Monsanto agrochemicals causing genetic damage in soybean workers – study
RT | January 22, 2015
Soybean workers exposed to the agrochemicals like glyphosate, the main component in Monsanto’s ‘Roundup’ herbicide and other biocides, suffer from elevated DNA and cell damage, according to a new study.
The study, published in the journal Mutation Research/Genetic Toxicology and Environmental Mutagenesis, involved 127 people, including 81 exposed to biocides while working in the Brazilian soybean industry and 46 non-exposed individuals in a control group.
The exposed group exhibited an elevated level of cellular apoptosis, as well as DNA damage, according to researcher Danieli Benedetti and his team, which concluded that the now-common use of genetically-modified soybeans in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, especially in the city of Espumoso, has toxic ramifications for workers.
“Our findings indicate the advisability of monitoring genetic toxicity in soybean farm workers exposed to pesticides,” the researchers said.
Genetically-engineered seeds, proliferated across the globe by multinational agribusiness conglomerates like Monsanto, are designed to withstand dousing by glyphosate and other biocides in order to terminate insect, fungus, and weed nuisances.
Benedetti’s team focused specifically on Glyphosate and 2,4-D, the two top biocide components in American-biotechnology farming culture. Glyphosate is the prime ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup products, while Dow Chemical’s 2,4-D is a potent herbicide that was also used in making Agent Orange, the chemical used by the US to devastate resistance during the Vietnam War.
Last spring, Brazil’s public prosecutor sought to suspend use of glyphosate based on its toxic effects. Studies have linked glyphosate to a fatal kidney disease that has affected poor farming regions worldwide.
Just last week, Monsanto won final approval from the US for its new genetically-modified soybeans and cotton, designed to withstand a dominant biocide that fights weed resistance built up as a result of the company’s glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide already in use.
Monsanto reported an earnings drop of 34 percent in its first fiscal quarter. The company reportedly lost $156 million in the fourth quarter of last year due to a one-time payment made to settle an environmental legal case.
As multinationals such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical have sought strict standardization in agriculture markets the world over, the corporate leviathans, especially the former, have become the target of considerable protests and demonstrations.
Companies like Monsanto market their own patented seeds that, given their genetic modification, can be doused with biocides to kill pests and weeds, and which can jeopardize long-term health of the soil and the necessary biodiversity of a local environment that allows for natural pollination and, thus, food security.
In May of last year, activists on five continents around the globe, comprising of 52 nations organized resistance under the ‘March against Monsanto’ umbrella. Protests positioned against Monsanto and involving other corporate-food issues occurred in around 400 cities worldwide, according to reports.
Just this past weekend, more than 120 organizations joined the fifth annual ‘We are Fed Up!’ demonstration in Berlin to focus on the increased importation of American farming practices – such as genetic modification, frequent antibiotic injections for animals, and chemical meat treatments – following the implementation of the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Protests have raged most furiously in Europe, where the EU recently approved a law that would let its nations ban genetically-modified organisms even if the EU had deemed them safe. Monsanto said last year it would not try to get any more GM crops approved in Europe given the consistent pushback.
Anger and unrest against Monsanto’s stranglehold has also spread to South America. In Argentina, protests have occurred in resistance to the company’s potent biocides used in tandem with their genetically-engineered seeds. In Brazil, farmers have called on Monsanto and other producers of pest-resistant corn seeds to reimburse them for money spent on additional biocides when the bugs killed the crops instead of dying themselves, speaking to the biocide arms race involved in using GM seeds. Brazilian soy exporters are also tangling with Monsanto over seed royalties.
In Central America, Guatemala’s highest court suspended in September a controversial ‘Monsanto Law,’ a provision of a US-Central American trade agreement, that would insulate transnational seed corporations considered to have “discovered” new plant varieties.
On its home turf in the United States, Monsanto has worked diligently with other multinational biotech, agribusiness, and food production companies to beat down state-level proposals to simply label whether food is comprised of GM ingredients.
The most recent example came in the state of Oregon, where a November ballot initiative to require GMO labeling was narrowly defeated in what became the most expensive ballot measure in the state’s history. The likes of Monsanto and Dupont flushed more than $21 million into the anti-labeling campaign, dwarfing the $9 million raised by proponents.
The company has sued Hawaii’s Maui County for passing last year that bans the cultivation of genetically modified organisms.
Monsanto’s St. Louis headquarters have been the target of mild protests, especially during shareholder meetings.
Meanwhile, agribusiness allies on Capitol Hill are pushing new federal legislation, the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, that would standardize food labeling, effectively killing popular state-based efforts to pass labeling laws.
READ MORE:
Monsanto gets approval for new GMO corn, soybeans designed for potent new biocide
Rising suicide rate for Indian farmers blamed on GMO seeds
In facts & numbers: Absolute majority of Americans want GMO food to be labeled
Israeli forces launch major detention campaign in Nablus camps
Ma’an – 21/01/2015
NABLUS – Israeli forces launched a major detention campaign in the northern West Bank refugee camps of Balata and Askar in Nablus district overnight, Palestinian security sources said.
More than 15 young men were seized after forces ransacked many houses.
Palestinian security sources told Ma’an that more than 20 Israeli military jeeps stormed Balata and Askar refugee camps near Nablus at midnight and broke into dozens of houses.
Locals said most of the houses belonged to Fatah supporters. Among those whose houses which were ransacked are Fayiz Arafat, Nasser al-Khatib Abu Aziz, Ahmad Naji Abu Hamada, Muhammad Abu Dari, Abu Mahyub abu Leil, Muhammad Abu Zaabal, Hatim abu Riziq, Talal abu Thira, Abu Hazim Kharma, Atallah Hashash, Bashir Hashash, Hasan Sharaya, Abu Nasim Arayshi and Mahir Ayyad.
The sources identified some of the detainees as Ayman abu Kharma, Muhammad Saqir, Muhammad Murshid, Shahir Ali Mutlaq, Ammar Mithqal, Abed al-Salam Abu Riziq, Mahmoud abu Ayyash, Muhammad Ali Hashash, Hasan al-Ashqar, Kamal abu Rayya, Mujahid Mashayikh, Zuhdi Abu Kharma and Muhammad Abu Arab.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said she was looking into the reports.
14-year-old arrested again after testifying to torture at Egyptian detention camp
Mada Masr | January 20, 2014
Fourteen-year-old Akram al-Sawy was detained in the early hours of Tuesday along with his father, following testimony he gave on torture at a Central Security Forces camp in Banha, according to Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence.
Sawy had been held at the camp since last September and was only released from the camp on January 8.
Following his release, Sawy gave testimony on his incarceration, detailing torture and abuse that he and other children were subjected to since they were arrested and during their time at the camp.
Sawy said he was arrested from his home on September 22 when police mistakenly thought that he was at a protest with his friends. Sawy said that he and his friends were actually at a private lesson.
According to his testimony, he spent two days at the police station where he and his friends were severely beaten, kicked and electrocuted before they were moved to the Banha camp, which he said holds 200 detainees, the oldest of whom is 20 years old and youngest of whom is 13 years old.
Sawy said the cell holds 25 detainees, who weren’t allowed to leave the cell unless they were being taken to prosecution. He added they weren’t allowed visitations, but their families were allowed to send blankets for them.
In the same testimony published by Nadeem, Sawy’s father, Ibrahim Mohamed al-Sawy, said he and his son were also beaten at State Security headquarters when he went to pick him up after his release. He said he and his son were blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten. He said he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and that they wouldn’t let them leave until he said that Mohamed Morsi is not returning.
The Nadeem Center reported the incarceration of 600 children between the ages of 14 and 17 in a Central Security Forces camp in Banha.
The Interior Ministry, however, continues to deny that this camp exists in the first place.
Independent rights group “Free the Children” claims that at least 1,000 minors have been detained in Egypt’s prisons over the last year and a half. Marwa Arafa, the group’s coordinator, says most of these minors have been randomly arrested during clashes between protesters and police across the country.
UK government accused of sponsoring human rights abuses in Ethiopia
RT | January 21, 2015
A development project funded by the UK government and run by the World Bank could be facilitating a violent resettlement program in Ethiopia that has been dogged by allegations of forced displacement, physical assaults and rape, a leaked report suggests.
Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) is the primary sponsor of the World Bank’s foreign aid initiative, supposedly set up to improve basic health, education and public services in Ethiopia. It has attracted over £388 million in UK taxpayer’s money to date.
According to a leaked report, obtained by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, the seemingly benign aid program is facilitating a controversial resettlement scheme driven by the Ethiopian government.
The scathing report, carried out by the Bank’s in-house watchdog, warns of poor oversight, inadequate auditing and a failure to adhere to its own regulations which has bred links between the development program and the forced displacement of the Anuak people.
The Anuaks are a marginalized minority Christian group in Ethiopia.
Severe human rights abuses
The Ethiopian government’s resettlement program has been condemned by human rights groups worldwide who warn it has led to the destruction of thousands of Ethiopians’ livelihoods.
The initiative, known as ‘villagization’, aims to relocate 1.5 million rural families from their homesteads to villages across Ethiopia.
Since its launch in 2010, the program has been the centre of allegations of rape, physical assaults, forced evictions and disappearances.
Many of those who are uprooted from their homes and resettled elsewhere are forced to reside in substandard living conditions in refugee camps in Southern Sudan.
While the World Bank’s top brass have long denied any links to the Ethiopian government’s villagization program, an inquiry conducted by the Bank’s internal watchdog indicates otherwise.
The inquiry’s leaked findings, which surfaced this week, said the Bank’s inadequate auditing controls created a situation whereby over £300m of the DfID’s foreign aid funding could have been siphoned directly into the contentious resettlement scheme.
The report did not examine allegations the resettlement program is responsible for human rights abuses in Ethiopia, however, stressing that such an inquiry was not within its remit.
Nevertheless, it uncovered a slew of failures in the planning and implementation of the World Bank’s foreign aid program, particularly the Bank’s failure to carry out risk assessments.
The watchdog also found the Bank did not adopt necessary safeguards to protect marginalized indigenous peoples.
Uneven economic development
Anuradha Mittal, founder of the Oakland Institute, a Californian development NGO that is active in Ethiopia, said the DfID participated in the World Bank’s development initiative, and should therefore take responsibility for the scheme’s failings.
“Along with the World Bank and other donors, DfID support constitutes not only financial support but a nod of approval for the Ethiopian regime to bring about ‘economic development’ for the few at the expense of basic human rights and livelihoods of its economically and politically most marginalized ethnic groups,” she told The Guardian.
David Pred of Inclusive Development International, an NGO that works to defend the rights of the Anuak people, said the World Bank has facilitated the forced displacement of “tens of thousands of indigenous people from their ancestral lands.”
“The Bank today just doesn’t want to see human rights violations, much less accept that it bears some responsibility when it finances those violations,” he told the Guardian.
A spokesman for the World Bank declined to comment on its internal watchdog’s leaked report.
Probed on the watchdog’s findings, the DfID also declined to comment.
A marriage of convenience?
In March 2014, an Ethiopian farmer secured legal aid to sue the British government following his claim UK taxpayers’ funds were sponsoring Ethiopia’s resettlement scheme.
He said murder, rape and torture were employed by Ethiopian authorities, as part of the forced displacement program.
The 34 year-old farmer, known as Mr. O, had been forced to flee Ethiopia after he was tortured and beaten for trying to protect his land.
He said the British government were contributing to the devastation of some of Ethiopia’s poorest people rather than assisting them.
In June, Britain’s DfID faced a judicial inquiry over its alleged funding of human rights abuses in Ethiopia.
A High Court judge ruled at the time that Mr. O had a case against the British government, and his legal challenge was upheld. His lawsuit is still ongoing.
Ethiopia’s single-party government is a core ally in the West’s war on terror.
It is also a leading recipient of UK aid, despite human rights groups’ repeated allegations the funding is used to crush dissent in the troubled state.
Five Surprises About American Internment During World War II
By Jan Jarboe Russell | Disinformation |January 20, 2015
The general history of America’s internment of its own citizens during World War II has focused on the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese, 62 percent of them American-born, who were forcibly evacuated from the Pacific coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
But few people know that Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt, which permitted the roundup of Japanese and their American-born children, also paved the way for the arrest of Germans and Italians who the FBI considered security risks and labeled as “enemy aliens.” Indeed the day before Roosevelt signed the order FBI agents had arrested 264 Italians, 1,296 Germans, and 2,209 on the East and West Coast. The hunt for perceived enemies was on.
Here are five surprising facts about the extent of FDR’s internment program:
Fact One: The arrests of suspected enemies extended far beyond our national borders. Under provisions of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, the same act that allowed Presidents George W. Bush and President Obama to intern modern-day suspected terrorists, Roosevelt orchestrated the removal of 4,058 Germans, 2,264 Japanese and 288 Italians from thirteen Latin American countries — and locked them up around the United States, many in a secret government internment camp located in Crystal City, Texas, an isolated desert town located at the southern tip of Texas, only thirty miles from the Mexican border. His reason? Roosevelt feared security threats from Germans and Japanese in Latin America.
Fact Two: Incredibly, among those taken from Latin America included a small number of Jews who had fled persecution in Germany. In his book, Nazis and Good Neighbors, Max Paul Friedman documented 81 Jews in Latin America who were part of the roundup. One Jewish family — the Jacobis from Columbia – was interned in the camp in Crystal City.
Fact Three: The entire political and military establishment applied pressure on Roosevelt to pursue a vigorous internment policy. The only person close to him who opposed it was Eleanor Roosevelt who believed the case against immigrants was driven by wartime hysteria. “These people were not convicted of any crime but emotions ran too high, too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental looking people,” she wrote of the evacuation order for the Japanese.
Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told Attorney General Francis Biddle to arrest Italians and Germans. “I don’t care so much about the Italians. They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different: they may be dangerous.” In response, Biddle widened the net of suspicion.
Fact Four: One reason for the internment program was to create a pool of people of hostages to exchange for Americans trapped behind enemy lines in Europe and in the Pacific. FDR created a secret division within the Department of State called the Special War Problems Division, which negotiated numerous prisoner exchanges with Japan and Germany.
Fact Five: The Crystal City Internment Camp was at the center of those exchanges. Some former internees, who were children in the camp, refer to it as The Kidnap Camp. Thousands of internees in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for ostensibly more important Americans — diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries — behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
The first of four exchanges in Crystal City took place in June 1942 and the second on September 2, 1943. During those exchanges, more than 2000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were traded for Americans caught in Japan. In February 1944, 634 German immigrants and their children, were sent from Crystal City into Germany. On January 2, 1945, 428 more in Crystal City were traded into war.
The tableau of today’s headlines about government surveillance, internment and prisoner exchanges was written more than seventy years ago in Crystal City, Texas.
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Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City, is a former Nieman Fellow, a contributing editor for Texas Monthly, and has written for the San Antonio Express-News, The New York Times, Slate, and other magazines. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Dr. Lewis F. Russell, Jr. For more information please visit http://www.janjarboerussell.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter
The FBI’s Dubious Record on Prosecuting Terror Plots
Fake plots get busted, real ones get a pass
By Dave Lindorff | ThisCantBeHappening! | January 19, 2015
If you’re planning to commit an act of terror in the US and want to be left alone by the FBI, make sure your target is something, or someone, that the US government doesn’t like or care about.
Consider these two terrorist plots.
Just last week, on Jan. 14, the FBI announced that it had arrested Christopher Lee Cornell, a guy in Ohio the bureau alleges had plans to attack Congress with pipe bombs and guns. Apparently acting alone, Cornell is alleged by the FBI to have “researched how to make pipe bombs” (there’s no indication that he actually made or tested any actual bombs), and to have purchased a pair of M-15 semi-automatic rifles and ammunition. How Cornell, who is described as a self-styled “jihadist,” but one with no real connection with foreign Islamic militants, planned to get past the metal detectors and tight security at the Capitol Building in Washington, was not explained, and probably was not known to Cornell himself. It also appears that the FBI was watching Cornell all along, and no doubt encouraging him too, as it was working with a snitch — a man facing prosecution who was in communication with Cornell and may well have been a provocateur, given the Bureau’s prior history of luring vulnerable people into planning terror acts which it then busts.
Compare this case with one we reported on earlier here, which was in the works in the fall of 2011. I’m referring to a terrorism plot in Houston, TX, which the FBI never did report publicly, but which was instead disclosed only thanks to some documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2012 by the Washington, DC-based public interest law firm Partnership for Civil Justice, and which involved an apparently well-developed plan to assassinate leaders of the Houston Occupy Movement. Those documents — internal memos sent out by FBI offices in Houston and Gainesville, FL — refer to “one identified [deleted]” that “planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary.”
The initial memo, sent to FBI headquarters in Washington from the Houston FBI office, went on to say that the “identified” plotters “had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas,” and that they “planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”
A second memo, sent out by the Gainesville, FL FBI office, says that the Houston assassination plot, while not executed, was actually just put on hold. As that memo states: “writer sent via email an excerpt from the daily [DELETED] regarding FBI Houston’s [DELETED] to all IAs, SSRAs and SSA [DELETED] This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire.”
That’s a lot of rich detail about an evidently serious plot that never resulted in any arrests.
Yet as we reported in an article which just won a 2015 Project Censored Award, the FBI never pursued this plot and never arrested anyone. Indeed when Paul Bresson, the senior public affairs officer for the Bureau in Washington, was asked by this reporter for an explanation for this bizarre lack of interest in a known plot to murder innocent protesters, and for the identity of the terrorist plotters, he evasively replied, “The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks that you are seeking. Exemptions are cited in each place where a redaction is made. As far as the question about the murder plot, I am unable to comment further, but rest assured if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.”
Actually, the response of the US Homeland Security Department to journalists who looked into the federal government’s involvement in the violent suppression of the 2011 Occupy movement shouldn’t make anyone feel like “resting assured” about anything. In 2014, we learned that our publication, in fact, had been the subject back on Nov. 18, 2011, of an alert sent out by Homeland Security’s Washington Office of Threat Assessment to all Fusion Centers around the country, saying ThisCantBeHappening! had published an article exposing the Homeland Security’s central role in orchestrating the wave of local police violence against Occupy encampments across the country.
The conclusion, hard to avoid, is that the FBI and Justice Department are playing a double game when it comes to terrorism. On one hand they have been aggressively pursuing a campaign of entrapment and outright incitement, actively promoting and assisting in the development of bogus terror plots by naive or mentally unbalanced individuals, so that they can later “bust” those plots, thereby justifying their expansive police-state tactics while keeping the public in a constant state of fear. On the other hand, they are either turning a blind eye towards genuine plots aimed against activists and radical protests, such as the one “identified” in Houston in the fall of 2011, or worse, are maybe actively involved in the development of those plots, which they then do not prosecute or prevent from happening.
This is something we need to keep in mind as we watch the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the only surviving suspect or witness in the Boston Marathon bombing — an actual terrorism act that has many rational people wondering how much the government knew in advance, or wondering if they were just patsies who were set up to look that way.
Delaware man: Police probing Biden shooting ‘beat the daylights out of me’
RT | January 20, 2015
A Delaware man said that local police violently accosted him before he was arrested, as law enforcement officials investigated reports of multiple gunshots near the home of Vice President Joe Biden in Greenville, Delaware.
There has been an ongoing investigation into the shooting incident near Biden’s home, but the man, Rock Peters, was arrested roughly 30 minutes after the gunshots were reported. Peters said he was left with a swollen nose, rib injuries, multiple face abrasions and a black eye after New Castle County police beat him.
The incident occurred on Saturday night when Peters had been driving a car near the entrance to Joe Biden’s estate, as officers were closing traffic after reports of the gunfire incident. An officer advised Peters to turn around, but Peters told him it was the only way he knew.
The police officer began to walk away but returned after he thought he heard Peters say something, at which point Peters sped away.
Shortly afterwards, Peters was pulled over by another police officer who radioed for assistance. The police officer signaled for Peters to step out of the vehicle and, as he did, Peters put his right hand in his right jacket pocket, according to police.
At this time the officer placed his left hand on Peters’ arm and forced him to the ground. With another officer, the two cops struggled with Peters, and one of the officers struck him on his shoulder, neck and head with is knee.
“They beat the daylights out of me,” Peters told The News Journal, adding that he did nothing wrong during his interaction with police. He also denied being connected in any way to the shooting incident, and was not charged in connection with the gunfire.
Police didn’t find a weapon on him, but Peters does face reckless endangerment and resisting arrest charges after fleeing from one officer and scuffling with two others, according to a police affidavit.
“That’s a lie,” Peters told the News Journal. “This is what they did to me,” he said, showing the newspaper’s reporter the bloody, stained clothes from when he says a New Castle police officer punched him in the face.
Regarding the shooting, the Secret Service and New Castle County police had no update on Monday, but they have continued to search for a suspect and witnesses. Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, were in the state over the weekend but not at home at the time of the shooting incident.
Guatemalan Court Sentences Ex-Police Chief for Murdering 37
teleSUR | January 19, 2015
A Guatemalan court found Pedro Garcia Arredondo guilty of murder, attempted murder, and crimes against humanity Monday for the massacre of 37 people at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala 35 years ago, EFE reports.
Garcia Arredondo, 69, is responsible for burning the victims of the massacre to death on Jan. 31, 1980, found the court after four months of hearings.
The tribunal outcome confirmed the long-held suspicions in the country that the fire was the result of a “clandestine police operation” and that the participants “prevented the Red Cross, emergency services, and journalists from entering” the building.
The former police chief was still trying to declare his innocence, but Judge Sara Yoc Yoc ruled that he gave the orders to burn down the embassy. According to her ruling, Garcia Arredondo “used the media to confirm the deaths of those inside the embassy.”
The security forces of Guatemala’s military regime at the time attacked the Spanish embassy after rural workers and students occupied it in protest to the dictatorship.
Among the 37 burned to death was Spanish Consul Jaime Ruiz del Arbol Soler and Vicente Menchu and Francisco Tum, the father and cousin, respectively, of 1992 Nobel Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchu. Menchu gave the first testimony against Garcia Arredondo in the case.
Just two people survived the fire, including the Spanish ambassador. The other, Guatemalan farmer Gregorio Yuja, subsequently disappeared and his body was found with evidence of torture three days after the fire in the rectory of the State University of San Carlos of Guatemala. Yuja has since become a symbol of the left-wing student movement.
Garcia Arredondo was first arrested in 2011 over the forced disappearance of a university student, also in 1980. He is three years into a 70 year sentence for that crime.
When Guns are Outlawed Only Jews will have Guns
By Richard Edmondson | Fig Trees and Vineyards | January 17, 2015
The head of a major Jewish organization in the EU is calling upon lawmakers to revise European gun control laws to allow Jews to begin arming themselves–presumably for self protection.
“The Paris attacks, as well as the many challenges and threats which have been presented to the European Jewish community in recent years, have revealed the urgent need to stop talking and start acting,” says Rabbi Menachem Margolin, General Director of the European Jewish Association.
“We hereby ask that gun licensing laws are reviewed with immediate effect to allow designated people in the Jewish communities and institutions to own weapons for the essential protection of their communities,” he adds.
Margolin made the remarks in a letter, which can be viewed in PDF format here, and while he does not specifically call for Jews to be exempted from laws barring citizens from carrying weapons in public, concealed or otherwise, that does seem to be the interpretation that RT, as well as the Jewish website Arutz Sheva, are giving it.
“A prominent European rabbi has called on governments to relax gun-licensing legislation to allow Jews to carry firearms for self-defense, following last week’s deadly Paris attacks and amid rising anti-Semitism on the continent,” says Arutz Sheva.
“The biggest Jewish association in the EU has called on lawmakers in Brussels to let Jewish people carry guns ‘for the essential protection of their communities’ in the aftermath of Paris shootings,” reports RT.
The letter is dated January 13, and seems to have given rise to public confusion in one other aspect as well. A “clarification” posted on January 17 does not clear up the question of whether Margolin and the EJA are asking for Jews to be exempted from certain gun regulations–but it does address the matter of whether the rabbi was issuing a general call-to-arms for all Jews, or perhaps only some. Apparently there were those who construed his remarks as advocating for pistols in the purses, waistbands and holsters of every single Jew in Europe.
“He never claimed that every Jew should carry a gun,” the clarification states, additionally reaffirming that guns would be issued only to “designated personnel that will undergo thorough investigation and training by local authorities.” But in a statement to Newsweek, the rabbi also said he felt that “as many people within the Jewish community as possible” should carry weapons.
In either event, what Margolin does clearly seem to be calling for is that Jews be given special consideration over Gentiles in the issuance of gun permits.
“There are too many Jewish people who feel insecure in Europe,” Margolin told RT.
“What I am asking is that the good people, those who live under danger, will be able to protect their life. Otherwise we might be again in the situation and we won’t be surprised if another time an attack against a Jewish institution is going to happen, people will be dead without any possibility to protect their life,” he added.
Can European political leaders, who seem abjectly servile to Jewish lobbies (possibly even more so these days than are American leaders), be expected to go along with the EJA’s request? Will we see the “designated” Jews freely carrying weapons as they walk about the streets of European cities, entering stores and cafes with them, while Gentiles remain strictly subject to current restrictive gun regulations? If so, how do you suppose this will effect the level of anti-Semitism in Europe? Will it cause it to go down… or up?
One can imagine that getting EU politicians to “stop talking and start acting” would not be a terribly hard trick for a well-funded Jewish lobby to pull off.
I find myself torn these days between two lines of thought: a) that Jewish leaders, through their words and actions, deliberately stoke anti-Semitism in order to achieve certain objectives they see as beneficial; and, b) that Jewish leaders–blinded maybe by their sense of supremacy and chosenness–remain essentially oblivious to how they are perceived by others, making resultant rises in anti-Semitism simply the inevitable byproduct of their words and actions.
Of course the human mind certainly operates on more than one level of consciousness, particularly when in the grip of psychosis, so perhaps the answer is it’s both.
Night raid in Beit Ummar: arrests, violence and property destruction
International Solidarity Movement | January 18, 2015
Beit Ummar, Occupied Palestine – Early Wednesday morning, January 14, 2015, a massive deployment of 400 Israeli occupation forces invaded the village of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron. From 2:00 – 5:00 am, the occupation forces invaded approximately 100 Palestinian homes, arresting 25 males and leaving notices for 15 additional males to meet with the Israeli intelligence.
Occupation soldiers invaded the private homes with violent force, blowing open the front doors with explosions, ransacking the rooms, breaking the furniture inside, smashing windows, and attacking the residents. One of the victims of this brutal invasion was the family of 25-year-old Nidal Abu Maria.
Nidal is the oldest son of Ahmed Abu Maria, who has been imprisoned for the last four months. According to the family, the occupation soldiers forcibly entered their home with large aggressive dogs, blowing the door open with explosives. Nidal’s mother, sister, and two brothers ages 6 and 7 were inside, and awoke shocked to find soldiers inside their home. The occupation forces locked Nidal’s mother in a separate room, away from her children, and took her phone, noting the family members phone numbers from it. The pregnant sister attempted to speak to the young boys, who were scared of the military invasion and their dogs, when the occupation forces violently hit her in the face and told her to keep quiet. In addition to physical violence against the family, the soldiers also ransacked the home, destroying the windows, the furniture, and the entire kitchen. Nearly 99 other houses were also invaded this same night, and experienced the same destruction.
During this brutal night invasion, 25 males were taken from their homes and arrested without any official charges or explanations. According to Ma’an News, those detained were as young as sixteen years old. The youths were not known activists nor had there been any protests in Beit Ummar since the massacre in Gaza for them to take part in. Five were released the next morning, while the rest still remain in custody. Additionally, the invading soldiers left official request notices for 15 residents of Beit Ummar to report to the Israeli Intelligence at the Kfar Etzion prison in the nearby Kfar Etzion settlement the following day. Nidal Abu Maria, along with his brother and cousin, were among those that were requested to report to Kfar Etzion.
Nidal decided to not comply with the occupying army’s request, and did not report to the prison at9:00 AM on Wednesday as the soldiers demanded. However, after the occupation forces called him and his mother on the phone, threatening the lives of the family, he felt he had no choice. When Nidal answered one of the many phone calls from the military and questioned why he should follow orders from an occupying military, the Secret Service member told him, “I am the state of Israel, I am the one who has power, I am the law”.
Nidal and his brother reported to the Kfar Etzion prison on Thursday morning and were interrogated for several hours by the Israeli intelligence. During the interrogation when the brothers were being questioned, they were told, “We want to make sure you guys are ok, and that you are doing the right things and not the wrong things.” Additionally, the interrogator told Nidal, “If you miss your uncle (the martyr), I will send you to him.” Nidal interprets this as a direct threat against his life.
Nidal’s family is no stranger to such violence at the hands of the Israeli occupation. Nidal’s father has been detained and imprisoned eight times for a total length of five years – once on charges of organizing peaceful protests in Beit Ummar, while the other seven times were without official charges. Additionally, Nidal’s uncle Hashem Abu Maria was executed on July 25, 2014 during a peaceful protest against the 2014 massacre in Gaza. Hashem was shot in the heart by an Israeli sniper on the main street, while encouraging the children to go home rather than risk being hurt in the demonstration. Hashem worked for the Defence For Children International documenting child-rights violation in Hebron and according to Haaretz, this was the role that Hashem played in many protests. Nidal’s aunt, the wife of Hashem, has suffered greatly since his death, and even months later she is still afraid to sleep in the house without him.
Ten days after Hashem’s assassination, the occupation forces invaded Beit Ummar and arrested Ahmed, Nidal’s father. He is currently still imprisoned and has not been officially charged with any crime. Despite not facing official charges, Nidal’s family is told that he faces three years in prison.
In the year of 2014, over 400 residents of Beit Ummar were arrested and over 120 residents are still currently imprisoned, some without official charges. Additionally, 3 residents were killed during this time. When asked why Beit Ummar experiences such frequent violence at the hands of the occupation army, Nidal explains it has a lot to do with its location. “Beit Ummar is surrounded by three settlements: Migdal Oz, Kfar Etzion and Karmei Zur. The village is located close to the main road that connects the settlements from Bethlehem to Hebron. The official explanation from the occupation forces are that these actions are taken against Beit Ummar for ‘security reasons’.” These nearby settlements have confiscated nearly one third of the village’s land which is located in Area C. Additionally, much of the military violence against Beit Ummar can be attributed to their strong commitment to resistance against the occupation. Beit Ummar was the site of nearly two protests every week during the 2014 attack on Gaza.
For residents of Beit Ummar the recent violence happens whenever there is a new commander in the area. Nidal explains that the commanders like to introduce themselves by sending a strong message to the local Palestinian population. The new commander in the Beit Ummar area goes under the name Abu Abed and is a former member of the Israeli Intelligence.
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Book Review
New paperback: Butchered by “Healthcare”
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
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