Villains of Judea: Ronald Lauder and his War on American Dissent
For Lauder, Israel always comes first.

José Niño Unfiltered | December 16, 2025
World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder likes to present himself as a civic minded elder statesman, a sober billionaire warning America about a rising tide of antisemitism.
At the Israel Hayom Summit on December 2, 2025, he framed the moment as a crisis of the West itself, calling it “a full-scale assault on truth, on democracy, and on the safety of Jewish people everywhere,” and insisting, “This is not normal. And it is not ‘just criticism of Israel.’ It is the world’s oldest hatred, once again wearing political clothing.”
Lauder was referring to the rise of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment worldwide in the wake of Israel’s 2-year bombing campaign in Gaza.
Then he sharpened the spear and aimed it at domestic enemies like Tucker Carlson, who has been one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the post-October 7 reality we live in. He told the audience, “Tucker Carlson is the Father Coughlin of our generation.” In the same speech he warned that complacency is over, because “antisemitism is rampant throughout our culture,” and he demanded a political and institutional counteroffensive.
That is the Lauder formula in its purest form. He wraps a totalizing political program in the language of safety and moral emergency, then treats America’s public life as territory to be reorganized around his crusade. The target is never merely hatred. The target is dissent, drift, and disobedience from the priorities he has chosen, priorities that consistently put Israel first.
Lauder did not arrive at this posture late in life. He was born into power in New York City in 1944, the heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, raised in elite institutions, and trained for international influence through business and foreign policy studies. He entered the family company early, then moved into government in the Reagan era, where he served at the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO policy.
Ronald Reagan then tapped him as U.S. ambassador to Austria in 1986. In Vienna, he did not behave like a neutral American emissary. He turned his diplomatic post into a stage for historical confrontation and political signaling. Lauder refused to attend the inauguration of Austria’s president Kurt Waldheim amid allegations of him being involved in or being aware of National Socialist atrocities in the Balkans during his service as a German army lieutenant in World War II. He also fired U.S. diplomat Felix Bloch for engaging in suspected espionage activities.
After government service, Lauder tried to convert his vast wealth into formal power at home. In 1989, he ran for mayor of New York City as a Republican, where he spent big bucks to get his name out and campaign to the right of Rudy Giuliani, only to lose the primary. Even in defeat, the pattern held. He treated politics as an arena where money does all the talking, and he kept looking for levers that could bend public life to his will.
He found one in term limits. During the 1990s he poured resources into imposing term limits on New York City officials, selling it as a democratic reform and a check on machine party politics. Yet in 2008, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted a third term, Lauder reversed course and supported extending those limits, a turn that mainstream critics interpreted as a billionaire bargain dressed up as civic necessity. However, from the perspective of long-time observers of Jewish behavior, Lauder’s support for Bloomberg reflects a pattern of co-ethnic solidarity among Jewish power brokers.
While Lauder played these games in New York, his real career was consolidating leadership in the organized Jewish political world. Notably, Lauder was a member of the Mega Group—a mysterious network of Jewish oligarchs that worked behind the scenes to advance Jewish interests and strengthen pro-Israel bonds among Jews in America. Leslie Wexner, founder of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret, and the late Jewish sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein were among the most prominent members of this Jewish consortium. By 2007, Lauder had become president of the World Jewish Congress, a position that turned him into a roaming power broker who meets heads of state and treats international politics as a permanent lobbying campaign.
From that perch, he repeatedly framed Western security architecture as a vehicle for Israeli priorities. In 2011, he publicly argued that Israel should be admitted into NATO, insisting, “Israel needs real guarantees for its security,” and pressing NATO states to bring Israel into the alliance.
In 2012, he attacked European pressure campaigns on Israel with maximalist rhetoric. When Irish officials floated an EU ban on goods from Israeli communities in the West Bank, Lauder called boycott talk “cynical and hypocritical,” and declared, “Minister Gilmore is taking aim at the only liberal democracy in the Middle East while keeping quiet about those who really wreak havoc in the region: the Assads, Ahmadinejads and their allies Hezbollah and Hamas.” He added that the West Bank was “legally disputed and not illegally occupied.”
He carried the same posture with respect to Iran — enemy #1 for world Jewry at the moment. In 2013, as Western diplomats negotiated with Tehran, he mocked their perceived softness and conjured Munich analogies, warning, “Just as the West gave up Czechoslovakia to Hitler in Munich in 1938, we see what is happening again and the world is silent,” and boasting, “Frankly, only France stands between us and a nuclear Iran.” In 2015, he escalated again, attacking the nuclear deal with a moral curse, saying, “The road to hell is often paved with good intentions,” and arguing that the agreement could revive Iran economically without stopping long term nuclear ambitions.
The story kept darkening as his proximity to Israeli power deepened. In 2016, Israeli police questioned Lauder in connection with “Case 1000,” the Netanyahu gifts affair. Reports said investigators sought his testimony because of his closeness to Netanyahu and the broader allegations involving luxury gifts and favors. Lauder was not charged, but the episode revealed how near he operated to Israel’s governing circle, not as an outside friend, but as part of the broader, transnational Jewish network.
By 2023, he openly wielded donor money as a disciplinary weapon in American institutions. After the October 7 attacks and campus controversies, he warned the University of Pennsylvania that, “You are forcing me to reexamine my financial support absent satisfactory measures to address antisemitism.” The message was simple. If a prestigious American university fails to police speech and activism the way he demands, he will squeeze it financially until it complies.
In 2025, Lauder continued supporting Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. He categorically rejected the idea that Israel bears any responsibility for ending the conflict, insisting, “The truth is simple: the war could end tomorrow if Hamas were to release the remaining hostages and disarm.” On education and propaganda, he stopped pretending the solution is persuasion alone. At the World Jewish Congress gala in November 2025, he argued that the education pipeline must be rebuilt from the ground up, declaring, “The entire education system — K-12 to college — must be retaught,” and adding, “It’s time we fight back with stronger PR to tell the truth.”
He also made the threat explicit. In a widely shared clip, he vowed, “Any candidate running for a seat… whose platform includes antisemitism, we will target them as they target us.”
Like most of the Israel First set, Lauder was ecstatic about the toppling of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria in late 2024. In September 2025, he met former al-Qaeda terrorist-turned Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly and afterward said, “We had a very positive discussion about normalization between Israel and Syria.”
Seen in order, the picture is not complicated. Lauder builds influence through money, embeds himself in elite institutions, and uses both to steer policy and culture toward a relentless Zionist agenda. He does not talk like a man defending American sovereignty. He talks like an agent of world Jewry who expects America’s parties, schools, media, and alliances to function as enforcement arms for a foreign cause.
That is why his December 2025 sermon about antisemitism matters. It is not only a warning. It is a blueprint. When Lauder says “If we don’t tell our own story, others will rewrite it,” he is not describing a cultural debate. He is declaring ownership over the narrative, and claiming the right to punish anyone in American life who refuses to repeat it.
In the end, Ronald Lauder emerges not as a guardian of American civic life but as a disciplined enforcer of a foreign political creed, using wealth, intimidation, and moral blackmail to bend institutions to his will. What he calls a fight against hatred looks increasingly like a campaign to subordinate American sovereignty, speech, and policy to the imperatives of Israel and the transnational Jewish clique that sustains it.
The Folly of Establishing a U.S. Military Base in Damascus
By José Niño | The Libertarian Institute | December 16, 2025
Recent reports indicate the United States is preparing to establish a military presence at an airbase in Damascus, allegedly to facilitate a security agreement between Syria and Israel. This development represents yet another misguided expansion of American military overreach in a region where Washington has already caused tremendous damage through decades of failed interventionist policies.
The United States currently operates approximately 750 to 877 military installations across roughly eighty countries worldwide. This staggering number represents about 70 to 85% of all foreign military bases globally. To put this in perspective, the next eighteen countries with foreign bases combined maintain only 370 installations total. Russia has just twenty-nine foreign bases, and China operates merely six. The American empire of bases already dwarfs every other nation combined, and the financial burden is crushing. Washington spends approximately $65 billion annually just to build and maintain these overseas installations, with total spending on foreign bases and personnel reaching over $94 billion per year.
These figures are not abstract accounting entries. They translate directly into American lives placed in volatile environments, as demonstrated by the recent insider attack in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, where a purported ISIS infiltrator embedded in local security forces turned his weapon on a joint U.S. Syrian patrol, killing two U.S. soldiers and one U.S. civilian during what was described as a routine field tour. The incident underscores how the sprawling U.S. basing network increasingly exposes American personnel to unpredictable and lethal blowback in unstable theaters far from home.
Syria itself already hosts between 1,500 and 2,000 American troops, primarily concentrated in the northeastern Hasakah province and at the Al Tanf base in the Syrian Desert. The Pentagon recently announced plans to reduce this presence to fewer than 1,000 personnel and consolidated operations from eight installations to just three. Yet now, despite this supposed drawdown, Washington reportedly plans to establish a new presence in Damascus itself, either at Mezzeh Air Base or Al Seen Military Airport. This contradictory expansion reveals the hollow nature of promises to reduce American military commitments abroad.
Since the fall of Bashar al Assad in December 2024, Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian military and civilian infrastructure while occupying parts of southern Syria including Quneitra and Daraa. Israel has systematically violated the 1974 disengagement agreement and expanded control over buffer zones. These actions align disturbingly well with the Yinon Plan, a 1982 Israeli strategic document by Israeli foreign policy official Oded Yinon that envisions the dissolution of surrounding Arab states into smaller ethnic and religious entities. The plan explicitly calls for fragmenting Syria along its ethnic and religious lines to prevent a strong centralized government that could challenge Israeli interests.
A permanent American military presence in Damascus would effectively serve as a tripwire guaranteeing continued U.S. involvement in securing Israeli strategic objectives in the Levant. Rather than protecting American interests or enhancing national security, such a base would entrench Washington deeper into regional conflicts that have consistently proven disastrous for both American taxpayers and Middle Eastern populations.
The human cost of American intervention in Syria should give any policymaker pause. The Syrian Civil War has resulted in between 617,000 and 656,000 deaths, including civilians, rebels, and government forces. More than 7.4 million people remain internally displaced within Syria, while approximately 6.3 million Syrian refugees live abroad. This catastrophic toll stems partly from Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA covert program that ran from 2012 to 2017 to train and equip Syrian rebel forces.
Timber Sycamore represented a joint effort involving American intelligence services along with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The CIA ran secret training camps in Jordan and Turkey, providing rebels with small arms, ammunition, trucks, and eventually advanced weaponry like BGM 71 TOW anti-tank missiles. Saudi Arabia provided significant funding while the United States supplied training and logistical support.
The program proved to be counterproductive. Jordanian intelligence officers stole and sold millions of dollars worth of weapons intended for rebels on the black market. Even worse, U.S.-supplied weapons regularly fell into the hands of the al Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, and ISIS itself. The program inadvertently strengthened the very extremists Washington was ostensibly fighting.
The failure of Timber Sycamore illustrates a fundamental problem with American interventionism in Syria. Washington has pursued regime change in Damascus in various forms for decades, yet these efforts have consistently backfired, creating power vacuums filled by jihadist groups and prolonging devastating conflicts. The current enthusiasm for establishing a military presence in Damascus suggests American policymakers have learned absolutely nothing from these failures.
The figure now leading Syria exemplifies the moral bankruptcy of this entire enterprise. Ahmed al Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al Julani, currently serves as president of Syria’s interim government. This represents a stunning rehabilitation for a man who founded al Nusra Front in 2012 as an al-Qaeda affiliate and later formed Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) by merging various rebel factions. Under the name Abu Mohammad al Julani, he was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the United States on July 24, 2013, with a $10 million bounty maintained on his head.
Al Sharaa’s terrorist designation stemmed from his leadership of al Nusra Front, which perpetrated numerous war crimes including suicide bombings, forced conversions, ethnic cleansing, and sectarian massacres against Christian, Alawite, Shia, and Druze minorities. He fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq, spent time imprisoned at Camp Bucca between 2006 and 2010, and was dispatched to Syria by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in 2011 with $50,000 to establish al Nusra. His close associates have faced accusations from the United States of overseeing torture, kidnappings, trafficking, ransom schemes, and displacing residents to seize property. The New York Times reported that his group was accused of initially operating under al-Qaeda’s umbrella.
Yet in November 2025, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 2799, removing al Sharaa and Interior Minister Anas Khattab from the ISIL and al-Qaeda sanctions list. The U.S. Treasury Department followed suit, delisting him from the Specially Designated Global Terrorist registry. This reversal came after the State Department revoked HTS’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation in July 2025. Washington essentially decided that a former al-Qaeda commander who oversaw sectarian massacres was now a legitimate partner worthy of American military support. This absurd rehabilitation demonstrates how completely untethered American foreign policy has become from any coherent moral framework or strategic logic.
Critics rightly question whether al Sharaa has truly broken from his extremist roots or merely engaged in calculated political rebranding. The speed with which Washington embraced him as a legitimate leader suggests American policymakers care far more about advancing Israeli interests and maintaining regional influence than about genuine counterterrorism or protecting religious minorities.
The United States needs to pursue a fundamentally different approach to foreign policy. Rather than establishing yet another military base to advance Israeli strategic objectives in Syria, Washington should implement a comprehensive drawdown of overseas military commitments. The hundreds of foreign bases it maintains abroad represent an unsustainable burden that diverts resources from genuine national security priorities like border security and stability in the Western Hemisphere. American taxpayers deserve better than footing the bill for an empire that consistently fails to advance their interests while enriching defense contractors and serving foreign powers.
Syria offers a perfect case study in the futility of American interventionism. Decades of attempts at regime change through covert programs like Timber Sycamore and direct military presence have produced nothing but chaos, empowered jihadist groups, created millions of refugees, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The rehabilitation of a former al-Qaeda commander into Syria’s president illustrates how divorced American policy has become from any coherent strategy or values.
Rather than doubling down on failed policies, the United States should pursue strategic restraint, scale back its sprawling network of foreign bases, and allow regional powers to sort out their own affairs without American military involvement. That represents the path toward a more sustainable, affordable, and morally defensible foreign policy. The Damascus base proposal deserves to be rejected outright as yet another wasteful expansion of an already overextended military empire.
US strikes three vessels in Eastern Pacific, killing eight
Al Mayadeen | December 16, 2025
The United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) announced that it launched deadly strikes on three vessels allegedly involved in drug trafficking in international waters in the Eastern Pacific, resulting in the deaths of eight people.
The strikes were carried out on December 15, under the orders of US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, according to an official statement posted on X.
“Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted lethal kinetic strikes on three vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters,” SOUTHCOM said.
The military reported that all individuals killed were adult males: three aboard the first vessel, two on the second, and three on the third.
While the US claims the targeted vessels were engaged in narco-trafficking, no verification of the alleged links to terrorism or drug networks has been provided for any of the 26 boats it struck. Critics, lawmakers, and legal experts have denounced the strikes as illegal under international law.
Part of a broader Trump-led coercion campaign
The latest strikes come amid a wider US military campaign launched by US President Donald Trump targeting so-called drug smuggling routes in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, including areas near Venezuela.
According to US officials, American forces have struck more than 20 vessels as part of the campaign, with at least 90 suspected drug smugglers reported killed so far. The operations represent a significant escalation and a marked departure from previous US approaches, which traditionally relied on interdictions, arrests, and prosecutions rather than direct military force.
Although the strategy has been widely criticized for its effectiveness in addressing the opioid epidemic in the United States, particularly given that Venezuela is not a source or transit hub for drug trafficking routes to the US, Trump and senior administration officials have continued to level baseless accusations against Caracas. Additionally, Washington has transferred an expansive force to the Caribbean, including its most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.
Legal controversy and international concerns
“Our operations in the Southcom region are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict,” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson told reporters earlier this month.
Critics, however, have questioned the application of the Law of Armed Conflict outside a declared armed conflict, particularly in international waters and against individuals not formally designated as combatants. Under the United Nations Charter, the use of force by one state against another, including against that state’s vessels on the high seas, is generally prohibited unless the target has conducted an armed attack or the action is authorized by the UN Security Council or undertaken in legitimate self-defense.
Legal analysts have pointed out that there is no credible evidence presented to suggest that the vessels struck were engaged in an armed attack against the United States, meaning the strikes lack a clear legal basis under international law.
Another major issue arose from a controversial September strike in the Caribbean, in which US forces hit a suspected drug-smuggling vessel. After the initial attack, which killed the majority of those aboard, surveillance reportedly showed two survivors in the water.
According to multiple accounts, the operation’s commander authorized a second strike on those survivors, based on a directive that those on board should be left with no survivors. Legal experts and lawmakers have warned that targeting individuals who are no longer actively resisting or posing an imminent threat, “hors de combat” under international humanitarian law, is a war crime and violates both the Geneva Conventions and customary law prohibitions on denying quarter.
Trump Files Sweeping $10 Billion Lawsuit Against BBC — Exposing a Global Machinery of Narrative Suppression
By Sayer Ji | December 15, 2025
President Donald Trump has filed a sweeping defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), alleging that the UK’s state-backed broadcaster deliberately edited his words to falsely portray him as inciting violence. You can view my report on the details of the initiating event here.
The 33 page suit, filed in U.S. federal court, seeks billions in damages and cites internal whistleblower documents, leadership resignations, and a documented pattern of prior misconduct to argue that the edit was not an error — but an intentional act of malice with real-world and political consequences.
The lawsuit stems from a BBC Panorama documentary that spliced together two separate portions of Trump’s January 6 speech — spoken nearly an hour apart — while omitting his explicit call for peaceful protest. According to the complaint, this manipulation created a false impression that Trump urged violence. The BBC has since issued a formal apology, withdrawn the documentary, and seen its Director-General and Head of News resign in disgrace.
But the significance of the case extends far beyond a single documentary or a single speech.
For the first time, a court filing squarely places legal scrutiny on the institution that has long functioned as a global arbiter of “misinformation” — and asks whether that authority has been weaponized against American political speech.
A Defamation Case With Systemic Implications
At face value, Trump’s lawsuit is a high-profile defamation action against one of the world’s most powerful media institutions. Yet embedded in the filing is a far more consequential allegation: that the BBC knowingly falsified political speech in pursuit of a narrative objective, and did so as part of a repeat pattern rather than a one-off lapse.
The complaint cites an internal memorandum by a former BBC editorial standards adviser who concluded that the edit “materially misled viewers,” as well as evidence that senior leadership was warned in advance. It also documents prior BBC broadcasts that used similar splicing techniques to misrepresent Trump’s words, including a 2022 Newsnight segment and a separate 2024 incident in which BBC presenters falsely suggested Trump had called for a political opponent to be shot.
In other words, the lawsuit alleges not mere negligence, but institutional intent.
That distinction matters — because it forces a broader reckoning with how narrative authority is exercised, exported, and enforced.
Why the BBC Matters More Than This Case
The BBC is not just another media outlet. It is a globally trusted, publicly funded broadcaster whose reporting is routinely cited by governments, technology companies, NGOs, and newsrooms worldwide.
Remarkably, US taxpayers have historically been compelled to fund BBC through USAID, as reported below.
USAID & BBC Caught Laundering Censorship—Unconstitutional & Unforgivable!
Moreover, British citizens are forced to pay the BBC license fees, even if they don’t use the service, with non-payment resulting in tens of thousands of prosecutions annually. You can find more details on this here.
When the BBC labels something “dangerous,” “extreme,” or “misinformation,” those labels do not remain confined to British television screens.
They travel.
For years, BBC investigations — particularly through programs like BBC Click — have been used to frame American websites, platforms, and political movements as threats to public order. In fact, their 2020 collaboration with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the US-Based NewsGuard listing 34 sites they wanted demonetized and removed from the internet including GreenMedInfo.com (yours truly), which I documented in detail here.
Those framings have then been echoed by advocacy groups, relied upon by technology companies, and quietly incorporated into content moderation policies, reputational risk assessments, and even intelligence briefings that labeled dissenting voices challenging medical orthodoxies as equivalent to domestic extremists.
This is how narrative power becomes operational power.
Trump’s lawsuit matters because it places that process — long taken for granted — under legal examination.
Before Trump: How the Architecture Was Built
Long before the BBC edited Trump’s speech, it had already positioned itself at the center of a transnational ecosystem that defines and enforces acceptable discourse.
Through partnerships with non-governmental organizations, alignment with “counter-disinformation” initiatives, and collaboration with philanthropic and government-adjacent funding streams, the BBC helped construct a system in which certain viewpoints could be labeled, marginalized, and suppressed — often without any judicial process or meaningful recourse.
That system did not begin with Trump.
Years earlier, similar mechanisms were deployed against U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., against independent media platforms, and against journalists whose speech was lawful under U.S. law but nonetheless treated as suspect once filtered through foreign media authority.
At the time, these actions were routinely dismissed as editorial disagreement or platform policy enforcement. In light of the Trump lawsuit, they now appear less accidental — and more like early applications of a model that would later be used against a sitting president.
From Narrative Framing to Enforcement
What the Trump case exposes is not simply bias, but a supply chain of suppression:
- Media institutions generate authoritative narratives
- NGOs and advocacy groups translate those narratives into risk frameworks
- Technology platforms operationalize them through moderation and deplatforming
- Targets — often U.S. citizens — absorb the consequences without due process
Once established, this architecture allows reputational harm and speech suppression to occur at scale, while responsibility remains diffuse and accountability elusive.
The BBC’s unique role in this system is precisely why Trump’s lawsuit is so consequential. It targets the node where authority originates — not merely where enforcement occurs.
A Personal Note of Corroboration
I have seen this system up close. Years before Trump filed suit, my own reporting and platforms were targeted following BBC-, ISD, Newsguard, and CCDH-linked reporting and targeting that framed lawful health and policy speech as dangerous. Some of these reports even made it into foreign court proceedings, to which I was not a party and had no standing, but nonetheless was named as a ‘shadow defendant.’ At the time, there was no mechanism to challenge those labels — only consequences to endure. More details of my plight can be found here.
Trump’s lawsuit does not vindicate any single individual. It does something more important: it makes visible the machinery that was previously invisible — and untouchable.
Why This Moment Is Different
Trump is not the first to be harmed by this system. But he may be the first with sufficient power, evidence, and legal standing to force it into the open.
Whether the lawsuit ultimately succeeds or fails on the merits, it has already accomplished something unprecedented: it has transformed what was once dismissed as “media controversy” into a matter of legal accountability.
That shift should concern anyone who cares about free expression, democratic self-governance, and the dangers of unaccountable narrative power — regardless of political affiliation.
The Rise of the Isaac Accords: How Israel is Redrawing South America’s Political Landscape
This is not neutral cooperation. It is political conditionality.
By Freddie Ponton | 21st Century Wire | December 15, 2025
Foreign influence in the Global South rarely arrives in uniform. It comes disguised as ethics, stability, and shared values, only revealing its true cost once the rules are set. In Latin America, such a transformation is now underway. A new architecture of alignment is being quietly assembled, presented as moral course correction but functioning as a geopolitical filter. At its core lie the Isaac Accords, a project deliberately modelled on the Abraham Accords. Where the latter normalised Israel’s position in the Middle East through elite deals brokered by Washington, the Isaac Accords aim to reorder Latin American politics by locking governments, economies, and security institutions into Israeli and U.S. strategic orbit.
The Accords are not simply about Israel’s image or diplomatic isolation. They operate as a filter of legitimacy: governments that align are embraced, financed, and promoted; those that resist are marginalised, sanctioned, or framed as moral outliers. Venezuela, long aligned with Palestine and the broader Axis of Non-Alignment, sits squarely in the crosshairs.
This article examines how the Isaac Accords function in practice, why figures such as Javier Milei and María Corina Machado have become central to their rollout, and what this strategy reveals about Israel’s ambitions in South America, not as a neutral partner, but as an active geopolitical actor working in tandem with U.S. power.
The Isaac Accords: A Latin American Reboot of the Abraham Model
The Isaac Accords did not emerge in a vacuum. They are consciously modelled on the Abraham Accords, which rebranded Israel’s regional integration in the Middle East as “peace” while bypassing Palestinian self-determination entirely. The lesson Israeli and U.S. policymakers appear to have drawn is simple: normalisation works best when imposed from above, through elite alignment, financial incentives, and security integration.
The Accords are administered through a U.S.-based nonprofit, American Friends of the Isaac Accords, and financially seeded through institutions closely linked to Israeli state and diaspora networks. Their stated aim is to counter antisemitism and hostility toward Israel. Their operational requirements, however, reveal a far broader ambition.
Countries seeking entry are expected to:
- Relocate embassies to Jerusalem, recognising Israeli sovereignty over a contested city
- Redesignate Hamas and Hezbollah in line with Israeli security doctrine
- Reverse voting patterns at the UN and the OAS, where Latin America has historically voted in favour of Palestinian rights
- Enter intelligence-sharing agreements targeting Chinese, Iranian, Cuban, Bolivian, and Venezuelan influence
- Open strategic sectors: water, agriculture, digital governance, security, to Israeli firms
Israel’s own diplomats have described the Isaac Accords as a way to pull “undecided” Latin American states into Israel’s orbit at a moment when European public opinion has become less reliable. In other words, the Global South is being repositioned as Israel’s strategic rear guard.
The role of Javier Milei in Argentina illustrates how this model operates. Milei has not merely improved relations with Israel; he has embraced it as an ideological reference point. He has pledged to move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, framed Israel as a civilisational ally, and positioned himself as the Isaac Accords’ flagship political figure.

Co-Founder and Chairman of The Genesis Prize Foundation Stan Polovets presents prize to 2025 Laureate Javier Milei on June 12 in Jerusalem. (Source: American Friends of Isaac Accords)
That role was formalised in 2025 when Milei became the Genesis Prize Laureate, an award frequently described as the “Jewish Nobel Prize.” The Genesis Prize is not politically neutral. It is explicitly awarded to figures who strengthen Israel’s global standing and its ties with the diaspora. Milei’s decision to donate the prize money directly back into the Isaac Accords ecosystem symbolised how moral recognition, political allegiance, and financing now operate as a single circuit.
This is alignment rewarded, visibly, materially, and publicly.
As reported by AP in August, the Isaac Accords are set to extend to Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and potentially El Salvador by 2026, as stated by the organizers, the American Friends of the Isaac Accords.
Recent New York Times reporting situates Brad Parscale’s involvement in the Honduran election within Numen, a Buenos Aires–based political consultancy he co-founded with Argentine strategist Fernando Cerimedo, highlighting how transnational firms operate beyond traditional regulatory scrutiny. Critics warn that Numen’s methods reflect a broader global political influence ecosystem that often draws on data-driven targeting, psychological profiling, and digital amplification techniques associated with Israeli-linked political technology and messaging firms that have operated in elections worldwide.
When combined with U.S. political endorsements, strategic pardons, and offshore consulting structures, this model raises serious concerns about how advanced data analytics and covert messaging infrastructures are used to shape voter behavior in vulnerable democracies, eroding electoral sovereignty while remaining largely insulated from accountability.
Venezuela, Palestine, and the Manufacturing of Illegitimacy
If the Isaac Accords require a moral antagonist, Venezuela fulfils that role perfectly.
Since Hugo Chávez severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009, in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza, Venezuela has positioned itself as one of Palestine’s most consistent supporters in the Western Hemisphere. Chávez, and later Nicolás Maduro, framed Palestinian resistance not as terrorism but as an anti-colonial struggle, aligning Venezuela with much of the Global South rather than the Atlantic bloc.
Under the Isaac Accords’ logic, this position is intolerable.
Opposition to Israel is no longer treated as a political stance but as evidence of extremism or antisemitism. Zionism and Judaism are deliberately conflated, allowing criticism of Israeli state policy to be reframed as hatred. This narrative provides the moral justification for isolation, sanctions, and, potentially, regime change.

Maria Corina Machado in Venezuela, Thursday, July 25, 2024. (Source: AP – Matias Delacroix)
Into this context steps María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition figure most warmly received by Israeli and U.S. political networks. Machado’s alignment with Israel is not rhetorical or recent. In 2020, her party, Vente Venezuela, signed a formal inter-party cooperation agreement with Israel’s ruling Likud Party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. The agreement committed both parties to shared political values, strategic cooperation, and ideological alignment.
This is a remarkable document. It ties a Venezuelan opposition movement directly to a foreign ruling party, well before any democratic transition, and signals how a post-Maduro Venezuela is expected to orient itself internationally.
DOCUMENT: Vente Venezuela signs cooperation agreement with Israel’s Likud party – Agreement signed by María Corina Machado and Eli Vered Hazan, representing Likud’s Foreign Relations Division (Source: Vente Venezuela)
Machado has since gone further, pledging to:
- Restore full diplomatic relations with Israel
- Move Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem
- Open Venezuela’s economy to privatisation and foreign investment
- Align Venezuela with Israel and the United States against Iran and regional leftist governments
Her narrative rests on a crucial claim: that Venezuela itself is not anti-Israel, only its government is. According to this framing, Venezuelans are inherently pro-Israel and pro-West, their “true” preferences suppressed by an illegitimate regime.
In a November interview with Israel Hayom, Machado asserted that “The Venezuelan people deeply admire Israel.”
This argument is politically useful and historically thin. Venezuelan solidarity with Palestine predates Maduro and reflects a wider Latin American tradition of identifying with colonised peoples. To erase that history is to deny Venezuelans their own political agency.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has repeatedly accused the Venezuelan government of fomenting “anti-Israel” and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Yet, a closer look tells a different story. Caracas’ statements are largely expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination, combined with pointed criticism of Israeli state policies. By framing these positions as attacks on Jews or Israel itself, the ADL distorts the narrative, turning principled political stances into a perceived moral failing. This tactic underscores a broader pattern in which international organizations can paint Global South governments as rogue actors whenever they resist the gravitational pull of Israeli and U.S. influence, subtly laying the groundwork for diplomatic pressure or intervention.
DOCUMENT: Mini report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, accuses Venezuela of fuelling an incendiary anti-Israel and anti-Semitic environment.(Source (ADL)
Security, Economics, and the Cost of Obedience
Beneath the moral language of the Isaac Accords lies a familiar architecture of control: security integration, economic restructuring, and ideological discipline.
Israel is a leading exporter of surveillance technologies, border systems, cyber-intelligence platforms, and urban security tools, many developed under conditions of occupation and internal repression. In South America, these systems are marketed as solutions to crime and narcotrafficking, but their real function is often political: expanding state surveillance capacity during periods of transition.
Security cooperation creates dependency. Once intelligence-sharing, training, and doctrine are integrated, political autonomy narrows. Policy divergence, particularly toward China, BRICS, or non-aligned partners, becomes risky.
The economic dimension is equally strategic. Israeli firms are deeply involved in water rights, desalination, agrotechnology, digital governance, and infrastructure, sectors that determine long-term sovereignty. These investments are typically tied to privatisation, deregulation, and long-term concessions, transferring control of strategic resources away from the public sphere.
Venezuela is the ultimate prize. A post-sanctions transition would open one of the world’s most resource-rich economies to restructuring. Machado’s commitment to rapid privatisation aligns seamlessly with this vision, raising an unavoidable question: who benefits from “democracy” when it arrives pre-packaged with foreign economic priorities?
This strategy is inseparable from U.S. power. The Trump administration’s framing of global politics as a permanent war on terror and narcotrafficking, a framing echoed by figures like Marco Rubio, has provided cover for sanctions, covert operations, and extrajudicial violence across the Caribbean and Pacific. Israel’s partnership reinforces this logic, supplying both technology and moral framing.
Conclusion: The Global South and the Right to Choose
The Isaac Accords are not simply about Israel’s diplomatic standing. They are about reordering South America’s political horizon at a moment when the Global South is rediscovering multipolarity.
Israel’s role in this process is active, strategic, and consequential. Through political patronage, economic leverage, security integration, and narrative control, it is shaping which governments are deemed legitimate and which are disposable.
For South America, and the wider Global South, the warning is familiar. When alignment is framed as morality, dissent becomes deviance. When sovereignty is conditional, development serves external interests. When history is rewritten, intervention soon follows.
Non-alignment was never about isolation. It was about the right to choose. That very right, today, is being quietly renegotiated, and the cost of refusing may soon become very clear.
Hamas says Israel’s killing of senior commander threatens Gaza ceasefire
Press TV – December 14, 2025
Hamas chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya has warned that Israel’s targeted assassination of a senior commander of the movement threatens the “viability of the truce” in the besieged Gaza Strip.
He confirmed the killing of Commander Raed Saad in a video statement on Sunday, and slammed Israel for violating the ceasefire.
“The continued Israeli violations of the ceasefire agreement…and latest assassinations that targeted Saad and others threaten the viability of the agreement,” he said.
The Israeli military reported Saad’s death in an attack near Gaza City, which also wounded at least 25 people. This marks the highest-profile assassination of a Hamas figure since the US-backed Gaza ceasefire began in October.
Al-Hayya emphasized that progress is unattainable unless mediators compel Israel to adhere to the ceasefire’s first phase. He called on mediators, particularly the US administration, to ensure Israel respects the agreement.
Despite the ceasefire, Israeli attacks have persisted, resulting in at least 386 Palestinian deaths since October 10.
Large areas of Gaza remain inaccessible due to the continued presence of Israeli occupation forces.
“Our priority is to continue with the steps to end the war and especially to complete phase one [of the ceasefire], which includes allowing aid and needed equipment to enter to rehabilitate hospitals and medical centers and the infrastructure,” al-Hayya said.
He also stressed that the role of the International Stabilization Force (ISF) should be limited to maintaining the ceasefire without interfering in Gaza’s internal affairs.
Al-Hayya reiterated that Hamas and other factions are committed to the agreement but reject any imposed guardianship over Gaza.
Hamas political bureau member Husam Badran also said that ongoing Israeli violations have hindered phase-two negotiations.
Last week, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding that Israel open unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza and comply with international law.
Aid agencies continue to advocate for expanded access for humanitarian convoys, while Israel has declined requests to allow relief shipments through the Rafah crossing.
Observers have expressed concerns about the reliability of the Israeli regime and the lack of mechanisms to enforce the deal’s terms.
Since October 2023, over 70,400 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza.
Why The Wall Street Journal amplifies collaborators instead of Palestinian voices
By Ahmed Asnar | MEMO | December 14, 2025
Once again, The Wall Street Journal has chosen to offer its pages not to genuine Palestinian voices, but to figures who align explicitly with Israeli agendas in Gaza. On 11 December, the newspaper published an opinion piece by Hussam al-Astal, an infamous militia leader presented as a potential military – and possible political – alternative in Gaza. His article echoed Israeli talking points almost verbatim, promoting the fantasy of “disarming Gaza” and for being ready to take part in implementing Trump’s so-called “peace plan” for Gaza in accordance with the Israeli objectives from the plan.
What is most troubling is not al-Astal’s rhetoric itself. His views are neither new nor Palestinian, nor do they reflect any authentic constituency among the Palestinian people in Gaza. What demands scrutiny is The Wall Street Journal’s editorial decision to elevate such a figure while systematically excluding real Palestinian scholars, journalists, and intellectuals who articulate the lived reality, aspirations, and internationally-recognised rights of their people.
According to widely reported Palestinian sources, al-Astal escaped from prison in the early days of Israel’s genocide on Gaza in October 2023. He had previously been sentenced to death in connection with serious criminal charges, including being involved in the assassination of a Palestinian scientist in Malaysia in 2018. Following his escape, he reportedly formed an armed gang operating under Israeli military oversight, engaging in the looting of aid convoys and clashes with Palestinian resistance groups. His militia is said to operate in areas under Israeli fire control, often with aerial cover—an arrangement that speaks volumes about whose interests he serves.
This was not an isolated editorial lapse. In June 2025, The Wall Street Journal published a similar opinion piece by another gang leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, who likewise positioned himself as an alternative for ruling Gaza while attacking Palestinian resistance and looting the people’s aid. Abu Shabab, who was later killed in December under circumstances widely linked to his collaboration, had also reportedly been imprisoned for criminal offenses prior to the war. In both cases, the newspaper chose to amplify figures rejected by Palestinian society, elevating them as if they represented a legitimate political alternative.
What these figures share—beyond their alignment with Israeli objectives—is their well-known illiteracy and complete lack of credibility and political thought. This raises an unavoidable question: who actually wrote these polished English-language opinion pieces? The answer is less important than what it reveals about The Wall Street Journal’s editorial standards and political standing.
The deeper issue is structural. The Wall Street Journal has long denied its pages to Palestinian academics, analysts, and journalists who challenge Israeli narratives with facts, law, and lived experience. Palestinian voices are welcomed only when they validate Israeli policy or undermine Palestinian collective resistance. This is not journalism in service of truth; it is gatekeeping in service of a colonial power.
For decades, much of the Western mainstream media has framed the Palestinian struggle through a distorted lens—portraying occupation as self-defence and resistance as aggression. Palestinians are routinely cast as obstacles to peace rather than a people living under military occupation, apartheid conditions, and now genocide. Over time, this bias has hardened into something more dangerous: complicity.
During Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, this complicity became unmistakable. Major Western outlets, including those that once claimed journalistic rigor, uncritically repeated Israeli allegations of mass rape, beheadings, and other atrocities. Many of these claims were later debunked or contradicted by independent investigations, yet they served their purpose: manufacturing moral justification for the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority of them women and children.
By publishing voices like al-Astal and Abu Shabab while excluding genuine Palestinian perspectives, The Wall Street Journal has crossed from bias into participation. It is no longer merely reporting on power—it is helping shape and legitimize a colonial narrative that seeks to replace a people’s political will with proxies and collaborators.
As for Palestinian voices, they will continue to write, document, and speak—whether Western gatekeepers approve or not. New media spaces, independent platforms, and global civil society have already broken the monopoly once held by legacy outlets like The Wall Street Journal. The truth of Palestine no longer depends on their permission.
History has a way of sorting narratives from propaganda. And when it does, The Wall Street Journal will be remembered not for amplifying the oppressed, but for offering its pages to those who work in service of their occupier.
The Real Reason U.S. Troops Were In Syria
The Dissident | December 13, 2025
Recently, two U.S. soldiers stationed in Syria were killed in an ISIS attack.
The U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, Tom Barrak, “condemned the ambush on his X account, calling it a ‘cowardly terrorist attack’ and expressing condolences to the families of the fallen.”
Reuters reported that, “in a post on his Truth Social platform, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed ‘very serious retaliation,’ mourning the loss of ‘three great patriots’. He described the incident in remarks to reporters as a ‘terrible’ attack.”
But the more important question to ask is, why were American troops sent to Syria in the first place?
The official reason given, in 2015, when U.S. troops were first sent to North East Syria, was that they were sent there to train Kurdish forces in the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight ISIS.
But the real reason- as admitted years later by a U.S. official- was to deprive Syrians of their oil and wheat, in hopes it would decimate Syria and lead to regime change against then Syrian leader Bashar al Assad.
The United States in 2012 launched “Operation Timber Sycamore”, a covert CIA program that poured billions of dollars into arming and training Syrian rebels, many of whom had links to Al Qaeda, in hopes that it would lead to regime change.
This regime change program- not fighting ISIS- was the real reason for the U.S. troop presence in North East Syria.
This was outright admitted by Dana Stroul, a U.S. Pentagon official, in 2019 when she said, “the United States still had compelling forms of leverage on the table to shape an outcome that was more conducive and protective of US interests … the first one was the one-third of Syrian territory that was owned via the US military, with its local partner the Syrian Democratic Forces … that one-third of Syria is the resource-rich, it’s the economic powerhouse of Syria, so where the hydrocarbons are, which obviously is very much in the public debate here in Washington these days, as well as the agricultural powerhouse.”
Stroul admitted, “this one-third of Syrian territory that the US military and our military presence owned” was, “leverage for affecting the overall political process for the broader Syrian conflict”, noting that because of the U.S. occupation and “owning” of one third of Syria, “the rest of Syria … is rubble”.
Along with this, she boasted that U.S. sanctions on Syria had been “preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria”.
Through depriving Syria of its “resource-rich economic powerhouse” and placing crushing sanctions on the country, Stroul boasted that it would lead to regime change in Syria.
Reporting on the effect of this policy on the ground in 2023, journalist Charles Glass wrote, “Damascus reminded me of Baghdad on my many trips there between the war over Kuwait in 1991 and the American invasion in 2003. In those years the US, the EU, and the UN were enforcing similar restrictions based on their conviction that economic hardship would destabilize Saddam Hussein’s regime or compel a hungry populace to depose him. In Iraq then, as in Syria now, the regime flourished and people starved.”
This siege warfare tactic eventually helped lead to the eventual overthrow of the Assad regime last year.
Instead of threatening more U.S. intervention in Syria as a response to the ISIS attack, the U.S should reflect on the fact that it put soldiers in harm’s way in order to starve the people of Syria, and deprive them of their “economic powerhouse” as the last phase of a bloody, covert regime change war.
Flawed Study Downplays Children’s Risk of Myocarditis From COVID Vaccine
By Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 3, 2025
Readers of The Defender are familiar with the fact that the COVID-19 mRNA shots pose a risk of myocarditis, especially in children. But they may not know that myocarditis is usually permanently disabling, and in adults, it is often fatal within five years.
Tragically, we are now also learning what the trajectory of myocarditis in vaccinated children actually looks like.
This has been a public relations setback for industry and governments that have been advocating, and sometimes mandating, that children as young as 6 months get the vaccines — even though COVID-19 is almost always mild or symptom-free in young people.
This month, 22 British scientists from prestigious universities published a study intended to ease parents’ minds about risks of the vaccine, and simultaneously scare them about the dangers of getting COVID-19.
The message is that yes, there are rare cases — they always use the word “rare” — in which children get myocarditis after vaccination, but hey, no product can be perfect. And it’s better to risk the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. Also, they claim, kids are more likely to get myocarditis if they get the virus than they are to get myocarditis from the vaccine.
That’s the message — and the authors and publisher have the clout to widely broadcast that message in a press release and in news headlines in Britain and America.
But what does the study actually say? In short, it asks the wrong question — and even so, the answer they get must be buried in the appendix, because it’s inconsistent with the message they want to promote.
Article summary omitted evidence of vaccine risk
The study design is deeply compromised because the 22 authors constructed a complicated model to avoid doing a straightforward comparison (vaccine only versus disease only).
And even after they cooked the books, even after they took data from almost 14 million children and teens under age 18 in England, they got a result that is barely statistically significant, with overlapping error bars for the risk from COVID-19 and the risk from vaccination.
It gets worse.
The results, which marginally favored the vaccination, were trumpeted in a summary at the top of the paper and announced to the press.
But buried in the appendix, published separately online, is a table that shows a more relevant version of the comparison.
The version in the summary is from an early time frame when the vaccine was not available. The appendix shows comparable data for the time frame in which the vaccine was available, limited to the ages for which the vaccine was offered.
In the appendix, the risk of myocarditis from the disease is half that of the risk from the vaccine. This blatantly contradicts the summary and the headlines generated by the article — and this was a response to the deceptive version of the question, not the more straightforward one that the researchers chose not to answer.
Study authors asked the wrong question
The most pertinent question is the simple one: Did vaccinated children have a higher incidence of myocarditis than unvaccinated children?
This is an easy question to answer, given the data that these authors (but not the public) had access to. In a few minutes, they could have calculated a rate of myocarditis among vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
However, if they did the calculation, they didn’t report the results. My guess is that they did the calculation, didn’t like what they saw, so they didn’t include it in the published article.
As I stated above, I believe the study authors “asked the wrong question.” What I mean is that the article compares the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from vaccination.
But this is not the most relevant question. Why?
Because many people got the vaccine and then got COVID anyway, so they were unnecessarily exposed to both risks.
Conversely, many children who didn’t get the vaccine, didn’t get COVID. Or, they get such a mild case that they don’t even notice it. These children avoided both risks.
This is why comparing the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from the COVID vaccine is not really the pertinent question. It’s not a question of “either or.”
Authors ‘muddied the waters’ by analyzing myocarditis in kids who got vaccine and the virus
The message the authors wanted to imply was that, even though the vaccine increased the risk of myocarditis, it decreased the risk of COVID — and since COVID itself can cause myocarditis, the total risk is actually lower with vaccination than without.
If that is their claim, it’s easy to determine if it is true. The simplest calculation they could have done with the data available to them was also the calculation most pertinent to what parents want to know: Is my child better off with or without the vaccine?
The authors chose not to offer us the simple answer to that straightforward question.
But — given that they asked the wrong question — they might have derived a clean answer just by comparing the subset of children who were vaccinated but never got COVID to the subset who got COVID but were never vaccinated.
Because the study included data spanning two years from all over the U.K., there were hundreds of thousands of children in these subcategories — more than enough to do a clean statistical comparison.
But again, the authors chose not to do this. Or, my guess, they did the comparison and didn’t like the result, so they didn’t include it in the publication.
Instead, the authors analyzed myocarditis in the large group of children who got both the vaccine and the disease. This muddied the waters because there is no clear way to determine whether it was the disease or the vaccine that damaged the child’s heart.
Hence, the complicated model, based on timing.
The possibility that seems likely is that children who got COVID after the vaccination had the highest heart risk of all. Of course, there is the logical possibility that children who got COVID after vaccination had a milder case, with a lower risk of myocarditis.
However, if that had been the result, I would think the authors would not only have included that result, but also headlined it.
One more thing — the study looked only at the Pfizer vaccine. Myocarditis risk from the Moderna vaccine is estimated to be three times higher than Pfizer. They had the Moderna data and chose not to look at it.
Or they looked at it, decided they didn’t like what they saw, and decided not to report it.
‘This is public relations masquerading as science’
So, to summarize:
- The authors asked a complicated question when a simple one was more relevant.
- Given this wrong question, they did not do the most straightforward analysis to answer it.
- Even so, they found that the vaccine held almost twice the risk of myocarditis compared to the disease. This result was only in Table S16 of the Supplementary Appendix — but mentioned nowhere in the body of the paper, let alone in the summary at the top.
- And still they made prominent announcements to the public, claiming that their study confirms that children are better off with the vaccine than without.
This is public relations masquerading as science. For an article like this to be peer reviewed and featured prominently in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal tells us just how deeply the ecosystem of medical research has been corrupted.
And this is the “science” that our U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies on when they approve dangerous vaccines for healthy children who are at almost no risk from the disease itself.
In most statistical articles, the raw data used for a study are published online and linked in an appendix to the article. However, in this case, the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) granted access to the data exclusively to this prestigious group of scientists.
Personally, I would like to see the raw data and perform the analysis that the 22 scientists should have done from the beginning. Children’s Health Defense is in the process of requesting access from the NHS. Stay tuned …
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Hezbollah: Syria not a model for Lebanon, weapons will not be taken to fulfill Israel’s demands
The Cradle | December 13, 2025
Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem declared on 13 December that the resistance is willing to cooperate fully with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) but emphasized that it is not ready “for any framework that leads to surrender to the Israeli entity and the American tyrant.”
“Since the ceasefire agreement was reached, we have entered a new phase … Once the agreement was concluded, the state became responsible for ending the occupation and consolidating the army’s presence, and the resistance has done everything required of it,” Qassem declared during a ceremony organized by Hezbollah’s Women’s Organizations Units.
“The problem facing the state is not exclusively the issue of weapons to rebuild the country; rather, what is being discussed is an Israeli-American demand … With surrender, Lebanon will not survive, and Syria is a model before us,” the resistance leader emphasized.
“We will defend ourselves even if the sky were to close in on the earth. The weapons will not be taken away in implementation of Israel’s demands, even if the whole world unites against Lebanon,” Qassem added.
He also pointed out recent remarks by Diotto Abagnara, the commander of the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL), who told Israeli media that Hezbollah is not rearming, contradicting Tel Aviv’s assertions to justify nonstop ceasefire violations in Lebanon.
During Saturday’s speech, Qassem also urged Lebanese authorities to “stop making concessions and backtracking.”
“Implement the agreement, and then discuss the defense strategy. Do not ask us not to defend ourselves, while the state is unable to protect its citizens. Let the state provide protection and sovereignty, and then we will put everything on the table for dialogue on the defense strategy, and reach a conclusion.”
Qassem’s speech coincided with Israeli threats to bomb a residential building in Yanouh, south Lebanon, hours after a UNIFIL and LAF patrol had inspected it.
According to local sources, the building was inspected at the direct request of the “mechanism committee” overseeing the one-sided ceasefire.
The house was alleged to have weapons, but the patrol found none. As the troops were preparing to leave, an Israeli drone hovered over the site, and UNIFIL received a request to conduct a second search of the house.
Israel has threatened to launch a major offensive against the country unless Hezbollah surrenders its weapons by the end of 2025. Washington has publicly backed Tel Aviv’s threats.
Investigation Into U.S. Military Bioweapons-Origin of Tick-Borne Lyme Disease Successfully Added to 2026 NDAA
By Jon Fleetwood | December 12, 2025
U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) has successfully included his amendment to investigate whether the U.S. military weaponized ticks with Lyme disease into the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The ordeal underscores the national security threat posed by laboratory pathogen manipulation.
Rep. Smith, who is Co-Chair of the Congressional Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Caucus, had offered similar amendments—one in 2019 and the other in 2021—which passed the House, but failed in the Senate.
The successful addition of the amendment follows FDA Chief Dr. Marty Makary’s statements during a November podcast, in which Makary expressed his belief that Lyme disease was created in U.S. military Lab 257 on Plum Island, New York.
A Thursday press release from Smith’s office reads:
A critical amendment authored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) to investigate whether the U.S. military weaponized ticks with Lyme disease has been included in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26 NDAA) (S. 1071), which has cleared the U.S. House of Representatives, headed to the Senate, and is expected to be signed by President Trump upon its final passage.
Smith’s amendment—now Sec. 1068 of the bill—directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—the Congressional “watchdog”—to investigate the Cold War-era Department of Defense (Department of War) bioweapons program and determine whether they ever used ticks as hosts or delivery mechanisms for biological warfare agents.
In the press release, Smith emphasized that “New Jersey has one of the highest Lyme rates in the United States—the disease is present in all 21 counties.”
“The pervasive presence of Lyme disease in New Jersey not only carries concerns for civilians, but also for the military personnel stationed in the state—especially and including those serving at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, part of which is located within my congressional district,” the republican added.
The press release explained that Smith’s amendments were inspired by Kris Newby’s book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.
The book includes interviews with Dr. Willy Burgdorfer, the federal researcher and U.S. bioweapons specialist credited with discovering Lyme disease.
Dr. Burgdorfer has revealed that “he and other bio-weapons specialists injected ticks with pathogens in order to cause severe disability, disease, and even death to potential enemies in unsuspecting ways.”
Smith’s amendment in the NDAA would compel the Comptroller General of the United States “to conduct an exhaustive review of research conducted by the military, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and other federal agencies between the period of January 1, 1945 and December 31, 1972, regarding experiments involving Spirochaetales and Rickettsiales—two forms of tick-borne bacteria.”
Smith says we are now “one step closer to finally determining whether the U.S. government’s bioweapons program contributed to the proliferation of Lyme disease.”
“The hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans suffering from Lyme disease—in addition to the millions across the United States—deserve to know the truth about the origins of their illness. An enhanced understanding of how Lyme came to be will only assist in finding a cure for this debilitating disease,” said Smith.
Rep. Smith’s amendment reads:
SEC. 1068. GAO REVIEW AND REPORT ON BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS EXPERIMENTS ON AND IN RELATION TO TICKS, TICK-BORNE DISEASE.
(a) REVIEW.— The Comptroller General of the United States shall, to the extent practicable, conduct a review of research conducted during the period beginning on January 1, 1945, and ending on December 31, 1972, by the Department of Defense, including by the Department of Defense in consultation with the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Agriculture, or any other Federal department or agency on—
(1) the use of ticks as hosts or delivery mechanisms for biological warfare agents, including experiments involving Spirochaetales or Rickettsiales; and
(2) any efforts to improve the effectiveness and viability of Spirochaetales or Rickettsiales as biological weapons through combination with other diseases or viruses.
(b) LOCATION OF RESEARCH.— In conducting the review under subsection (a), the Comptroller General shall review research conducted at facilities located inside the United States and, if feasible, facilities located outside the United States, including laboratories and field work locations.
(c) INFORMATION TO BE REVIEWED.—
(1) CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.— In conducting the review under subsection (a), the Comptroller General shall review any relevant classified information.
(2) MATTERS FOR REVIEW.— In conducting the review under subsection (a), the Comptroller General shall review, among other sources, the following:
(A) Technical Reports related to The Summary of Major Events and Problems, US Army Chemical Corps, FY 1951–FY 1969.
(B) Site Holding: CB DT DW 48158
Title: Virus and Rickettsia Waste Disposal Study.
Technical Report No. 103, January 1969.
Corp Author Name: Fort Detrick, Frederick, MD.
Report Number: SMUFD-TR-103.
Publish Date: 1969-01-01.(C) Site Holding: CB DT DW 60538
Title: A Plaque Assay System for Several Species of Rickettsia.
Corp Author Name: Fort Detrick, Frederick, MD.
Report Number: SMUFD-TM-538.
Publish Date: 1969-06-01.(D) Site Holding: CB DW 531493
Title: Progress Report for Ecology and Epidemiology and Biological Field Test Technology, Third Quarter FY 1967.
Corp Author Name: Army Dugway Proving Ground, UT.
Publish Date: 1967-05-08.(E) Any relevant scientific research on the history of Lyme disease in the United States.
(d) REPORT.—
(1) IN GENERAL.— Not later than two years after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Comptroller General shall submit to the Committees on Armed Services of the House of Representatives or the Senate a report that includes the following:
(A) A list of the research projects reviewed under subsection (a) and an assessment of the scope of such research.
(B) A finding by the Comptroller General as to whether such review could lead to a determination that any ticks used in such research were released outside of any facility (including any ticks that were released unintentionally).
(C) A finding by the Comptroller General as to whether such review could lead to a determination that any records related to such research were destroyed, and whether such destruction was intentional or unintentional.
(2) FORM OF REPORT.— The report required under paragraph (1) shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may contain a classified annex.
If the GAO does its job and follows the paper trail where it leads, this amendment may finally force the U.S. government to answer a question it has avoided for decades: whether a taxpayer-funded Cold War bioweapons program left millions of Americans paying the price with their health.





