Many interested parties have already weighed in on President Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century.” Even though it sounds like a phrase that a used car dealer would use, the “Deal” is dead serious in that it effectively denies to the Palestinians in perpetuum any political entity that has attributes of genuine sovereignty. Israel, which has just postponed a vote to immediately annex some of its illegal settlements on the West Bank with the blessing of the White House, will completely surround the fragmented Palestinian holdings by virtue of the annexation of the entire Jordan River Valley. It is the Zionist dream of a Greater “Eretz” Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea finally achieved. The empty shell swiss-cheese-like completely disarmed state of Palestine will have no authority over its borders and airspace, no means to defend itself and no right to manage its own water resources.
Within the territory granted to Palestinians by Trump there will remain Israeli settler enclaves guarded by soldiers and police. Israel will have total control over the entire West Bank. Millions of Palestinians under its control will de facto be stateless people without basic civil rights whose land will be stolen by settlers. They will be unable to travel even within their “state,” forced to pass through checkpoints, arrested and imprisoned for speech harming “public order” and jailed through indefinite “administrative detentions” without any charges or trial.
Gaza will be completely disarmed and connected to the West Bank by a tunnel controlled by Israel. Presumably, the Mediterranean will continue to be a restricted area for Gazan fishermen, patrolled by the Israeli navy with the offshore oil and gas reserves exploited by Israeli companies. In return for their complete surrender, the Palestinians will be required to express gratitude for being able to survive as helots in what will be largely an open-air outdoor prison. If they behave well, they may or may not get money doled out by Trump to Israel for distribution to the Palestinians as long as they keep quiet and smile as they writhe under the Israeli thumb.
One of the more interesting features of the Deal is that Trump insists that the Palestinians will have East Jerusalem as their capital while at the same time confirming that an undivided Jerusalem will be under total Israeli control. If one looks at the map provided by the White House when the Deal was unveiled, it appears that a piece of East Jerusalem is indeed shown as part of the Palestinian land. But obviously, even though it will have that area technically as its capital it will have no sovereignty over it. It is a detail that is clearly unsustainable and may in fact be a complete fiction designed to demonstrate how magnanimous Israel and the United States are in giving the Palestinians a “state.”
Trump’s one-sided Deal was crafted around Israeli interests, not those of the United States and without any input whatsoever from the Palestinians themselves. The team pulled together by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner consisted of Orthodox Jews and they worked closely with U.S. Ambassador (sic) David Friedman, whose time in Israel has consisted mostly of being an apologist for Netanyahu, excusing accelerated Israeli settlement building as well as the weekly shooting party along the fence line in Gaza. Immediately after Trump and Netanyahu announced the outline of the Deal in Washington, Friedman stated that the Israeli government was at that point free to begin the annexation of any or all of the illegal settlements.
The sad part of what we see unfolding in front of our eyes is that the United States, long an enabler of Israel, is now openly a partner in Israeli war crimes. The Fourth Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949, was intended to protect civilians in time of war. It clearly states that occupying a territory obtained by war and colonizing it with your own people is a war crime. Germany’s demand for lebensraum for German colonists during the lead up to the Second World War and its defining the Slavs who would be displaced as Untermenschen was the crime that motivated the drafters of the Convention. Does that sound familiar? The words are probably somewhat similar in Yiddish.
Most of the mainstream media commentary on the Deal is neutral or even mildly critical, observing inter alia that it is a gift to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was at the podium and beaming alongside Trump. If the boost from the White House succeeds in getting Bibi reelected, Trump will expect payback big time in 2020 through the Israel Lobby’s influence over Jewish voters and from the generosity of Jewish billionaire donors named Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus.
That Trump has betrayed U.S. interests repeatedly in the Middle East and has also flipped on his pledge to remove American soldiers from its “loser wars,” makes him a disgrace as president, though he will likely be re-elected as the voters have been fed a steady diet of propaganda both by the mainstream media and government on Israel. That just might be because Jews are vastly over-represented both in the media and in the choke points in government that deal with the Middle East and foreign policy in general. Even liberal Jews who are critical of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians tend to rally round-the-flag at election time and vote for the candidate perceived as being “strongest” on Israel. One notes with interest that while Senator Bernie Sanders roundly condemned the Deal, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi saw “some areas of common ground here” in it. She would, wouldn’t she? And I am sure Senator Chuck Schumer, the self-proclaimed protector of Israel in the Senate, is secretly delighted.
In the rather less restrained alternative media, there is much banter about how the Deal is little more than a sweeping annexation plan that is really Apartheid by another name. That in itself is a bit of a fudge as the reality in Palestine is far worse than South African Apartheid ever was. Some braver individuals have observed how the United States is controlled by Israel in terms of its engagement in the Middle East, but the language used to describe the situation really misses the point. The United States vis-à-vis Israel is not controlled by Israel per se but rather by subversion from within, Jewish billionaires having bought both major political parties and a Jewish dominated media spouting nonsense about the “only democracy in the Middle East” and “America’s best friend and ally.” Israel is neither a democracy nor a friend. And the American Jews and their allies the Christian Zionists who are full time promoters of the Israel myth are little more than traitors to the United States and everything it once upon a time stood for.
The Palestinians have already rejected the Deal, but their refusal to participate will be seen by Trump and Israel as an insult, or at least it will be spun that way. Trump has already warned that his proposal is the Palestinians’ “last chance” and his United Nations Ambassador Kelly Craft has advised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas not to raise the issue at all with the world body. Unwillingness to embrace it will provide a good opportunity to really lower the hammer on the Arabs. The map provided by Trump shows a cluster of Bantustans surrounded by Israel soldiers and police who historically have regarded nominally Palestinian areas as a free fire zone. When violence erupts, which it will, the largely unarmed Arabs will be slaughtered and David Friedman, Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu will all conveniently blame it on the Palestinians as it was the Israelis who “wanted peace” and the only obstacle remaining was and is the obduracy of the Palestinians. If only they had accepted the Deal, the outcome would have been different the contrived narrative will go.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
In yet another sign of deteriorating relations between Moscow and Washington, senior Russian officials and parliamentarians have agreed that Russia should end its “provisional enforcement” of the 1990 accord signed by then–Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and then–US Secretary of State James Baker on the delimitation of the sea border between the two countries in the Bering Strait. That agreement was ratified by the United States in 1992 but was not ratified by the Soviet Union before it collapsed and has not been ratified by its legal successor, the Russian Federation. Instead, Moscow has heretofore agreed to provisionally recognize and enforce its stipulations. But now, that looks likely to change.
On Monday (January 27), Konstantin Kosachev, the chairperson of the Federation Council’s (upper chamber of the Russian parliament) foreign relations committee, said he and other lawmakers had met with foreign ministry, Federal Security Service (FSB), and Russian fisheries officials to discuss whether Moscow should continue to fulfill the provisions of the agreement in the absence of its ratification. He insisted that the participants were unanimous in calling for the Russian government to announce it would no longer recognize or enforce the terms of that agreement. The following day, a spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry indicated it was receptive to the idea (Finanz.ru, January 27, 2020).
The agreement has been unpopular in Russia since it was signed because many there believe Shevardnadze gave up too much in an effort to curry favor with the West; indeed, this is one reason the Russian parliament never ratified the deal. Still, until this week, there was no indication that Moscow would change its de facto recognition of the accord even though there was little chance of a de jure ratification. Now, Russia appears set to declare that it will no longer adhere to it, though some Russian analysts are skeptical whether Moscow has sufficient naval power to enforce any prospective new sea border between the two countries (Topcor.ru, January 29).
According to the document’s terms, Moscow and Washington agreed to delineated the sea border between them in the Bering Strait from “the point, 65° 30′ North, 168° 58′ 37″ West, along the 168° 58′ 37″ West meridian through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea into the Arctic Ocean as far as permitted under international law” (Un.org, June 1, 1990, accessed March 18, 2002).
The State Department noted (State.gov, September 8, 2009), as have other observers since that time, that when the US purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire, there was no need to define the border beyond the three-mile exclusion rule then in effect. But with the introduction of a 200-mile economic exclusion zone as a result of the Law of the Sea agreements, both Russia and the US recognized that there was suddenly a necessity to come up with one. The negotiating record from the 1860s was flimsy, however; and the two could not agree. The Baker-Shevardnadze exchange eventually opened the way for a compromise, but it left most of what had been disputed inside the US zone. Many Russians objected at the time, and those objections have continued.
Shevardnadze and Baker consented to split the difference, but that led to US sovereignty over areas that Russians had long considered theirs. As a result, Moscow has not ratified the 1990 accord, and Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, periodically talk about the need to modify it. Since the document’s signing, the two countries have occasionally conducted talks on further adjusting the agreement; but to date, nothing has come of those talks. Two reasons explain this deadlock, one pertaining to Russia and the other to the United States. The Russian issue relates to the fact that Moscow wants to expand shipping across the Northern Sea Route and does not want to have to request approval from the US for transiting through what are now American waters (see EDM, March 29, 2017); additionally, Russia does not want the US to interfere with Russian fishing in the area. As for the United States, it widely believes there are significant oil and other mineral deposits in that region, which it hopes to one day exploit.
It remains to be seen how far Moscow will push this issue. Russia has brought up the sea boundaries before—at a 2003 Federation Council hearing and in Putin’s comments to Western leaders after Russia’s annexation of Crimea—and each time it led to a sharp uptick in tensions; but ultimately Russia took no action. This time, however, statements by senior Russian officials and parliamentarians appear to make it less likely that Moscow will back down from its tough line, especially given that Russian outlets are suggesting openly that “Russia is ready to begin a territorial dispute with the US over the sea border” (Gr-sily.ru, January 29, 2020).
Anatoly Kuznetsov, the editor of Russia’s Sea News, suggested that, at the very least, “the Russian parliament might pass the law about a refusal to recognize the 28-year-old Soviet legal act” (Fairplanet.org, January 29, 2020). “According to the law ‘About Russia’s international agreements,’ any deal regarding borders, be it land or maritime, is considered legally [null and void] unless ratified.” The expert added, “If Russia decides to ignore the American interests in the Bering Sea, it risks engaging with the similar ‘war of nerves.’ Russian fishermen will have to rely on the [Russian navy’s] protection in a hope that the U.S. warships are reluctant to start sea battles over such minor incidents.” A Russian parliamentary move in that direction could end the current brewing dispute, but the principle the legislature in Moscow would be enunciating—a non-enforcement of accords not yet ratified—would open the way to more problems elsewhere in the future.
After several postponements, US President, Donald Trump, has finally revealed the details of his Middle East plan, dubbed ‘Deal of the Century’, in a press conference in Washington on January 28.
Standing triumphantly beside Trump, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, must have surely understood that the timing of the announcement, only a few weeks before Israel’s third general elections in one year, was tailored especially to fit the embattled Israeli leader’s domestic agenda.
Consisting of 80 pages, 50 of which are entirely dedicated to the plan’s economic component, the document was a rehash of previous Israeli proposals that have been rejected by Palestinians and Arab governments for failing to meet the minimum standards of justice, equality and human rights.
Former Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, contended in an interview that the plan is not even American, but an Israeli one.
“What you heard last night from Trump is what I heard from Netanyahu and his negotiating team in 2011-2012,” Erekat said. “I can assure you that the US team did not make a single word or comma in this program. I have the protocols and I am willing to reveal to you what we have been offered. This is the plan of Netanyahu and the settler council.”
It was no surprise, then, to read the reaction of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, who assigned Trump’s plan to the “dustbin of history”.
As expected, Trump has granted Netanyahu everything that he and Israel ever wanted. The American vision for Middle East ‘peace’ does not demand the uprooting of a single illegal Jewish settlement and recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s ‘undivided’ capital. It speaks of a conditioned and disfigured Palestinian state that can only be achieved based on vague expectations; it wholly rejects the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees, and fails to mention the word ‘occupation’ even once.
Obviously, only Israel benefits from the US plan; the Zionist discourse, predicated on maximum territorial gains with minimal Palestinian presence, has finally prevailed. Every Israeli request has been met, to the last one. Meanwhile, Palestinians received nothing, aside from the promise of chasing another mirage of a Palestinian state that has no territorial continuity and no true sovereignty.
Palestinian concerns continue to be ignored, as Palestinian rights have been ignored for many years, even during the heyday of the ‘peace process’, in the early and mid-1990s. At the time, all fundamental issues had been relegated to the ‘final status negotiations’, which have never taken place.
The ‘Deal of the Century’ merely validated the status quo ante as envisioned and unilaterally carried out by Israel.
That said, Trump’s plan will fail to resolve the conflict. Worse, it will exacerbate it even further, for Israel now has a blank check to speed up its colonial venture, to entrench its military occupation and to further oppress Palestinians, who will certainly continue to resist.
As for the economic component of the plan, history has proven that there can be no economic prosperity under military occupation. Netanyahu, and others before him, tried such dubious methods, of ‘economic peace’ and such, and all have miserably failed.
Time and again, the UN has made it clear that it follows a different political trajectory than that followed by Washington, and that all US decisions regarding the status of Jerusalem, the illegal settlements and the Golan Heights, are null and void. Only international law matters, as none of Trump’s actions in recent years have succeeded in significantly altering Arab and international consensus on the rights of the Palestinians.
As for the status of – and Palestinian rights in their occupied city – East Jerusalem, rebranding a few neighborhoods – Kafr Aqab, the eastern part of Shuafat and Abu Dis – as al-Quds, or East Jerusalem, is an old Israeli plan that has already failed in the past. The late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, had enough political sagacity to reject it, and neither Abbas nor any other Palestinian official would dare compromise on the historic and legal Palestinian rights in the city.
The Palestinian leadership cannot be absolved from its responsibility towards the Palestinian people, and its unmitigated failure to develop a comprehensive national strategy.
Immediately after Trump announced his plan, Abbas called on all Palestinian factions, including his rivals in the Hamas movement, to unite and to develop a common strategy to counter the ‘Deal of the Century’.
Knowing that the US-Israeli plot was imminent, why did Abbas wait this long to call for a common strategy?
National unity among Palestinians should never be used as a bargaining chip as a scare tactic, or as a last resort option aimed at validating ineffectual Abbas in the eyes of his people.
The PA is now facing an existential crisis. Its very formation in 1994 was meant to marginalize the more democratically-encompassing Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
According to the new American diktats, the PA has already outlasted its usefulness.
As for Israel, the PA is only needed to maintain ‘security coordination’ with the Israeli army, which essentially means ensuring the safety of the illegal and armed Jewish settlers in occupied Palestine.
While unity among Palestinian parties is an overriding demand, Abbas’ PA cannot expect to maintain this ridiculous balancing act: expecting true and lasting national unity while still diligently serving the role expected of him by Israel and its allies.
While Trump’s sham ‘plan’ does not fundamentally alter US foreign policy in Israel and Palestine – as US bias towards Israel preceded Trump by decades – it has definitely ended the so-called ‘peace process’ charade, which divided the Palestinians into ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ camps.
Now, all Palestinians have become ‘extremists’ from Washington’s viewpoint, all equally shunned and marginalized.
Abbas would be terribly mistaken if he thinks that the old political discourse can be saved, which was, oddly enough, written in Washington.
The problem with the Palestinian leadership is that, despite its frequent protestations and angry condemnations, it is yet to take independent initiatives or operate outside the American-Israeli paradigm.
And this is the Palestinian leadership’s greatest challenge at this stage. Will it move forward with a Palestinian-centric strategy or persist in the same place, regurgitating old language and reminiscing of the good old days?
President Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ has been published this week. Mostly, it has been examined as a purely political project – whether in terms of the domestic needs of Trump and Netanyahu, or as a maximum squeeze on Palestinians, which may, or may not, work. But there is another (implicit) dimension, lying – a little out of sight – behind these explicit politics.
It has been argued, by at least one U.S. historian, that the U.S. is no ordinary nation-state, but should be understood as a system leader, a ‘civilizational power’ – like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. The ‘system leader’, historically, has always sought to embed its particular civilizational vision onto those distant ‘lands’ that serve, or abut, its empire: which is to say that the universalistic vision may be bound to one state, but is forcefully unfurled across the globe, as ‘our’ inevitable destiny.
It is not hard to see what we are talking about when it refers to America: politically it is liberal markets, liberal capitalism, individualism and laissez-faire politics – and the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too, if you like. For most Americans, their victory in the Cold War spectacularly affirmed the superiority of their civilizational vision, through the defeat and implosion of communism. It was not just a political defeat for the USSR, more significantly, it represented a triumph for America’s full cultural paradigm: It was a Civilisational ‘win’.
What has this to do with what happened in the East Room of the White House this Tuesday? Well, it gives us a better vantage point to perceive something less obvious than just the explicit politics to the spectacle. Something more often ‘felt’, than explicitly considered.
That is because Jewish Zionism, as expressed by Netanyahu this week, though ostensibly secular, is not just a political construct: It is, too, as it were, an Old Testament project. Laurent Guyénot observes, that when it is asserted that Zionism is biblical, that doesn’t necessarily mean it to be religious. It can, and does, serve as key leitmotiv for secular Jews too. For secular Zionists, the Bible is on the one hand, a ‘national narrative’, but on the other, a particular civilizational vision, bound around a modern state (Israel).
Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he could declare: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”. Dan Kurzman, in his biography (Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, 1983) writes that “[Ben Gurion] was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah, who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind”. This is the inner Universalist vision (tied to a state). These backstage, half acknowledged, convictions – of being ‘elect’, as an example – clearly do condition political actions, (such as disregarding legal norms).
Ben-Gurion was in no way a special case. His immersion in the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation, and the next. And the Israel of today, is no longer as secular as it once was, but rather, is in transit back towards Yahweyism — which is to say, away from the law of a secular state founded by the Zionists, towards traditional Hebraic law as revealed in the Tanakh (the Old Testament of the Christians). Netanyahu implicitly reverts to Hebraic tradition (from secular norms), when he states flatly that as ‘leader’, he should not be removed from power. In other words, Israel is becoming more, not less, ‘biblical’.
So, back to last Tuesday, when an Israeli leader speaks of Trump having secured Israel’s destiny, he is not just resorting to flowery flattery for the US President. The emphasis on ‘destiny’ is flagging something lurking in the background: “Zionism cannot be a nationalist movement like others”, Guyénot writes, “because it resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible … Israel is a very special nation indeed. And everyone can see that it has no intention of being an ordinary nation. Israel is destined to be an empire”.
An ‘empire’ – as in Isaiah, which describes the messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob”; when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.”
Further on in the same book, we read: “The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you” (60:5); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). Pretty clear: this is not just run of the mill nationalism.
Aren’t such quotes just too historically arcane? What has this to do with last Tuesday? Well, a lot. Because these notions of election, of an exceptional mission and destiny are literally believed by many Americans, as well as by Jews. The point about last Tuesday – from this implicit vantage point – is that it then becomes evident that Trump’s “deal” is not about any two-state solution. Why would Trump encourage a rival state to emerge, or for that matter anything that would impede the path towards Israel’s becoming the dominant civilisational power in the Middle East? What Tuesday was about was firstly, conditioning the Palestinians – squeezing them – to accept that they have no alternative, but to offer their fealty to the regional ‘system leader’ (Israel). And secondly, as phase two, to assimilate subordinated Sunni components, under the regional Pax Judaica umbrella.
These old prophesies may not be uppermost in the daily consciousness of many contemporaries. But they are alive, and present in the Hebraic world. And they are wholly present in one key US constituency: Trump’s Evangelical base (one in every four Americans say they are Evangelists). They see the actualisation of Israel’s destiny as an eschatological necessity: It was they who insisted on the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem; they supported the Trump’s assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan; they support the annexation of Israeli settlements; and they were behind the demand that the US scrap the JCPOA. The Evangelicals may be unlikely to switch to vote Democrat, but if enough simply sit on their hands and don’t vote Trump, it could tip ‘swing constituencies’ in the November US Presidential elections.
The Evangelicals were, of course, very happy with Tuesday’s outcome. Israel’s civilisational imperium is, they believe, now assured – at least between the west bank of the River Jordan and the sea. The actualisation of these prophesies has the effect of hastening the arrival of the Redeemer (for these Christian Zionists).
And here again, our vantage point helps to understand a wider paradigm, which centres around the term ‘Judeo-Christianity’. American leaders today increasingly refer to the US as having a Judeo-Christian culture. Might the term not seem something of an oxymoron: Wasn’t Christianity supposed to represent a fundamental break with Jewish textual law? Certainly, Saint Paul proclaimed Christianity was exactly that. The question is: does this Judeo-Christian self-labelling imply some subtle change: That some American élites are becoming unconsciously more Hebraic? In which direction is the core cultural ‘vision’ travelling? Israel originally was viewed as a recipient outpost for western Christian ‘values’ (in the days when Zionism largely was secular). Tuesday’s events suggest that the travel of values may be reversing.
But why this ‘Judeo-Christianity’ nomenclature in the first place? What is going on here? After the fall of Rome, circa 800, the leaders of the Frankish church precisely turned to the Old Testament as the basis to legitimise cultural war on Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, which the Franks then labelled (pejoratively) as ‘Greek’ – with its clear connotation of eastern ‘paganism’ and apostasy. And they further leveraged the Old Testament in order to reign Dei Gratia: as divine sovereignty, whether as Popes or Emperors (i.e. Charlemagne), demanding the unreserved fealty and discipline of their subjects. This Frankish ‘turn’ towards a ‘Judeo-Christianity’ gave Europe its feudalism; resulted in the obliteration of the Cathars as an exemplar punishment for ill-discipline; and saw the imposition of its Civilisational model (Judeo-Christianity) on the Middle East, via militarised Crusades. West Christianity was infused with the Hebraic textual tradition, then – and again, of course, with the rise of Protestantism. East Christianity (Orthodox Christianity) never was. The two Churches were split asunder at the Great Schism (1054).
This is the point: The Israeli civilisational vision may not be exactly the same as America’s, but America’s archetypal cultural stories – Abraham commanded to sacrifice his son – come from the Hebrew Bible. In short, the American exercise of power has never been more ‘Frankish’, as it were. And the exercise of it, increasingly is justified in terms of Israeli language – viz the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani.
This is the principal message to Tuesday’s events: When those on the American Right (such as Steve Bannon) speak incessantly of the need to sustain America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, they almost certainly would see an Israeli project to spread its Pax Judaica right across the Middle East as a clear civilisational ‘win’ for America too. Trump may not be prepared to go to war for Israel, but others in the US Establishment view America ‘winning again’ in the wider civilisational war, as an existential issue for America.
And this latter understanding perhaps offers yet another vantage point onto today’s politics. Why are American Evangelists so hostile to Iran? Because Iran presents the greatest obstacle to Israel’s Pax Judaica hegemony; or, is it more the case that the demise or implosion of the Islamic Republic, would constitute a civilisational ‘win’ for America and Israel, almost on a par with America’s Cold War ‘win’ over Communism? Is that what the withdrawal from the JCPOA – for the Evangelists, at least – was all about? A step on the way towards America, starting to ‘win again’ – towards Judeo-Christianity maintaining ‘system leadership?
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which consists of more than 50 Muslim-majority countries, has asked member states not to cooperate in any way with US President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Israel and Palestine.
During a special session in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Monday, the OIC’s executive committee called on all member states “not to engage with [Trump’s] plan or to cooperate with the US administration in implementing it in any form.” The body also asked members to refrain from any actions that “do not adhere to the inalienable rights of Palestinians.”
OIC Secretary General Yousef Al-Othaimeen said that the organization will support any international peace effort that is in accordance with international law.
Touted as the ‘deal of the century’ by the Trump administration, the plan describes the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with its capital set up in the outskirts of East Jerusalem, currently controlled by Israel.
The plan, however, allows Israel to keep existing settlements in the occupied West Bank, which the UN considers illegal under international law. The proposed roadmap also rules out the return of all Palestinian refugees, which the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Arab world see as one of the key requirements for lasting peace.
The plan was endorsed by US ally Israel but universally rejected by the Palestinians and the Arab League, who view the plan as heavily skewed in favor of Tel Aviv.
Iran has dismissed as insufficient a Swiss-US “humanitarian” channel set up to enable medicine transfers to the country, arguing that the United States is originally banned by the International Court of Justice from subjecting Iran’s much-needed medical supplies to sanctions.
“We do not recognize any such so-called humanitarian channel,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Mousavi told a press conference on Monday. “We do not recognize sanctions [for that matter]. Medicine and foodstuffs were never subject to sanctions in the first place so they can now create a channel [for their transfer] with much publicity,” he added.
The US returned its sanctions against Iran after leaving a historic nuclear accord with the country and others in 2018. The measures defied the agreement’s multilateral nature and the fact that it had been ratified by the United Nations Security Council.
Washington then began forcing others to toe its sanctions line. Britain, France, and Germany have stopped their transactions with the Islamic Republic, bowing under the pressure.
On Thursday, Switzerland launched the so-called Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement (SHTA), claiming it was aimed at facilitating the medicine trade, reportedly using the Central Bank of Iran’s credits. Swiss officials have, however, refused to clairfy how such transactions would continue if the CBI ran out of credit with Swiss banks.
On October 3, 2018, the Hague-based International Court of Justice, the UN’s principal judicial organ, issued a ruling ordering the US to halt its unilateral sanctions on “humanitarian” supplies to Iran. The verdict came following a lawsuit lodged by Iran in July of the same year.
Mousavi said Washington is well aware that as per the ruling, it bears an obligation not to block such transactions, adding that these “conditional waivers” from the sanctions will not result in the US war crimes passing into oblivion.
The medicine supplies, he added, were bound to enter the country a year and a half ago, but their imports were blocked by US obstructionism.
The Swiss company tasked with facilitating the transactions “has been paid to do so,” he said, noting, “Our expectations far exceed such measures. And their obligations are hundreds of times more than what they are offering.”
He noted that the Islamic Republic welcomes all efforts that are aimed at reducing the pressure faced by the country, but still Switzerland’s initiation of the SHTA, falls short of the expectations.
Also on Monday, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed the efficiency of the Swiss channel and drew attention to the ICJ ruling in this regard.
The top diplomat noted that the US keeps pursuing the policy of “maximum pressure” and denying Iran the financial channels that enable it to import medicine.
“This is a small step and we thank the Swiss government for its efforts … but this channel is not a sign of America’s goodwill at all,” he said.
Last October, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that the US’s harsh sanctions against Iran posed a serious threat to the Iranian people’s right to health, urging Washington to adopt swift measures aimed at facilitating trade of humanitarian goods with the Islamic Republic.
The sanctions are compromising Iranians “access to essential medicines—and has almost certainly contributed to documented shortages— ranging from a lack of critical drugs for epilepsy patients to limited chemotherapy medications for Iranians with cancer,” it said.
Though the US government has supposedly built exemptions for humanitarian imports into its sanctions regime, “broad US sanctions against Iranian banks, coupled with aggressive rhetoric from US officials, have drastically constrained Iran’s ability to finance such humanitarian imports,” the rights organization added.
A month later, an NGO said Iranian children suffering from a rare skin condition known as EB were losing their lives as US economic sanctions hampered the flow of vital medical products.
Hamid Reza Hashemi-Golayegani, the head of the NGO that helps such patients, said that at least 15 Iranian children with epidermolysis bullosa (EB) had died since the US restored the sanctions.
The attitude of the US towards Latin peoples has been one of domination, imposition and imperialism. The core of this policy is in the American ideology itself, based on the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th Century, which, enunciating an “America for Americans”, promoted the American expansion towards other lands of the New World. Specifically in South America, external interference in national policies became even more evident with the advent of the military dictatorships of the last century, which, with the shallow excuse of avoiding a “communist threat”, promoted long decades of misery and persecution whose only end had been to preserve the subjugation of those countries to Washington’s commandments during the Cold War.
The process of redemocratization in Latin America was a flawed and vulnerable one. The transition of power witnessed by the exchange of the Armed Forces for civilian politicians represented nothing but the very interests of the same groups that had financed and supported the military’s takeover. In fact, when the American objectives bequeathed to the military were already achieved, they authorized the transition of power, pacifying national policies with the capitulation of the left, which abandoned the armed struggle in favor of the democratic pact.
Since then, outside interference in Latin America has been triggered by the cooptation of parliamentary factions, feeding gigantic networks of corruption that “fight each other” publicly, when, truly, they work for the interests of the same foreign power. This is the case of the reactionary parties and of the groups from the new left – concerned with the “identitarian” agenda of liberalism and omitted in relation to social problems and national sovereignty.
While the theater of public confrontation of these groups is functioning, the American foreign occupation works perfectly, without major challenges and threats. However, any deviation from this reality is understood as an affront and gives room for the resurgence of Washington’s interference. The most recent cases corroborating this fact are the failed attempted coup against the legitimate Bolivarian government in Caracas and the successful coup d’état carried out against Bolivian President Morales, both in the past year.
In general, American attacks on independent peoples of the South have intensified in recent years. This, most likely, is due to the fact that the period before the current one was marked by the growth of the political left, which, although subordinated to the liberal hegemony, acted with an agenda reasonably linked to social struggles, delaying, even if very little, the neoliberal plans. Now, these same countries are facing the extraordinary advance of reactionary rights, with a greater emphasis on Brazil.
A member of the BRICS, Brazil, with all its potential to achieve prestigious status in the international order, has been suffering the worst period in its recent history. The rise of Bolsonaro brings with it the worst in the country: the growth of the harmful influence of neo-Pentecostal groups – whose greatest commitment is to the interests of Washington and Tel Aviv; the paramilitary armed militias that control organized crime in the poorest regions of the country, truly acting as a mafia and; the business sector as a whole, with enormous progress in dismantling labor laws and permitting agribusiness, with the legalization of pesticides and the criminal burning of native forests for the formation of pastures for livestock. Brazil is going through one of the worst deindustrialization processes ever witnessed in history.
Argentina recently completed this cycle of reactionary ascension and is now witnessing a return of the “soft left”, with the return of the Kirchner Party. The negative legacy of Fernández. Macri’s legacy will not be wiped out so quickly and the left now in power does not seem committed to the complete break with external interests, but to the perpetuation of the liberal-parliamentary cycle.
The most striking cases, however, are the aforementioned examples of Venezuela and Bolivia, countries victimized by American imperialism. Fundamentally, one must realize how both cases reveal real occurrences of foreign invasion, even if camouflaged with a democratic appearance. Venezuela perceived the opposition’s articulations as a true case of war and managed to gain control over the situation: activated the Bolivarian National Guard, intensified security policies and ignored internal and external opposition pressure. As a result, Maduro remains in power and the coup has become an international joke. On the other hand, Morales did not have the same perspicacity and gave way too much to the opposition, falling and being forced to leave the country and hand it over to the coup d’état.
In Chile, recent political unrest is having a positive effect. The claims against neoliberal Piñera, carried out through violent protests that have already given rise to the State of Emergency, are successful and little by little the government is forced to yield to popular pressure.
Currently, the panorama of South America is terrible. With the exception of Venezuela, which is in an undeniable crisis, all countries are, in one way or another, hostages to American interests, with some under governments that make this reality more explicit – like Brazil – and others under more camouflaged regimes. There is no doubt about the fundamental point that American imperialism has never been as aggressive in South America as it has been in recent years. The reason is simple: in the face of progress in the formation of a multipolar world, the geopolitical north is becoming increasingly reactive.
Lucas Leiroz de Almeida is a research fellow in International Law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
If you haven’t watched my video yet, you should definitely do so. And then you should go read that New York Times article for yourself. (But read it at this link to avoid giving the Old Grey Presstitute your click.)
When you do read the article, you’ll see that it is an obvious limited hangout—that is, the deliberate revelation of some information in order to prevent the discovery of other, more important information. This observation tells us two things:
That there is novel and compelling information about the CIA’s covert propaganda programs contained in the article; and
that that novel and compelling information is not the whole story.
In order to understand the hangout the Times is attempting here, we first have to examine the article itself and the information that the article does contain.
The report concerns the so-called “Mighty Wurlitzer,” the propaganda network of “800 news and public information organizations and individuals,” including “newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities” that the CIA either owned outright or exerted editorial control over.
That the article is indeed a limited hangout is evident right from the start. Within the first few paragraphs of this extensive investigation, the author is quick to reassure readers that the incredibly vast, incredibly powerful CIA propaganda network that he is documenting was never actually used to forward propaganda.
“Although the C.I.A. has employed dozens of American journalists working abroad, a three-month inquiry by a team of reporters and researchers for The New York Times has determined that, with a few notable exceptions, they were not used by the agency to further its world-wide propaganda campaign.”
This claim is not just disingenuous, it’s downright ridiculous. Indeed, the remainder of the article serves as one giant rebuke of that preposterous lie. But only a tiny percentage of the population makes it more than a few paragraphs into a story, so placing such a claim up front makes sure to placate the majority of readers and convince them that this propaganda network must not be so bad after all.
The report then goes on to detail a number of media entities that the CIA owned or controlled during the period in question (primarily the 1950s and ’60s), including:
Radio stations like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Free Cuba Radio;
Newspapers like The Rome Daily American, The Okinawa Morning Star, The Manila Times, The Bangkok World and The Tokyo Evening News;
Magazines and journals like Quest, East Europe and Paris Match.
Book publishers like Allied Pacific Printing in India and the Asia Research Centre in Hong Kong.
Perhaps more important to the CIA than its control over these media organs, however, were the journalists and editors who were willing to aid the agency in publishing its propaganda. Some were on the CIA payroll directly, others worked on contract. Names dropped in the article range from the familiar—like Tom Braden and William F. Buckley, Jr.—to the long-forgotten. Readers are left with the impression that the agency’s propaganda efforts were (emphasis on past tense) more extensive and far-reaching than anyone had imagined to that point.
The article must have been a bombshell for the relatively information-deprived New York Times readers of 1977. Given how difficult it was to discover any reliable information about the CIA and its operations in that pre-internet era, finding such a treasure trove of information in no less a publication than the USA’s “newspaper of record” must have been incredible.
This, of course, poses the question: Why, then, was this article published? Surely the details of this report had been known to journalists for some time previously. So why was the Times publishing it at that precise moment?
To answer that, we have to look at the context of what was happening in 1977. The issue of the intelligence agencies and what they were really doing under the cover of national security had been blown wide open in the Church Committee hearings of 1975. The Committee, set up after a series of revelations about US military and intelligence agency abuses of Americans’ rights, released reports on a wide variety of issues that had hitherto been under wraps, from the existence and operations of the National Security Agency to the workings of covert assassination programs (including the infamous heart attack gun).
One of the issues to arise during the committee’s hearing was that of the intelligence agencies’ relationship with the media. One journalist who was working to document these ties was Carl Bernstein, who, in October of 1977, published his own report on the subject, “The CIA and the Media,” in Rolling Stone magazine. Bernstein’s extensive article revealed a number of long-suspected links between the agency and leading publishers, including the fact that Arthur Sulzberger Sr. (then publisher of The New York Times) worked hand-in-hand with the CIA.
I’ll allow you a moment to recover from your shock.
In fact, Bernstein not only identified Sulzberger (along with Henry Luce of Time Inc., William Paley of CBS and numerous other media moguls) as working directly with the CIA, but he revealed that there were ten CIA operatives working at the New York Times in the 50s and 60s alone.
Perhaps you’re starting to see why the Times was suddenly motivated to publish a report exposing the CIA’s “worldwide propaganda network,” but conveniently omitting its own role in that network. Neither will you be surprised to learn that the Times “forgot” to note the fact that its American media brethren (Time, CBS, NBC, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, The Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek and many others) were named by Bernstein as “organizations which cooperated with the CIA.”
In fact, the Times article goes out of its way to stress that the “Mighty Wurlitzer” was only directed abroad, not at the American public. In a section with the prominent subhead “Agency Charter Bars Propaganda in U.S.” (emphasized in italics and bold, unlike any of the article’s other sections), the report is at pains to stress that the CIA has been legislatively prohibited from propagandizing American citizens directly. It then presents a limited hangout argument that some of the agency’s foreign propaganda may have been “accidentally” relayed back to American media by “unwitting” correspondents abroad, thus propagandizing the American public (which totally wasn’t the CIA’s intention, guys!).
As Bernstein had already shown, however, the agency was actively involved with spreading propaganda to the American public via American media organs like the New York Times. For some reason, this fact was left out of the Times’ report.
In the end, the entire Times article serves as a case study in the art of the limited hangout. It shows us exactly how and why these types of “bombshell revelations” are dropped on the public in the pages of mainstream publications. These revelations—containing true and verifiable information, including information of real importance—can help to obscure other, more embarrassing facts and shift the public debate from matters of vital importance to peripheral issues.
To be sure, the article is still worth reading. It does contain true and verifiable information about the CIA’s propaganda activities. But, like all such limited hangouts, it can only be properly understood when one understands what has been left out of the story.
The propagandists never do make it easy to get to the bottom of their lies, do they?
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently received criticism from some of America’s most outspoken figures, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and billionaire activist George Soros, who accused the tech billionaire of indirectly assisting Donald Trump get re-elected as a result of the platform’s policies.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, defended the platform’s principle of free expression at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Utah, arguing that the company is now set to change its previous approach of not doing anything deemed “too offensive” amid increased censorship calls, CNN reported.
“Increasingly we’re getting called to censor a lot of different kinds of content that makes me really uncomfortable”, the platform’s CEO was quoted as saying.
“This is the new approach, and I think it’s going to p**s off a lot of people. But frankly, the old approach was p**sing off a lot of people too, so let’s try something different”, Zuckerberg insisted.
Despite the proposed change of direction, Facebook’s founder insisted that the company still has a responsibility to remove content related to child exploitation, violence, or terrorism from its platform.
“We’re going to take down the content that’s really harmful, but the line needs to be held at some point”, Zuckerberg reportedly stated. He also defended the use of encryption in Facebook messaging services that potentially prevents third parties from accessing communications sent between users.
Facebook’s leadership has come under increased scrutiny over the past year following its refusal to remove political ads that may contain misinformation, citing its policy of free speech and the right of users to make up their own minds about the agendas of politicians. Zuckerberg’s new approach prompted strong backlash from former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called his stance “authoritarian” and aimed at helping her 2016 presidential rival Donald Trump get re-elected by refusing to tackle alleged misinformation and propaganda.
This criticism was recently echoed by Hungarian-American hedge fund manager and activist George Soros, who urged for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to be removed from the company’s leadership due to the platform’s “informal” alliance with Donald Trump, which is allegedly helping him win the 2020 presidential election.
The accusations have not been directly addressed by Zuckerberg, but he recently insisted that his company’s goal for the next decade is not “to be liked, but to be understood.”
(Referals from Facebook to Aletho News, though still a fraction of one time numbers, have just recently more than doubled )
This week brought a bunch of news about the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. In Afghanistan, the United States and its allies have been directly involved in fighting the Taleban for over 18 years. In Syria, they’ve attempted to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad with the help of proxies in various forms, who are now holed up in an ever-shrinking enclave in Idlib province. And in Yemen, they’ve been backing the Saudis in their attempt to reinstall Adrabbun Mansar Hadi as president in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, now under the control of the Houthis. So, how go America’s wars?
First, Afghanistan:
A few days ago, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released his latest quarterly report to the US Congress. According to an email I got from SIGAR’s office, the key points of this report include the following:
Enemy-initiated attacks (EIA) and effective enemy-initiated attacks (EIA resulting in casualties) during the fourth quarter of 2019 exceeded same-period levels in every year since recording began in 2010.
The month of the Afghan presidential election (September 2019) saw the highest number of EIA in any month since June 2012, and the highest number of effective enemy-initiated attacks (EEIA) since recording began in January 2010. The high level of violence continued after the presidential election; October 2019 had the second highest number of EIA in any month since July 2013.
According to the UNODC, the overall value of opiates available for export in Afghanistan in 2018 (between $1.1 billion and $2.1 billion) was much larger than the combined value of all of the country’s licit exports ($875 million).
As of December 18, conflicts had induced 427,043 Afghans to flee their homes in 2019 (compared to 356,297 Afghans during the same period in 2018).
Between November 2019 and March 2020, an estimated 11.3 million Afghans – more than one-third of the country’s population – are anticipated to face acute food insecurity.
I think that gives a good enough impression. Eighteen years on, things aren’t going so well in Afghanistan.
So what about Syria?
About a week ago, government forces (the Syrian Arab Army (SAA)) launched a two-prong offensive against what were once US-proxy forces in Idlib, but might now be more accurately described as Turkish proxies. News reports suggest that casualties have been heavy on both sides, but the results from the SAA point of view have been very satisfactory. In the north, the SAA advanced a short distance south west of Aleppo, but the real progress was further to the south, where the SAA smashed through the rebel defenses and advanced rapidly to seize the town of Ma’arrat al-Numan, as shown in this map:
Since this map was produced, the SAA have advanced even further, continuing northeast up the M5 highway from Ma’arrat as far as the town of Saraqib. How much further they will go before pausing remains to be seen. But one thing is clear – bit by bit, the rebels in Idlib are being squeezed out. Once they’re gone, the war in Syria will be all but over. The attempt to topple Assad has failed.
Which brings us to Yemen.
As you may recall, in September last year the Houthis crushed a Saudi incursion into northern Yemen, capturing large numbers of prisoners and armoured vehicles. After that things quieted down for a bit, until about a week ago when Saudi-backed forces launched an offensive to the east of Saana in the province of Marib. Before long, the Houthis counter-attacked, with devastating consequences. According to one news report:
Hadi’s forces are now on the back foot. Where once they spoke about taking the Houthi-held capital Sanaa, now they discuss ways to defend Marib, a strategic oil and gas hub. … Ibrahim, a pro-government fighter in Marib province, said that some loyalist soldiers ‘betrayed’ them and withdrew from battles, causing sizeable losses amongst their troops. ‘We were planning to advance towards Sanaa, but our attempt was hindered by the withdrawal of a battalion of soldiers, which gave the Houthis a chance to attack us … This was a betrayal by the soldiers and their leaders.’
Houthi sources claim that Saudi-backed forces suffered 2,500 casualties, and that the Houthis captured 400 pieces of equipment, including tanks, armoured personal carriers, and multiple rocket launch systems. The Saudi defeat has gone just about unnoticed in the English-language media but, for anybody interested, Russian blogger Colonel Cassad has published a bunch of Houthi photographs and videos, such as the picture below, showing the results of the battle (here and here). They make for interesting viewing.
Putting this all together, what we see is the Americans and their allies losing not just one, not just two, but three wars simultaneously. It’s quite something. A few days ago, news emerged that US president Donald Trump had denounced his generals as ‘losers’ and ‘a bunch of dopes and babies’. The story was treated by pretty much everybody as yet more evidence of Trump’s unsuitability to be president. But given the news from the front this week, I have to think that Trump got it right. ‘I wouldn’t go to war with you people’, Trump allegedly told the generals. If only the president took his own advice.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only road to reform is through the ballot box. Whether you vote or don’t vote doesn’t really matter.
What matters is what else you’re doing to push back against government incompetence, abuse, corruption, graft, fraud and cronyism.
After all, argues John W. Whitehead, there is more to citizenship than the act of voting for someone who, once elected, will march in lockstep with the dictates of the powers-that-be.
Israel says it has ramped up the deployment and testing of nuclear and nuclear-capable weapons amid heightened regional tensions after the US assassinated top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and unveiled a biased Middle East plan.
The ministry of military affairs of the Israeli regime on Friday announced that it had conducted a launch test of a “rocket propulsion system from a base in the center of the country”.
The ministry refused to disclose any additional details regarding the nature of the missile, contrary to its usual conduct following satellite launcher and missile interceptor tests.
The little information revealed about the test prompted speculation among observers that the tested projectile may have been related to Israel’s long-range ballistic missile program, which Israel seeks to not acknowledge publicly.
Tel Aviv conducted a similar rocket engine test last December with Israeli media reporting that the test was meant to be a “show of force” of the Israeli regime’s “nuclear deterrent system especially aimed at Iran”.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said last year that the Israeli regime is in possession of approximately 100 atomic warheads, noting that it has 30 gravity bombs which can be delivered by fighter jets – some of which are believed to be equipped for nuclear weapon delivery.
The regime has refused to allow inspections of its military nuclear facilities or sign the the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
US deploys new nuclear warhead
The Federation of American Scientists also warned that Washington was deploying the recently developed W76-2 low-yield nuclear warhead as part of a new generation of less-destructive yet more “usable” nuclear weapons.
The report said the W76-2 warhead, which has an explosive yield of about a third of the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in August 1945, was supplied to Ohio-class USS Tennessee ballistic missile submarines last month.
The authors of the report, military analyst William Arkin and Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Information Project director Hans Kristensen, warned that such weapons increase the likelihood of a nuclear armed conflict.
In a Newsweekarticle published earlier this month, Arkin and Kristensen said that the development of the W76-2 warhead is the result of Pentagon planning for potential first strike scenarios “against adversaries, especially Iran”.
The article noted that Washington simulated a nuclear strike against Iran in the Global Thunder 17 nuclear exercise in October 2016 during the tenure of then-US President Barack Obama.
It pointed that the newly-deployed W76-2 warhead “is intended for exactly the type of Iran scenario that played out in the last days of the Obama administration”.
Israel and Washington’s provocative military deployments and weapons testing come at a time of major regional tensions resulting from Washington’s recent unveiling of the “deal of the century” and notably its assassination of General Soleimani.
Iran retaliated to the January 3 assassination with a volley of ballistic missiles launched at the US-occupied Ain Al Assad base in Iraq and another outpost in Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan.
Iran, which has noted that Tel Aviv played a part in the assassination of Lieutenant General Soleimani, had threatened to target Israel if the US were to respond to Iran’s retaliatory attack.
Seeking to downplay the attack and deny any casualties, the Trump administration has since backed down from earlier pledges to respond to Iran’s retaliatory attack.
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
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Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
