is understood that the globalists are most interested in sustaining not the harmony of nature but their own power. They want to reduce the masses to neo-feudalist subsistence, under total control of resources. Food or fuel shortages are used for sequential power grabs, through a problem-reaction-solution mechanism. As seen in Sri Lanka, depriving the people of petrol (problem) caused riots (reaction), leading to acceptance of rationing by digital identity system (solution). Arguably, the war in Ukraine is causing economic strife in Europe for a similar purpose. Meanwhile the elite continue to fly around the world in private jets.
Thirdly, technological progress is accelerating the application of constant surveillance systems. Central digital currency will require every citizen to hold a virtual wallet linked to their national (or international, at least in the EU) identification. Total control of the population will ensue. Citizens will be monitored via checking in and out of buildings, face recognition cameras in public places, and all purchases. It goes much further than that. Potentially, through mandatory vaccination the authorities could exert control over hormones and fertility. Transmittable microchips embedded in hands are already in use in Sweden. Homo sapiens is being led along the path of transhumanism.
The erection of a digital cage shows that Covid-19 has worked wonders for the globalists. Yuval Noah Harari, historian and philosopher turned globalist ideologue, recently admitted that the virus was unremarkable, while lauding the unprecedented progress enabled by lockdown. Imagine how much could be done with a really serious crisis, he mused, such as climate change.
The Covid regime has not yet been relinquished, but millions have realised that the primary motive was not saving lives but control through fear.
Even the most gullible ‘normies’ must be asking themselves, belatedly, whether public health is really the priority. Farcically, Australian female cricketer Tahlia McGrath played in the Commonwealth Games despite testing positive for Covid-19, while the world’s top tennis player Novak Djokovic cannot go to Australia because he is unvaccinated.
Court cases are swinging in favour of freedom. An Ohio federal judge blocked the vaccine mandate for US Army, Air Force and Navy personnel with religious exemption.
A US healthcare company was ordered to pay $10.3million compensation to doctors and nurses whose claimed exemption was denied by hospital management. Pastor Artur Pawlowski, persecuted by the authorities in the Canadian province of Alberta for opening his church during lockdown, spending months in jail for his sins, won reimbursement of unlawful fines.
Is this all too late? Covid-19 has done its job, dramatically changing our lives on the road to a global technocracy. ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ George Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ Yet the viral coup has not been overwhelmingly successful. Some of us are more awake than ever; once we see we can’t un-see.
August 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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I often complain that Washington’s heavily lopsided relationship with Israel is an arrangement that brings absolutely no benefit to the American people, and even less to our national security as it has involved the US in an endless series of completely avoidable conflicts. But there is one exception to that generalization, though one hesitates to call it a benefit, consisting of the White House’s adoption of the Israel practice of referring to opponents as “terrorists.” Israel uses it as a generic cover designation to denigrate and humiliate the Palestinians while also delegitimizing their resistance, permitting them to torture and kill Arabs at will, destroy their homes, and bomb them mercilessly. Washington, which claims to be the font of a “rules based international order” as well as the defender of global “democracy” and “freedom,” has developed since 9/11 an unfortunate tendency to do the same thing as the Israelis to justify its attacks on civilians and its brutal assassination policies.
In fact, the US and Israel are generally speaking the only two countries that openly use “targeted assassination” as a political tool without even bothering to fall back on “plausible denial” to conceal their actions. Israel only last week, initiated a politically motivated bombing attack on Gaza, which killed 45 civilians, including seventeen children and destroyed numerous homes. No Israelis were killed or even injured when the Gazans struck back with their home-made rockets. Both the White House and leaders in the US Congress congratulated the Israelis for “exercising their right to defend themselves.”
The principal targets of the Israeli onslaught were two Islamic Jihad leaders whom both Israel and the international media have described as “terrorists” and “militants.” The Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid described the operation as successful as the two men were reported killed. A retired Israeli general went so far as to describe the massacre as “really clean, very nice” and an “exceptional achievement.”
The Israeli action recalls the recent assassination of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The media coverage described how the Agency relentlessly stalked al-Zawahiri, described as the mastermind of 9/11, eventually learning that the 71-year-old was living in a house in an upscale Kabul neighborhood. It was also determined that he spent most days sitting on a terrace at the top of the house. The hellfire drone that killed him targeted the terrace at the time of day when he was normally sitting outside. Taliban sources report that his body was torn apart and incinerated by the two missiles that apparently struck him.
The White House is, of course, framing the assassination as a great success, a major blow in the war against terror. Joe Biden is hoping that it will improve the administration’s dismal approval ratings in the lead-up to the November elections, but the information given to the media regarding the incident praising the CIA’s tenacity and professional expertise is perhaps a bit over the top. Alternative reports from Afghanistan suggest that al-Zawahiri was living quite openly in Kabul and that he has not been active in any presumably radical activities for many, many years beyond making a number of “conspiracy theory” videos. Both al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden were, at the times when they were assassinated by the US, leading quiet lives with little protection even though they allegedly continued to be nominal leaders of al-Qaeda, an organization that had lost its raison d’etre years before.
Al-Zawahiri’s record as a terrorist comes largely from US and UK intelligence sources as well as media innuendo, which should be automatically considered unreliable. Recall for a moment the lying that the George W. Bush administration engaged in to go to war with Iraq, with folks like Condoleezza Rice speaking of mushroom clouds spewing radiation over the US and a shop in the Pentagon run by a group of neocons producing fabricated intelligence reports. What has been confirmed from independent sources is that al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian medical doctor, was savagely tortured by the secret police during a crackdown on political dissidents initiated by US puppet President Hosni Mubarak. The torture reportedly radicalized him, and he joined Osama bin Laden’s underground group, later apparently becoming its nominal leader after bin Laden was himself killed in May 2011 by US Navy Seals. Much of the rest of al-Zawahiri’s presumed biography relies on little in the way of actual evidence.
What actually happened on 9/11 and who was behind it remains somewhat a mystery as all the apparent perpetrators of which might have occurred are dead. Consider for a moment that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri never actually admitted that their group al-Qaeda was the perpetrator of the attack. In fact they denied it, sometimes attributing it to other radicalized Saudi Arabian underground groups. Nor is there any actual evidence that they planned the attack. They were accused because they had the claimed track record, resources, motive and possible access to carry out the incident, not because there was any real evidence that they had done the deed. When the US approached the Taliban government of Afghanistan in late 2001 and demanded that bin Laden be turned over to American law enforcement, the Afghans responded that bin Laden was a guest in their country, but they would surrender him if Washington could demonstrate that he had organized and ordered the attacks. George W. Bush’s Pentagon and the CIA apparently could not make that case based on actual evidence, leading to the decision to go to war instead.
Also, of all the hundreds of “terrorist” prisoners that have been recycled through the US military prison at Guantanamo only five have ever been charged with any involvement in 9/11. They are still being held but have never been tried and it is quite possible the case against them can never be made. They might even be completely innocent.
And there is more to the story. Bin Laden could have been arrested and tried but the Barack Obama administration decided to kill him and dump his body at sea, presumably to avoid a courtroom drama that would reveal government malfeasance. And then there are Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman, both of whom were American citizens killed by CIA drones in Yemen, where their family originated. The al-Awlakis may or may not have been actual members of al-Qaeda, but the elder al-Awlaki’s sermons and writings certainly inspired groups that opposed US foreign policy’s hostility towards Muslims. It is widely believed that Anwar al-Awlaki could have been captured and tried in the US if an attempt to do so had been pursued, but instead the Obama Administration again decided that he should be killed.
Finally, there is the death by drone of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January 2000 under President Donald Trump. In a recent book, Trump’s Defense Chief Mark Esper claims that Trump lied after the assassination was criticized by saying that Soleimani was actively preparing “terror” attacks on four American Embassies in the Mideast region. Esper confirms that there was no intelligence to back up that claim, but interestingly goes beyond that to make clear that there was no specific intelligence at all suggesting that such an attack was imminent or even being planned. There were only generic regional security threats that many embassies in the world respond to and make preparations to defend against.
The Esper claim is supported by the Iraqi government itself, which declared that Soleimani, widely regarded as the second most powerful official in Iran after the Ayatollah, was in Baghdad to discuss peace arrangements and that the US Embassy had been informed of his planned trip and had raised no objection to it. Instead, the US used the opportunity to launch an armed drone to kill him and nine Iraqi militia members that were accompanying him from the airport. In other words, there was no imminent threat, nor even a plausible threat, and the US went ahead anyway and killed a senior Iranian government official in a targeted assassination.
So, the United States and Israel have a formula down pat whereby they can kill anyone anywhere without any due process or rule of law, even if they don’t know who you are as in the cases of the “signature” or “profile” executions by drone in Afghanistan. And all the presidents and senior officials know that no matter what they do there will be no accountability. All one has to do is call it terrorism prevention, which might include citing terrorist attacks that can in no way be linked by way of actual evidence to the person being killed. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist, repeat as needed, and the public and media will swoon with pleasure at being so well-protected. And, as the Israeli general described it, the end result will be “really clean, very nice” an “exceptional achievement.”
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.
August 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | CIA, Human rights, Israel, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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The CDC has dropped special quarantine recommendations for unvaccinated persons, finally admitting that natural immunity should be considered and that vaccines don’t stop infection.
“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection,” their update reads.
The CDC removed the recommendation that unvaccinated persons quarantine after they’re exposed to the virus. They now recommend that individuals wear a mask for ten days post-exposure and get tested after five days.
The CDC further acknowledged that the Omicron variant of COVID poses a smaller risk of hospitalization and death than previous variants.
This announcement will likely pressure Canada’s health authorities (and Trudeau) to follow suit. Although numerous countries dropped their medical segregation policies long ago, Canada remains one of the last to do so.
Moreover, each consecutive variant appears to be weakening, with immunity (including natural immunity) being widespread. Although Canada has an abnormally high amount of mask and vaccine fanatics, the remaining medical segregation could soon be a thing of the past.
With that said, Canada’s health authorities have done nothing but warn of a return to restrictions and upcoming waves of COVID, telling Canadians that the pandemic is not over.
Additionally, the University of Toronto recently mandated that young health students living on residence get a 3rd vaccine.
August 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Canada, CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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A former Washington State University football coach is seeking $25 million from the university for wrongful termination after he was fired last year for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19, The Seattle Times reported Tuesday.
A tort claim was filed April 27 on behalf of Nick Rolovich with the state’s risk management office. Filing a claim is a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit against a state agency.
There’s a 60-day waiting period between when a claim is filed and when the claimant can file a lawsuit. As of Wednesday, a spokesperson for Attorney General Bob Ferguson said no suit had been filed, according to The Washington Post.
After denying Rolovich’s request for a religious exemption from Gov. Jay Inslee’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for state employees, the university in October 2021 fired Rolovich.
At the time of his firing, Rolovich was subject to a five-year contract with three seasons remaining and was paid $3.2 million per year — the highest public salary in the state. He had coached 11 games with the Cougars over two seasons.
Rolovich’s attorney, Brian Fahling, said at the time his client would take legal action for religious discrimination. He filed a 34-page letter with the university appealing the university’s decision to fire Rolovich, but the appeal was denied.
Rolovich, a Catholic, is not the first person to file a claim for wrongful termination or religious discrimination over an employer’s failure to grant a religious exemption to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Liberty Counsel on July 29 settled the nation’s first class action lawsuit on behalf of healthcare workers who were unlawfully discriminated against and denied religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate by their employer, Chicago-based NorthShore University HealthSystem.
The $10,337,500 settlement, filed in the federal Northern District Court of Illinois, compensates NorthShore employees who were “punished for their religious beliefs against taking an injection associated with aborted fetal cells.”
As part of the settlement agreement, NorthShore also will change its unlawful “no religious accommodations” policy to make it consistent with the law and must provide religious accommodations in every position across its numerous facilities.
In addition, employees who were terminated because they refused to receive a COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds will be eligible for rehire if they apply within 90 days of the final settlement approved by the court, and they will retain their previous seniority level.
The amount of individual payments from the settlement fund will depend on how many valid and timely claim forms are submitted during the claims process.
If the settlement is approved by the court and nearly all of the affected employees file valid and timely claims, it is estimated employees who were terminated or resigned because of their religious refusal of a COVID-19 vaccine will receive approximately $25,000 each.
Also under the settlement, employees who were forced to get the shot against their religious beliefs to keep their jobs will receive approximately $3,000 each.
The 13 healthcare workers who are lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit will receive an additional approximate payment of $20,000 each for their role in bringing this lawsuit and representing the class of NorthShore healthcare workers.
Lawsuits over denied exemptions or insufficient accommodations to COVID-19 vaccine requirements began last September after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine, allowing more employers to enact vaccine mandates.
Workers as of May 19, 2022, had filed at least 66 lawsuits since September 2021 against private employers for refusing to grant exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine requirements, according to Bloomberg Law.
Judges rejected workers’ requests for immediate court orders blocking enforcement of mandates in 22 cases.
In one case involving United Airlines Inc., the airline changed its policy allowing accommodations rather than contest the lawsuit.
According to Bloomberg Law, 59% of lawsuits filed over COVID-19 vaccine mandates are related to an employer’s response to faith-based requests for accommodation.
About 22% of lawsuits involve contesting a company’s handling of both religious and disability requests and 5% involve health-related accommodations.
Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
August 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States, Washington State University |
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The World Economic Forum is becoming a little concerned. Unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal. The censorship engines employed by Internet platforms, turned out to be quite stupid and incapable. People are even daring to complain about the World Economic Forum, which is obviously completely unacceptable.
So, WEF author Inbal Goldberger came up with a solution: she proposes to collect off-platform intelligence from “millions of sources” to spy on people and new ideas, and then merge this information together for “content removal decisions” sent down to “Internet platforms”.
To overcome the barriers of traditional detection methodologies, we propose a new framework: rather than relying on AI to detect at scale and humans to review edge cases, an intelligence-based approach is crucial.
By bringing human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence into learning sets, AI will then be able to detect nuanced, novel abuses at scale, before they reach mainstream platforms. Supplementing this smarter automated detection with human expertise to review edge cases and identify false positives and negatives and then feeding those findings back into training sets will allow us to create AI with human intelligence baked in. This more intelligent AI gets more sophisticated with each moderation decision, eventually allowing near-perfect detection, at scale.
What is this about? What’s new?
The way censorship is done these days is that each Internet platform, such as Twitter, has its own moderation team and a decision making engine. Twitter would only look at tweets by any specific twitter user, when deciding on whether to delete any tweets or suspend their authors. Twitter moderators do NOT look at Gettr or other external websites.
So, for example, user @JohnSmith12345 may have a Twitter account and narrowly abide by Twitter rules, but at the same time have a Gettr account where he would publish anti-vaccine messages. Twitter would not be able to suspend @JohnSmith12345’s account. That is no longer acceptable to the WEF because they want to silence people and ideas, not individual messages or accounts.
This explains why the WEF needs to move beyond the major Internet platforms, in order to collect intelligence about people and ideas everywhere else. Such an approach would allow them to know better what person or idea to censor — on all major platforms at once.
They want to collect intelligence from “millions of sources”, and train their “AI systems” to detect thoughts that they do not like, to make content removal decisions handed down to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This is a major change from the status quo of each platform deciding what to do based on messages posted to that specific platform only.
For example, in addition to looking at my Twitter profile, WEF’s proposed AI would also look at my Gettr profile, and then it would make an “intelligent decision” to remove me from the Internet at once. It is somewhat of a simplification because they also want to look for ideas and not only individuals but, nevertheless, the search for wrongthink becomes globalized.
This sounds like an insane conspiracy theory from hell: WEF collecting information on everyone everywhere, and then telling all platforms what posts to remove, based on a global decision-making AI engine that sees everything and can identify individual people and ideas beyond any given platform.
If someone ever told me that it would be contemplated, I would probably think that this person is insane. It sounds like a sick technological fantasy. Unfortunately, this crazy stuff is real, is in a WEF agenda proposal that is officially posted on their website’s “WEF Agenda” section. And WEF is not messing around.
You will have no voice and you will be happy!
August 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, WEF |
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I joined the Tavistock Clinic in North London as a clinical nurse therapist in 2003. Back then, Tavistock was prestigious—known all over the world for its professional seminars and specialized psychological treatments for mental-health patients. Before I ever worked there, I would attend lectures and training workshops to hear from renowned psychoanalysts, who were considered some of the best in the field.
A lot can change in a decade.
Last week, the National Health Service ordered that the gender youth clinic at Tavistock to shut its doors by next spring. And I am part of the reason why.
The story of what happened at Tavistock is the story of how a small group of whistleblowers—doctors, nurses, parents and patients, together with the help of journalists and reporters—were able to relentlessly expose activist-driven medicine that they knew was irresponsible. It’s also an object lesson for others who are deeply concerned about a one-size-fit-all approach to transgender healthcare and wonder what they should do about it.
I was delighted when I started working at Tavistock back in the early 2000s. My role as senior clinical lecturer was to devise and deliver training courses for mental-health staff. Shortly after I joined, I took on another part-time role working with children and adolescents in what was called the Gender Identity Development Service.
There were, as I recall, seven of us on the team back then. We would have clinical meetings each week in which we would discuss our referrals and caseloads. Back then we had fewer than 100 referrals per year in the entire country and they were mostly biological boys.
Sometime during my first few weeks we were discussing a newly referred patient, a 16-year-old boy with a complex history, who felt he had been born in the wrong body. My colleague took on the case. Four months later, the boy’s name came up again in the meeting, and my colleague announced that she was recommending him for puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists), which are used to suppress the further development of secondary-sex characteristics like breast tissue in females or facial hair in males. Puberty blockers are almost always followed by cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen).
Usually, when new patients arrived at the service, they would come in for an hour or so once a month for the first few months. So I was surprised to hear that my coworker was recommending drugs when, in my view, no meaningful understanding of his internal world could have been reached. I knew from my experience in working with adolescents that any diagnostic assessment arrived at after such a short time span would have been superficial.
It’s worth pointing out that Tavistock specialized in therapy—talking through problems with patients—and that we did not generally prescribe drugs. For that reason, I had expected the same approach when it came to treating children and teens with gender dysphoria. But it seemed that, even back then, certain staff didn’t hesitate to recommend puberty blockers—even for vulnerable kids contending with anxiety, autism, internalized homophobia or other challenges.
I had also noticed that senior clinicians in the service would regularly meet with Mermaids, a transgender patient-advocacy group. At the time, various patient-advocacy groups were springing up alongside mental-health services so that patients would have a voice in the examination room. At first, I viewed all of this as an overdue development. But as time progressed, it seemed clear that groups like Mermaids were exerting influence over doctors and clinicians in the service—sometimes dictating the expectations of care for our patients.
One small anecdote: I was once instructed by a superior to rewrite a letter I’d written to a male patient’s referring doctor—making sure to use the patient’s chosen, female name and new pronouns. I understood the sensitivities around this subject, but I pointed out that using a female name and female pronouns might be confusing to the clinical team, since we had been talking about a male child with gender dysphoria..
I was informed that failure to use the right name and pronouns might result in problems or even litigation for me and the gender clinic at Tavistock.
The external influence of the advocacy groups increased. Instead of being a clinical, research-focused service where we were learning and developing ideas, it felt like it was a fait accompli that we had to go along with what Mermaids and patients wanted—even if we, the mental-health-care professionals, had legitimate questions about the appropriateness of the treatments that patients and patient advocates were demanding.
For example, a weird paradox arose at a conference on transgender health care hosted by Tavistock around 2005: the opening speaker declared that we were no longer supposed to think of gender dysphoria as a mental illness. But we were a mental-health team working at a mental-health facility. What were we supposed to be doing if not treating patients with psychological conditions?
Remember, this was all before the internet took hold of an entire generation of teenagers. There were no online groups dedicated to gender affirmation and coaching kids on what to say to their providers to secure cross-sex hormones. We mostly saw younger boys who believed themselves to be girls from an early age and a few teenagers who felt like they were trapped in the wrong bodies. So, although I felt aware of the gathering force of thinking around the area of gender dysphoria and transgender identity, it was hard to foresee the slow-motion avalanche that would hit over the next two decades.
Yet even what I saw in those years worried me deeply and working on the Gender Identity Development Service started to affect my personal well-being. I would come home with a headache on the days that I worked in the unit, and my heart would beat quickly when I went in the next morning. It felt like every time I raised a concern about us rushing prematurely to prescribe drugs that would have permanent effects on our patients, I’d be met with an eye roll and the unstated “Oh, here she goes again,” or “Can’t she just fit in?”
There were a few colleagues who shared my views. One colleague, Dr. Az Hakeem, would also speak up at team meetings. But for the most part I felt alone, and I felt very anxious about some of the children who had been referred for body-altering medications. I began to feel as though I might be part of something unethical. I tried to take on only children who were legally too young to commence the blockers, which would allow me more time to do long-term therapeutic work while avoiding the dilemma of the fact I worked in a so-called “gateway service” to medicalization.
I spoke a lot to my husband, Marcus, who is a psychoanalyst and who was by now a senior member of staff in the Adult Department of Tavistock. He suggested I go to the clinical director at theTavistock, which I did. She listened and took my concerns seriously. I later learned that she reached out to Dr. David Taylor, the Medical Director of the Trust, who was asked to launch an investigation into the work of the gender clinic. That was issued in 2006.
I do not remember being shown the report then, and don’t recall any in depth discussion about the contents of it or how the recommendations would be implemented. The only change that I remember was that a senior staff member from the more general Adolescent Department began overseeing our work. That oversight petered out when this staff member retired.
It was only in 2019 that I saw the full report when Hannah Barnes, a BBC journalist, obtained it via a Freedom of Information request. It confirmed all the disturbing things I had reported: Our data was poor; it wasn’t being stored properly; and there were not sufficient follow-ups with patients once they left the service—meaning we didn’t know how our patients were faring unless they voluntarily wrote to us.
As we have now learned from more recent whistleblowers, the recommendations in the report were buried, and when any criticism or difficult questions arose in the press, the Tavistock management would repeat the same mantra about how they were “a world-class service.” It’s important to acknowledge that there might have been some staff still struggling to deliver thoughtful, measured care, but the noise around our standards was growing louder.
I had tried hard to help the Gender Identity Development Service from the inside, but it felt like I was swimming against a stronger and stronger tide. I didn’t want to be part of something that felt wrong, and I knew that each time I spoke up I was being cast in a darker shadow of suspicion by my colleagues.
So in 2007, I quit.
After I left the gender clinic, I continued to work in other departments at Tavistock. I continued my clinical lecturing and practiced psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Life was satisfying and busy, and I tried to put the experience out of my mind.
But it became increasingly impossible to ignore.
In the past decade, there has been an explosion in referral numbers to the gender clinic at the Tavistock—over 3,000 in 2019—and the service came under mounting pressure to get through the long waiting lists. This resulted in even more children getting fast-tracked and put on blockers if they expressed a wish for them.
The profile of the patients changed significantly, too. Many were adolescent girls who had never exhibited signs of gender dysphoria. Often, their feelings of wanting to be a boy developed along with their breasts, or when they got their period. They were horrified by their bodies, and they wanted control over the changes taking place in them.
Between then and now, there were more whistleblowers, like Dr. David Bell, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Tavistock, who issued yet another report on the service in 2018 that raised a lot of the same concerns that I had raised back in 2005. Sonia Appleby, whose job title was Safeguarding Children Lead, spoke out in November 2019, claiming that she was being blocked from doing her job by management. By then, the political pressure, the institutional capture, and the influence of social media had become much more intense, and about 40 people were working on the youth gender care team. Shortly after Dave’s report came out, my husband Marcus resigned from the Tavistock Board.
His resignation gained national publicity, and Marcus was invited to present at a 2019 House of Lords meeting, which I attended with him. A representative of the Tavistock Trust who was also at the meeting read a statement claiming that no one was being rushed through treatment, that Tavistock was a best-in-class facility. This was my second Damascene moment. I raised my hand to speak. “Look, that is not correct,” I said. “I worked there. And I saw that children were being pushed to transition very quickly.”
After that meeting, a group of us met, and we learned that a mother of a girl with autism and gender dysphoria was seeking support as a claimant in a judicial review of Tavistock’s practice of giving puberty blockers to minors. (Adults who transition are also prescribed blockers prior to starting on cross-sex hormones.) She had contacted a lawyer and he arranged a meeting with several of us who had attended the House of Lords meeting. The mother was worried about her daughter’s referral to the Gender Identity Development Service, as she did not feel that her daughter would be able to fully understand the ramifications of the treatment and give informed consent to it. She needed to remain anonymous and, therefore, needed a co-claimant who could afford to go public. Dave was still at Tavistock and was being threatened by the administration there. My husband had his hands full with his own patients. I did not relish the idea of sticking my neck out, but I knew I had to get back into the ring. By now, the whistleblowers’ reports felt grave. I signed onto the suit.
Almost no one in the U.K. wanted to get involved, so I set about finding expert witnesses in the United States, Australia and Scandinavia. Gradually, we put together statements and evidence to support our claim that children could not give fully informed consent to an experimental treatment with lifelong, as yet unknown consequences. I found, among many others, Kiera Bell through a journalist, and I was immediately taken by her story.
Keira is a young woman who went on puberty blockers at 16, testosterone at 17, and then had a double mastectomy—only to realize, at 21, that she wasn’t, in fact, a man trapped in a woman’s body. She argued that, as a minor, she hadn’t been able to consent in any meaningful way to the treatment. Eventually, she became a co-claimant in the case against Tavistock.
In December 2020, we won. The court ruled that minors under 16 could not give informed consent to having their puberty blocked. The ruling came as a great relief. I thought, Finally, people will have to pay attention and examine the evidence base for treatment of childhood gender dysphoria.
It’s hard to deal with the feeling of being hated. I’m aware how contentious this area is, and while I was only ever trying to do my best for our young patients, there was a loud group of people who would only hear my concerns as transphobia or bigotry or that I was a proponent of conversion therapy. The win felt like such a victory—not just legally, but culturally. It felt like an honest conversation was finally beginning to happen.
But then, in September 2021, we lost on appeal. It was awful—deflating.
The only thing that softened the blow was the fact that the government commissioned yet another report into Tavistock. And the results were devastating. It vindicated everything we had been saying for years.
But this time, the NHS decided they were going to do something about it. On July 28, the NHS announced that Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service would be closed and that, from now on, regional clinics would handle cases of transgender kids. I was blown away. I still can hardly believe it. The aim is that the new services should be more holistic, taking into consideration the whole child, and adopt better clinical standards according to the new report’s findings.
I didn’t seek any of this. It has been a pretty stressful few years. When I get a letter from patients or parents from around the world, and they tell me, “Well done, thank you for speaking up, you didn’t give up,” I sometimes get a lump in my throat. It’s been hard to be suspected of being prejudiced when all I wanted was safer clinical practice, more scrutiny and evidence collecting, and improved data storage.
Because what I am is a nurse. And my job as a nurse is to treat all my patients with respect and an open mind. I try to think about who they are as people, and to relate to their experience and empathize with them. I also believe we need to keep an open and curious clinical mind when something is occurring in society that seems novel or not yet fully understood. It should never be that doctors and nurses are unable to question diagnoses and prescriptions.
If my actions all those years ago have made a contribution, then I am proud. I made the right decision to raise my hand to ask another unwanted question.
Sue and Marcus Evans run a private psychotherapy practice in London. They are the authors of “Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults,” which you can buy here.
August 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, UK |
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The World Health Organization (WHO) is moving ahead with plans to enact a new or revised international pandemic preparedness treaty, despite encountering setbacks earlier this summer after dozens of countries, primarily outside the Western world, objected to the plan.
A majority of WHO member states on July 21, during a meeting of WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), agreed to pursue a legally binding pandemic instrument that will contain “both legally binding as well as non-legally binding elements.”
STAT News described the agreement, which would create a new global framework for responding to pandemics, as “the most transformative global health call to action since [the] WHO itself was formed as the first specialized United Nations agency in 1948.”
Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum, African Union and World Bank — which created a $1 billion fund for “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics” — are developing their own pandemic response mechanisms, including new cross-country vaccine passport frameworks.
WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’: what’s been proposed and what would it mean?
Ongoing talks to formulate a new or revised “pandemic treaty” are building on the existing international framework for global pandemic response, the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), considered a binding instrument of international law.
On Dec. 1, 2021, in response to calls from various governments for a “strengthened global pandemic strategy” and signaling the urgency with which these entities are acting, the WHO formally launched the process of creating a new treaty or amending the IHR, during Special Session — only the second in the organization’s history.
During the meeting, held May 10-11, WHO’s 194 member countries unanimously agreed to launch the process, which previously had been discussed only informally.
The member countries agreed to:
“Kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
The IHR, a relatively recent development, were first enacted in 2005, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1.
The IHR legal framework is one of only two binding treaties the WHO has achieved since its inception, the other being the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
The IHR framework already allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.
The proposals for a new or revised pandemic treaty, put forth at the special ministerial session of the WHO in May, would “somewhat” strengthen the WHO’s pandemic-related powers, including establishing a “Compliance Committee” that would issue advisory recommendations for states.
However, according to the Daily Sceptic, while the IHR is already legally binding, the amendments proposed in May would not strengthen existing legal obligations or requirements:
“The existing treaty regulations, like all (or most) international law, do not actually compel states to do anything other than talk to the WHO and listen to it, and neither do they specify sanctions for non-compliance; almost all their output is advice.
“The proposed amendments don’t alter that. They don’t allow the WHO unilaterally to impose legally binding measures on or within countries.”
The Daily Sceptic noted one of the risks stemming from the negotiations for a new or updated treaty include the potential codification of “the new lockdown orthodoxy for future pandemics,” which would “replace the sound, science-based, pre-COVID recommendations” previously in place.
According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, such a treaty would grant the WHO “absolute power over global biosecurity, such as the power to implement digital identities/vaccine passports, mandatory vaccinations, travel restrictions, standardized medical care and more.”
Mercola also questioned a “one-size-fits-all approach to pandemic response,” pointing out that “pandemic threats are not identical in all parts of the world. In his view, he said, “the WHO is not qualified to make global health decisions.”
Similar concerns contributed at least in part to opposition against the proposals presented at the special ministerial session, during which a bloc of mostly non-Western countries, including China, India, Russia and 47 African nations, prevented an agreement from being finalized.
Will opposition fade away?
Although no final agreement was achieved at the May meeting, consensus was reached to organize a new special ministerial session of the WHO later this year, possibly after the WHO’s World Health Assembly, scheduled for Nov. 29 through Dec. 1, Reuters reported.
Mxolisi Nkosi, South Africa’s ambassador to the UN, told the WHO’s annual ministerial assembly the new special session would “consider the benefits for such a convention, agreement or other international instrument.”
Nkosi added:
“Probably the most important lesson COVID-19 has taught us is the need for stronger and more agile collective defences against health threats as well as for building resilience to address future potential pandemics.
“A new pandemic treaty is central to this.”
At the time, the U.K.’s ambassador to the UN, Simon Manley, addressing the lack of an immediate agreement and the consensus to hold a new meeting, tweeted “negotiations may take time, but this is a historic step towards global health security.”
The INB, at its meeting held in Geneva July 18-21, also agreed with this view, reaching a consensus that its members will work on finalizing a new legally binding international pandemic agreement by May 2024.
As part of this process, the INB will meet again in December and will deliver a progress report to the 76th World Health Assembly of the WHO in 2023.
According to the WHO, “Any new agreement, if any when agreed by Member States, is drafted and negotiated by governments themselves, [which] will take any action in line with their sovereignty.”
The WHO further claims that “governments themselves will determine actions under the accord while considering their own national laws and regulations.”
The Biden administration expressed broad support for a new or updated pandemic treaty, with the U.S. heading previous negotiations on this issue, along with the European Commission, via its president Ursula von der Leyen, who, as previously reported by The Defender, is also a strong proponent of vaccine passports and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination.
An analysis by the Alliance for Natural Health International speculated that any final agreement may simply strengthen the existing IHR or, alternatively, may involve an amendment to the WHO’s constitution — or both.
Just two days after the July 21 INB agreement, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, tweeted:
“I’m pleased that alongside the process of negotiating a new [international] accord on pandemic preparedness & response, WHO’s Member States are also considering targeted amendments to the [IHR], incl. ways to improve the process for declaring a [public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC].”
In the same Twitter thread, he also declared the ongoing monkeypox outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern,” one “that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners.”
Notably, the WHO director-general overruled an expert panel that was divided over whether to classify the outbreak as a global public health emergency.
With this declaration, three “global health emergencies” are now in place, as determined by the WHO: COVID-19, monkeypox and polio.
Busy summer for vaccine passport proposals
While the WHO and global governments weigh plans for an updated or new pandemic treaty, other organizations are moving forward on vaccine passport technologies and partnerships.
On July 8, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), composed of many of the world’s industrialized nations, announced it would promote the unification of the different vaccine passport systems currently in use around the world.
Thirty-six countries and international organizations participated in a July meeting with the goal of “creating a multilateral framework for establishing a global vaccine passport regime,” according to Nick Corbishley of Naked Capitalism.
The development is a continuation of efforts involving the WHO to harmonize global vaccine passport regimes.
In February, the WHO selected Germany’s T-Systems as an “industry partner to develop the vaccination validation service,” which would enable “vaccination certificates to be checked across national borders.”
T-Systems, an arm of Deutsche Telekom, was previously instrumental in developing the interoperability of vaccine passport systems in Europe.
Also in July, 21 African governments “quietly embraced” a vaccine passport system, which in turn would also be interlinked with other such systems globally.
On July 8, which is also Africa Integration Day, the African Union and the Africa Centers for Disease Control launched a digital vaccine passport valid throughout the African Union, describing it as “the e-health backbone” of Africa’s “new health order.”
This follows the development in 2021, of the Trusted Travel platform, now required by several African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Togo and Zimbabwe, and air carriers such as EgyptAir, Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways, for both inbound and outbound travel.
Beyond Africa, Indonesia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the G20, is conducting “pilot projects” that would bring about the interoperability of the various digital vaccine passport systems currently in use globally. The project is expected to be completed by November, in time for the G20 Leaders’ Summit.
Naked Capitalism highlighted the role of South African company Cassava Fintech in the efforts to develop an interoperable vaccine passport for all of Africa.
A subsidiary of African telecommunication company Econet, Cassava initially developed the “Sasail” app, which the company described as Africa’s first “global super app” that combines “social payments” with the ability to send and receive money and pay bills, chat with others and play games.
Cassava and Econet entered into a strategic partnership with Mastercard, “to advance digital inclusion across Africa and collaborate on a range of initiatives, including expansion of the Africa CDC TravelPass.”
As previously reported by The Defender, Mastercard supports the Good Health Pass vaccine passport initiative that is also backed by the ID2020 alliance and endorsed by embattled former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair.
Mastercard has also promoted technology that can be embedded into the DO Card, a credit/debit card that keeps track of one’s “personal carbon allowance.”
ID2020, founded in 2016, claims to support “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID.” Its founding partners include Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation, Accenture, GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance (itself a core partner of the WHO), UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank.
Mastercard’s top two stockholders are Vanguard and BlackRock, which hold significant stakes in dozens of companies that supported the development of vaccine passports or implemented vaccine mandates for their employees. The two investment firms also hold large stakes in vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
Mastercard provides funding for the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) Program, which “focuses on promoting digital identification systems to improve development outcomes while maintaining trust and privacy.”
The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York School of Law recently described the ID4D program, which touts its alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , as one which could pave the way to a “digital road to hell.”
According to the center, this would occur through the prioritization of “economic identity” and the use of an infrastructure that has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations” in several countries.
Mastercard is also active in Africa through its joint initiative with another fintech (financial technology) company, Paycode, to “increase access to financial services and government assistance for remote communities across Africa” via a biometric identity system containing the data of 30 million individuals.
World Bank, WHO promote ‘pandemic preparedness’ and vaccine passports
The World Bank in late June announced the creation of a fund that will “finance investments in strengthening the fight against pandemics” and “support prevention, preparedness and response … with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.”
The fund was developed under the lead of the U.S., Italy and current G20 president Indonesia, “with broad support from the G20,” and will be active later this year.
It will provide more than $1 billion in funding for areas such as “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics.”
The WHO is also a “stakeholder” in the project and will provide “technical expertise,” according to WHO’s director-general.
The agreement follows a 2019 strategic partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum, to “accelerate” the implementation of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its SDGs.
Although the agreement has recently circulated on social media, it was announced in June 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It encompasses six areas of focus, including “health” and “digital cooperation.”
In terms of health, the agreement purports that it will “support countries [sic] achieve good health and well-being for all, within the context of the 2030 Agenda, focusing on key emerging global health threats that require stronger multistakeholder partnership and action.”
In turn, the “digital cooperation” promoted by the agreement will purportedly “meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution while seeking to advance global analysis, dialogue and standards for digital governance and digital inclusiveness.”
However, despite rhetoric preaching “inclusiveness,” individuals and entities that have refused to go along with applications such as vaccine passports have faced repercussions in their personal and professional lives.
Such was the example of a Canadian doctor who was fined $6,255 in June over her refusal to use the country’s ArriveCAN health information app — which is being investigated over privacy concerns — to enter the country.
Dr. Ann Gillies said she was fined when re-entering Canada after attending a conference in the U.S.
Andrew Bud, the CEO of biometric ID company iProove, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contractor, described vaccine certificates as driving “the whole field of digital ID in the future,” adding they are “not just about COVID [but] about something even bigger” and that “once adopted for COVID [they] will be rapidly used for everything else.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
August 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Africa, Gates Foundation, Human rights, Rockefeller Foundation, WEF, WHO, World Bank |
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