The Notorious London Spy School Churning Out Many of the World’s Top Journalists
The Maughan Library Gate at Kings College London, UK. David JC | Alamy
By Alan MacLeod | MintPress News | June 4, 2021
LONDON — In a previous investigation, MintPress News explored how one university department, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, functions as a school for spooks. Its teaching posts are filled with current or former NATO officials, army officers and intelligence operatives to churn out the next generation of spies and intelligence officers. However, we can now reveal an even more troubling product the department produces: journalists. An inordinate number of the world’s most influential reporters, producers and presenters, representing many of the most well-known and respected outlets — including The New York Times, CNN and the BBC — learned their craft in the classrooms of this London department, raising serious questions about the links between the fourth estate and the national security state.
National security school
Increasingly, it appears, intelligence agencies the world over are beginning to appreciate agents with a strong academic background. A 2009 study published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that, “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system.”
The paper, written by two King’s College staffers, boasted that the department’s faculty has “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.” This was no exaggeration. Current Department of War Studies educators include the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K. Minister of Defense, and military officers from the U.K, U.S. and other NATO countries. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” said then-U.S. Secretary of Defense (and former CIA Director) Leon Panetta in a speech at the department in 2013.
King’s College London also admits to having a number of ongoing contracts with the British state, including with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), but refuses to divulge the details of those agreements.
American connections
Although a British university, King’s College markets itself heavily to American students. There are currently 1,265 Americans enrolled, making up about 4% of the student body. Many graduates of the Department of War Studies go on to attain powerful positions in major American media outlets. Andrew Carey, CNN’s Bureau Chief in Jerusalem, for example, completed a master’s there in 2012. Carey’s coverage of the latest Israeli attack on Gaza has presented the apartheid state as “responding” to Hamas rocket attacks, rather than being the instigator of violence. A leaked internal memo Carey sent to his staff last month at the height of the bombardment instructed them to always include the fact that the Gazan Ministry of Health is overseen by Hamas, lest readers begin to believe the well-documented Palestinian casualty figures brought on by days of bombing. “We need to be transparent about the fact that the Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas. Consequently, when we cite latest casualty numbers and attribute to the health ministry in Gaza, we need to include the fact that it is Hamas run,” read his instructions.
King’s College alumnus turned CNN Jerusalem bureau chief Andrew Carey instructed reporters on how to cover Israel’s latest assault on Gaza
Once publicized, his comments elicited considerable pushback. “This is a page straight out of Israel’s playbook. It serves to justify the attack on civilians and medical facilities,” commented Al-Jazeera Senior Presenter and Producer Dena Takruri.
The New York Times, the United States’ most influential newspaper, has also employed Department of War Studies alumni. Christiaan Triebert (M.A., 2016), for example, is a journalist on their visual investigations team. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for “Revelations about Russia and Vladimir Putin’s aggressive actions in countries including Syria and Europe.” Hiring students from the school for spooks to bash Russia appears to be a common Times tactic, as it also employed Lincoln Pigman between 2016 and 2018 at its Moscow bureau.
Josh Smith, senior correspondent for influential news agency Reuters and formerly its correspondent in Afghanistan, also graduated from the department in question, as did The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Ford.
Arguably the most influential media figure from the university, however, is Ruaridh Arrow. Arrow was a producer at many of the U.K.’s largest news channels, including Channel 4, Sky News and the BBC, where he was world duty editor and senior producer on Newsnight, the network’s flagship political show. In 2019, Arrow left the BBC to become an executive producer at NBC News.
The British invasion
Unsurprisingly for a university based in London, the primary journalistic destination for Department of War Studies graduates is the United Kingdom. Indeed, the BBC, the country’s powerful state broadcaster, is full of War Studies alumni. Arif Ansari, head of news at the BBC Asian Network, completed a masters analyzing the Syrian Civil War in 2017 and was soon selected for a leadership development scheme, placing him in charge of a team of 25 journalists who curate news primarily geared toward the substantial Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in Great Britain.
Many BBC employees begin studying at King’s years after their careers have already taken off, and balance their professional lives with pursuing new qualifications. Ahmed Zaki, Senior Broadcast Journalist at BBC Global News, began his master’s six years after he started at the BBC. Meanwhile, Ian MacWilliam — who spent ten years at BBC World Service, the country’s official news broadcast worldwide, specializing in sensitive regions like Russia, Afghanistan and Central Asia — decided to study at King’s more than 30 years after completing his first degree.
Another influential War Studies alumnus at the World Service is Aliaume Leroy, producer for its Africa Eye program. Well-known BBC News presenter Sophie Long also graduated from the department, working for Reuters and ITN before joining the state broadcaster.
“It’s an open secret that King’s College London Department of War Studies operates as the finishing school for Anglo-American securocrats. So it’s maybe not a surprise that graduates of its various military and intelligence courses also enter into a world of corporate journalism that exists to launder the messaging of these same ‘security’ agencies,” Matt Kennard — an investigative journalist for Declassified U.K. who has previously exposed the university’s connections to the British state — told MintPress. “It is, however, a real and present danger to democracy. The university imprimatur gives the department’s research the patina of independence while it works, in reality, as the unofficial research arm of the U.K. Ministry of Defence,” he added.
Israeli writer and King’s College alumnus Neri Zilber has bylines in many of the media’s most important outlets
The Department of War Studies also trains many international journalists and commentators, including Nicholas Stuart of the Canberra Times (Australia); Pakistani writer Ayesha Siddiqa, whose work can be found in The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, The Hindu and many other outlets; and Israeli writer Neri Zilber, a contributor to The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Foreign Policy and Politico.
What’s it all about?
Why are so many influential figures in our media being hothoused in a department well known for its connections to state power, for its faculty being active or former military or government officials, and for producing spies and operatives for various three-letter agencies? The point of this is not to allege that these journalists are all secretly card-carrying spooks: they are not. Rather, it is to highlight the alarmingly close links between the national security state and the fourth estate we rely on to be a check on their power and to hold them accountable.
Journalists trained in this sort of environment are far more likely to see the world in the same manner as their professors do. And perhaps they would be less likely to challenge state power when the officials they are scrutinizing were their classmates or teachers.
These sorts of questions abound when such a phenomenon exists: Why are so many journalists choosing to study at this particular department, and why do so many go on to be so influential? Are they being vetted by security agencies, with or without their knowledge? How independent are they? Will they just repeat British and American state talking points, as the Department of War Studies’ publications do?
On the question of vetting, the BBC admitted that, at least until the 1990s, it conspired with domestic spying agency MI5 to make sure that people with left-wing and/or anti-war leanings, or views critical of British foreign policy and empire were secretly blocked from being hired. When pressed on whether this policy is still ongoing, the broadcaster refused to comment, citing “security issues” — a response that is unlikely to reassure skeptics.
“While it strikes me as very interesting that a single academic institution could play such a major role in the recruitment of pro-establishment activist intellectuals and delivery of the same to the media, it is not so surprising,” Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State’s School of Media and Communication and an expert in collusion between government and media, told MintPress, adding:
Elite institutions in the past and doubtless still today have been major playgrounds for intelligence services. The history of the modern nation-state generally, not just the USA, seems to suggest that national unity — and therefore elite safety — is regarded by elites as achievable only through careful management and often suppression or diversion of dissent. Far more resources are typically committed to this than many citizens, drilled in the propaganda of democracy, realize or care to concede.
The Bellingcat Boys
While the journalists cataloged above are not spooks, some other Department of War Studies figures working in journalism could possibly be described as such, particularly those around the influential and increasingly notorious investigative website Bellingcat.
Cameron Colquhoun, for instance, spent almost a decade at GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA, where he was a senior analyst running cyber and counter-terrorism operations. He holds qualifications from both King’s College London and the State Department. This background is not disclosed in his Bellingcat profile, which merely describes him as the managing director of a private intelligence company that “conduct[s] ethical investigations” for clients around the world.
Bellingcat’s senior investigator Nick Waters spent four years as an officer in the British Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, where he furthered the British state’s objectives in the region. After that, he joined the Department of War Studies and Bellingcat.
For the longest time, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgings dismissed charges that his organization was funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — a CIA cutout organization — as a ridiculous “conspiracy.” Yet by 2017, he was admitting that it was true. A year later, Higgins joined the Department of War Studies as a visiting research associate. Between 2016 and 2019 he was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the brains behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Higgins appears to have used the university department as a recruiting ground, commissioning other War Studies graduates, such as Jacob Beeders and the aforementioned Christiaan Triebert and Aliaume Leroy, to write for his site.
Bellingcat is held in very high regard by the CIA. “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love [Bellingcat],” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the agency’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia. Other officers explained that Bellingcat could be used to outsource and legitimize anti-Russia talking points. “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and say ‘there you go’ [when they ask for evidence],” added former CIA Chief of Station Daniel Hoffman.
Bellingcaught
A recent MintPress investigation explored how Bellingcat acts to launder national security state talking points into the mainstream under the guise of being neutral investigative journalists themselves.
Newly leaked documents show how Bellingcat, Reuters and the BBC were covertly cooperating with the U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to undermine the Kremlin and promote regime change in Moscow. This included training journalists and promoting explicitly anti-Russian media across Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, the FCO noted, Bellingcat had been “somewhat discredited,” as it constantly spread disinformation and was willing to produce reports for anyone with money.
Nevertheless, a new European Parliament proposal published last month recommends hiring Bellingcat to assist in producing reports that would lay the groundwork for sanctioning Russia, for throwing it out of international bodies, and to “assist Russia’s transformation into a democracy.” In other words, to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.
An academic journalistic nexus
The Department of War Studies is also part of this pro-NATO, anti-Russia group. Quite apart from being staffed by soldiers, spooks and government officials, it puts out influential reports advising Western governments on foreign and defense policy. For instance, a study entitled “The future strategic direction of NATO” advises that member states must increase their military budgets and allow American nuclear weapons to be stored in their countries, thereby “shar[ing] the burden.” It also recommended that NATO must redouble its commitment to opposing Russia while warning that it needed urgently to form a “coherent policy” on the Chinese threat.
Other War Studies reports claim that Russia is carrying out “information-psychological warfare” through its state channels RT and Sputnik, and counsel that the West must use its technical means to prevent its citizens from consuming this foreign propaganda.
King’s College London academics have also proven crucial in keeping dissident publisher Julian Assange imprisoned. A psychiatrist who has worked with the War Studies department testified in court that the Australian was suffering only “moderate” depression and that his suicide risk was “manageable,” concluding that extraditing him to the United States “would not be unjust.” As Matt Kennard’s investigation found, the U.K. Ministry of Defence had provided £2.2 million ($3.1 million) in funding to the institute where he worked (although the psychiatrist in question claimed his work was not directly funded by the MoD).
King’s College London markets the War Studies department to both graduates and undergraduates as a stepping stone towards a career in journalism. In its “career prospects” section for its master’s course in war studies, it tells interested students that “graduates go on to work for NGOs, the FCO, the MoD, the Home Office, NATO, the UN or pursue careers in journalism, finance, academia, the diplomatic services, the armed forces and more.”
Likewise, undergraduates are told that:
You will gain an in-depth and sophisticated understanding of war and international relations, both as subjects worthy of study and as intellectual preparation for the widest possible range of career choices, including in government, journalism, research, and humanitarian and international organisations.
Courses such as “New Wars, New Media, New Journalism” fuse together journalism and intelligence and are overseen by War Studies academics.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the department has taught many influential politicians, including foreign heads of state and members of the British parliament. But at least there is considerable overlap between the fields of defense policy and politics. The fact that the very department that trains high state officials and agents of secretive three letter agencies is also the place that produces many of the journalists we rely on to stand up to those officials and keep them in check is seriously problematic.
An unhealthy respect for authority
Unfortunately, rather than challenging power, many modern media outlets amplify its message uncritically. State officials and intelligence officers are among the least trustworthy sources, journalistically speaking. Yet many of the biggest stories in recent years have been based on nothing except the hearsay of officials who would not even put their names to their claims.
The level of credulity modern journalists have for the powerful was summed up by former CNN White House Correspondent Michelle Kosinski, who last month stated that:
As an American journalist, you never expect:
- Your own govt to lie to you, repeatedly
- Your own govt to hide information the public has a right to know
- Your own govt to spy on your communications
Unfortunately, credulity stretches into outright collaboration with intelligence in some cases. Leaked emails show that the Los Angeles Times’ national security reporter Ken Dilanian sent his articles directly to the CIA to be edited before they were published. Far from hurting his career, however, Dilanian is now a correspondent covering national security issues for NBC News.
Boyd-Barrett said that governments are dependent on “the assistance of a penetrated, colluding and docile mainstream media which of late — and in the context of massive confusion over Internet disinformation campaigns, real and alleged — appear ever more problematic guardians of the public right to know.”
In recent years, the national security state has increased its influence over social media giants as well. In 2018, Facebook and the Atlantic Council entered a partnership whereby the Silicon Valley giant partially outsourced curation of its 2.8 billion users’ news feeds to the Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, supposedly to help stop the spread of fake news online. The result, however, has been the promotion of “trustworthy” corporate media outlets like Fox News and CNN and the penalization of independent and alternative sources, which have seen their traffic decrease precipitously. Earlier this year, Facebook also hired former NATO press officer and current Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Ben Nimmo to be its chief of intelligence. Reddit’s Director of Policy is also a former Atlantic Council official.
Meanwhile, in 2019, a senior Twitter executive for the Middle East region was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, its unit dedicated to psychological operations and online warfare. The most notable thing about this event was the almost complete lack of attention it received from the mainstream press. Coming at a time when foreign interference online was perhaps the number one story dominating the news cycle, only one major outlet, Newsweek, even mentioned it. Furthermore, the reporter who covered the story left his job just weeks later, citing stifling top-down censorship and a culture of deference to national security interests.
The purpose of this article is not to accuse any of those mentioned of being intelligence agency plants (although at least one person did actually work as an intel officer). The point is rather to highlight that we now have a media landscape where many of the West’s most influential journalists are being trained by exactly the same people in the same department as the next generation of national security operatives.
It is hardly a good look for a healthy, open democracy that so many spies, government officials, and journalists trusted to hold them accountable on our behalf are all being shot out of the very same cannon. Learning side by side has helped to create a situation where the fourth estate has become overwhelmingly deferential to the so-called deep state, where anonymous official’s words are taken as gospel. The Department of War Studies is just one part of this wider phenomenon.T
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.
Do SAGE Members Calling for Lockdown to be Extended Beyond June 21st Not Believe the Vaccines Work?
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • June 1, 2021
So do the vaccines not work then? That’s certainly the impression you’d get from the way various members of SAGE are carrying on, warning of new waves and new variants and the need to delay the end of lockdown even further (completely ignoring the fact that half of America is now open without any problems so far).
As Sherelle Jacobs asks in the Telegraph, why is the debate continuing as though nothing has changed despite half the country – the most vulnerable half – being vaccinated?
Instead of discussing how quickly vaccines could spell the end of restrictions, the commentariat fixates on the risk of another wave as if absolutely nothing has changed. Somehow, despite low deaths, the Indian variant rather than the vaccine has become the game changer.
We have become wearily used to these media interventions from SAGE members in the build-up to key decisions around lockdowns, usually pushing some skewed version of the scientific evidence to frighten the public and pile pressure on the Government to tighten or maintain restrictions. This was bad enough in the autumn before the vaccines were on the scene, but now it leaves you wondering if they know something we don’t about how well the vaccines prevent death and serious disease.
The Government has been continually putting out new research showing how effective the vaccines are, including against the Indian variant, and while I have written on a number of occasions about the shortcomings of these studies, I had been assuming that the vaccines do work, or at least that the Government and its scientists believe they work. With all this talk of third waves and extending lockdown, you have to wonder.
The latest line to justify extending the lockdown is from NERVTAG member Professor Ravi Gupta, who argues for just a few more weeks to let more people get vaccinated, saying there are signs an “explosive” third wave is on the horizon.
Yet according to the latest figures, 51.3% of the adult population has now had one vaccine dose and 31.4% has had two. Over 90% of the over-70s are now fully vaccinated.
The vaccines are supposed to be up to 90% effective at preventing symptomatic infection, including in the over-65s. They are also claimed to be a 90% effective at preventing hospitalisation or death (though presumably their efficacy is reduced somewhat in the frail elderly). This means any new “surge” will have something like one tenth of the infections of earlier waves, while hospitalisations and deaths should be up to a hundred times less – a non-event in infectious disease terms. While these are likely overestimates of vaccine effectiveness, especially among those most susceptible to the disease, there is also naturally acquired immunity and prior immunity that will help to bring the disease burden down.
However you look at it, if the vaccines are going to do their thing then they are already doing it and there’s no point postponing the unlocking. If they’re not working then there’s nothing we can do about it now anyway so we might as well get back to living fully. Either way, the SAGE prophets of doom should be roundly ignored.
Brits protest outside BAE Systems for weapons sales to Israel
By Ahmed Kaballo – Press TV – May 28, 2021
London – Hundreds of pro-Palestine protestors gathered outside the BAE Systems factory in Blackburn in the north of England, to call upon the weapons manufacturer to stop supplying components for F-35 fighter jets that have been used in the recent bombardment of Gaza.
The protest came on the back of one the largest pro-Palestine demonstrations in British history on Saturday and similar demonstrations throughout the week led by Palestine action groups who have been protesting outside the Israeli-owned Elbit Systems factory that provides drones, weapons, and military hardware to the Israeli army.
We have seen protests in Leicester, Tamworth, Oldham, and today in Blackburn as the anger amongst the British public begins to swell at the thought that UK weapons have been used by the Israeli army to kill Palestinian children.
It has become increasingly clear that the British government’s unwavering support for Israel is not representative of the feeling on the ground with more than 383,000 Brits calling on their government to sanction the Israeli regime for their crimes against the Palestinian people.
But while the UK remains complicit through the hundreds of millions of pounds worth of weapons sold to the Israeli army. Some might wonder if the UK should also be held accountable.
Shocking! – Latest update on adverse reactions to the Covid Vaccines in the USA released by CDC
THE DAILY EXPOSE • May 23, 2021
The number of reported adverse reactions to the Covid vaccines in the USA surpassed 200,000 according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data comes directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. The latest data shows that between the 14th December 2020 and the 14th May 2021, a total of 227,805 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 4,201 deaths — an increase of 144 over the previous week — and 18,528 serious injuries, up 1,338 on the previous week.
This data also showed 943 total adverse events, including 23 rated as serious, among 12- to -17-year-olds.
In the U.S., 268.4 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of May 14. This includes 115 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 144 million doses of Pfizer and 9 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine. […]
The latest VAERS data shows:
- 20% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
- 54% of those who died were male, 44% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased.
- The average age of death was 74.7 and the youngest deaths reported include two 15-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1187918 and 1242573 ) and a 16-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1225942). There were other reported deaths in children under 16 that could not be confirmed or contained obvious errors.
- As of May 14, 1,140 pregnant women reported adverse events related to COVID vaccines, including 351 reports of miscarriage or premature birth.
- Of the 2,275 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 51% were reported after Pfizer-BioNTech vaccinations, 42% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 192 cases, or 10%, of Bell’s Palsy cases were reported in conjunction with J&J.
- There were 195 reports of Guillain-Barré Syndrome with 40% of cases attributed to Pfizer, 38% to Moderna and 26% to J&J.
- There were 65,854 reports of anaphylaxis with 38% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 51% to Moderna and 11% to J&J.
- There were 3,758 reports of clotting disorders and other related conditions. Of those, 1,468 reports were attributed to Pfizer, 1,093 reports to Moderna and 1,093 reports to J&J.
There have also been 822,845 adverse reactions to the Covid vaccines in the UK alongside 1,180 unnecessary deaths, you can read our latest analysis of the UK report here.
The Myth of the ‘Asymptomatic Spreader’ Dealt Another Blow This Week
21st Century Wire | May 24, 2021
Since the pandemic crisis began in early 2020, government and public health officials have been adamant that any difficult measures taken were all being done in order to ‘control the spread of the virus’ or ‘stop the disease.’ Thus, a litany of so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions, and also pharmaceutical interventions – were deemed by the consensus to be essential measures in fighting the spread of what was being characterized as an asymptomatic disease.
Over a year later, a few industrious ‘public health’ mavens have summoned the courage to actually test this fundamental assumption. Recently in the UK, officials have staged and monitored nine large-scale events, including an FA Cup final football match, and the Brit Awards – both of which were exempt from the usual COVID rules. The results of this test should be hailed as good news, but for those heavily invested in the narrative, it’s nothing short of a meltdown: little to no coronavirus “cases” turned up.
Officials managed to scrape together just 15 alleged “cases” or “infections” (deemed as such merely from a single ‘positive test’) out of some 60,000 total attendees.
The result of this experiment has dealt a crushing blow to the central myth upon which the entire COVID-19 ‘global pandemic’ crisis has been built – namely the myth of the asymptomatic spread, and the much-maligned notorious “super-spreader” events.
Sky News UK reports…
Nine large-scale events were staged as part of the government’s plan to allow for the return of big crowds this summer. Those who attended were exempt from certain coronavirus rules, such as the rule-of-six.
The government confirmed to Sky News that 15 COVID cases had been recorded out of nearly 60,000 people who attended the events, which “is in line with the broader population”.
Latest figures show the rate of people testing positive for COVID in the UK is 22 infections per 100,000 people.
The pilot events included three football matches at Wembley Stadium – the FA Cup final which was attended by 21,000 supporters, an FA Cup semi-final and the Carabao Cup final.
IMAGE: Animated graphic from NPR’s debunked April 2020 propaganda article entitled, “What We Know About The Silent Spreaders Of COVID-19.”
Combine this latest UK admission with the recent backtracking by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the US Center for Disease Control CDC on masks and asymptomatic transmissions, and it’s clear that officials will have no choice now but to back-off supporting the nonscience-based myth of the asymptomatic spreader or “silent spreaders,” and it’s not difficult to see how problematic this widely held assumption is now becoming, with many media doctors and public health officials now facing challenges over what can only be described as a collective propaganda effort deployed by government, media and medical industry over the last 14 months.
The peer-reviewed literature is also clear, with large-scale studies conducted, including at the supposed epicenter of the pandemic in Wuhan, China – all of which showed no evidence of alleged asymptomatic spreading of the ‘novel’ coronavirus. See their results here, here, and here.
Of course, none of this should surprise any honest doctor or real scientist. We’ve always known that any disease requires symptoms first. But somehow, common sense has been completely abandoned during the Covid crisis.
Of all the widely-held assumptions and hysteria surrounding the COVID crisis, none has been more pivotal than the myth of the ‘asymptomatic spread’ in ballasting every single unprecedented ‘health intervention’ policy including:
- Social Distancing
- Mass Testing
- Reliance on non-diagnostic PCR and Lateral Flow tests
- Track and Trace bio surveillance
- Lockdowns
- Quarantining the healthy
- Masks
- Border Closures
- Business Closures
- School Closures
- Mass Vaccinations
- Vaccine Passports
It’s astonishing to consider that every single one of these emergency measures have been predicated on the widely-held, nonscientific myth of the asymptomatic spread.
Perhaps more shocking is the fact that no one in government, media or the legions of newly-crowned ‘public health experts’ – have bothered to challenge this key assumption, perhaps out of fear, or more likely because it was politically and economically expedient for stakeholders of the current crisis narrative.
It is not uncommon the see the bevy of experts and media anchors, all repeating ad nauseum presumptive statements like:
“A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.”
Unraveling the murky ontology of the myth of the asymptomatic spreader, we can point to an informative piece published recently in Lockdown Skeptics entitled, “How Did a Disease With no Symptoms Take Over the World?” A fair question, and indeed a necessary one too.
The article answers this question quite simply – it’s so obvious and still profound if one pauses to consider just how many of the so-called experts and health ministers have routinely avoided applying any real epistemology or scientific method to the wild ‘pandemic’ claims which have become so commonplace over the last 14 months:
“Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.”
It’s been 14 months, and the world has been turned upside-down, and the billionaire class have reached new heights in wealth and consolidation of power and influence, while everyone else has slid downwards.
Let there be a reckoning. It’s time to talk about the real science – which does not even remotely support the inflated ‘global pandemic’ narrative.
Telegraph: UK Needs “Vaccine Force” To Produce Jabs “On Tap”
By Richie Allen | May 24, 2021
Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph editorial focused on vaccine production. The newspaper claimed that the UK should set up a “Vaccine Force” in the same way that we maintain a standing army in peacetime.
According to the editorial:
One of the big lessons from this crisis is that vaccines are essential, one of modern civilisation’s greatest inventions and must be deployed far more efficiently and ruthlessly than Britain’s public health establishment had previously fathomed.
Ruthlessly? I’ll come back to that. The Telegraph claims that the country needs to be better prepared for pandemics and flu-seasons to come and that vaccine work and human challenge trials should begin immediately. The paper says:
We need to be much better prepared next time a new virus emerges. Like this time, vaccine work must begin straight away; but the difference must be that we need immediate human challenge trials.
It was a remarkable achievement that it took just 11 months for vaccines to start being injected; but next time the target should be closer to three.
We need massive production and distribution capacity on tap, at all times, just as we maintain a standing army even in peacetime. Never again should an epidemiological challenge lead to the country being locked down for months on end.
The Telegraph’s message is pretty clear. The paper wants the country to set up a vaccine army that will run mass-production facilities and human trials forever more. It wants this new army or “force” to be ruthless in its endeavours.
This, says the paper, is the only way to avoid lockdowns in future. Lockdowns are intolerable and devastating for the economy and health. The only answer, says The Telegraph, is to have vaccines “on-tap.”
By ruthless, the paper might mean that there should be little or no red-tape to prevent these vaccines reaching our arms. Maybe the paper means that the UK should be ruthless in dealing with refuseniks, because after all, refuseniks delay the end of restrictions.
I’m betting that The Telegraph didn’t come up with the idea of a “Vaccine Force” all by itself. But then again, what the hell do I know? I do know this. We really are here now.
How the vaccine can make Covid worse
By Neville Hodgkinson | The Conservative Woman | May 24, 2021
EVIDENCE is growing that Covid-19 vaccines may worsen the disease in some recipients. The danger arises when a vaccinated person meets the actual virus. Antibodies developed as a result of the jab can end up enhancing disease rather than protecting against infection.
Previous warnings about this potentially lethal effect, known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), have been downplayed or dismissed as theoretical by the manufacturers. The phenomenon has been seen with vaccines against other viruses but is considered very rare.
After reviewing published evidence concerning the effect, however, two US experts [1] have concluded it is ‘non-theoretical and compelling’. Receiving the vaccine could convert a subject from someone who experiences mild disease ‘to someone who experiences severe disease, lasting morbidity or even death’.
They say that to meet the ethical requirement of informed consent, all potential vaccinees, as well as trial participants, should have this risk specifically drawn to their attention.
Meanwhile, an international group of doctors and scientists have published an appeal to governments, regulators and vaccine developers worldwide to halt mass-vaccination programmes until safety issues, especially ADE, have been resolved.
They say that given the high rate of adverse effects there is a need for better understanding of the benefits and risks, particularly in sections of the community who were excluded in most of the clinical trials. These included the elderly and people with prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19.
Exclusion of the latter, the group says, is particularly unfortunate ‘as it denied the opportunity of obtaining extremely relevant information concerning post-vaccination ADE in people that already have anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.’ Without careful monitoring, cases of ADE or similar immune pathology caused by the vaccine would be indistinguishable from severe Covid-19.
The same may be true of damage caused by a toxin, the so-called ‘spike’ protein, production of which is triggered in our body cells by the vaccine. The protein is a uniquely dangerous characteristic of the virus, and the aim of the vaccine is to alert the immune system to it so as to block infection.
But not a single study has examined how long the toxin continues to be produced in us following vaccination, the doctors say. The jab itself may be causing the very symptoms it is designed to protect against, symptoms then erroneously diagnosed as ‘coincidental’ cases of infection. ‘If so, the true adverse effects of the current global vaccination strategy may never be recognised unless studies specifically examine this question.’
This an extraordinarily serious concern, since across the world sicknesses and deaths seen immediately in the wake of vaccination are regularly attributed to the virus itself. This has been the case even with dramatic increases in deaths concurrent with vaccination drives, such as last January in Gibraltar.
A family doctor in Texas highlighted the risk of ADE in evidence this month to the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs. Dr Ben Edwards said more than half of Texans now have natural immunity to the virus, and this confers ‘a more robust immunity’ than the vaccine. But two different studies have shown that ‘vaccinating someone who is already robustly immune increases their risk of adverse reactions 2-3-fold.’
He told the committee that in the past four months, 4,178 deaths associated with the Covid vaccine had been reported to the US Government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), almost the same as the 4,182 deaths reported from all vaccinations combined over the past 20 years.
The deaths included those of a 15-year-old boy in Colorado, two 16-year-old girls in Wisconsin, a 17-year-old girl in Wisconsin and a 17-year-old boy in New Hampshire, all previously healthy.
Pointing to studies indicating that only a tiny percentage of adverse reactions reach VAERS, Dr Edwards added: ‘To give context, in the 1976 swine flu epidemic, after recording 500 cases of paralysis, with 53 deaths, the vaccine was pulled off the market.
‘I have received numerous reports from family members of my patients, and close friends of my patients, that within hours to days of receiving the vaccine they’ve suffered stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, blood clots, sudden death; and as far as these family members know, none of these were reported by the medical staff as being associated with the vaccine. So my concern is that there is indeed vast under-reporting.’
He said there was no need for the jab in people who have acquired immunity, whether through having had the disease, or having been exposed to the virus without developing symptoms.
Asked by the committee chairman if people can do anything to strengthen their immune system, Dr Edwards said: ‘Absolutely . . . through proper nutrition, hydration, exercise, sunlight, and most importantly, peace – not the spirit of fear which in my opinion has overcome this nation.’
Last week former White House Covid-19 adviser Dr Scott Atlas made a similar criticism of fear-based policies which, he said, had caused rational and critical thinking to disappear. Lockdowns in the United States and across the globe had not only been a ‘heinous abuse of power’ by public health experts, but had also failed to protect the elderly and vulnerable. The harm caused would be felt for decades to come.
In an interview with Epoch TV, Atlas said he believed lockdowns were appropriate in the early stages of the pandemic, when it was thought the virus could be more lethal than turned out to be the case. But a ‘frenzy’ took over, and the goal gradually shifted from protecting health care facilities to stopping Covid-19 cases altogether.
‘Fear is very powerful, and it was really shown how powerful fear is during this pandemic,’ he said. Americans bought into the initial control measures because they thought they would be temporary, and a small price to pay to get things under control. But poor leadership by ‘the faces of public health’ led to persistent lockdowns that defied logic, causing loss of medical resources for countless others.
Child abuse and domestic abuse skyrocketed, opioid deaths and suicides surged, and there was a dramatic rise in young people suffering from depression and anxiety. Children were kept out of school – ‘sacrificed’ – out of fear for adults, even though the children had no significant Covid risk.
‘I think it is still somehow held by many people that OK, the lockdowns are an economic harm, but we’re saving lives. No, you’re destroying families, you’re destroying lives, and you’re literally killing people. It’s a disgrace.’
Fear-based public health responses to the Covid crisis as described by Dr Atlas have caused immeasurable harm in many countries, including the UK. We still don’t know the full outcomes of this ‘frenzied’ period, including whether the vaccines are fit for purpose.
At least some are weathering the crisis well. As Saturday’s Daily Mail revealed, nine executives from four vaccine companies have become billionaires during the pandemic, reaching a combined net wealth of $19.3billion. The list was compiled by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a campaign group that includes Oxfam, UNAIDS, Global Justice Now and Amnesty International.
And according to a January report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, 651 existing US billionaires, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, saw their collective wealth grow by more than $1trillion during the first nine months of Covid-19, even as the less fortunate faced economic hardship and hunger.
Third of British cabinet, including Boris Johnson, has been funded by Israel or pro-Israel lobby groups
By Matt Kennard • Declassified UK • May 22, 2021
While the UK government has been backing Israel’s intense bombing campaign in Gaza, Declassified can reveal that a third of cabinet ministers and the foreign minister responsible for the Middle East, have been courted by the Israeli government or pro-Israel lobby groups.
More than a third of the British cabinet, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has made overseas trips funded by the Israeli government or affiliated lobby groups, it can be revealed.
Of the 23 cabinet ministers, eight have been funded to visit Israel or Washington DC while members of parliament, to the tune of at least £14,000.
Johnson went on a five-day trip to Israel in November 2004, three years after he first entered parliament. It was jointly funded by the Israeli government and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), a powerful Westminster lobby group which does not disclose its funders but has claimed 80% of Conservative MPs are members.
CFI says it “works to promote its twin aims of supporting Israel and promoting Conservatism in the UK”.
Johnson did not declare the trip in his parliamentary register of interests until four years later, in 2008, and did not disclose the cost of the trip, which may be a breach of parliamentary standards. Former chancellor George Osborne, who was also on the trip, registered it two weeks after returning.
The only public record of the visit is an article in the Spectator magazine Johnson authored soon after, in which he refers to his “affable minder from the Israeli foreign office”.
In 2012, CFI organised a “battle bus” to take Johnson on a tour of north London as part of his London mayoral election campaign.
As mayor, in 2015, Johnson visited Israel again, saying on the trip there is “something Churchillian about the country” due to its “feats of outrageous derring-do”. Two years later, now foreign secretary, Johnson referred to the “miracle of Israel” at a CFI event.
Then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, tastes spices during a visit at the Mahane Yehuda market on 10 November 2015, in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo: Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
Five other ministers in the cabinet – Alok Sharma, Kwasi Kwarteng, Robert Jenrick, Oliver Dowden and Amanda Milling – took paid-for trips to Israel from 2011 to 2016. Kwarteng and Milling visited the year after they first entered parliament, while Dowden went before he became an MP.
A further two cabinet ministers, Michael Gove and Priti Patel, were funded to visit Washington DC to attend conferences put on by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier Israel lobby group in the US.
The UK government has been criticised for its backing of Israel’s bombing of schools, medical facilities, media organisations and residential towers in Gaza over the past 11 days.
At least 227 Palestinians in Gaza, including 121 civilians, have been killed since Israel’s bombardment began on 10 May, according to the health ministry in the territory. A ceasefire began early on Friday morning.
While the UK government repeatedly condemned the Palestinian group Hamas for firing rockets into Israel, it did not condemn Israel for launching hundreds of airstrikes on Gaza, an occupied territory.
At the height of the violence, Johnson said: “I am urging Israel and the Palestinians to step back from the brink and for both sides to show restraint. The UK is deeply concerned by the growing violence and civilian casualties and we want to see an urgent de-escalation of tensions.”
The UK government has so far refused to halt its arms exports to Israel and significant cooperation with the country’s military, which has deepened in recent years.
AIPAC
The home secretary, Priti Patel, was given £2,500 by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) in 2013 to be a delegate at a “forum” organised by AIPAC.
The London-based HJS does not disclose its funders but has a staunch pro-Israel position and close links to Israel. At least two HJS staffers have moved directly from the group to working for the Israeli foreign ministry, while the group’s executive director, Alan Mendoza, was a founding director of the Friends of Israel Initiative.
Patel was on the HJS’s “political council” in 2013, leaving at some point in 2016, and also previously served as parliamentary officer of CFI. She was later forced to resign as a minister in David Cameron’s government after it emerged she held secret meetings with several Israeli politicians during a “family holiday” to Israel in August 2017.
The meetings, including one with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were arranged by Lord Polak, the honorary president of CFI.
The head of the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove, is also closely associated with CFI and has spoken at its annual business lunch, describing Israel as a “light to the world” and “an inspiration”.
In 2017, Gove received over £3,000 from AIPAC to speak at its conference in Washington DC. The Henry Jackson Society also contributed to this trip. The previous year, the HJS had paid another £2,764 for Gove to fly to New York to pick up an award from pro-Israel newspaper, The Algemeiner Journal.
UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab is also closely associated with the HJS, having also sat on the group’s “political council” while minister for justice. It is not known what membership of this council involves or if Raab is still a member.
‘Fact-finding delegation’
In 2011, the year after he entered parliament, Kwasi Kwarteng, now minister for business, was funded by the Israeli foreign ministry to visit Israel, in a trip costing £1,242.
The other visits by now serving cabinet ministers were funded by CFI, and were mostly described as being part of a “fact-finding political delegation to Israel and the West Bank”. They lasted up to six days and cost between £1,500 and £2,000.
It is not known if the MPs were given Israeli “handlers” during their visits like Johnson, but the Israeli government is known to be involved in programming such trips.
The current minister for the COP26 climate negotiations, Alok Sharma, made a CFI-sponsored trip to Israel in 2013, while Oliver Dowden, now culture minister, went the following year.
In 2016, Robert Jenrick, now minister for housing and local government, visited alongside Amanda Milling, the current minister without portfolio, who had entered parliament the previous year.
According to CFI: “The centrepoint of the [2016 CFI] visit was a high-profile meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the announcement of the UK Government’s plans to stop local councils boycotting Israel.”
This announcement was made by Matt Hancock, then head of the Cabinet Office whose trip to Israel coincided with the CFI delegation. Hancock is now health secretary.
The CFI group also met then British ambassador to Israel, David Quarrey, at his residence in Tel Aviv. Quarrey is now Johnson’s international affairs adviser.
Robert Jenrick later called Israel “one of the great achievements in human history” at a CFI event. He told parliament last week that the UK government supports the idea that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”, a controversial position that could be regarded as itself anti-Semitic as it conflates all Jewish people with the state of Israel.
Meanwhile, the current Attorney General, Michael Ellis, who is not a minister but attends cabinet, went on a CFI-funded trip to Israel in 2014. Current foreign minister James Cleverly visited the following year, just three months after first entering parliament.
On his 2015 trip, Cleverly said: “Israel is an amazing country, there’s no doubt about that.” Now minister for the Middle East, Cleverly on Wednesday provided strong support for the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.
He told parliament: “The UK unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Jerusalem and other locations within Israel,” adding: “We strongly condemn these acts of terrorism by Hamas and other terrorist groups who must permanently end their incitement and rocket fire against Israel. There is no justification for the targeting of civilians.”
Cleverly also told parliament that his government opposes an International Criminal Court enquiry into Israeli war crimes in the occupied territories and continues to reject calls to halt arms exports to Israel and recognise a Palestinian state.
Aside from trips to Israel paid for by lobby groups, other members of Johnson’s cabinet have been funded by pro-Israel individuals. Defence secretary Ben Wallace has received a donation to his constituency party from Lord Steinberg, the founder and president of the Northern Ireland Friends of Israel group until his death in 2009.
Meanwhile, Liz Truss, minister for international trade, in 2015 received a donation from David Meller, a British businessman who was a director of CFI from 2012 to 2014. Meller has also donated to Michael Gove. DM
Matt Kennard is head of Investigations at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world.
As US regime-change agency NED admits interference in Belarus, leaked documents also implicate UK Foreign Office
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | May 21, 2021
The full extent of Western meddling in Belarus prior to the country’s contested August 2020 election may never be known. Yet the outlines of a wide-ranging foreign effort to destabilize the government are becoming ever clearer.
As RT reported earlier this week, a pair of Russian pranksters posing as Belarusian opposition figures have duped high-ranking representatives of US regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into exposing the extent of Washington’s clandestine involvement in the unrest that erupted across the country throughout 2020.
Among other bombshell disclosures, Nina Ognianova, who oversees the NED’s work with local groups in the country, suggested “a lot of the people” who were “trained” and “educated” via the organization’s various endeavors there were pivotal to “the events, or the build-up to the events, of last summer.”
Long-time NED chief Carl Gershman – who in September 2013, less than six months prior to the coup that shifted Kiev’s political orientation, dubbed Ukraine “the biggest prize” for Washington – added that his organization was working with controversial opposition figure Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and her team “very, very closely.” In all, the agency bankrolled at least 159 civil society initiatives in Belarus, costing $7,690,689, from 2016 to 2020 alone.
The team’s unguarded comments represent a rare public admission of the insidious, destabilizing role played by the NED – in 1991, its then-president acknowledged, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” However, leaked UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) files indicate that the US is far from the only foreign power attempting to undermine the country’s government.
In 2017, then-Prime Minister Theresa May unveiled a £100 million kitty, ostensibly for battling Kremlin disinformation. In practice, internal FCDO files leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous made clear the effort was primarily concerned with “weakening the Russian state’s influence,” particularly in its “near abroad.” As a close neighbor and arguably most important ally of Moscow, Belarus was unsurprisingly very much in the FCDO’s crosshairs.
In January of that year, Whitehall commissioned an extensive analysis of Belarusian citizens’ perceptions, motivations, and habits, in order to “identify opportunities” to “appropriately communicate” with them. In particular, London was interested in “existing or potential grievances against their national government” that could be exploited, and “channels and messages” by which the UK government could “appropriately engage with different sub-groups.”
The analysis was conducted by shadowy FCDO contractor Albany Associates, which has, in recent years, also conducted numerous information warfare operations in the Baltic states, in order to “develop greater affinity” among the region’s Russian-speaking minority for the UK, European Union and NATO. While carrying out another Whitehall-funded project targeted at Moscow, the firm closely collaborated with NED-connected French NGO IREX Europe.
An accompanying bio notes IREX has been working in Belarus since 2006 “with print, online and radio outlets,” to “improve the quality of their coverage,” and “increase their understanding of the EU and EU member states.” As part of its youth audience offering in the country, the organization was said to have founded the Warsaw-based Euroradio, along with online outlet 34mag.
Footage produced by Euroradio of violent crackdowns on protesters in Minsk was regularly aired by the Western media, including the BBC, during the strife. The outlet even specifically amplified calls from the British state broadcaster for activists to submit pictures and videos for use in news coverage. Franak Viacorka – an Atlantic Council senior fellow, and now senior advisor to Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – prominently hailed its “fearless” reporting of the upheaval.
Euroradio also repeatedly crops up in documents related to the Open Information Partnership (OIP), which is the “flagship” strand within Whitehall’s multi-pronged propaganda assault on Russia. Bankrolled by the FCDO to the tune of £10 million, the organization maintains a network of 44 partners across Central and Eastern Europe, including “journalists, charities, think tanks, academics, NGOs, activists, and factcheckers.” One of the collective’s primary, covert objectives is influencing “elections taking place in countries of particular interest” to the FCDO.
The classified files make clear the OIP has engaged in numerous astroturfing initiatives throughout the region, helping organizations and individuals produce slick propaganda masquerading as independent citizen journalism, which is then amplified globally via its network.
For instance, in Ukraine, the OIP worked with a 12-strong group of online ‘influencers’ “to counter Kremlin-backed messaging through innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models that reflected the complex and sensitive political environment,” in the process allowing them to “reach wider audiences with compelling content that received over four million views.”
In Russia and Central Asia, the OIP established a covert network of YouTubers, helping them create videos “promoting media integrity and democratic values.” Participants were also taught how to “make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding” and “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages,” while the consortium minimized their “risk of prosecution” and managed “project communications” to ensure the existence of the network, and indeed the OIP’s role, were kept “confidential.”
It would be entirely unsurprising if similar efforts were being undertaken in Belarus. After all, the country – along with Moldova and Ukraine – is referred to in the leaked documents as “the most vital space in the entire network,” and a “high-impact priority” for London, suggesting its 2020 election was very much “of interest” to Whitehall. If so, it would likewise be entirely unsurprising if many of the alleged so-called citizen journalists and media outlets covering the unrest in Minsk received funding and training from the OIP.
All along, too, MEMO 98, an OIP member coincidentally also funded by NED, kept a close eye on the incendiary proceedings, publishing several analyses of media coverage and social media activity related to the protests. It drew particular attention to the output of Belsat TV, a Warsaw-based channel – founded in December 2007 by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it seeks to influence political change in Belarus. MEMO 98 praised the station’s “extensive coverage of protests and related intimidation of activists.”
Strikingly, the leaked FCDO files indicate that Belsat TV received intensive, Whitehall-financed support from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the newswire’s international “charitable” wing, including 150 days’ consultancy in improving “TV output quality and audience reach.”
While the protests have largely fizzled out in recent months, and Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s calls for Western leaders to recognise her as the legitimate president of Belarus continue to fall on deaf ears, there are clear signs many other media platforms in Belarus receive life-giving sponsorship from London to this day.
In March 2021, the FCDO published an update on the progress of its global ‘Media Freedom Campaign’, which revealed that, over the past year, Whitehall had allocated £950,000 in financing to Belarusian news outlets, enabling them to “remain open and maintain a functional level of equipment.”
“Without this support, they would otherwise have been forced to close by government measures,” the document stated. “The funding has saved jobs and ensured that independent media can still hold the government to account during a period of increasingly violent action by the security forces.”
Evidently, even during a global pandemic, the regime-change show must go on – and the UK government is committed to ensuring people the world over continue to receive a steady deluge of slanted agitprop from the streets of Minsk, in order to turn public opinion against the government not only of Belarus, but of Russia too.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Hateful hypocrisy: In hate crime-obsessed Britain, vilifying Covid vaccine ‘refuseniks’ comes with establishment approval
By Neil Clark | RT | May 21, 2021
We hear so much in woke Britain about ‘hate crime’ and how terrible it is. But right now, we’re in the midst of an extremely nasty campaign against those who don’t wish to take a Covid vaccine and somehow that’s deemed acceptable.
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” From George Orwell’s ‘1984.’
“Selfish idiots.” “Refuseniks.” “Anti-vaxxer loonies.” “Holding the country to ransom.” “A menace to their own health and ours.” “They’re like drink drivers.” Just a few of the insults that have been hurled at Brits who, despite the biggest drug promotion campaign in our history, have decided they don’t wish to take one of the new-on-the-market Covid vaccines.
Freedom of choice? Bodily autonomy? They seem to have gone out of the window, along with all the other basic rights we have lost in Britain these past 15 months. The date is 2021, but we’re actually living in Orwell’s ‘1984,’ with its daily ‘Two Minutes Hate.’
A whole succession of obnoxious newspaper columnists, radio ‘shock jocks’ and some ‘celebrities’ have gone out of their way to be as rude as possible to those who don’t want to have a jab – and call for extreme measures to be used against them that would be more associated with a totalitarian state in mid-1930s Europe than a country which still styles itself a ‘democracy’. Or, indeed, with Pretoria, circa 1965.
Apartheid – which we all denounced when in place in South Africa – has had a 2021 public health makeover and is back in vogue, with ‘Covid vaccine passports’ replacing ‘pass laws.’
“Love the idea of covid vaccine passports for everywhere: flights, restaurants, clubs, football, gyms, shops etc. It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullsh*t bluff called & bar themselves from going anywhere that responsible citizens go,” tweeted media motormouth Piers Morgan.
Nick Cohen penned an article for the Observer entitled “It’s only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated.” “Rational people will ask why they should continue to accept restrictions on their freedoms because of ignorant delusions,” he wrote.
Columnist Richard Littlejohn went even further by calling for the unvaccinated to publicly declare themselves ‘Unclean.’ “If some people don’t like the idea of getting the jab, tough. I wouldn’t force them. But maybe refusniks should have to wear a bell round their necks and sport a sandwich board declaring themselves ‘Unclean’”, he wrote in the Daily Mail, in an article entitled “No jab, no job – it’s a no brainer.”
In similar vein there was Sean O’Grady, an associate editor of the supposedly ‘liberal’ Independent. His article, published earlier this week, was entitled “This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access.”
“The time has come when the hard choices are looming closer,” O’Grady opined. “If we don’t want this Covid crisis to last forever, we need some new simple, guidelines: No jab, no access to NHS healthcare; no jab, no state education for your kids. No jab, no access to pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, stadiums. No jab; no entry to the UK, and much else.” I think we’ve got your point Sean. You wouldn’t make vaccination mandatory, but the unvaccinated wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, or do anything. And if they got ill? Well they’d just have to die because they shouldn’t have access to NHS healthcare. All in the name of ‘the common good’.
On the same day that O’Grady’s piece was published, we had one Sarah Vine weighing in with her penny’worth, too. “We can’t let idiots who don’t want Covid vaccines hold us hostage” was the title of her screed published in the Daily Mail. “You are stupid. Weapons grade stupid,” is how she addressed those who don’t want to take the Coronavirus vaccine. Who cares what this poisonous Vine thinks, I can hear you ask? But actually, it does matter, because her husband is none other than Michael Gove, the UK government minister currently heading a review into vaccine passports. If Gove’s wife thinks the unvaccinated are “weapons grade stupid” then it hardly gives us confidence that her husband won’t decide to discriminate against them.
It’s not just in print that the attacks on ‘refuseniks’ are coming. It’s on the airwaves, too. Iain Dale berated the unvaccinated on his LBC radio call-in show earlier this week. “The fact that people still refuse to get the vaccine for whatever reason, I don’t really care what the reason is, they are not only putting themselves at risk – they are putting other people at risk,” he said. “If you are 50, 60, 70, 80 years old and you still haven’t availed yourself of the opportunity of having the vaccine, I’m afraid you need your head read. You need your head examined. You are a selfish individual.”
Repeat after me: “I am a selfish individual. I am a selfish individual.” Gaslighting really doesn’t get any more obvious.
At least Dale didn’t suggest putting poison into ‘refuseniks’ coffee as his LBC colleague Shelagh Fogarty did. “I’d literally be in fights with these people (vaccine decliners),” she told a caller. “How do you keep seeing them at work without wanting to poison their coffee.”
Let’s not mince words: We are dealing here with the very open, plain-view demonisation of a group of people, with no consequences for those who are doing the demonisation. And all this is happening, lest we forget, in ‘woke’ times when anything you say might be seen as ‘offence’, ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘genderism’ or a form of ‘ism’ or ‘phobia.’
To see the egregious double standards, just replace the ‘unvaccinated’ with a minority racial or religious group. But the unvaccinated are fair game. Hate crime, according to the Crown Prosecution Service website, “can be used to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.” Vaccine status is not a “protected characteristic” so it seems people can be as hateful to the unvaccinated as they like.
But that doesn’t make what’s going on right. Far from it.
If someone is vaccinated, why should they care if someone else isn’t? We never had these arguments before about the flu jab. Either the vaccine works to protect the vaccinated, or it doesn’t. Nor were those who decided not to have a flu vaccine labelled ‘anti-vaxxers.’ You can be generally pro-vaccination, but have rational ‘wait and see’ reservations about the new-on-the-market Coronavirus ones, especially if your chances of becoming ill or indeed dying from Covid are extremely low. But that nuanced position is simply not recognised in the current, coercive ‘Just take the bloody jab’ hysteria.
As for the line that it is the unvaccinated who are holding the country hostage by putting in jeopardy an end to Covid restrictions? Sarah Vine really needs to look closer to home. Literally. It was the government of which her husband is a prominent member which assured us that life would be back to normal as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated. In an interview with The Spectator in January, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he would “Cry freedom” as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated.
But we still don’t have freedom. The goalposts have moved from vaccinating the ‘most vulnerable’ to now vaccinating everyone. Is it any surprise there are those who wonder if this is motivated by the introduction of vaccine passports, which in turn could lead to other digitised social credit systems?
But, conveniently, it’s the vaccine ‘refuseniks’, the current subject of the daily Orwellian Two Minutes Hate, who are being blamed for continued restrictions and not the authorities. In these toxic times, ‘divide and rule’ has never been more blatant.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.
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The Balfour Declaration – A Century of Jewish Power
By Gilad Atzmon | May 17, 2017
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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