The Israeli occupation forces have arrested 75 Palestinians in total last year at the Erez Crossing between Gaza and Israel, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Centre for Studies.
The Israeli army bans Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from entering the 300-meter area adjacent to its border with the enclave and shoots or arrests anyone who breaches it.
The Palestinian Prisoners Centre for Studies observed that the number of arrests last year was the same as the year 2020, during which 76 Palestinians were arrested, despite the enclave not being under direct occupation like the occupied West Bank.
Researcher, Riad Al-Ashqar, Director of the Centre, stated that the Israeli occupation forces use the Erez Crossing as a means for collective punishment.
He added that the Israeli forces blackmail Palestinians to work with the occupation by providing information in exchange for allowing them to cross, especially patients and merchants.
Al-Ashqar noted the arrest of 35-year-old Walaa Muhammad Mustafa Al-Rifai, from Maghazi in the Gaza Strip, while accompanying his wife, who is ill with cancer.
They had attempted to reach the Makassed Hospital in occupied Jerusalem, where his wife had previously obtained a medical referral for treatment there and had obtained Israeli permits that allow them to pass through the checkpoint to reach the hospital for treatment.
However, the Israeli forces arrested Walaa and transferred him to Ashkelon Prison for investigation.
Al-Ashqar also expressed concern for Israel’s heavy naval presence, restricting any traffic in and out of the enclave as well as the distance Gaza’s fishermen can travel to fish, severely affecting the livelihoods of some 4,000 fishermen and at least 1,500 more people involved in the fishing industry.
Palestinian fishermen often suffer from multiple Israeli violations, including attempting to sink Palestinian boats in the sea, firing at them, as well as narrowing the fishing area for long periods.
Gaza has been under a strict Israeli siege for 14 years and has been subject to repeated Israeli onslaughts during that period which have led to wide scale damage, high rates of unemployment and poverty.
In a Daily News Bulletin issued February 4, 1924, by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jewish leaders across the nation publicly mourned the passing of former war-time president Woodrow Wilson, the self-described “staunch friend of the Jews.” The telegram goes on to commemorate Wilson’s “intense interest in Jewish questions” by reviewing his political deeds as president, appointing Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court Bench despite vigorous opposition from the Court itself and urging the approval of the British Mandate over Palestine following the Balfour Declaration.[1]
Nearly a century later, this adulation of America’s twenty-eighth president continues to be echoed by prominent Jewish leaders and intellectuals. In Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg’s book, “Wilson,” this formidable Head of State has influenced the decision-making of each succeeding American president up to former President Donald Trump. Furthermore, Berg argues that Wilson is the most pro-Jewish president in US history.[2] This is attributed to Wilson’s breakaway from American isolationism, which guided the nation’s political function on the world stage for a hundred and twenty-five years.
Six months after winning a second consecutive term as president on the Democratic ticket (the first time since Andrew Jackson’s second term), Wilson asked the legislature to declare war on Germany in an imperative speech to Congress on April 2, 1917. His justification was to answer the question of the role the United States would play in the world – it was America’s duty to ensure that “the world must be safe for democracy.” This rhetoric has been repeated repeatedly by American politicians at all levels in subsequent generations, followed by military action.
As Wilson plunged the nation into Europe’s devastating four-year war which wrought 17 million deaths and 25 million wounded, he often portrayed himself as the beacon of progressive ideals, a missionary of self-determination, democracy, and multilateralism to the world and, by involuntary extension after the First World War, its conquered colonies from the ashes of the defeated German and Ottoman Empires. The question is on whose behalf and if foreign elements were acting abroad, at home, or both.
For example, it is entirely plausible today to assert that the invasion of Iraq was contrived almost entirely by high-ranking Jewish Zionists in the Bush administration for the long-anticipated purpose of removing Israel’s arch-nemesis at the time—Saddam Hussein—in another mission to destroy the Jewish State’s Arab neighbors and assert dominion over the region.[3]The catch was that Israel would not be fronting the 2 trillion dollar bill and sacrificing 190,000 lives; that was left to the Americans.[5]
Eighty years prior, before the founding of modern Israel, this similarly established Zionist paradigm in America’s political institutions persuaded the Wilson administration to do the same. Instead of winning the hearts and minds of the public through unbridled war propaganda and an unprecedented national tragedy for the specific purpose of creating a homeland for Jews, a cooperative network of Zionists in Britain, Russia, and the United States worked towards this goal through the imperial hand of the idealistic Wilson.
Jews long held Woodrow Wilson in high regard for his liberal politics and inclination to address their requests. When the former governor of New Jersey first ran for president in 1912, Boston’s Jewish Advocate published a political ad, pressing readers to join with “practically all the great Jewish leaders throughout the country” in endorsing him.[6]These leaders included financier Jacob H. Schiff, philanthropist Nathan Straus, and Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. At the time, beginning in 1906, the United States was faced with the difficult task of admitting roughly ten million immigrants, mainly from Eastern and Southern Europe.
This sudden influx overwhelmed several facets of the native populace, whereby the “restrictionists” emerged with literary test campaigns as a method by which to curtail subsequent waves of immigration. The American Jewish Committee was the most active and significant anti-restricionist lobby group in each of these battles through delay and outright blockage of the legislative passage. During his tenure as president, Wilson assisted by vetoing three restrictive measures he believed were aimed principally at Jews before being overridden by Congress. The AJC’s particular fixation on the plight of Russian-Jewish immigrants caused an extensive lobbying endeavor in America’s foreign policy.[7]
This emerging conflict of interest was sidestepped upon the outbreak of the First World War. The intense pogroms and anti-Jewish sentiment of Czar Nicholas II caused the American Jewish community to side more with Germany than with Allied forces. Immigrant Jews even prayed that the “more civilized” Germans would liberate their suppressed brethren in Eastern Europe from Russian harassment. In the Yiddish press, the enemy was portrayed vividly as: “The Jews support Germany because Russia bathes in Jewish blood.” Who will dare say that it is a crime for Jews to hate their torturers, their oppressors and murderers?”[8] The German Foreign Office took advantage of this position in order to maintain its favor in the Jewish community; in September, 1914, Dr. Isaac Straus was even sent to the United States to manage propaganda work among Jews for the German Information Bureau located in New York.
The German Information Bureau, despite official American neutrality, could not be more pleased following its meeting with the Jewish press. This came at a time when most Americans would rather side with French and British allies out of strong ancestral ties: “So far as our relations with the very influential Jewish press are concerned, they are in good shape, and will be carefully nourished. It is critical in this regard that all news pertaining to them elevate Jewish self-esteem; for example, the appointment of Jewish officers, the installation of Jewish professors, and honors bestowed upon Jewish professors should all be sent here.”
While war efforts were being bolstered in the Jewish press, American Zionist leaders adopted a policy of neutrality for the time being, stemming from Theodor Herzl’s stance on non-partisanship in a neutral country as war raged. During this time, it was Britain’s Grand Fleet that managed the naval blockade of supplies into Germany, starving 400,000 German civilians to death. For the first two years of the First World War, German war efforts nevertheless proved supreme thanks to their unexpected arsenal of submarines against the wealthier, more weaponized Allied Powers. Imperial German forces nearly captured Paris, expelled Russia from the war, and drove the French Army into mutiny, all before a Western Front victory was barely in their grasp by 1918. On three separate occasions throughout 1916, Germany pursued avenues to negotiate for peace, but both British and French resolve maintained that peace would only come about upon Germany’s defeat.[9]
Zionist leaders eventually came to the realization that Allied victory meant Russia’s influence would be amplified in the Near East. In early 1915, a conditional Entente agreement even allocated Constantinople to Russia. This posed an issue as Constantinople rested in the possession of the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany and Austro-Hungary. High-profile Zionists had their eyes eastbound on Palestine as a suitable place to lay the groundwork for a Jewish homeland. In 1896, the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, approached Sultan Abdul Hamid II and offered to pay off the Ottoman debt in exchange for a charter that permitted Zionists access to Palestine.[10] The Sultan outright refused.
The prospect of a promised land for Jews never escaped one highly influential man’s attention — Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Through Brandeis, Zionist leadership “passed into American hands by default.” He was considered one of the men of “light and lead” on whom Wilson relied.[11] Born in 1856 to secular Jewish immigrant parents from the present-day Czech Republic, he graduated from Harvard Law School at the age of 20 and settled in Boston to open a law firm focused on progressive social causes. In his early career, he was distinguished for his public advocacy against powerful corporations, mass consumerism, monopolies, and public corruption while advising methods to restrict the influence of big banks and money trusts in his collection of essays, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.[12]
These progressive positions would later be taken up by Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson on the larger question of the role of the national government and the future of the American economic system. By that time, Louis Brandeis was head of both the Federation of American Zionists and the American Zionist Movement after meeting the English-born Zionist leader and close associate of the late Herzl, Jacob de Haas. The prominent Jewish lawyer was converted into a staunch Zionist under the mentorship of leading Zionists during that time, such as Aaron Aaronsohn, Horace Kallen, Shmarya Levin, Bernard Rosenblatt, and Nahum Sokolow.[13] From August 31, 1914, to October 1, 1916, Brandeis was also chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee for general Zionist affairs.
The Brandeis-Wilson coalition was the start of a political partnership with far-reaching consequences on the international scene until Wilson’s death. The opportunity for career advancement presented itself so visibly that Brandeis switched parties and carried his advocacies, including Zionism, into American political institutions as a high-ranking political figure with direct access to the newly elected U.S. president.
Upon Wilson’s presidential win in November, he noted to Brandeis, “You were yourself a great part of the victory.” During Wilson’s first year as president, Brandeis was instrumental in the behind-the-scenes creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. The ambitious president attempted to make Brandeis his Attorney General and later Secretary of Commerce, but intense resistance from corporate executives forced Wilson to rescind his plan to make the renowned radical part of his cabinet. Instead, he nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, and he was sworn in amid a public outcry.
At a time when correspondence between Zionist leaders and the American president was steadily rising, as the Great War intensified in its first year, Brandeis approached Wilson about Zionist plans, to which Wilson seemed receptive. By 1916, Brandeis established regular contact with the State Department on the future fate of the declining Turkish Empire following the war, with Hungarian-born leading Zionist and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in communication with Wilson’s chief adviser on European politics and diplomacy during the First World War, Edward Mandell “Colonel” House, on Zionist objectives. Specifically, Wise functioned as an intermediary between Wilson and House from 1916 to 1919. Wise began his Zionist career in the late 1890’s by assisting the movement’s ideological development and organization of its membership. Another acquaintance of Herzl’s, he served as American secretary of the World Zionist Movement and was instrumental in producing the aforementioned Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs.[14]
Opposition to American entry into the First World War cut across political, racial, and economic lines. Various factions of society, including socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, pacifists, civil libertarians, Marxists, rural southerners, Canadian and Irish nationalists, and women’s groups, were just some of the small but vocal minorities opposing American militarism. International socialist groups, for example, were keenly aware of the capitalist mobilization the war promised to big business rivals. The working class fought, while the ruling class profited.[15] This was America’s first debut as a global military power and pitted citizen against citizen until eventually the government itself grossly violated civil liberties under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.
In 1916, Wilson reignited his bid for re-election through his continued commitment to progressive change by calling for legislation regulating work hours and a minimum wage. Democrats campaigned on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” insisting to voters that a Republican victory would mean war with Germany. Just four months after his second inauguration, Wilson reneged on his campaign promise of neutrality and officially declared war. By this time, public resistance to this betrayal was minute. The preceding years of preparedness campaigns, patriotic zeal, and heavily propagandized press cycles swayed the consensus into viewing the war as just and necessary. Thousands more dissenters continued to be jailed, silenced, and deported under newly solidified justification.
Shortly after the U.S. entered into the war, the British Foreign Minister, Arthur J. Balfour, arrived in Washington. In a cable, James Rothschild urged Brandeis to discuss Zionism with Balfour on the viability of an English Zionist program to recognize Palestine as the Jewish national homeland. “Unanimous opinion is the only satisfactory solution for Jewish Palestine under British protectorate,” Rothschild explained in a telegram. Russian Zionists fully approve. Public opinion and competent authorities here are favorable… It would greatly help if American Jews would suggest this scheme to their government.[16]The charitable activity of the Zionist movement was over. Now an era of wielding political power has commenced to shift the tide of international conflict under the London-Moscow-New York axis.
Only one month after American entry into the war, Brandeis followed through with Rothschild’s request. Appealing to Wilson’s progressive vision for the globe, Brandeis explained that a Jewish Palestine would fulfill the conditions of the peace settlement Wilson desired; Turkish despotism would be swept aside for a democratic government where economic and cultural development would be undertaken by a historically suppressed people.[17]In reaction to the Balfour Declaration, Wilson said, “The allied nations, with the fullest concurrence of our government and people, agree that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.”[18]
Partnered with Brandeis in courting Wilson was the Austrian-born Jewish lawyer and professor, Felix Frankfurter, a lifelong committed Zionist and member of the Zionist Organization of America. Frankfurter became acquainted with Brandeis in the Parushim, a secret Zionist society, reform movement, and arguably the first modern militant Zionist organization in America. Found by their former mentor, Horace M. Kallento, Zionist purpose was “a group much like the Peace Corps, young men and women who saw the Utopian opportunity that existed for the Jewish people in Palestine and who were willing to devote themselves to an ideal.”[19]
The ideological motivations for endorsing Zionism were personal for Wilson as well: “To think that I, the son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” With Wilson formally persuaded, Brandeis passed along the good news via urgent cables to Rothschild in London. Two weeks later, Jacob de Haas, now advisor to Brandeis, cabled Russian born-Zionist leader and future president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, not only outlining the plan for Palestine but to communicate “an accurate statement of the prevailing sentiment in the United States to be presented to the Allied Governments.”[20]
President Wilson was later asked directly by the British government about the likelihood of issuing a declaration of sympathy for the Zionist movement. Wilson responded that the time was not ripe. A month later, Wilson placed his full backing behind the affirmation as pressure mounted against Germany’s Turkish ally to make dispensations to the Zionists. The topic of the Balfour Declaration was on the table between the two world powers. Colonel House complained to Wilson in a note: “The Jews from every tribe have descended in force, and they seem determined to break in with a jimmy if they are not let in.”[21]
Brandeis’ influence over Wilson in regards to Zionist ambition could not be understated. Wilson once remarked that it was Brandeis to whom he owed his career. According to Frank Edward Manuel, Wilson’s interest in Zionism and including it as part of his foreign policy was “being slowly nurtured by Louis Brandeis, one of the men who stood closest to him in the early years of the administration and who became the key figure in future American intervention in Palestine.”[22]
A roadblock in the way of the highly anticipated declaration was the Counselor to the State Department, Robert Lansing. Lansing was completely bypassed in House and Wilson’s correspondence on the Balfour Declaration. In response, Lansing argued in a letter to Wilson why America must decline Balfour’s promise, noting that, among several reasons, “many Christian sects and individuals would undoubtedly resent turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ,” a flagrant secession from the protracted Christian support for the prophetic restoration of Israel.
Lansing ordered Ambassador Walter Hines Page to investigate and report prudently the British reasons for the Balfour Declaration. In spite of political opposition within the State Department, the declaration was officially signed by Lord Balfour after a two-year process of edits by British and American Zionists and officials. Despite its official status as a British document, it was Brandeis who spearheaded its drafting and application through Wilson.
News rapidly spread worldwide upon the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, with heaps of telegrams addressed to Wilson expressing their gratitude for his contributions. Leaflets were dropped over German and Austrian territory announcing, “The hour of Jewish redemption has arrived…” The Allies are giving the land of Israel to the people of Israel… Will you join them and help to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Stop fighting the allies who are fighting for you, for all the Jews… An Allied victory means the Jewish people’s return to Zion.”[23]
By the summer of 1918, Turkish resistance was waning and President Wilson took this time to formally announce his public endorsement of the Balfour Declaration in August. Three months later, Germany was the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice agreement with the Allies. The war was over. The next battle would be held in Paris.
The ambitions of Wilson’s liberal internationalist foreign policy were outlined in the Fourteen Points and used as the basis of terms for Germany’s surrender at the Paris Peace Conference. The Peace Conference produced five treaties, one of which was the notorious Treaty of Versailles. There were a number of high-profile Jews present, not just in diplomatic positions but in many senior and important functions within the Allied delegations.[24] This included Baron Sonnino for Italy, Edwin Montagu for Britain, Louis Klotz for France, and Paul Mantoux as the interpreter for the “Big Three”—United States, Britain, and France.
Wilson also endorsed Rabbi Wise to promote the Jewish program for Palestine in Paris. Another Zionist delegate was Frankfurter, who was among the nearly one hundred intellectuals that signed a statement of principles for the formation of the League of Free Nations Associations. This formally enacted Wilson’s mission to dispel isolationism in favor of increasing American participation in international affairs.[25]
In the midst of empirical savagery slicing up Germany and parceling out Europe’s colonial holdings, the case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was presented by a delegation of the Zionist Organization led by Weizmann. The terms of the newly established British Mandate involved promoting Jewish immigration and settlement, suggesting boundaries, self-government, and the assurance of religious liberty.
At the request of President Wilson, Jewish statesman and Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch attended the Paris Peace Conference as an advisor to negotiate a deal with the victorious Allied powers on the destiny of Germany.[26] He served as a member of the American Delegation to the Preliminary Peace Conference and on the Committee on Form of Payments of Reparations. Baruch is credited with managing America’s economic mobilization in the First World War while chairman of the War Industries Board. While Baruch opposed the strenuous financial tenets of punishing Germany, he nonetheless attempted to assist the Senate in passing the Treaty of Versailles.
Baruch also played a significant role in securing France’s vote in favor of the Palestine Partition Plan. He swayed their vote by visiting France’s UN delegate and heavily suggesting that failure to support the resolution could result in America withholding desperately needed monetary support as the war devastated France’s financial market.[27]
The renowned English economist, John Maynard Keynes, was also in attendance at the Peace Conference as a delegate of the British Treasury. Disgusted by the ravenous nature of the treaties, particularly the Versailles Treaty, Keynes publicized a negative portrayal of the treaties in his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In response, Baruch paid John Foster Dulles $10,000 to ghostwrite his own book, The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty, to counter Keynes by exalting the treaties.[28]
The most significant of American Jewish attendees, however, was Justice Brandeis himself, whose task at the world’s peace tables was to assist Colonel House “in collecting peace data for President Wilson.” The task was clear: “Colonel House will devote his attention to problems concerning the war in the west, while Justice Brandeis will study the near eastern question.” Their work will form the basis for the country’s contention.”[29]
For a liberal president known for endorsing and exporting democratic ideals even through coercion, its inconsistent implementation was noted during the peace talks and formally addressed on August 28, 1919, through the presentation of the King-Crane Commission. The commission argued that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably lead to an immediate violation of the right of the indigenous Palestinian people to self-determination and deemed the Zionist program incompatible.
The report also stated that meetings with Jewish representatives led them to conclude that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine through armed forces” and begged the Peace Conference to reject Zionist proposals. The findings of this report were suppressed for three years by Brandeis until after the Peace Accords were passed. Working diligently to ensure the stipulations of the Balfour Declaration were incorporated into the final arrangement was Frankfurter, who found the findings of the commission to “cheat Jewry of Palestine.”[30]
As the dissolution of the former Ottoman Empire began via the Treaty of Sevres, the vehicle for colonizing Palestine as spelled out by the Balfour Declaration was put into effect under the Brandeis-guided Wilson. The Council of the League of Nations and the United States both approved the Mandate for Palestine in July of 1922. It was clear from the beginning that the flagrant denial of self-government for the Palestinian population would continue until the Jews were strong enough to take the reins of government in the region.
For four days in April 1922, Congress debated resolutions brought forth to reaffirm the colonial implications of the Balfour Declaration as urged by Zionists. One of the vocal participants of its opposition was Professor Edward Bliss Reed, who testified in a prophetic hearing before Congress about the outcome of what American support entailed: “If you indorse the Balfour declaration, you are caught absolutely in the mandate…” What I want to warn you against is getting caught up in the mandate in what I consider an impasse. It will devastate this country, Palestine. I want to prevent my country from doing something that will bring it untold trouble.”[31]
Nevertheless, Congress was subjected to endless Zionist pressure and passed the Lodge-Fish Resolution endorsing the British Mandate for Palestine as laid out by the Balfour Declaration, which was signed by Wilson’s presidential successor, Warren G. Harding, on September 21, 1922.
When Wilson died two years later, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, Louis Lipsky, stated publicly, “Mr. Wilson followed with interest the progress of the Zionist movement even after he retired to private life.” In 1921, when informed that the Mandate for Palestine had been finally ratified, he telegraphed to the Zionist Organization of America: “I am proud that it should be thought that I have been of service to the Jewish people.”[32]
The First World War was proclaimed to represent “the war to end all wars”, bringing about a golden future on the promise of self-determination, democracy, mutual security, and peace. The cost would only be the blood and ashes of young, idealistic men committed to the service of their nation. What resulted was the pervasive indifference and lack of cohesive understanding of the memory of the war in spite of its devastating cost. As Steven Trout tried to explain the lack of American consciousness toward the war, “What exactly should the nation recall about the war? Is neutrality failing? The bravery of the combat soldier? The futility of trench warfare? The racial discrimination that permeated the ranks? Are there domestic attacks on German Americans? The botched peace processes? ”
Not to mention the American public that had opposed entry into Europe’s war was forced to grapple with the casualties of 120,000 soldiers and the reintegration of 200,000 wounded men, crippled of mind and body. For Wilson, it was his lifelong and close political partnerships with notable Jewish Zionists fully entrenched in American institutions that prompted his breakaway from isolationism—to which the United States has never returned. More consequential was Wilson’s setting the pattern for amplifying and servicing the dominance of a foreign state as the costs continue to rise.
Footnotes
[1] Jewish Telegraphic Agency, INC., “Leaders Pay Tribute To The Passing Of A Great Statesman,” Daily News Bulletin, last modified February 4, 1924, https://pdfs.jta.org/1924/02-04_025.pdf.
[7] Joseph Rappaport, “The American Yiddish Press and the European Conflict in 1914.” 113–28 in Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 3/4 (1957).http://www.jstor.org/stable/4465551.
[16] Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann to Brandeis (cable), April 21, 1917 (received April 25), Zionist Archives, New York City, Jacob de Haas Archives.
[17] Lebow, Richard Ned. “Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration.” The Journal of Modern History, 40, no. 4 (1968): 507 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1878450.
[19] Schmidt, Sarah. “The ‘Parushim’: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1975): 122. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23880453
[20] De Haas Archives, Brandeis to Rothschild (cable), May 9, 1917.
[22] Ahmed, Hisham H. “From the Balfour Declaration to World War II: The U.S. Stand on Palestinian Self-Determination.” Arab Studies Quarterly 12, no. 1/2 (1990): 9–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41858937.
[24] Levene, Mark. “Nationalism and Its Alternatives in the International Arena: The Jewish Question in Paris, 1919.” Journal of Contemporary History 28, no. 3 (1993): 522. http://www.jstor.org/stable/260644.
[25] Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge, 261.
[31] United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Sixty-seventh Congress, Second Session, on H. Con. Res. 52, Expressing Satisfaction with the Re-creation of Palestine as the National Home of the Jewish Race April 18, 19, 20, and 21, 1922 (Kessinger Publishing, 1922), 23–24.
Shocking video emerged Sunday of police in Holland beating anti-lockdown protesters with batons and sending in dogs to maul the dissenters.
Massive amounts of people turned out to protest hard lockdown restrictions which were put back into place by the Dutch government before Christmas.
Everything except essential stores has been shut down in the country until at least Jan. 14.
The restrictions dictate that gatherings of more than two people are illegal, so the government sent in the riot police.
Watch:
Riot police in Amsterdam violently shut down an anti-lockdown protest today after leftist mayor Femke Halsema triggered an emergency order to stop the march. The Netherlands has been in Covid lockdown & gatherings of more than 2 are illegal. pic.twitter.com/AphZew85LI
Towards the end of last year, tech start-up Dsruptive Subdermals announced a microchip installed under the skin that can be scanned to reveal Covid vaccination status.
The technology was criticized, with many calling it “invasive.”
In an interview with Express, the company’s managing director doubled down on the technology and told critics the technology was here to stay.
The technology is a pre-programmed and scannable implant about the size of a grain of rice. It stores the vaccination information, displaying a person’s Covid-19 vaccine passport when scanned.
Speaking to Express, Hannes Sjobald, the company’s managing director, said: “This technology exists and is used whether we like it or not.
“I am happy that it is brought into the public conversation.
“New technologies must be broadly debated and understood.
“Smart implants are a powerful health technology.
“That is what we are building at Dsruptive and our goal is to transform healthcare on a global scale.”
Sjobald said the technology makes the vaccine passports more “accessible.”
“This means it is always accessible for me or for anyone else, really, who wants to read me.
“For example, if I go to the movies or go to a shopping center, then people will be able to check my status even if I don’t have my phone.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 7 will convene a special session to hear oral arguments in two cases related to the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandates.
The two cases pertain to the mandates imposed on private businesses with 100 or more employees, and healthcare facilities participating in the Medicare or Medicaid programs.
The Supreme Court announced Dec. 22, 2021, it would hold a special session to hear both cases, following a series of decisions in lower courts that successively implemented and lifted injunctions against the two mandates.
In both disputes, the formal legal question at hand pertains to whether the federal government can continue enforcing the mandates while legal challenges against them work their way through the judicial system.
In the first instance, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling Dec. 17, 2021, lifted an injunction against Biden’s vaccine mandate for private businesses previously issued by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The mandate is now set to come into force on Jan. 4, though the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced it will not begin enforcement of the rule until Jan. 10. The mandate, if and when it is enforced, will impact an estimated 84 million U.S. workers.
Two of these requests, one filed by a trade group and the other by a group of states led by Ohio, were formally accepted for oral argument.
These groups were joined by more than 170 Republican lawmakers who on Dec. 30, 2021, jointly filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing OSHA has no legal authority to impose a vaccine mandate on private businesses.
The Supreme Court, via Justice Brett Kavanaugh — whose jurisdiction includes the 6th Circuit — asked the Biden administration to submit a response to the legal challenges by Dec. 30, 2021.
In its response, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argued the Biden administration possesses the authority, under federal law, to impose the mandate and the Supreme Court should not block a program that will save thousands of lives.
The Supreme Court will also hear arguments pertaining to Biden’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers at facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid funding. This rule is estimated to impact more than 17 million workers across the U.S.
In this instance, it was the Biden administration that filed an emergency request with the court, requesting it be allowed to temporarily enforce the healthcare worker mandate, which is currently blocked in 24 states following a series of injunctions issued by lower courts.
A brief filed with the Supreme Court by 14 Republican-led states described the mandate as “plainly unlawful.”
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service, which oversees the healthcare mandate, announced Dec. 29, 2021, it will begin enforcing the mandate in the 26 states where it is not blocked.
A modified enforcement timeline accompanied this announcement: Healthcare workers will now be required to receive the first dose of a COVID vaccine by Jan. 27, and the second dose by Feb. 28.
The Supreme Court’s move to hold oral arguments in deciding whether or not to issue an emergency stay is considered unusual. Typically, such cases are placed on the “shadow docket” and are decided without a full briefing or a presentation of oral arguments.
In this instance though, the Supreme Court may seek to alleviate the uncertainty which exists among employers and workers who remain unsure as to whether they are subject to a mandate or not.
It remains unclear whether a decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the injunctions against the healthcare worker mandate will impact all 50 states or only the 24 where the mandate is currently blocked.
Any emergency stay issued by the Supreme Court would not constitute a final ruling regarding either case, but would freeze the enforcement of the two mandates until legal challenges make their way through the federal appeals courts before, most likely, ending up in the Supreme Court for a full hearing.
Separate Biden administration mandates pertaining to such categories as federal contractors and military personnel also have been challenged legally.
In the most recent such example, Judge James “Wesley” Hendrix of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled against a mask and vaccine mandate for participants in federal Head Start programs. The rules were set to take effect by the end of January.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton described the ruling as “a win for the children of Texas.”
However, the Supreme Court will not examine any of these other Biden administration mandates in the Jan. 7 special session.
While the Supreme Court previously rejected requests for emergency stays against state-level vaccine mandates, the court is also viewed as one that is skeptical of the power of federal agencies to issue mandates relating to COVID countermeasures.
This stance was evident, for instance, when the court lifted a moratorium on evictions imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the basis it was outside the agency’s authority.
Notably, a well-known Supreme Court decision from 1905, Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, which, according to proponents of vaccine mandates, sets a legal precedent for their legality, actually pertains to state-level mandates.
This argument was made by the state of Arizona in its lawsuit against the OSHA mandate, as previously reported by The Defender.
The lack of a federal-level precedent may therefore weigh into the justices’ decision.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
The entire interwebs are ablaze with the term “mass formation psychosis”. Since a smart Ph.D. visited Joe Rogan everyone and their grandmother are now reading up on it, and emitting into the ether how the COVID panic (hysteria) is nothing but a mass psychosis. That is great. Except that it is January freaking 2022.
It has been a psychosis for nearly TWO YEARS now. It has been evident it is nothing but brain rot in the heads of excitable idiots this whole time. Aleksandr Lukashenko, a Belarusian potato farmer, and a much less educated man than Dr. Robert Malone, diagnosed it as a “psychosis” and an “info-demic” way back in March 2020.
“Despite some criticism on my part, I call this coronavirus nothing other than a psychosis, and I will never deny that, because I’ve gone through many situations of psychosis together with you, and we know what the results were.
“Coronavirus is yet another psychosis, which will benefit some people and will harm others.”
Doesn’t it seem to you that the powerful forces of the world would like to remake the world, without a ‘war’(Emmanuel Macron has already called it a war), through this so-called ‘corona-psychosis’, or ‘info-demic’? Many people are asking: ‘what will happen after the pandemic?’”
Some need the permission of a PhD to start thinking, preferably a PhD they saw on a massive media outlet like Rogan.* Others, like Lukashenko have their common sense.
*Who is on record as saying that without lockdowns you would have had more COVID deaths.
With over 1,200 daily COVID deaths for many weeks the US is on track to reach a total of one million COVID related deaths by the end of March. A shameful record for 2022.
To think that every week over 8,000 Americans are dying, mostly in hospital ICUs is unbelievable. But that is no excuse that there is no serious attention by the mainstream media. Take a moment to reflect that this is more deaths than those in the 9/11 attacks and Pearl Harbor, combined. And it is happening every week.
The late stage problem
Hospitals have become killing machines, places where the kiss of death is a protocol following government guidelines. Despite wide COVID vaccine use deaths in hospitals because of late stage viral infection remain at a high level. Difficulty in getting COVID testing quickly and often probably contributes to the high death rate. Too many people do not get their COVID infection addressed early. There remains too little use of monoclonal antibodies early for infected people. So their infection progresses to serious lung and breathing problems. That is the beginning of the end.
And it will be a long time before the new antiviral drugs from Pfizer and Merck are broadly available and there will be more information on whether they are really safe and effective for all diverse types of people.
In hospitals, patients with breathing problems and upper respiratory distress are giving medical actions that may address pain but inevitably lead to death, often after many weeks in the ICU. They get the useless and harmful drug remdesivir, supplemental oxygen, steroids, and are intubated, put on a ventilator and usually put into a coma. And eventually they die and become another COVID statistic.
It has been reported that the death rate for COVID patients prescribed remdesivir (26%) exceeds the fatality rate of COVID patients prescribed ivermectin, which is recorded by the Medicare database at 7.2%. And it has documented serious side effects.
In a few successful court actions, such late stage COVID patients were given the cheap, safe generic IVM and – much to the astonishment of hospital doctors – have walked out of the hospital, completely recovered.
And there is considerable medical research literature supporting such use of IVM, principally because of its anti-inflammatory property. As just one example, a published medical 2021 hospital study found nearly a 50% reduction in deaths for patients with severe pulmonary involvement, the typical late stage COVID death-bed patient condition. The many doubters of IVM should pay more attention to the medical science literature.
But published medical articles are ignored by the medical and public health establishments.
Hospital shame
Hospitals stubbornly refuse to honor the few court decisions directing them to give death-bed late COVID stage patients a chance of surviving by administering ivermectin. Hospitals use an army of lawyers and every dirty legal trick to overturn or delay those few court decisions that reach the sensible conclusion that there is nothing to lose by using ivermectin.
Indeed, here is the ugly truth: Hospital protocols for late stage COVID patients have nearly a one hundred percent record of failure. Their patients suffer and then die. Families desperate to get ivermectin used usually fail and watch their loved ones die.
This is a medical disgrace. This is the power of corporate medicine. This situation exemplifies the loss of medical freedom. This is the epitome of medical tyranny. This is a total loss of medical ethics. This is an extreme example of doctors failing to live up to their Hippocratic Oath. They follow hospital rules and let their patients die without trying what has a medical justification. Without doing what other doctors have successfully done.
Apparently, that weekly death total is not enough to push hospitals and doctors to use what several nations have used to curb the COVID pandemic and save many millions of lives.
Hospital care arguments
Consider this paradox and hypocrisy. Virtually all hospitals put a priority on patient centered care. Patient-centered care focuses on the patient and the individual’s particular health care needs. The goal of patient-centered health care is to empower patients to become active participants in their care.
Clearly, denying patient and family pleas for using ivermectin for people facing death is totally inconsistent with this philosophy and hospital commitment.
Add to all this that demanding all patients use a one-size-fits-all medical treatment or hospital protocol is also counter to personalized medicine, long the hallmark of medicine. Doctors need the freedom to use what suits their patient rather than what the government dictates or accepting what it withholds.
Court actions to get hospitals allowing IVM use might be more successful if both patient centered care and personalized medicine arguments were presented to judges.
Conclusions
Time to let those who want to use ivermectin in an attempt to save their life get it. It is medically and morally the right thing to do.
With now a long record of hospital protocols for late stage COVID utterly failing to save lives, how can the medical profession justify not using a generic medicine that both research and clinical results justify and explain its ability to save lives?
They cannot.
Families trying to find a lawyer and a friendly court face a very, very difficult race to save their loved one stuck in the ICU just like a prisoner sentenced to death.
Is it COVID killing these people or the medical profession and their hospital employers? Worth pondering as you keep watching mounting COVID death numbers.
A seasoned stock analyst colleague texted me a link today, and when I clicked it open, I could hardly believe what I was reading. What a headline. “Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64”. This headline is a nuclear truth bomb masquerading as an insurance agent’s dry manila envelope full of actuarial tables.
People frequently write to Jill and myself. People we have never met. They call, they arrive at the farm by appointment or unannounced, they fill our email in boxes with their inquiries. They all want something; time, attention, an interview. Many want to tell us about their fear, illness, nightmares, or (what often seems like) outright paranoid conspiracies. And then, over time, these fears and “conspiracies” keep getting confirmed. As Jan Jekielek (a senior editor with The Epoch Times) recently said to me, it is getting harder and harder to tell which ones are mere conspiracy theories and which are true reality.
One farm visitor told me of his foreshadowing massive numbers of deaths within three years consequent to the genetic vaccines, and that this was all about the “Great Reset” and the depopulation agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF). I tried to reassure him that, in my opinion, this was highly unlikely- while privately thinking about how easily people fall into this type of conspiracy ideation, and how I need to be careful to avoid going there when confronting so many public health decisions that appear either incompetent or nefarious. At the time, I only knew of the WEF as the host of a big annual party in Davos Switzerland where the uber rich and the hoi oligoi of the Western nations went to watch Ted talks, drink the best wine, see and be seen. Silly me. What a long, strange trip this has been. I doubt that even Hunter S. Thompson could have imagined it in his most drug and booze addled state. Suffice to say, I nominate Ralph Steadman as official illustrator of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Or a resurrected Hieronymus Bosch.
But I am wandering from a point that I am afraid to clearly state.
It is starting to look to me like the largest experiment on human beings in recorded history has failed. And, if this rather dry report from a senior Indiana life insurance executive holds true, then Reiner Fuellmich’s “Crimes against Humanity” push for convening new Nuremberg trials starts to look a lot less quixotic and a lot more prophetic.
Here is what lit me up in this report from The Center Square contributor Margaret Menge.
“The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.
Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.
“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.””
So, what is driving this unprecedented surge in all-cause mortality?
“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths,
Davison said.“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.””
AT A MINIMUM, based on my reading, one has to conclude that if this report holds and is confirmed by others in the dry world of life insurance actuaries, we have both a huge human tragedy and a profound public policy failure of the US Government and US HHS system to serve and protect the citizens that pay for this “service”.
IF this holds true, then the genetic vaccines so aggressively promoted have failed, and the clear federal campaign to prevent early treatment with lifesaving drugs has contributed to a massive, avoidable loss of life.
AT WORST, this report implies that the federal workplace vaccine mandates have driven what appear to be a true crime against humanity. Massive loss of life in (presumably) workers that have been forced to accept a toxic vaccine at higher frequency relative to the general population of Indiana.
FURTHERMORE, we have also been living through the most massive, globally coordinated propaganda and censorship campaign in the history of the human race. All major mass media and the social media technology companies have coordinated to stifle and suppress any discussion of the risks of the genetic vaccines AND/OR alternative early treatments.
IF this report holds true, there must be accountability. We are not just talking about running over the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States and grinding it into the mud with an army of artificial intelligence-powered heavy infantry. This article reads like a dry description of an avoidable mass casualty event caused by a mandated experimental medical procedure. One for which all opportunities for the victims to have become self-informed about the potential risks have been methodically erased from both the internet and public awareness by an international corrupt cabal operating under the flag of the “Trusted News Initiative”. George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.
There seems to be little effort to hide the fact that the Biden Administration does not plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison in his first term as he once declared. That pledge is but a whisper on the wind, much like the promises made by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama. According to a recent New York Timesreport by Carol Rosenberg, who has been been covering the infamous GTMO for the 20 years since it opened, the military is building a new, secret courtroom on the premises — which won’t be completed until 2023.
It’s hard to say what is the most disturbing thread in her report, which came out right before the New Year and of course made no waves. (It must be quite difficult to dedicate one’s journalistic career to an issue that most Americans have lost all interest in. The torture and detention of other human beings without charge appeared to go out with the government spying illegally on Americans — no one seems to care) According to Rosenberg, the military is building a second courtroom to handle more than one case simultaneously, as the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks is still going on. That sort of sounds legit considering there are five others at the prison today charged and awaiting trials, too. However, she points out, this new courtroom will have no gallery for visitors, with proceedings broadcast for journalists and observers on closed circuit with a 40 second delay in a remote room so judges can cut off anything “classified” said during trials:
Only people with a secret clearance, such as members of the intelligence community and specially cleared guards and lawyers, will be allowed inside the new chamber.
As a workaround, the court staff is designing a “virtual gallery with multiple camera angles simultaneously displayed,” said Ron Flesvig, a spokesman for the Office of Military Commissions. The public would be escorted there to watch the proceedings, streamed on a 40-second delay.
During recesses in the current courtroom, lawyers and other court participants often engage with reporters and relatives of victims of terror attacks, routine contact that would be lost with the “virtual gallery.” So would the ability for a sketch artist to observe the proceedings live.
“I’ve observed trial proceedings in person at Guantánamo. The chipper ‘secrecy’ imposed by the military is insulting, anti-democratic, and cowardly,” tweeted Michael Bronner, producer of the 2021 film The Mauritanian, which portrays the plight of GTMO detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi (incidentally, the former 14-year prisoner spoke at a special Quincy Institute panel on June 8 on the subject of the facility’s closure). “The entire enterprise makes a mockery out of what the US pretends to stand for,” added Bronner.
Rosenberg said this was the latest in a serious of moves to make the court and the prison itself less transparent to the public:
For example, for 17 years the military routinely took visiting journalists to the detention facilities where most captives are kept, but required them to delete photographs that showed cameras, gates and other security procedures. Then, the military undertook a consolidation that moved Mr. (Khalid Sheikh) Mohammed and other detainees who were held by the C.I.A. from a secret site to the maximum-security portion of those once showcase facilities — and declared the entire detention zone off limits to journalists.
Their empty, formerly C.I.A.-controlled prison is off limits to reporters too. Defense lawyers who are seeking a preservation order on the site describe it as a rapidly deteriorating facility that was clearly unfit for the prisoners and their guards. One military lawyer who visited there recently described carcasses of dead tarantulas in the empty cellblocks.
The other obvious disturbing angle is that despite earlier reports that the Biden Administration was “quietly moving to close the prison,” Rosenberg’s report indicates no such thing. Either they have hit a brick wall with Congress and/or those efforts have been suspended, but as I wrote in October, even those prisoners cleared for release have zero-to-no chance of getting out anytime soon. Currently there are 27 men at the scrubby island base who are not charged with any crime and/or awaiting repatriation (compared to the 10 awaiting trail and two already convicted). The administration and military rules have made it virtually impossible for the men who have been cleared to be placed in another country at this point.
To be fair, Congress has shown no willingness to budge on the issue of trying the charged in federal courts, even though we know they would be just as secure, cost the taxpayer less, and adjudicate faster. However, that does not explain why they are making it less transparent, and why there has been no progress on resolving the abomination of keeping 27 souls locked away indefinitely without charge. The administration points to the elaborate legal process set up by the military tribunal system, but that is not enough. Moral courage is in order here, and it seems this administration has as much as any of its predecessors in this regard. Very little.
Any pretext or none at all unjustifiably justifies Israeli aggression against blockaded/defenseless Gazans.
At its discretion, the apartheid state bombs, shells, invades, and otherwise immiserates long-suffering Strip residents.
Despite Israeli state terror repeating with disturbing regularity, the world community yawns and ignores its worst crimes of war and against humanity against Palestinians for the “crime” of not being Jewish.
NGO Gisha supports enforcement of the rule of law and free movement of Palestinians — especially illegally blockaded Gazans, explaining the following:
Since Israel illegally occupied the West Bank and Gaza with intent to steal and develop Palestinian land for exclusive Jewish use, its ruling regimes instituted “a complex system of rules (and) restrictions” in flagrant breach of international law.
Fundamental rights of Palestinians — especially Gazans — are consistently and repeatedly violated.
Israeli regimes deny them “the right to life, the right to access medical care, the right to education, the right to livelihood, the right to family unity and the right to freedom of religion.”
Gisha’s website explains the following:
For nearly 15 years under illegal Jewish state blockade, Gazans suffer from oppressively “high unemployment, long blackouts, and severe shortages of clean water.”
Their basic rights Gazans are denied — with no world community to help reverse what no one should have to tolerate.
“Electricity is only available for about half the day” — on some days for a few hours alone or none at all.
The vast majority of Gazans have no access to clean water.
“More than 70% of Gaza’s population relies on humanitarian aid to meet basic needs.”
“The vast majority of residents do not meet Israel’s (apartheid) criteria for travel permits.”
They have little or no chance to leave the Strip for employment, education, medical care unavailable to them under blockade,
“or to visit or reunite with family members living in Israel, the West Bank, and abroad.”
Israel blocks free land, sea and air movement to or from the Strip.
It “oversees entry of goods into Gaza… demands to know (what) they’re intended for, (who’ll) receive them, and who paid for them.”
Its ruling regimes decide “what goods produced in Gaza can be sold outside the Strip, how much, when and where.”
They also decide how much electricity the Strip is allowed to have — reducing or cutting it off entirely at its discretion.
They repeatedly close “Gaza’s crossings and den(y) access to its sea space as a means of punishing and pressuring the population.”
At all times, Israel enforces severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people.
It “blocks access to opportunities, prevents economic development, and violates basic human rights.”
B’Tselem said Gazans endure made-in-Israel “humanitarian crisis” conditions at all times.
Its ruling regimes “sentenced” two millions Gazans “to a life of abject poverty and… inhuman conditions.”
They control “critical aspects of life” in the blockaded Strip.
“Isolating Gaza from the rest of the world, including separating it from the West Bank,” is part of a longstanding Israeli policy.
What began in the 1990s has grown more oppressive since that time for invented reasons.
Two million Gazans are virtually held captive in the world’s largest open-air prison.
Over 80% of Gazans need humanitarian aid to survive.
Even with what Israel allows into the Strip, nearly two-thirds of its people are food insecure — unsure where their next meal is coming from.
Gazan infrastructure and public services are bare-bones.
Over 95% of Strip water is contaminated and unpotable.
What’s considered normal in Israel and the West is nonexistent in Gaza.
At its discretion for invented reasons, Israel wages war on Gaza.
Any time for any reason or none at all, it terror-bombs, shells, or otherwise strikes Strip targets — including residential buildings, schools, hospitals, mosques, and shops.
Free-fire policy lets IDF soldiers shoot Gazan children, farmers in their fields, and other Strip residents for target practice.
Blockades are acts of war by other means, Law Professor Francis Boyle explained — “because of the(ir) belligerent use of force…”
Gazans pose no threat to Israel.
Blockading the Strip is solely for political reasons, not security ones.
On most issues, Al Jazeera’s reports resemble US/Western propaganda — fake news over the real thing.
All things related to Israeli state terror against Palestinians is an exception to its standard practice on most other issues.
On New Year’s eve, Qatar-based Al Jazeera (AJ) spoke to Gazans injured and disabled from Israeli aggression last May.
“The assault… killed at least 260 people, including 39 women and 67 children, and wounded more than 1,900, according to the health ministry in Gaza,” AJ reported, adding:
“The bombardment also destroyed 1,800 residential units and partially demolished at least 14,300 other units.”
Since that time, the Netanyahu and Bennett regimes blocked entry of many reconstruction materials on the phony pretext of alleging their dual use, including for military purposes (sic).
Israeli aggression last May blinded 7-year-old Mohammed Shaban.
His new year’s wish is to see his mother’s face, he said.
Badly damaged by Israeli terror-bombing last May, his eyes couldn’t be saved and were surgically removed.
“I can’t stop crying whenever I see him,” his mother said, adding:
“He keeps asking his siblings, ‘Why can I only see black darkness? Why can’t I go to my school?’ ”
“Last night, he told me: ‘Mum, I wish I could see your face.’ ”
Recently enrolled in a school for visually challenged children, his mother, Somayya Shaban, expects no positive change in the new year.
“I believe Gaza’s destiny is to face more torture and suffering,” she said.
She wishes her son ,Mohammed, could see again. “I wish I could give him my eyes,” she stressed.
Countless thousands of other Gazans were killed, injured or disabled from multiple Israeli wars and other attacks on the Strip since 2008.
On New Year’s weekend, Israel terror-bombed and shelled Strip targets again.
Its latest aggression came in response to two rockets allegedly fired from the Strip on New Year’s day.
Reportedly, they fell harmlessly into offshore waters, harming no one, doing no damage.
According to an IDF statement, no sirens were sounded for Israelis to take cover.
The Bennett regime’s Iron Dome air defense system wasn’t activated.
In its yearend annual report, Israel said only five rockets were fired from the Strip, injuring no one.
According to the Times of Israel (TOI) on Sunday:
IDF “warplanes and helicopters hit (multiple) Hamas targets” overnight — over virtually nothing, TOI left unexplained.
“Palestinian media first reported airstrikes in the southern part of the Strip shortly before midnight” on Saturday.
“Hamas media claimed ‘resistance fighters’ launched ‘experimental rockets’ toward the sea.”
Gaza’s health ministry said three Palestinians were wounded from strikes on northern Strip targets.
How many others may have been injured or killed is unclear as of early Sunday morning — or the extent of damage to Strip targets.
Life in blockaded Gaza is harsh by any standard.
Israeli inflicted misery on Strip residents followed Hamas’ sweeping January 2006 electoral triumph to become historic Palestine’s legitimate government.
At the dawn of a new year, the message of weekend terror-bombing and shelling of the Strip shows that dirty Israeli business as usual continues unchanged.
Two million Gazans are victimized by apartheid ruthlessness — with no end of it in prospect.
The same goes for all occupied Palestinians.
Largely ignored by the world community, the highest of Israeli high crimes of war and against humanity continue to go unpunished.
The same reality applies to US-dominated NATO’s war on humanity at home and abroad.
Ontario’s former privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian has warned that the government cannot be trusted with cellphone tracking amid the pandemic. The warning came after it was revealed last week that a federal agency has been using cellphone data to track the movements of Canadians since the beginning of the pandemic.
“It concerns me enormously that this would enable the government to collect more and more information,” Ann Cavoukian told The Epoch Times.
“I do not want to [see] a trend where the government is consistently doing this and starting now. You can’t trust the government.”
Last week, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) confirmed it has been using cellphone data to analyze movements for the purposes of pandemic policies. The agency plans to continue with the data analysis until 2026, expanding it to other health issues.
“In March 2020, [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau said that tracking cell phone users was not being considered. Well, they did it, PHAC’s been doing it, and they want to do it even more,” Cavoukian said.
“[Officials] say ‘as soon as the emergency is over, we’re going to return to privacy.’ They don’t. The privacy invasive measures that are introduced during emergencies, pandemics, etc., often continue well after the emergency is over,” she added.
According to the former privacy commissioner, who served from 1997 to 2014, PHAC kept the data collection a secret because “they know people do not want their mobile devices tracked.”
Cavoukian was particularly concerned with the PHAC partnering with other unknown data providers, like the Communications Research Center (CRC).
“In partnership with CRC, PHAC has been producing report summaries to look at how movement trends of the Canadian population have changed over the course of the pandemic, including identifying new patterns to help direct public health messaging, planning and policy development,” PHAC said in a statement to The Epoch Times.
The agency insisted that it did not “receive or collect any individual mobility data” and that it has not stored or acquired individual level data.
On December 16, the PHAC posted a Research for Proposal for a contractor that could “provide it with a steady flow de-identified cell phone data,” reported The Epoch Times.
In a statement, the agency said it “requires access to cell-tower/operator location data that is secure, processed, and timely in addition to being adequately vetted for security, legal, privacy and transparency considerations to assist in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
According to Cavoukian the language in the RFP “reflects an intention to collect this data and retain it.”
She is concerned that the de-identification of data could be done so poorly that it could easily be re-identified.
“At the very least, the Privacy Commissioner’s Office should be all over this, and saying we need to examine exactly what measures you introduced to do this and how you’re going to protect privacy and de-identify data such that it cannot be re-identified,” she said.
“Examine this from end to end. Look under the hood.”
A new documentary, based on an interview with a self-confessed member of the Glennane Gang, gives some insights into allegations that British military intelligence was behind a shocking murder plot to cause the situation in Northern Ireland to “spiral out of control”.
In a documentary, Unquiet Graves: The Story of the Glennane Gang, John Weir, a former officer from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), alleges that British intelligence tried to persuade paramilitary group Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to attack a Catholic primary school at Belleeks in County Armagh.
Weir claimed that the UVF was urged to kill children and teachers in retaliation for the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, in which gunmen stopped a minibus carrying twelve workmen and shot them; only one person survived despite having been shot 18 times.
“The plan that was decided on was to shoot up a school in Belleeks”, he said, adding that the British intelligence plot was to make the situation in Northern Ireland “spiral out of control”. … continue
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