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If vaccines work, then why are they bending the curves in the wrong direction?

el gato malo – bad cattitude – february 27, 2022

israel has been a good laboratory for covid intervention assessment. they are a small nation in one climate zone with a small population, good record keeping, a pretty honest set of health agencies, and modern healthcare system. they did lots of testing and they also pursued damn near every mitigation in the book from lockdowns to masking to mandating vaccines and vaccine passports. and unlike many places, they were extremely serious about compliance. they even have an very useful control group in palestine that did almost none of these things.

this provides an interesting opportunity to measure the efficacy of such interventions. at this point, it’s so well established that masking and distancing have no effect that we can more or less drop them from consideration and focus solely on vaccines. (to the extent they worked, they would drive apparent vaccine efficacy in israel anyhow).

and the two states have had remarkably similar overall outcomes and had near identical cumulative deaths per capita through 2021. however, it looks like this might be starting to diverge and this creates a useful comparison.

about three weeks ago, i left THIS POST with some questions:

we now have enough data to start to answer this.

the relative vaxx rates are very different and israel is over 50% boosted vs ~0 in palestine. so, if boosters are working, this is about as good a natural experiment setup as you could ask for.

cases are a problematic metric due to variance in testing rates (and we know vaccines do not stop cases) and palestine does not report hospital data. but we can compare deaths, so this is the figure i used.

OWID is the source for all data.

this series is striking. as has commonly been the case, palestine lagged israel by a couple weeks. (i suspect this is reporting lag, this data is day of report, not day of incidence).

assuming this peak holds, the palestine peak was 21% below winter seasonal peak last year. israel was up 13%. that’s a meaningful divergence and the israeli figure is deeply unexpected given a milder variant and 18 months of vulnerable cohort depletion.

this starts to hint at something being quite wrong and also starts to rule out “variant” as the source, because it did not drive that outcome in palestine.

it can be notoriously difficult to eyeball area under curve, so i have plotted cumulative deaths here:

as can be seen, israel had gone pancake flat in november 2021 through jan 2022. then it inflected severely. this is omicron which hit the levant in the second half of december 2021. clinically, you’d expect about a 24 day log to show up in deaths and this tends to jibe with the data i’ve seen all over the world.

it’s possible that boosters were having some effect in bending the curve, but to the extent that they did, it was either fleeting or rapidly inverted in the face of a new variant. (or both)

this becomes extremely easy to see when we zoom into 2022 and start a cumulative count from 1/1/2022.

there is a powerful inflection in israel that does not exist in palestine and israel has seen roughly twice the cumulative per capital death rate of palestine so far this year.

if boosters are effective in preventing deaths from omicron, it sure does not show up here.

this also lets us rule out “omicron” as a source of greater underlying virulence/fatality. if this were so, it would be manifest in both places. the fact that it is not doing so supports the idea that omicron is an OAS/hoskins effect evolution taking advantage of the narrow antigenic fixation generated by mRNA and adenovirus vaccines. it also seems to show that this advantage is NOT, as many claim, limited to cases. it seems to carry through to deaths as well.

we can also compare israel to itself and see how this highly vaccinated and boosted period compares to the prior year when vaccination was zero. from this data as well, we see strong support for the OAS hypothesis.

israel had been doing better. then omi came and everything changed.

(to remove the skew from widely varying sample rate driven by big shifts in testing levels, i have normalized all cases data to 10 tests per day per 1000 population though given the absurdity of calling a high Ct PCR+ a “case” even lacking symptoms, all case data is troublesome to assess, but we work with what we have, not with what we wish we had)

cases nearly tripled and hospitalizations nearly doubled. deaths rose 13%.

according to israeli authorities and hospitals, this was not driven by “the unvaxxed” but rather by the vaccinated. they seem to make up more than their share of severe outcomes though one must we wary of simpson’s paradoxes. (more HERE)

it might be possible to construct an argument whereby vaccine efficacy is claimed on any given infection (once you are sick, better to be vaxxed) but if that is, in aggregate, swamped by a rise in cases (and we know vaccines lead to more cases, not fewer) then this is still not much of an argument. having vaccines reduce risk of hospitalization per case by 50% but tripling case risk is still a 50% rise in overall hospitalization.

the aggregate data is possibly supportive of this claim outcome, but it’s far from certain either way.

but still, if the overall outcomes are worse post vaxx in the active arm but not in control, from a public health perspective do we really care why?

cases were trending MUCH lower. then that changed in a hurry.

zooming in makes it all the more clear.

even adjusted for testing, this is a massive surge in cases.

we see the same in hospitalization.

and see the crossover to worse outcomes in 2022 when we zoom in.

overall, they are 39% higher in aggregate YTD vs prior yr.

deaths have not yet caught up, but appear likely to do so.

 

taken as a whole, this is pretty damning of the booster programs.

israel saw a big spike in deaths that was not present in the palestine control group.

it saw a massive jump in cases, a big jump in hospitalizations, and is rapidly converging on deaths (which will lag the others by ~3-4 weeks).

there is just no way to spin this as a win. it looks like an own goal.

this was the known and knowable outcome of widespread inoculation with a leaky vaccine. it is, in fact, WHY we do not use leaky vaccines.

they will rapidly and inevitably select for escape or vaccine enhanced variants. and now it makes you worse and worst of all, locks you into a suboptimal antigenic response pattern that may keep you from EVER generating real sterilizing immunity. the truly nasty part of this may take years to really see.

omicron was not “bad luck” it was invoked consequence of ill conceived intervention. even assuming they ever worked as claimed (dubious) these vaccines were always going to fail because that’s what leaky vaccines do.

this was known and knowable. the drug companies that made them knew it. the regulatory agencies that approved them knew it. and many, many doctors, researchers and public health officials all over the world knew it. they were silenced, threatened, and attacked for it. and this is the bitter fruit of that harvest.

in the US, the data has been manipulated and misused so badly as to render it outright fraud. it becomes obvious when one compares the US data (which calls all “unknown or undetermined” patients “unvaxxed” and used the fact that the EPIC system is awful to create a false sense of VE) with a system that keeps good records as longtime gatopal™ HOLD2, newly on substack, has done here.

like so much of the rest of the covid response, we knew better than to do this, but it was done anyway.

and now, the US is lying about it while others are, at least, coming clean.

but this truth will be too vast to hide much longer, even behind these big lies.

and american health and regulatory agencies are going to have a great deal to answer for.

dr atlas (with whom many at rational ground, including even notorious internet felines, had the pleasure to collaborate) is correct in everything he says here except in his use of the world “almost.”

February 27, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Leading law firm issues Facebook letter of complaint over ‘anti-Palestinian bias’

MEMO | February 23, 2022

Leading law firm Bindmans LLP has sent a formal letter of complaint to Facebook over its “anti-Palestinian bias.” Instructed by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the London based firm demanded explanation for the “systematic” and “far-reaching” censorship of content and accounts related to Palestine.

The complaint was also sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression. It requests an urgent review of, and explanation for, the decisions made by Facebook, which was rebranded last October as Meta Inc, to suspend accounts and posts which are affiliated to Palestinian news agencies, commentators and journalists.

Monday’s letter of complaint to Facebook is the second in nine months sent by Bindmans LLP to the social media giant. A previous communication submitted in May 2021 was made on behalf of five journalists and news agencies in Palestine. Facebook is said to have interfered with their accounts and/or posts and was accused of breaching their fundamental right to freedom of expression as well as its own Corporate Human Rights Policy.

In the May 2021 complaint, the main questions posed by Bindmans LLP included whether the censorship decisions were carried out by an algorithm or by a person exercising their discretion, and details regarding Facebook’s policy in justifying their censorship decisions, in addition to steps taken by the company to resolve unfair censorship.

In its response to the letter, a month later, Facebook said that it had investigated the accounts referenced in the letter and, after further review, has restored content and/or accounts where applicable. Notably, no substantial answers were provided to any of the main questions cited in the original communication.

Despite the commitments made by Facebook in their letter sent in June 2021, the censorship remained, said ICJP in its press release detailing the content of the complaint. The centre is an independent organisation of lawyers, academics and politicians that work to promote and support Palestinian rights.

Monitoring group, Sada Social, which has been documenting the suspension of Palestinian content and accounts on Facebook, recorded in 2021 alone, hundreds of instances of inappropriate censorship of social media content in support of the rights of Palestinians. This censorship was exacerbated significantly during the last Israeli offensive on Gaza in May 2021.

The complaint reinstates the request that Meta/Facebook discloses and reviews its decision-making process, and explains why the accounts were closed, suspended or posts taken down, and whether in doing so an algorithm or human discretion was used.

February 23, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

New textbook to be published without ‘undue influence of pro-Israel groups’

MEMO | February 22, 2022

UK Publisher, Pearson, has given assurances that UK lobby groups supporting the State of Israel will no longer play a role in their editorial decision-making process in the soon to be released textbook covering the Middle East.

Pearson, a major international education company, which oversees national exams for 14- to 16-year-olds in the UK, came under the spotlight over two of its GCSE school textbooks, after revelations last year that they had been significantly altered following pressure from pro-Israel groups. GCSEs are the academic qualifications studied for by UK high school students to the age of 16.

Details of the extensive “biased” and “misleading” alterations were exposed by a report, by Professors John Chalcraft and James Dickins, Middle East specialists in History and in Arabic, respectively, and members of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP).

Their eight-page report uncovered “dangerously misleading” changes to the books published by Pearson, titled “Conflict in the Middle East” and “The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change”, both by author Hilary Brash, which are read by hundreds of thousands of GCSE students annually.

The alterations were made following intervention by the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD), working together with UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). Both are amongst the most vocal pro-Israeli groups in the UK.

Pearson finally withdrew the textbooks in June. The publisher confirmed earlier this month that it is partnering with specialist educational charity, Parallel Histories, to develop new educational materials on the topic.

Writing in the Times Higher Education recently, Chalcraft urged academics to keep an eye out for bias in school textbooks. Recounting what he called the “undue influence of pro-Israel groups on a history textbook”, Chalcraft stressed the value of engagement to avoid a similar interference in the future.

Commenting on the report Chalcraft co-authored with Dickins, he said that the modified textbook “read to [me] as though it had been reworked by lawyers acting as if for a client (Israel), rather than by historians acting to educate schoolchildren about a complex history”.

Equally problematic, warned Chalcraft, was the discovery “that the pro-Israeli lobby groups had been invited into the editorial process, and had collaborated with Pearson over many months”. He revealed that no pro-Palestinian groups had been invited to the table and that “something” had gone “dangerously wrong”.

Chalcraft said that he and Dickins had been reassured by Pearson that no lobby groups are involved in the production of new materials on the topic.

February 22, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas: Australia aligned itself with Israel’s terrorism

Palestine Information Center | February 17, 2022

Senior Hamas official Hisham Qasem has condemned Australia’s intention to designate his Movement as a terror group as “a reflection of blatant bias in favor of the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.”

In press remarks to Quds Press, Qasem said that “the Israeli occupation regime sees every opponent as a terrorist party, although it practices organized state terrorism day and night against the Palestinian people at home and abroad.”

“Hamas has never been hostile to any country of the world and only resisted the occupation inside the occupied Palestinian territory, which makes any terror designation by Australia ‘a step against logical reasoning’ and ‘without foundation.’ It is rather complete adoption of the occupation’s aggressive narrative,” the Hamas official underlined.

“The Australian step against the Movement will not change its conviction about upholding its path of resisting the occupation until it achieves its final goal of liberation and return,” he said, stressing that Hamas would never deviate from this path.

Flouting the fact that Hamas is a national liberation movement that resists an occupying power in accordance with international laws and resolutions, the Australian government has declared its intent to add the Hamas Movement to its list of terror groups.

Australia had previously listed the armed wing of Hamas, al-Qassam Brigades, as a terror group in 2003, but the new designation, which will come into effect in April, will blacklist the Movement in its entirety.

February 17, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Leave a comment

America’s return to UNESCO will work in Israel’s favour

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | February 15, 2022

In 2017, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), citing “mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organisation, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO.” A few hours later, Israel followed suit, with then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing the organisation as “a theatre of the absurd.” The Israeli ambassador to the UN at the time, Danny Danon, opined, “Today is a new day at the UN where there is a price to pay for discrimination against Israel.” On 1 January 2019, the US and Israel officially left the organisation.

Last year, though, the US announced its intention to re-join UNESCO, “to counter Chinese influence or promote other US interests,” reported Reuters. The Jerusalem Post added that Israel has no intention of rejoining, although last year Foreign Minister Yair Lapid considered following in America’s footsteps, arguing that Israel’s absence from UNESCO had no effect on “anti-Israel bias”. He also admitted that Israel’s decision to quit UNESCO made it difficult to influence foreign policy.

To rejoin UNESCO, the US Congress would have to waive a bill that prevents Washington from funding international organisations which accept the Palestinian Authority as a full member. The US decision is said to have been influenced by UNESCO changing its approach towards Israel, while America is expected to counter any anti-Israel bias, following talks between Israeli and US officials.

Israel had opposed UNESCO’s designations of Palestinian heritage sites, which it described as erasing history and memory. Never mind that Israel is built upon the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the erasure of their collective memory and sites. Perhaps the biggest and most obvious erasure in Israeli memory is that the settler-colonial state did not exist prior to the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and so neither Palestinians nor UNESCO can be faulted for designating Palestinian heritage sites which date from well before Israel was created as “Palestinian”.

Moreover, accusing UNESCO of anti-Israel bias follows no logic, given that UNESCO has recognised sites as pertaining to Israeli heritage, including Tel-Aviv’s “White City”, which means that the organisation has also legitimised Israel’s violent settler-colonial origins and existence. If Israel decides to follow Lapid’s suggestion, UNESCO is expected to increase the number of heritage sites attributed to Israel.

For now, the US is expected to pave the way for Israel’s return, hence the Israeli government’s insistence that it will not oppose the Biden administration’s decision to re-join the UN body. Meanwhile, Israel will seek to extort further concessions, all the while planning to return to the organisation and condescend to grace UNESCO with its presence, rather than a reappearance gloating at having colonised and appropriated more Palestinian land, history and memory.

This whole gimmicky process makes Israel’s accusations of international institutions harbouring “anti-Israel bias” collapse. All international institutions have legitimised Israel’s origins and existence, despite violations of international law and war crimes committed by Zionist paramilitary gangs prior to 1948, and in the uniforms of the “Israel Defence Forces” from then to the present day. The debacle of departing and hinting at returning is a ploy for colonial gain, and for such gain to be recognised by international resolutions and declarations. America’s return to UNESCO will thus work in Israel’s favour. It wouldn’t do so otherwise.

February 15, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Assassination Hypocrisy

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 9, 2022

On the morning of January 25, 1993, a man named Mir Amal Kansi appeared outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he began assassinating people who were driving their cars into the facility. He ended up killing two CIA employees and wounding three others.

Four years later, FBI agents arrested Kansi in Pakistan and brought him back to the United States.

Kansi was prosecuted in a Virginia state court for murder, where he was convicted and sentenced to die. On November 14, 2002, the state of Virginia executed him.

What I find fascinating in this episode is that under U.S national-security law, when the CIA assassinates people, it isn’t considered murder. But as Kansi’s case shows, when people assassinate CIA officials, it is considered murder.

Kansi gave the reason for his assassinations. No, he didn’t say that he hated America for its “freedom and values.” He said that the reason he was assassinating CIA officials was to retaliate for the fact that the U.S. government was killing people in Iraq and for its role in helping Israel kill Palestinians.

Under U.S. national-security law, U.S. officials can assassinate anyone they want — “communists,” “terrorists,” “bad guys,” “adversaries,” “opponents,” “rivals,” or “enemies.” When they do that, it’s to be called an “assassination” or a “targeted killing.”

Moreover, under the law, U.S. officials can kill whoever they want with economic sanctions, as they were doing with the Iraqi people at the time that Kansi was retaliating. I am reminded of U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.” Those killings weren’t called “murder” of course. They were called unfortunate deaths arising from the sanctions.

U.S. officials also wield the authority to kill whoever they want with invasions of Third-World countries. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq can attest to that. Again, those killings are not considered to be murder. They are considered to be casualties of war.

If, however, anyone retaliates against the national-security establishment by assassinating officials within the national-security establishment, it’s called “murder,” in which case the assassin will be put to death after being accorded a trial.

Of course, this was the law prior to the 9/11 attacks. After those attacks, the law was implicitly amended to provide that the national-security establishment had the option of taking “bad guys” like Kansi to Gitmo, where they could be tortured, held indefinitely without trial, or executed after a kangaroo trial before a military tribunal.

All this hypocrisy goes to show what the conversion from a limited-government republic to a national-security state has done to the consciences of the American people. Most everyone has come to accept the state-sponsored assassinations and deaths arising from sanctions, embargoes, invasions, occupations, and wars of aggression to just be part of the U.S. government’s “foreign policy tools.”

As I pointed out in a recent blog post, however, the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s assassinations constitute murder, just as Kansi’s assassinations do. Why, even Lyndon Johnson referred to the CIA’s assassination program as “Murder, Inc.,” which is precisely what it is. The same goes for deaths arising from sanctions, embargoes, wars of aggression, invasions, and occupations. It’s just plain murder.

Referring to Kansi, Virginia prosecutor Robert F. Horne stated, “I’ve tried an awful lot of killers in my life, and I think he’s the only one I’ve run into that is absolutely proud of what he did. You get a lot of killers who don’t feel all that bad about what they did, but he’s proud of it.”

Apparently Horne has never met any CIA assassins. Like Kansi, they feel really good about their killings and are absolutely proud of what they do. What Horne fails to realize is that even though Kansi is a “bad guy” for assassinating people, that doesn’t convert the CIA assassins into “good guys.”

It’s probably worth mentioning that after Kansi was executed, four American citizens were assassinated in Pakistan in retaliation.

What we need in America is a great awakening, one that involves a revival of individual conscience. When that day comes, Americans will put a stop to the evil within our midst by converting America back to a limited-government republic and putting an end to state-sponsored murder. It will also make Americans traveling overseas a lot safer.

February 9, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

From Tantura to the Naqab, Israel’s roll call of shame is being exposed

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | February 8, 2022

A succession of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts to hide the truth about its origins and its racist apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than it is able to gain new supporters or whitewash its past and ongoing crimes.

First, there were the revelations about Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants were mostly exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on 23 May, 1948. Like many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians over the years, the Tantura massacre was mostly remembered by the village’s few survivors, ordinary Palestinians and Palestinian historians. The mere attempt in 1998 by Israeli graduate student Theodore Katz to shed light on that bloody event ignited a legal, media and academic war, forcing him to retract his findings.

In a recent social media post, Professor Ilan Pappé revealed why, in 2007, he had to resign his position at Haifa University. “One of my ‘crimes’,” wrote Pappé, “was insisting that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948 as was exposed by MA student, Teddy Katz.”

Now, some Alexandroni Brigade veterans have finally confessed to the crimes in Tantura.

“They silenced it. It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened.” These were the words of Moshe Diamant, a former member of the Alexandroni Brigade who, with other veterans, revealed in the documentary “Tantura” by Alon Schwarz, the gory details of the horrific crimes that were committed in the Palestinian village.

An officer “killed one Arab after another” with his pistol, said former soldier Micha Vitkon. “They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the blood in the barrel,” explained another. “I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners,” admitted Amitzur Cohen.

Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Tantura in cold blood. They were buried in mass graves, the largest of which is believed to be under a car park at the Dor Beach, to which Israeli families flock daily.

The Tantura massacre is arguably the most glaring representation of “hidden” Israeli criminality on the occupation state’s roll call of shame. However, this is not the story of Tantura alone. The massacre in the village is representative of something much bigger, of ethnic cleansing on a huge scale, forceful evictions and mass killings. Thankfully, the truth is now being unearthed and exposed.

In another example, the Israeli army launched a full-scale military operation in 1951 to ethnically cleanse Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab Desert. The tragic scenes of entire communities being uprooted from their ancestral homes were justified by Israel with the usual cliché that the terrible deed was carried out for “security reasons”.

In 1953, Israel passed the so-called Land Acquisition Law, which allowed the occupation state to seize the land of the Palestinians who had been forced out of their homes. By then, Israel had unlawfully expropriated 247,000 dunams of land in the Naqab, with 66,000 remaining “unutilised”. The remaining land is currently the epicentre of an ongoing saga involving Palestinian Bedouin communities in Israel and the Israeli government, which makes ludicrous claims that the land is “essential” for Israel’s “development needs”.

Extensive research conducted by Professor Gadi Algazi points to Israel’s narrative in the Naqab being a complete fabrication. According to numerous newly-revealed documents, Moshe Dayan, then the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, was central to an Israeli government and military ploy to evict the Bedouin population and to “revoke their rights as landowners”, under the conveniently created Israeli law, which allowed the government to “lease” the land as if it was its own.

“There was an organised transfer of Bedouin citizens from the north-western Negev eastward to barren areas, with the goal of taking over their lands,” Algazi told Haaretz. “They carried out this operation using a mix of threats, violence, bribery and fraud.”

The entire scheme was organised in such a way as to facilitate the claim that the Palestinians had moved “voluntarily”, despite their legendary resistance and “the stubbornness with which they tried to hold onto their land, even at the cost of hunger and thirst, not to mention the army’s threats and violence.”

Furthermore, a newly-released volume by French historian Vincent Lemire has entirely dismissed the official Israeli version of how the Moroccan Quarter in Jerusalem was demolished in June 1967. Although Palestinian and Arab historians have long argued that the destruction of the neighbourhood — 135 homes, two mosques and more — was done as per the order of the Israeli government through the then Jewish Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, Israel has just as long denied that version. According to the official Israeli account, the demolition of the neighbourhood was carried out by “15 private Jewish contractors [who] destroyed the neighbourhood to make space for the Western Wall plaza.”

In an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP), Lemire said that his book offers “definitive, written proof on the pre-meditation, planning and coordination of this operation,” and that includes official meetings between Kollek, the commander of the Israeli army and other top government officials.

The story continues with more heartbreaking revelations as a well-integrated version of the truth exposing long-hidden or denied facts. The days of Israel getting away with these crimes seem to be behind us. For the third time in a little over twelve months, a major human rights organisation, on this occasion Amnesty International, has condemned Israeli apartheid.

Amnesty’s report, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Look into Decades of Oppression and Domination”, is 280 pages of damning evidence of Israel’s racism and apartheid. It does not shy away from connecting Israel’s violent present with its equally bloody past, nor does it borrow from Israel’s deceptive language and self-serving division of Palestinians into disconnected communities, each with a different claim and a different status. For Amnesty, as was the case with Human Rights Watch’s report in April last year, Israeli injustices against the Palestinians must be recognised and duly condemned in their entirety.

“Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony,” wrote Amnesty, “while minimising the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights.” This could only happen through mass killing, ethnic cleansing and genocide, from Tantura to the Naqab, to the Moroccan Quarter, the Gaza Strip and Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli roll call of shame is long.

February 8, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

UAE ‘directly benefiting’ from illegal Israeli settlement enterprise

MEMO | February 7, 2022

The UAE is directly benefitting from Illegal Israeli settlements and is in violation of international law according to recently signed bilateral trade agreements between Abu Dhabi and the occupation state, Hugh Lovatt, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, has pointed out in a series of tweets.

Lovatt has worked to advance the concept of EU Differentiation, which includes a variety of measures taken by the European bloc and its member states to exclude settlement-linked entities and activities from bilateral relations with Israel.

The EU has never recognised the legality of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories (including those in East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights that have been formally annexed by Israel). This means that the EU has an obligation to practically implement its non-recognition policy by fully and effectively implementing its own legislation against Israel’s incorporation of settlement entities and activities into its external relations with the EU.

In 2016, Lovatt worked to have this measure enshrined within UN Security Council Resolution 2334. It passed in a 14–0 vote, with the US notably abstaining. The Resolution states that Israel’s settlement activity constitutes a “flagrant violation” of international law and has “no legal validity”. It demands that Israel stop such activity and fulfil its obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Lovatt claims that recently released details of bilateral agreements between the UAE and Israel show that that the Gulf State is in violation of Resolution 2334 and the principal of differentiation which all UN member states are expected to abide by.

“Has the UAE respected international law and its obligations to differentiate between Israel and the settlements as per UNSCR 2334?” asked Lovatt in his tweet. “The answer: No.”

Lovatt explained that “to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 2334, every bilateral agreement signed with Israel should contain a ‘differentiation’ clause defining the territorial scope of its application to Israel’s pre-June 1967 borders. This is not the case in this UAE-Israel agreement”. He shared a screen shot of a clause from the bilateral agreement indicating that no such territorial distinction was made.

The definition of territory applied in the agreement includes all the land that is under “Israel’s jurisdiction”, which Lovatt explained include Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.

Notably Japan’s trade agreement with Israel includes a definition of “Israeli territory” which upholds the differentiation principal and, therefore, does not fall foul of Resolution 2334, Lovatt said. The absence of this distinction in the bilateral agreement between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv means that the UAE is “directly” befitting from illegal settlements through its normalisation with Israel.

Lovatt admits that the UAE may have a different interpretation of the agreement than he does, in which case “it would be incumbent on the UAE government to clarify the agreement’s territorial applicability as soon as possible,” he added.

February 7, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , | Leave a comment

Volunteers’ group targets Facebook for suppressing Palestinian content

MEMO | February 4, 2022

A Palestinian group of volunteers that monitors Facebook has raised an alarm that the social media platform was increasingly blocking and suppressing the content posted by Palestinian journalists, activists and influencers, Anadolu News Agency reports.

In a report, the volunteers’ group, Sada Social, has mentioned that Facebook had limited the reach of the accounts of the Palestinian influencers recently when they were highlighting the issues of Shaikh Jarrah neighbourhood and Gaza Strip.

According to the statistics issued by the group, Facebook had banned the users from reaching the hashtag “Al-Aqsa” in 2021, where many activists were writing about the events happening in Palestine.

“Facebook and Instagram had blocked as many as 1,500 posts in 2021. Almost 44 per cent of posts were posted by journalists and authentic media institutions,” said Iyad Refai, a social media specialist and the Director of Sada Social.

He said that access to the accounts that covered the incidents was restricted through algorithms that identify the digital content, adding that new words were added to expand the restrictive practices.

Facebook catches the words like “to support the Palestine cause” and other words like these, and then blocks the account. In addition, the restrictive practices have been expanded to the names of Palestinian factions, leaders, or martyrs, in addition to any pictures or videos related to this.

“After each violation, we contact Facebook to clarify that we have the right to tell our story. All the discussions with them are about the importance to have a clear and certain adoption of standards of the concepts about violence and hatred since Facebook policies do not follow the UN standards about violence and hatred,” said Refai.

In its annual statement, Sada Social said, in contrast to the efforts of defenders of the right to free expression and a sense of security in digital space, in 2021 there was a growing tendency to impose coercive powers on people’s practices in digital space.

Refai emphasised that, despite repeated calls to Facebook to put an end to the bias shown against the Palestinian content, there has been an increase in attacks on media platforms during the coverage of the recent war and events in Jerusalem. Palestinian news pages like Maydan Al Quds were finally pulled down last year in November.

“It is a US company and US law defines the Palestinian struggle as acts of terrorism,” he added.

According to the annual statistics released by the Sada Social, more than 390 Palestinians were detained by the Israeli forces and exposed to interrogation because of highlighting issues related to Palestine on Facebook.

February 4, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

46 Israel violations against Palestinian journalists in January

Journalists flee after being attacked with grenades in the West Bank on 22 February 2019 [HAZEM BADER/AFP/Getty Images]

MEMO | February 2, 2022

An Arab journalists’ rights group has recorded 46 Israeli violations of Palestinian media freedoms in January, Anadolu News Agency reports.

In a report on Wednesday, the Journalists’ Support Committee which documents media violations across the Palestinian territories, said the Israeli violations varied between “arrest, extortion and direct field assault” of media personnel among other forms of harassment.

According to the NGO, four Palestinian journalists were arrested by Israeli forces last month.

It noted that the Israeli army and settlers committed “17 cases of assault and injury against journalists” during their coverage of the demolition of Palestinian homes in the occupied East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood and rallies in the West Bank.

The Israeli army often used rubber bullets and gas bombs against Palestinian journalists, the report said.

The NGO also documented 18 cases of journalists being blocked from covering Israeli violations against the Palestinians.

According to the report, Israeli forces raided the house of one journalist, threatened two female journalists, while restricting the social media accounts of four others for “violating publishing instructions.”

Last month, the NGO said that 17 Palestinian journalists and media workers were held in prison by Israel.

February 2, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

The act of theatre that shows Israel’s contempt for Gaza

By Eva Bartlett | RT | January 30, 2022

Israel has apparently reprimanded a soldier for firing rounds into Gaza. That’s all very well, but what about the countless other soldiers who have done the same for years, maiming and killing Palestinian civilians?

The soldier, who posted his bravado video to TikTok, reportedly got 10 days in military prison. According to an Israeli army statement, “The soldier’s behavior in the video does not conform with the norms expected of soldiers and commanders.”

His sentencing and the media reporting around the incident is pure theatre, given the reality of how the Israeli army routinely targets Palestinians working on land in Gaza’s east and northern regions. While this one particular soldier received a mild punishment, many others who attack unarmed civilians are not held accountable.

Since pulling the illegal settlers out of Gaza in 2005, Israel has implemented a kill zone – dubbed the “buffer zone” or “no go zone” – where, on a regular basis, its soldiers shoot at Palestinian civilians. Ostensibly, it comprises a band of land 300 metres from the fence encaging Palestinians in Gaza. In reality, Israeli soldiers fire upon civilians well over a kilometre away, or even further, as I have experienced myself.

As I reported some years ago, “According to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the 300 metres off-limits area extends in areas to at least 1.5 km. PCHR [the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights] has documented the Israeli army targeting of Palestinian civilians as far as 2 km from the border.”

Israeli soldiers in sniper position. © Eva Bartlett

Between 2008 and 2013, I regularly accompanied farmers and other civilians in border areas, and on many of the occasions that we came under fire, we were 500 metres or more from the fence. Among the disturbing incidents was an attack one morning in February 2009, when I came under prolonged Israeli gunfire while accompanying a group of farm labourers on land roughly 500 metres from the fence. By then, I was accustomed to the routine – I would walk with farmers on their land, the Israeli soldiers would arrive in jeeps, assume sniper position and begin firing at us.

On this occasion, the young men had finished their parsley harvest and were pushing a stalled pickup truck when the Israeli gunfire began. The incident was captured on video, as I was there to document such attacks, and as I wrote at the time, “The lightly-dressed, unarmed farmers were clearly visible to… the several Israeli army jeeps and the Hummer which had patrolled the border fence, stopping for long intervals to watch the farmers work, then moving on.” I noted that the soldiers had observed us for a good half hour before shooting, choosing to fire at precisely the time when the farmers were leaving.

Shooting just beyond where I stood in a fluorescent vest, an Israeli soldier hit 20-year-old Mohammad al-Buraim in his leg, and continued to fire at us for a further 15 minutes. Some weeks prior, an Israeli soldier shot his cousin Anwar in the neck, killing him and leaving his wife, young children, and extended family without a breadwinner. Anwar had been on land 600 metres from the fence, also doing farm labour work.

When someone gets injured in these areas, the injury is compounded by the fact that ambulances cannot reach them, as they are targeted by the Israeli army. So, locals need to somehow get the injured to a point where an ambulance can safely reach them. If this is not done quickly enough, the injured risks bleeding to death.

On another occasion, again with farm workers in Gaza’s southeast, I came under intense Israeli fire lasting over 40 minutes from soldiers roughly 500 metres away. Bullets flew within metres of our hands, heads, and bodies. This proved to be an especially interesting case, as a representative from the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv – who had been informed of the shooting by other volunteers – called me to express concern for my safety.

This dissipated as soon as she realized I was being fired on by an Israeli soldier, and not a Palestinian. Her superior, the then-attache in the Tel Aviv office, had the gall to state quite clearly that they were fine with Israel’s “security measures” – firing on an unarmed Canadian and unarmed Palestinians and internationals, who in no way posed any threat to the heavily armed Israeli soldiers – and that we should be aware of the risks.

In another example, in February 2009, also in the southeast on land 550 metres from the fence, I accompanied elderly farmers and their families who intended to harvest some of their meagre crops. Shortly after we had arrived on the land, Israeli soldiers started firing very close to us, less than a metre from where we stood.

As I wrote at the time, “We could almost taste Tuesday’s firing, and the distinct ping-whizz sound they make was somehow impossibly loud, so close the shots were. One of the older women was having trouble walking away, stumbling in her fear. As the shots dug in around her she fell to the ground in terror. Positioning ourselves between the elderly farmers and the Israeli snipers, we accompanied them off the field. A few hundred metres away, the Israeli snipers continued to shoot. Another elderly woman had dived in terror behind a rock and adamantly wouldn’t get up. “They’ll kill me, they’ll kill me,” she cried in fear…”

Thankfully we did make it away that day in one piece. But this was just one of many examples of the terror Palestinian farmers face on a daily basis. And it’s not just farmers – at around the same time, a 17-year-old girl standing around 800 metres from the fence, near the ruins of her home (destroyed in the war just a month previously), was shot in the kneecap by an Israeli sniper.

Children going to school in the eastern village of Khoza’a were, at the time, being fired upon by Israeli soldiers at the fence 1km away. Teens and young men gathering scrap metal from demolished homes routinely come under Israeli fire. One example was 15-year-old Said Abdel Aziz Hamdan, who went to an area in Gaza’s north with his 13-year-old brother, to try to earn money for their large family. After finishing his work, an Israeli soldier fired at him, hitting his leg, without warning.

“People go there every day to gather bits of metal and concrete. The Israelis see us and know we are just working, it’s normal,” he told me when I visited him in hospital.

Palestinians don’t only face Israeli sniper fire, but also flechette shelling – dart bombs – which Israel has indiscriminately used against civilians and medics. One victim was 17-year-old Saleh Ahmad al-Medani, whose shoulder and neck were punctured by the two-inch-long, razor-like, dart-shaped bits of metal packed by the thousands into a single shell. He was attacked while walking home after midnight in June 2009, in northwestern Gaza, over 1km from the wall.

As I wrote at the time, “Due to their design, flechettes dig deeply into their target, with their “tails” frequently breaking off, leaving multiple injuries and rendering them nearly impossible to extract without inflicting more injury in the surgical search. In most cases, doctors opt against surgery, leaving the darts inside the victim’s body.”

The routine and very dangerous Israeli policy of harassment, which risks maiming or killing targets, also means farmers frequently stay off their land, meaning plants don’t get watered, and crops don’t get harvested. These are not isolated and random instances. They are part of a policy that aims to cut off any means of self-sufficiency the Palestinians try to engage in. Other Israeli army tactics include burning Palestinian crops, destroying wells and cisterns, and demolishing homes, livestock farms, and trees throughout the border regions.

So, please, let’s not get carried away with the fact that Israel has thrown one soldier in prison for unacceptable behaviour. It is quite clear that Israel doesn’t hold its own soldiers accountable for their crimes, including killing children or firing white phosphorus on heavily populated civilian areas. Neither does the United Nations nor anybody else appear willing to make Israel take responsibility for its decades of crimes against Palestinians.

One headline about one soldier being reprimanded for posting his tough-guy video on TikTok should not fool anyone.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

January 30, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

How Israel’s ‘Facebook Law’ Plans to Control All Palestinian Content Online

By Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle | January 22, 2022

It is ironic that even former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had rejected a Knesset (Israeli Parliament) bill which proposed to give the government greater power to control and suppress online content. This was in 2016, and the bill was introduced by Netanyahu’s Likud party rival, Gideon Sa’ar.

Some analysts argued that Netanyahu had feared that a law aimed at suppressing Palestinian freedom of speech online could be exploited by his enemies to control his own speech and incitement. Now that Netanyahu is no longer in the picture, the bill is back, and so is Sa’ar.

Gideon Sa’ar is currently Israel’s justice minister and deputy prime minister. While his boss, Naftali Bennett, is moving rapidly to expand settlements and to worsen already horrific realities for Palestinians on the ground, Sa’ar is expanding the Israeli military occupation of Palestinians to the digital realm. What is known as the ‘Facebook Law’ is set to grant “Israeli courts the power to demand the removal of user-generated content on social media content platforms that can be perceived as inflammatory or as harming ‘the security of the state,’ or the security of people or the security of the public.”

According to a December 30 statement by the Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition (PDRC) and the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC), Israeli censorship of Palestinian content online has deepened since 2016, when Sa’ar’s bill was first introduced.

In their statement, the two organizations highlighted the fact that Israel’s so-called Cyber Unit had submitted 2,421 requests to social media companies to delete Palestinian content in 2016. That number has grown exponentially since, to the extent that the Cyber Unit alone has requested the removal of more than 20,000 Palestinian items. PDRC and PHROC suggest that the new legislation, which was already approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation on December 27, “would only strengthen the relationship between the Cyber Unit and social media companies.”

Unfortunately, that relationship is already strong, at least with Facebook, which routinely censors Palestinian content and has been heavily criticized by Human Rights Watch and other organizations. After examining the numerous allegations of Facebook censorship, Deborah Brown, the senior digital rights researcher and advocate at HRW, concluded that “Facebook has suppressed content posted by Palestinians and their supporters speaking out about human rights issues in Israel and Palestine.”

Facebook’s involvement in Israel’s efforts aimed at silencing Palestinian online voices that call for justice, freedom and end of the occupation, is itself situated in an agreement the company had reached with Israel in September 2016. Then, the Israeli government announced that it had signed an agreement with the social media giant “to work together to determine how to tackle incitement on the social media network.” Within days, the accounts of prominent Palestinian journalists and activists were reportedly being deleted.

Israel’s latest ‘Facebook Law’ does not just pertain to controlling content on Facebook-related platforms, including Instagram and others. According to a Haaretz editorial published on December 29, the impact of this particular bill is far-reaching, as it will grant District Court judges throughout the country the power to remove posts, not only from Facebook and other social media outlets, “but from any website at all”.

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s censorship of Palestinian content is justified under the typical pretense of protecting Israel’s ‘national security’. We all know how Israel interprets this elusive concept to include anything from a Palestinian calling for Israel to be held accountable for its crimes in the occupied territories, to another demanding the end of Israeli apartheid to a third writing a poem. A case in point was the humiliating imprisonment of Palestinian poet, Dareen Tatour. The latter, an Israeli citizen, was thrown in jail in 2015 per court order for writing a short poem entitled “Resist, My People, Resist Them”.

Judging from past experience, undoubtedly, the ‘Facebook Law’ would almost exclusively target Palestinians. Moreover, judging from Israel’s previous successes, many digital and social media companies would comply with Israel’s demands of censoring Palestinians everywhere.

In its January 11 report, the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement – 7Amleh – detailed some of the practices that Israel engages in to monitor, silence, and spy on Palestinians. 7Amleh’s report, entitled ‘Hashtag Palestine 2021’, discusses the increased use of surveillance technologies, especially in the context of a proposed Israeli law that would expand the use of facial recognition cameras in public spaces. It is worth noting that such technologies have already been used against Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints throughout the West Bank for at least two years.

Moreover, the Israeli Pegasus spyware, which has recently made headlines throughout the world for its use against numerous high-profile figures, has also long been used against Palestinian activists. In other words, Palestine continues to be the testing ground for Israel’s human rights violations of all kinds, whether in new weaponry, crowd control or surveillance.

Expectedly, what applies to Palestinians demanding their freedom online does not apply to Israelis inciting violence and spreading hatred against those very Palestinians. According to the 7Amleh ‘Index of Racism and Incitement’, published last June, during the Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip and the subsequent anti-Palestinian violence throughout Palestine in May 2021, “incitement in Hebrew against Arabs and Palestinians increased by 15 times” if compared to the same period of the last year. Much of this has gone unnoticed, and it is hardly the subject of the proposed ‘Facebook Law’ or the sinister activities of the Cyber Unit. For Gideon Sa’ar and his ilk, anti-Palestinian incitement, along with the daily violence meted out against the occupied Palestinians, is a non-issue.

While Israel is permitted, thanks to the deafening silence of the international community, to maintain its military occupation of Palestine, to cement its apartheid and to deepen its control of Palestinian life everywhere, it should not be permitted to expand this matrix of control to the digital realm as well. Civil society organizations, activists and ordinary people everywhere must speak out to bring an end to this mockery.

Moreover, as the Pegasus and the facial recognition surveillance technologies experiences have taught us, what is usually first applied to Palestinians is eventually normalized and applied everywhere else. Israel should, therefore, be confronted in its abuses of human rights in Palestine, because these abuses, if normalized, will become a part of our daily lives, regardless of where we are in the world.

January 23, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

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