West May Lose at Least $285Bln If Confiscates Russian Reserves
Sputnik – 14.09.2025
MOSCOW – Russia’s frozen reserves continue to “burn the pockets” of Western countries: states burdened with huge debts and budget deficits have begun to talk more and more about confiscating Russian assets that they froze in 2022, but such a step could cost them at least $285 billion, Sputnik calculated based on national statistics.
Currently, the G7 countries and the European Union are implementing a scheme to seize income from frozen Russian assets to finance a $50 billion loan to Ukraine. In early September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed creating a new “reparation loan” to finance Ukraine from these incomes. However, Western politicians periodically call for the direct confiscation of frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine. The Russian authorities have repeatedly said that they would take reciprocal measures in the event of confiscation.
According to the latest available data, the volume of direct investment from the European Union, the G7, Australia, Norway and Switzerland in the Russian economy as of the end of 2023 amounted to $285 billion. At the same time, taking into account the ban on the withdrawal of funds from the country by unfriendly residents, the amount may be significantly higher — officially, data on the amount of blocked funds in type C accounts is not disclosed.
The EU accounted for $238 billion in assets, of which $145.4 billion belonged to Cyprus, $21.7 billion to France, and $19.2 billion to Germany. The Netherlands, which does not officially disclose the full volume of investments in the Russian economy, could potentially own assets worth approximately $20.8 billion. Italy ($12.6 billion) and Austria ($6.9 billion) are also among the largest European investors. The remaining EU states accounted for another $11.5 billion.
Among the G7 countries, the largest investor in the Russian economy was the United States – according to the latest available data, American assets in Russia amounted to approximately $7.7 billion. Japan had Russian assets worth $4.8 billion, Canada – $3.9 billion, and Britain – $3 billion.
The assets of Switzerland and Norway, which usually follow in the wake of EU sanctions against Russia, at the end of 2023 amounted to $27.5 billion and $43 million, respectively. Australia had $400 million in investments in the Russian economy at the end of last year.
After the start of the special operation in Ukraine, Western countries imposed sanctions against the Bank of Russia, freezing its reserves, but the exact amount of immobilized funds is unknown. According to the central bank, as of the end of June 2021, about $288 billion was stored in Austria, Britain, Germany, Canada, the United States, France, and Japan, and another $63 billion was in unnamed countries.
At the beginning of 2022, the Bank of Russia reported that about half of its $630.6 billion in assets were in key reserve currencies.
Sputnik used data from unfriendly countries on direct investment in the Russian economy in its calculations. Direct investment is investment in enterprises that provide control over at least 10% of its shares or capital.
Is It Safe to Get 3 Vaccines at Once? Vaccine Makers Say Yes, But FDA Wants Proof
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 8, 2025
Is it safe to get a COVID-19, RSV and flu vaccine at the same time? The answer is yes, according to many medical experts and the CDC and HHS websites — but that’s about to change.
According to an Aug. 25 memo, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now says vaccine makers must conduct clinical trials to study the potential adverse effects of simultaneously giving multiple shots for respiratory viruses before they can market the vaccines as “safe and effective” when received at the same time.
The FDA said it “cannot affirm that concurrent administration is both safe and effective,” as coadministration has not been thoroughly studied.
Some medical and scientific experts welcomed the new policy, first reported last week by The Washington Post.
Dr. Clayton J. Baker, an internal medicine physician, said:
“There is urgent need for scientifically sound, non-Pharma-conducted studies regarding the safety of all simultaneously administered vaccines.
“This practice is widely used and dangerously under-evaluated. The greatest risk is to young children during co-administration of the many different vaccines listed on the current, bloated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] pediatric schedule.”
Last month, two doctors who lost their medical licenses because they questioned the CDC’s vaccine recommendations for children sued the agency for failing to test the cumulative effect of the 72-dose schedule on children’s health.
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., said, “Properly controlled and sufficiently powered trials are the gold standard,” promised by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and that such trials are “the correct approach for any clinical intervention.”
“It’s about time the gold standard of science is applied to vaccines,” he said.
In a statement shared with The Defender, Emily G. Hilliard, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the department “does not comment on future or potential policy decisions.”
Prasad: Past studies ‘incapable of adequately documenting safety signals’
According to Fierce Pharma, the Biden administration “supported vaccine coadministration as a means to increase immunization rates.”
Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), has publicly criticized this strategy due to a lack of evidence supporting it, the Post reported.
The Post cited 2021 guidance from the World Health Organization, which found that coadministration of the COVID-19 and flu vaccines is safe and “has potential advantages.”
A survey of the scientific literature, published in March in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses and cited by the Post, found that “Adult vaccine coadministration is safe for all the combinations we assessed,” with adverse events that were “generally mild to moderate and of short duration.”
The Post also cited a 2022 CDC study published in JAMA Network Open, which found that “simultaneous administration of COVID-19 mRNA booster and influenza vaccines may be associated with increased likelihood of systemic reactions.” Yet, according to the Post, “those reactions were mostly mild and went away quickly.”
In the FDA memo, Prasad said past determinations regarding the safety of coadministering respiratory virus vaccines were made on the basis of small randomized studies. “Such small trials are inherently incapable of adequately documenting safety signals,” he said.
Baker agreed:
“At least two of the studies showed statistically significant increases in systemic reactions when the vaccines were coadministered. To dismiss this finding without further evaluation — as was done — is both irresponsible and tendentious in favor of ‘just giving’ the shots.”
Lyons-Weiler said the relevant studies “support convenience and short-term tolerability,” but “do not deliver the decisive evidence needed for label-level claims about clinical benefit or the absence of interaction-driven risk.”
Giving multiple vaccines at once is convenient, profitable — but not necessarily safe
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s former coronavirus coordinator during the Biden administration and now dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told the Post that the millions of doses of respiratory virus vaccines coadministered over the years prove they are safe.
“The burden of proof is not on manufacturers to be able to do something that clearly has been done millions of times safely,” Jha said.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist at Children’s Health Defense, said Jha “is partaking in a fallacy that past actions were safe and warranted,” as “historic data of dubious record does not constitute a safety study.”
Jablonowski said:
“That it has been administered millions of times does not make vaccines safe; it makes them profitable. That we administered vaccines to our most vulnerable — during pregnancy and to 6-month-old infants — doesn’t make them safe, it makes us reckless.”
Baker agreed, saying, “Jha is correct in stating that the coadministration of multiple vaccines for respiratory viruses ‘clearly has been done millions of times.’ But how ‘safely’ has it been done? Jha doesn’t know, because nobody knows.”
Jablonowski said looking at vaccination data retrospectively is problematic because “there is no experimental control.”
He cited the case of a 6-month-old in Iowa who received multiple respiratory virus vaccines concurrently in 2022 and was “found pulseless” in his crib 10 days later, according to a report in the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS.
“Which vaccine, if any, likely killed him? We don’t know, because we don’t have the safety studies for combinations,” Jablonowski said.
Jablonowski also referred to a 2023 paper published in The BMJ on the safety of the mRNA COVID-19 booster shots. His analysis of the study’s data found that people who received a flu vaccine along with their fourth COVID-19 booster dose had a 62.5% higher risk of stroke within 28 days of vaccination.
The 2022 CDC study does, in fact, show “a compounding or synergy of adverse reactions,” Jablonowski added.
The study states:
“Compared with administration of COVID-19 mRNA booster vaccines alone, simultaneous administration of COVID-19 mRNA booster and seasonal influenza vaccines was associated with significant increases in reports of systemic reactions during days 0 to 7 following vaccination.”
Jablonowski analyzed the study’s results. He found that people who received Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines concurrently with a flu vaccine were more likely to experience a systemic or injection-site reaction or to be unable to work or attend school following vaccination.
FDA policy ‘could have implications’ beyond cold and flu season
CDC guidance, current as of Aug. 18, states, “Flu, COVID-19, and RSV vaccines may be co-administered (given at the same visit)” and “may also be co-administered with other vaccines.”
According to the Post, Prasad’s memo “could have implications that go beyond the fall respiratory vaccination season.”
While the memo “does not prevent pharmacies and doctors from providing coronavirus and flu vaccines in the same visit,” the Post suggested that immunization rates may decline if more than one visit is required to receive multiple respiratory virus vaccines, or longer intervals are required between shots.
The memo comes as national pharmacy chains, including CVS and Walgreens, have begun limiting access to COVID-19 vaccines in response to new federal guidelines enacted last month ending emergency use authorization of the COVID-19 shots and restricting them to people at higher risk for severe illness.
According to the Post, Pfizer responded to Prasad’s memo by sending a letter to healthcare providers stating that some batches of its COVID-19 vaccine contain “unapproved prescribing information inside the cartons,” indicating the company intends to add a warning about coadministration of the vaccine to its product label.
According to the Post, the FDA’s policy change may also lead to new recommendations for respiratory vaccines — potentially stemming from the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
CDC vaccine advisers to meet next week
ACIP is scheduled to meet Sept. 18 to vote on COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for the upcoming cold and flu season.
In June, Kennedy retired all 17 members of ACIP to eliminate conflicts of interest. Shortly after, Kennedy named eight researchers and physicians to the committee, but one nominee declined to participate. Fierce Pharma reported last week that Kennedy plans to nominate seven additional members to the committee.
The new FDA policy is part of a broader series of shakeups at the FDA and CDC.
Prasad resigned from his position on July 29 amid pressure from vocal critics, but returned to his position two weeks later.
In May, Prasad replaced Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., as head of CBER. Marks had overseen Operation Warp Speed and the rapid development and approval of the COVID-19 vaccines. He resigned in March under pressure from Kennedy.
On Aug. 27, the White House confirmed the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, after she refused to resign amid clashes with Kennedy.
During a contentious U.S. Senate hearing Thursday, Kennedy said Monarez had indicated she would refuse to endorse any ACIP recommendations, even before the committee met to make them.
On Sept. 1, President Donald Trump suggested that the CDC and Big Pharma have not been fully forthcoming about COVID-19 vaccine safety data. Trump demanded they “clear up this mess.”
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.
Netanyahu’s Crude Exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s Death to Get the American Right Back into Line
If Americans Knew | September 13, 2025
Journalist Glenn Greenwald provides information on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s misinformation about Charlie Kirk, and on Kirk’s evolving views on Israel-Palestine. System Update, September 12, 2025. Full video at: https://rumble.com/v6yv6nq-system-upd…
US lawmakers introduce ‘thought police’ bill to strip citizens of passports over Israel criticism
The Cradle | September 13, 2025
A US congressman is introducing a bill that could potentially be used to deny US citizens the right to travel based solely on their speech, including for criticism of Israel, the Intercept reported on 13 September.
Introduced by Florida Congressman Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill would grant Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to revoke the passports of US citizens in the same way he has revoked the green cards and visas of foreign nationals in the US for criticizing Israel.
In March, Secretary of State Rubio revoked the visa of Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk after she wrote an opinion piece critical of Israel in the Tufts University student newspaper in 2024.
The op-ed did not mention Hamas, but called for boycotting and divesting from Israel.
One section of the bill grants the Secretary of State the ability to deny passports to people determined to have “knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”
The reference to “material support” disturbs civil liberties advocates because it is vague and can be interpreted to include speech and anti-war activism.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which functions as a front for Israeli intelligence in the US, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law suggested in a letter last year that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was providing “material support” for Hamas by organizing campus protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The provision regarding material support to terrorism poses a threat specifically to journalists, The Intercept noted.
In 2023, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas demanded a Justice Department “national security investigation” of AP, CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters after they published photos taken by freelance photographers during the Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and military bases on 7 October 2023.
Gaza Inc: Where genocide is battle-tested and market-ready
A scalable model of industrial genocide sold to allies across the globe
By Aymun Moosavi | The Cradle | September 12, 2025
The Israeli occupation state has turned its war on Palestinians into a privatized killing industry. Gaza is where tech firms, mercenaries, and consultancy giants orchestrate surveillance, displacement, and mass death for profit. Apart from being colonial warfare, it is also a prototype for the global export of industrial-scale extermination, repackaged as security innovation. Data-driven and profit-focused, this model, being tested on Palestinians today, will be deployed elsewhere tomorrow. A growing list of private firms now operate as the invisible hand of genocide. Their services range from identifying targets for airstrikes to engineering famine and facilitating mass displacement.
Gaza is where genocide meets capitalism
Since the early 2000s, private military companies (PMCs) have wedged themselves deeply into the economy of war. Firms like Blackwater (now Academi) and Dyncorp International marked a pivotal shift, stepping into roles traditionally held by national militaries.
Initially focused on security and logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan, these companies have expanded their operations, providing combat support and acting as key players in warzones worldwide, including in parts of Africa, Yemen, and Haiti. The irony is evident: The UAE has become a new hub for these private military companies, which find refuge in the Gulf state, where mercenaries receive special privileges from local authorities.
Private companies evolved from distant contractors to active agents of war, operating with impunity. This laid the groundwork for the current model, where non-military personnel influence political outcomes without limits or regulation. Another layer of support comes from private nonprofits. A recent Drop Site News report reveals how US organizations like American Friends of Judea and Samaria (AFJS) and Friends of Israel leverage their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status to funnel donations directly to Israeli military operations and settlements. These groups supply equipment such as thermal drones, helmets, vests, and first aid kits to units like the 646 Paratrooper Brigade, even inside Gaza. Beyond logistics, they back settlement projects, lobby for the annexation of the occupied West Bank, run educational campaigns promoting Israeli sovereignty, and support military efforts in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) broadened the scope of acceptable actors of war, opening new, lucrative opportunities in surveillance and intelligence gathering. Israel has embraced this model but applied it with chilling precision. Its elite Unit 8200, the digital brain of the occupation state, has fused military surveillance with corporate tech to create the world’s first AI-assisted genocide. Tools like Lavender and The Gospel now scan Palestinian communications, using dialect recognition and metadata to auto-generate kill lists.
These tools, primarily focused on Arabic dialects, were designed to monitor Palestinians and other Arabic-speaking populations. Companies like Palantir, Google, Meta, and Microsoft Azure have reportedly facilitated these projects, assisting in the development of Lavender and other surveillance systems. Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, invest in global surveillance tech firms that fuel the machinery of genocide.
With AI systems deciding who lives and dies, the line between military command and corporate algorithm has all but vanished. The very infrastructure of Israel’s occupation, from surveillance to assassination, has been outsourced, streamlined, and sold.
From battle-tested weapons to algorithmic apartheid
Israel’s economy is built on militarized capitalism. Its $14.8 billion in weapons sales this year alone are propped up by a marketing line as cynical as it is effective: “battle-tested” on Palestinians. A prime example is Smartshooter’s weaponry, an Israeli firm, being stocked by the UK military since June 2023 in a £4.6-million ($5.7 million) deal. Smartshooter’s technology has been used by the occupation army’s elite Maglan Unit and Golani Brigade during the assault on Gaza.
Journalist Antony Loewenstein was quoted by Declassified as saying:
“Smartshooter is just one of many Israeli companies testing equipment on occupied Palestinians. It’s a highly profitable business and the slaughter in Gaza isn’t slowing down the trade. If anything, it’s increasing due to many nations attracted to the Israeli model of subjugation and control.”
Today, Israel’s arms and tech sectors are indistinguishable. Surveillance software, AI-driven kill lists, and automated targeting systems are packaged alongside rifles and drones. Warfare has become a sandbox for tech innovation, turning Gaza into a lab where privatized genocide is perfected. This fusion has allowed Tel Aviv to industrialize its occupation, creating a modular system of subjugation that can be exported globally. What began as the militarization of tech has become something far more dangerous: the technologization of genocide.
McGenocide
Israel’s model for genocide has international buyers. A recent headline in Haaretz, “Why the future of Israeli defense lies in India,” highlighted the mutual benefits of the Israel–India defense partnership. For Tel Aviv, it reduces reliance on the west, while India gains some strategic leverage in West Asia. Between 2001 and 2021, India imported $4.2 billion worth of Israeli defense technology, including advanced drones and military components.
More recently, Europe became Israel’s biggest arms purchaser, making up to 54 percent of total exports in 2024. In the wake of Brexit and the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s administration, Britain, in particular, has strengthened its defense coordination with Israel in an attempt to reposition itself as a key, relevant player in a multipolar order. Reports indicate London is preparing a $2.69-billion deal with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, to train 60,000 British soldiers annually.
This relationship deepened earlier this year when it was revealed that a British military academy was training occupation army soldiers, many of whom have been implicated in war crimes during the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts. That same Elbit provides 85 percent of the occupation army’s drones and has been repeatedly targeted by the proscribed Palestine Action for its direct role in war crimes. London has not only shielded the company but also ramped up joint operations.
Britain also produces 15 percent of all F-35 fighter jet components. These jets have been used relentlessly in the Gaza genocide, yet their manufacture continues, upheld by British courts despite protests. Far from neutrality, Britain is a stakeholder in Tel Aviv’s genocidal infrastructure. The arms industry has now become a global business, intertwining defense, technology, and systemic oppression. Israel’s model for genocide, which profits directly from this intersection, has spread beyond its borders, with international partners complicit in its success.
Weaponizing aid, redesigning Gaza
Private contractors are now embedded in every layer of Israel’s war machine, including its cynical manipulation of humanitarian aid. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly set up to facilitate aid, has been exposed for colluding with occupation forces, storing intelligence, and deploying private security firms with zero humanitarian credentials. The role of private companies extends far beyond distant surveillance assistance, infiltrating the mechanisms of humanitarian aid. The GHF has repeatedly come under fire for violating the core principles of aid delivery, such as impartiality and independence. It has been found to fire into crowds, store intelligence, and collaborate with Israeli authorities, while outsourcing private security firms like Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) and UG Solutions (UGS), two private security firms led by personnel with no humanitarian expertise. UGS has recently been exposed as having recruited members of a notorious anti-Islam biker gang from the US. In total, 2,465 Palestinians have been killed and over 17,948 injured while waiting for humanitarian aid in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The key issue lies in the fact that private companies are not bound by the same ethical standards as traditional humanitarian organisations. This lack of regulation enables them to function as extensions of the occupation, advancing Israel’s goals under the guise of aid with little to no accountability. Privatized aid is therefore not a secondary detail, but a central component of Israel’s genocide model, which transforms humanitarian aid to another tool of occupation.
Scorching the Earth
US President Donald Trump’s ‘Gaza Riviera’ plan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision of mass expulsion both hinge on a complete reimagining of Gaza. Trump’s post-war plan requires a population willing to turn into subjects of an economic hub, while Netanyahu envisions a land cleansed of Palestinians, on which he can erect new illegal settlements. Unlike the imperial model, the genocide model requires the cleansing of a population, as it is easier – and more efficient – to eliminate a population than to make it servile. This makes the privatization of a post-war Gaza not just an option, but a necessity.
According to the Financial Times (FT), Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the US consultancy partly responsible for the establishment of GHF, was reportedly tasked with estimating the cost of Gazan relocation as part of a wider post-war reconstruction plan. Reports also point to the greater reliance on US mercenaries to manage the post-war environment and control the movement of arms, showing how both the imperial model and Israel’s genocide model rely on each other to sustain themselves.
Humanitarian aid has been instrumental in realizing this vision. The four ‘aid distribution’ sites, described by the UN officials as “death traps,” have become militarized zones, driving Palestinians into even smaller enclaves in southern Gaza, directly contributing to Israel’s displacement objective. This is not the future of war. It is the present. And it is being built, tested, and sold in Gaza.
Western media’s pre-existing condition? Gaza atrocity denialism
By Rebecca Ruth Gold | The New Arab | September 10, 2025
In August 2025, for the first time in its 20 year history, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) classified Gaza as having reached phase 5, the most acute phase in its system. This classification meant that Gaza was deep into a famine, and many of the starving have already suffered irreversible damage.
The IPC locates Gaza City as being fully within phase 5. The same level of food scarcity is expected to reach Deir al Balah and Khan Younis by late September.
Never before has the IPC made a full phase 5 famine classification outside Africa. It had certainly never reached this classification for a location that was just a few kilometres from world class restaurants. As UN Under-Secretary General Tom Fetcher put it in a memorable speech, the Gaza famine is taking place “within a few hundred meters of food, within a fertile land.”
The Gaza famine has been engineered in a manner that is without precedent in world history. People have described Israel’s siege as medieval, but the famine is backed by the full force of modern technology. Rather than looking to early history for analogies, what is happening in Gaza is best understood as a grotesquely futuristic iteration of modern biopolitics.
“Pre-existing conditions”
Within days of report’s release, Israel immediately called for its retraction. There is nothing unusual about a state that has created a famine pulling all the levers at its disposal to deny it. What makes Israel different from the average perpetrator is the eagerness of US and European media outlets to spread the perpetrator’s denialist narrative.
Already in July, the groundwork had been laid in mainstream outlets like the New York Times, which ran a “correction” to the caption it provided on an image of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child dying of starvation in Gaza. When the cover image of his emaciated body was used for the story on Gazans dying of starvation, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which controls the entry of food and medicine into Gaza, informed the Times that al-Mutawaq was born with cerebral palsy.
Israeli media, including I24 and The Jerusalem Post set to work spreading this misinformation and suggesting that vulnerable individuals dying of starvation could not be treated as evidence of a famine.
Soon after, the Times stated that al-Mutawaq had “pre-existing health problems.” But what they failed to disclose is that this “correction” was made in response to Israeli pressure and that all famines target the vulnerable first. While cerebral palsy is a lifelong condition, it is not typically fatal for young children absent conditions of siege and famine. Had the victims of starvation not been Palestinian, common sense would have prevailed. No one would have found it necessary to make the obvious point that death by starvation combined with co-morbidities is still death by starvation.
Other media outlets soon followed, adjusting their captions to reflect, even in the abstract and untethered from specific cases, the possibility that children dying of starvation were suffering from “preexisting conditions.”
The Associated Press captioned the images on a photo essay by Palestinian photojournalist Jehad Alshrafi documenting how starvation is attacking children’s bodies with the following disclaimer: “In Gaza, malnutrition is often worsened by preexisting conditions and compounded by illnesses linked to inadequate health care and poor sanitation, largely the result of the ongoing war.”
Perhaps the Associated Press thought that they were mitigating the harm done by such captions by acknowledging that these so-called “preexisting conditions” that Israel and its defenders are using to deny evidence of famine are in fact “the result of the ongoing war.” But they should not be excused so easily for their complicity in famine denial.
The “pre-existing conditions” discourse has a dark history in the US, where it was introduced during the 1940s to deny healthcare to ailing patients. Even more ominously in Gaza, the “pre-existing conditions” that the media uses to whitewash famine are themselves the direct result of two decades of siege.
Legitimising Israel’s narratives
The right-wing US media company Free Press further disseminated the Israeli narrative when it published a story claiming that the “symbols of Gazan starvation […] suffer from other health problems.” Once again, ableism was used to deny the Gaza famine.
If the sick were made sicker by Israel’s engineered famine, it was implied that it was their own fault, and Israel could not be blamed for Gaza’s starvation. Yet the “preexisting conditions” cited by the Free Press journalists—rickets and cystic fibrosis—are not typically fatal for young children.
The fact that children in Gaza afflicted with these diseases are at a much higher risk of imminent death only confirms the severity of the famine, as well as its wider impact on conditions of life and mortality rates. Yet some media outlets downplayed the famine by focusing on the medical challenges faced by children who are dying of starvation.
On the very day the IPC released its famine report, CNN redacted its own story on starvation in Gaza by “updating” its captions to “reflect new information regarding the condition of some of the subjects.”
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu—himself a war criminal whom the International Criminal Court has indicted with “crimes of starvation,” marking the first time it had ever charged any leader with that crime—endorsed the Free Press story. He did not acknowledge all that his own government had done to undermine accurate reporting and to block data collection on starvation in Gaza.
The Gaza famine is an atrocity, a war crime, and evidence for genocide not just because it leads to deaths from starvation. No less fundamentally, it contributes to the breakdown of a social order. Famine tears communities apart. Mothers are forced to watch their children starve, and children watch their parents risk their lives—sometimes getting shot and killed—while searching for food to keep them alive.
Having normalised famine denialism through a eugenicist discourse in July, Israel was well-prepared to escalate its information warfare when the IPC issued its landmark report in August.
Israel attacked the report on two fronts. First, by falsely claiming that the data was biased. Second, by smearing the report authors due to their alleged political biases. As for the data-related dispute, the official X account for the state of Israel falsely insisted that the IPC had “forged” a famine by lowering the threshold to 15% malnutrition among the general population, as measured by upper-arm circumference. Yet the 15% malnutrition standard, measured according to upper arm circumference, was also relied on for previous IPC reports for other locations that reached a phase 5 famine assessment, including Sudan in 2024 and South Sudan in 2020.
As Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International concludes, Israel’s misrepresentation “is not a good-faith misread. It is a campaign of concerted disinfo[rmation].” The IPC quickly refuted Israel’s false claims.
Denialism
Food security experts criticise the IPC for being too conservative in its metrics. The general consensus is that the IPC places the bar for phase 5 famine classification too high. By the time famine is assessed by the IPC, mortality rates will have sharply escalated (as happened in Gaza during the second half of July 2025), and for many of those who are starving it will be too late to save them.
Unlike most European countries, the US did not issue any official response to the IPC famine report. On 27 August, during an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council which had been convened to address the famine in Gaza, US Ambassador Dorothy Shea to the UN rejected the report by alleging that one of the authors was biased against Israel. Shea’s critique was based on guilt-by-association and did not engage with the substance of the report’s claims.
The US’s denialist stance was explicitly rejected by all other 14 of the 15 Security Council members, who issued a statement affirming that they “trust the IPC’s work and methodology.” However, this consensus will be meaningless unless further measures are taken in defiance of the US.
Indeed, denialism is a core feature of Israel’s information war and is one reason why the genocide persists. In October 2023, less than three weeks into the Gaza genocide, U.S. President Joe Biden stated that he doubted the veracity of the casualty reports provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. In a classic case of denying Palestinians the right to narrate their own extermination, he said “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
These same reports that Biden cast doubt on had been deemed reliable by the United Nations, human rights groups, and mainstream—even the Israeli—media, not to mention Biden’s own State Department.
It was the first time a US President cast doubt on the validity of the figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Subsequent reporting and scholarship has shown that the Ministry of Health’s numbers are likely to be a drastic undercount; importantly, they don’t include indirect deaths from Palestinians who died due to lack of food, water, medicine, and medical care. Yet, mainstream US media started to refer to Gaza’s Ministry of Health as “Hamas-run” in order to undermine the source.
Around the same time, Israel launched a campaign questioning the casualty figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN uncritically absorbed Israel’s messaging and began attaching “Hamas-run” to every reference to casualty figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.
For no other nation does the media find it necessary to preface every reference to a civilian agency with the name of the political faction governing that country. Civilian agencies ought to be respected for the work they do, wherever they happen to be located.
Ending impunity, sanctions now
The crime of famine often converges in practice with the crime of genocide. For this reason, both kind of denialist narratives often flourish together. Just as complicity in genocide is a crime under international law, so should complicity in famine bring criminal sanctions.
In the first days of September 2025, as the famine and mass murder of civilians in Gaza continued to spiral out of control, Belgium announced that it would formally sanction Israel. The following day, Scotland announced similar measures. The majority of European states have maintained full complicity in this genocide, but the impunity that has been granted to Israel for decades is finally beginning to fray.
Famine expert Alex de Waal has compared famine to torture at the societal level. Systematic forced starvation creates a system in which “the biological imperative of survival turns against every impulse that makes us humans—compassion, solidarity, and love.”
The people of Gaza have pooled all their resources to resist this stage of social breakdown. That they have been able to withstand the pressures of famine for so long attests to the strong social and familial bonds that pre-existed the genocide.
However, no community can survive intact when their starvation becomes so acute that their bodies begin to consume themselves. Mass death by starvation awaits the people of Gaza unless we take action to stop the blockade and force Israel to open its borders and let aid flood Gaza.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Download for Free: ‘Forbidden Facts,’ Gavin de Becker’s New Book About Childhood Vaccines
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 12, 2025
The link between vaccines and autism has been “debunked, debunked, debunked,” said New York Times bestselling author Gavin de Becker, in an interview with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland on “Good Morning CHD.”
However, that “debunking” relied on a private organization and a behind-the-scenes meeting where the conclusion was set before the discussion began. De Becker told viewers:
“Out of that closed-door meeting and closed-mind meeting comes one of the most significant damages done to the American public, which is the cessation of … any full-hearted and authentic government-funded research into vaccines and brain damage.”
The transcripts of those Simpsonwood meetings were leaked, giving outsiders an inside look into how scientific concerns and evidence were suppressed, de Becker said.
In his new book, “Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression about Brain Damage from Childhood Vaccines,” de Becker details how private organizations and public health agencies have buried negative information and touted false claims to propagate the lie that vaccines are unquestionably “safe and effective.”
CHD is offering the book as a free download.
“Forbidden Facts,” aimed at a broad audience that may be reluctant to question vaccine orthodoxy, addresses a heartbreaking topic, but also manages to weave in some humor.
“What’s such an amazing facet of this book about something very tragic, about brain injury to children, is that you’ve actually made it funny,” Holland said. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
De Becker detailed his key findings in the interview with Holland.
The link between vaccines and autism was “debunked” by the Institute of Medicine — now known as the National Academy of Medicine, he said.
The private organization also “debunked” the dangers of Agent Orange, the link between baby powder and cancer, the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, the dangers of silicone breast implants and the dangers of the anthrax vaccines.
But all of those claims were later revealed to be wrong.
“If you can accept that they do it once, then hopefully you can accept that they do it in other areas, and be … skeptical,” de Becker said.
Public health agencies altered definitions of key terms
The book also explains how agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confuse public health issues by changing the definitions of key terms.
For example, a vaccine used to be defined as “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease,” de Becker said.
Today, it is defined as “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune system against diseases.” That means vaccines no longer have to protect people from a disease, he said.
A similar change was made to the word “pandemic.” It used to mean an outbreak that killed large numbers of people, but now it just means the appearance of a new virus to which people don’t have prior immunity.
“That terminology of what we used to think a vaccine meant, and what we used to think a pandemic meant, both of those died of COVID in 2020 and 2021,” de Becker said.
A similar move had been made with autism, as the definition has expanded to include people who don’t suffer from severe disability, according to de Becker. This benefits the pharmaceutical companies, he said. They can claim there is a disorder, with no clear definition, that is definitely not linked to vaccines — which also are not, which also have no clear definition.
“I encourage people to use the term ‘brain damage,’ because that, we know, is caused by vaccines,” he said.
No evidence childhood vaccines saved more than 150 million lives
Over the last year, scientific papers, studies and reports have confirmed that vaccines saved over 150 million lives, de Becker said.
However, all of the reports rely on the same flawed data — published in The Lancet — from a modeling study conducted by Imperial College London, which has produced many incorrect modeling studies, according to de Becker.
The modeling study doesn’t account for any vaccine injuries, de Becker said:
“Words that never appear inside that 7,000-word report …: adverse event, side effect, injury, harm, reaction, autism, myocarditis, brain damage, seizure, blood clot, neurological, simian virus 40, autoimmune, heart, heart failure, cardiac arrest, sudden death, stroke, fatality, convulsions. You get the idea.”
That manipulation is pervasive among vaccine manufacturers, vaccine supporters and much of the medical community, Holland said:
“This is why we talk about gaslighting. [Vaccines are] lifesaving, but if you’re injured or if you die — which they acknowledge can happen, but it’s ‘so rare’ — it’s completely ignored in the numbers, in the narrative. It’s not something that’s acceptable in polite conversation.”
The studies touting vaccine successes also fail to address questions such as why people vaccinated against tetanus have the same, very low tetanus death rate as those who aren’t vaccinated against it, de Becker said.
And the numbers are similar for other diseases among healthy people, he added.
When you look at the claim that vaccines saved more than 150 million lives, you have to believe one of two things, de Becker said:
“One is that 154 million lives saved is a headline-grabbing claim bought and paid for and amplified by biased stakeholders in order to affirm and encourage and expand mass vaccination. In other words, the claim is propaganda and promotion, not science.
“Or the other alternative is that the number is perfectly accurate and verifiable, discovered by an unbiased, unconflicted group of geniuses.”
Drug industry uses ‘threats, intimidation’ against people who question them
De Becker, a criminologist, said he believes the pharmaceutical industry is violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, or RICO.
Industry insiders “use bribery, all variety of deceit, threats, intimidation to do damage to the reputation of people who question the orthodoxy that they’ve created,” he said.
It isn’t surprising, as most product launches involve some element of conspiracy, de Becker said:
“They’re going to discredit or harm their competitive products. They’re often going to overvalue and exaggerate the value and benefit of the product they’re rolling out, and they’re not doing it alone. That is a conspiracy. And conspiracies happen every day, all day. There is nothing dark or special about it.”
So the question that remains is: Who can you trust?
“And I say, ‘trust yourself,’” de Becker said, adding that people should look into the recommended vaccines, become informed and make their own decisions.
Just by reading his book, people will know more about how vaccine harms were “debunked” than most doctors, he said.
Watch the interview here.
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.
THE “661 TRIALS” LIE: WHAT AARON SIRI REVEALED IN CONGRESS
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | September 11, 2025
Del sits down with ICAN’s lead attorney, Aaron Siri, Esq., for a hard-hitting conversation following his explosive Senate testimony. Siri takes aim at the false narrative of “661 placebo-controlled vaccine trials,” dismantling it point by point. He also exposes the buried Henry Ford study featured in the upcoming documentary “An Inconvenient Study,” and opens up about his powerful new book, “Vaccines. Amen.” Together, they make the case for why true transparency in vaccine science can no longer be delayed.
‘A Form of Bribery’: FDA, HHS Crack Down on Misleading Drug Ads
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 10, 2025
Pharmaceutical companies will be required to provide full safety disclosures in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements of their products, according to a new policy HHS and the FDA announced Tuesday.
DTC advertisements “can mislead the public about the risks and benefits” and “encourage medications over lifestyle changes,” according to a memorandum by President Donald Trump outlining the policy.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will send nearly 100 “enforcement action letters” and thousands of warning letters to pharmaceutical companies and drug retailers who have “increasingly been promoting drugs with no mention of side effects at all,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said in a post on X.
The policy also addresses online pharmacies that promote drugs with “no mention of side effects, and paid social media influencers advertising drugs,” Makary wrote.
Administration officials told ABC News that drugmakers often market their products on social media using influencers who are not clearly identified as paid spokespeople.
Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, called the new policy “a major victory” that will “dramatically increase the price of pharma advertising, discourage uptake because of side effects and make Big Pharma‘s lawyers stay up at night worrying that they may not have adequately disclosed risks.”
“This will greatly contribute to making America healthy again because it will start to dismantle Pharma’s grip on Big Media,” Holland said.
‘Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs’
In announcing the new policy, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the ads have “distorted physician prescribing habits and patient decisions.”
The advertisements use positive emotional appeals to encourage people to get those medications, HHS said.
The new policy stops short of an outright ban on the advertising. Instead, the policy will require DTC advertisements to “report full contraindications, boxed warnings, and common precautions” — a return to regulations in effect until 1997.
HHS said the loosened regulations in place since that year created an “explosion of DTC pharmaceutical advertising,” which led to “public deception from patient confusion” and “patient harm via inappropriate demand for medications and misalignment of therapeutic choices with actual patient needs.”
Administration officials told ABC News the new policy “is the strongest, boldest action we can take to make sure that patients have adequate safety information on pharmaceutical ads.”
They said no additional steps are planned to regulate such ads.
“Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs,” U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. He added:
“We will shut down that pipeline of deception and require drug companies to disclose all critical safety facts in their advertising.
“Only radical transparency will break the cycle of overmedicalization that drives America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
The new policy was announced on the same day the White House released its Make Our Children Healthy Again strategy report, which states that the federal government “will increase oversight and enforcement under current authorities for violations” of DTC drug advertising laws.
Time reported that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that permit DTC drug ads. According to Digiday, Big Pharma spent $30 billion on advertising in 2024. According to HHS, drugmakers spent $369.8 million in social media advertising in 2020.
Relaxed advertising rules had ‘clear negative impact on public health’
According to the White House memo, the U.S. Congress granted the FDA authority to regulate prescription drug advertising in 1962. DTC drug advertising in the U.S. began in 1981, but regulations were loosened in 1997, resulting in a 330% increase in drug advertising by 2005.
According to HHS, the relaxed regulations permitted drugmakers to direct the public to websites, toll-free phone numbers and package inserts for details on contraindications and common precautions.
An HHS fact sheet states that this “loophole … had a clear negative impact on public health,” contributing to about 31% of the rise in U.S. drug spending since 1997.
According to HHS:
- Patients who consulted with their physician about a DTC-advertised drug were about 17 times more likely to receive a prescription than those who didn’t — the result of persuasive marketing techniques.
- 91% of direct-to-consumer drug ad claims featured social approval as a result of product use and 94% employed positive emotional appeals.
- Prescription drug use among Americans increased from 39% (1988-1994) to 49.9% (2017-2020) in the last 30 years.
Following the FDA’s loosening of its regulations in 1997, the agency’s enforcement actions also decreased. “Enforcement letters plummeted from over 130 annually in the late 1990s to just three in 2023,” according to the fact sheet.
HHS said enforcement actions will intensify, with the issuing of “dozens of enforcement letters related to false and misleading advertising, which makes the drug at issue misbranded.”
The FDA will also “send a letter to every single sponsor of an approved drug or biologic … warning them that the Agency is no longer asleep at the wheel, putting them on notice that FDA will be actively enforcing violations of the law, and directing them to remove all non-compliant promotional materials from the market.”
Drug advertising ‘a form of bribery’
Attempts by the federal government to enact a full ban on DTC drug advertisements are likely to face legal challenges, some legal experts say.
A report by The Lever in January states that it is “relatively unlikely” the federal government will be able to ban DTC pharmaceutical ads, partly because courts have previously rejected such attempts on First Amendment grounds.
Attorney Rick Jaffe wrote last year that while legal precedent exists through the 1970 ban on cigarette advertising in broadcast media in the U.S., “An advertising ban on the entire Pharma industry would be a much heavier lift.”
Despite such obstacles, the End Prescription Drugs Now Act, introduced in June and pending before Congress, would ban DTC prescription drug advertising entirely if passed.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, said the Trump administration’s new policy is “entirely consistent with the First Amendment but will very likely make vast amounts of existing DTC advertising too arduous for it to continue as is.” He said:
“An outright ban would be easily overturned by the courts on First Amendment grounds. On the other hand, in a free society, every seller of products and services has an obligation to warn of risks. This normal practice has been neglected for a long time. This is what has allowed Pharma to spread its wings without accountability and without ensuring informed consent.
“This is an excellent step, not only to protect the public but to curb Pharma capture of the major media.”
According to CNN, the healthcare and drug industry is fourth among all industries in television advertising expenditure, accounting for 11.1% of the market. Prescription drugs accounted for 30.7% of ad minutes across evening news programs on ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
According to a 2019 Forbes report, Pfizer spent twice as much on marketing its products as it did on research.
Last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a 10% increase in DTC advertising results in a 1% to 2.3% increase in consumer drug spending.
Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., a professor of media studies at New York University whose research and teaching focus on propaganda, said such expenditures have enabled Big Pharma to exercise significant editorial control over the legacy news media.
Miller said:
“Drug advertising, like all commercial advertising, is a form of bribery that corrupts all media that carry it. This development has been the most destructive of them all. Nothing on TV, radio and/or the Internet should be ‘brought to you by Pfizer’ or any other corporate poisoner.”
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.
Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals
By Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil | The Grayzone | September 12, 2025
A Trump insider and longtime friend of Charlie Kirk tells The Grayzone how the assassinated conservative leader’s turning point on Israeli influence provoked a private backlash from Netanyahu’s allies that left him angry and afraid.
The source said anxiety spread within the Trump administration after an apparent Israeli spying operation was uncovered.
Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization, America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator speaking on the condition of anonymity. The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it.
In the weeks leading up to his September 10 assassination, Kirk had come to loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a “bully,” the source said. Kirk was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.
According to Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and his inner circle, Kirk strongly warned Trump last June against bombing Iran on Israel’s behalf. “Charlie was the only person who did that,” they said, recalling how Trump “barked at him” in response and angrily shut down the conversation. The source believes the incident confirmed in Kirk’s mind that the president of the United States had fallen under the control of a malign foreign power, and was leading his own country into a series of disastrous conflicts.
By the following month, Kirk had become the target of a sustained private campaign of intimidation and free-floating fury by wealthy and powerful allies of Netanyahu – figures he described in an interview as Jewish “leaders” and “stakeholders.”
“He was afraid of them,” the source emphasized.
At TPUSA, the rift with Israel widens
Kirk was 18 years old when he launched TPUSA in 2012. From its inception, his career was propelled by Zionist donors, who showered his young organization with money through neoconservative outfits like the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He repaid his wealthy backers over the years by unleashing a relentless firehose of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic diatribes, accepting propaganda trips to Israel, and sternly shutting down nationalist forces challenging his support for Israel during TPUSA events. In the Trump era, few American gentiles had proved more valuable to the self-proclaimed Jewish state than Charlie Kirk.
But as Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza Strip drove an unprecedented backlash within grassroots right-wing circles, where only 24% of younger Republicans now sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians, Kirk began to shift. At times, he toed the Israeli line, spreading disinformation about babies beheaded by Hamas on October 7, and denying the famine imposed on the population of Gaza. Yet he simultaneously ceded to his base, wondering aloud if Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset, questioning whether the Israeli government allowed the October 7 attacks to proceed in order to advance long-term political goals, and parroting narratives familiar to his most vociferous critic on the right, streamer Nick Fuentes.
This July, at his TPUSA Student Action Summit, Kirk provided a forum for the right-wing grassroots to vent its fury about Israel’s political hammerlock on the Trump administration. There, speakers from former Fox News stalwarts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, to the anti-Zionist Jewish comedian Dave Smith, denounced Israel’s blood-soaked assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, branded Jeffrey Epstein as an Israeli intelligence asset, and openly taunted Zionist billionaires like Bill Ackman for “getting away with scams” despite having “no actual skills.”
Following the confab, Kirk was bombarded with infuriated text messages and phone calls from Netanyahu’s wealthy allies in the US, including many who had funded TPUSA. According to his longtime friend, the Zionist donors treated Kirk with outright contempt, essentially ordering him to fall back into line.
“He was being told what you’re not allowed to do, and it was driving him crazy,” Kirk’s friend recalled. The conservative youth leader was not only alienated by the hostile nature of the interactions, but “frightened” by the backlash.
The friend’s account dovetails with those of multiple right-wing commentators with access to Kirk.
“I think, in the end, Charlie was going through a spiritual transformation,” Candace Owens, a conservative influencer who shifted decisively against Israel after October 7, reflected after her friend’s killing. “I know it, he was going through a lot. There was a lot of pressure, and it’s hard for me to watch the people who were pressuring him just say the things that they’re saying.”
She continued: “They wanted him to lose everything for changing or even slightly modifying an opinion. It’s very hurtful to me.”
Kirk appeared visibly outraged during an August 6 interview with conservative host Megyn Kelly, as he discussed the menacing messages he was receiving from pro-Israel bigwigs.
“It’s all of the sudden: ‘oh, Charlie: he’s no longer with us.’ Wait a second—what does ‘with us’ mean, exactly? I’m an American, okay? I represent this country,” he explained, before addressing the powerful Zionist interests harassing him.
“The more that you guys privately and publicly call our character into question—which is not isolated, it would be one thing if it were just one text, or two texts; it is dozens of texts—then we start to say, ‘whoa, hold the boat here,’” Kirk continued. “To be fair, some really good Jewish friends say, ‘that’s not all of us’… But these are leaders here. These are stakeholders.”
He went on to complain to Kelly, “I have less ability… to criticize the Israeli government than actual Israelis do. And that’s really, really weird.”
In one of his final interviews, conducted with Israel’s premier influencer in the United States, Ben Shapiro, Kirk once again tried to raise the issue of censorship of Israel critics.
“A friend said to me, interestingly: ‘Charlie, okay, we’ve pushed back against the media on COVID, on lockdowns, on Ukraine, on the border,’” Kirk told Shapiro on September 9. “Maybe we should also ask the question: is the media totally presenting the truth when it comes to Israel? Just a question!”
According to Kirk’s longtime friend, Kirk’s resentment of Netanyahu and the Israel lobby was spreading within Trump’s inner circle. In fact, they said, the president himself was terrified of Netanyahu’s wrath, and feared the consequences of defying him.
During the past year, the Trump insider was told by contacts in the White House that the Secret Service had caught Israeli government personnel placing electronic devices on its emergency response vehicles on two separate occasions.
While The Grayzone was unable to confirm the story with the Secret Service or White House, such an incident would not have been unprecedented. Indeed, according to a report in Politico citing three former senior US officials, a cellphone spying device was placed by Israeli agents “near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington” toward the end of Trump’s first term in 2019.
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recounted a similar incident in his memoir, writing that his security team found a listening device in his bathroom soon after Netanyahu used his personal toilet.
The Israel-did-it theory
Kirk was killed this September 10 with a single shot fired by a sniper apparently positioned on a rooftop 200 meters away. He was shot while seated before a crowd of thousands at Utah State University in Orem, Utah on the first leg of his American Comeback Tour. The scene of Kirk collapsing from the impact of a gunshot to his neck just as he began answering a question about transgender mass shooters was perhaps the most shockingly vivid spectacle of assassination – and certainly the most viral – in human history.
There is currently no evidence of an Israeli government role in Kirk’s assassination. However, that has not stopped thousands of social media users from speculating that the pro-Trump operative’s shifting views on the issue contributed in some way to his death. By the time of publication, over 100,000 Twitter/X users have liked a September 11 post by libertarian influencer Ian Carroll declaring about Kirk, “He was their friend. He basically dedicated his life to them. And they murdered him in front of his family. Israel just shot themselves.”
Many advancing the unsubstantiated theory have pointed to a Twitter/X post by Harrison Smith, a personality at the pro-Trump Infowars network, stating on August 13 – almost a month before Kirk’s assassination – that he was told by “someone close to Charlie Kirk that Kirk thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against Israel.”
The frenzied speculation has set off shockwaves in Tel Aviv, where Netanyahu was compelled to explicitly deny that his government killed Kirk during a September 11 interview with NewsMax.
Netanyahu and his allies bury the Kirk crisis as “big tent” collapses
That appearance was just one of several interviews and statements the Prime Minister dedicated to Kirk in the wake of his killing in an effort to frame the late conservative leader’s legacy in a uniformly pro-Israel light. The major public relations push has occurred while Netanyahu wages a military campaign on seven fronts, punctuated by a regional assassination spree that most recently reached into the heart of Qatar, a US ally.
Netanyahu first tweeted prayers for Kirk at 3:02 PM in the afternoon on September 10, minutes after news of the shooting broke. He has since authored three additional posts about Kirk, even breaking away from the Israeli war cabinet to spend the afternoon of September 11 memorializing the conservative leader on Fox News.
During that interview, Netanyahu did his best to insinuate that Israel’s enemies were responsible for murdering Kirk, despite the fact no suspect was named or in custody at the time:
“The radical Islamists and their union with the ultra-progressives—they often speak about ‘human rights,’ they speak about ‘free speech’—but they use violence to try to take down their enemies,” the Prime Minister told Harris Faulkner.
In a September 10 Twitter/X post eulogizing the conservative leader, the Israeli Prime Minister described a recent phone conversation with Kirk.
“I spoke to him only two weeks ago and invited him to Israel,” Netanyahu declared. “Sadly, that visit will not take place.”
Left unmentioned was whether Kirk declined the invitation—just as he did with the Prime Minister’s offer to reload TPUSA’s coffers with donations from his coterie of wealthy American Jewish cutouts.
At the time of publication, a 22-year-old resident of Utah has been taken into custody after supposedly confessing to killing Kirk. The public may soon learn the true motives of the alleged assassin. Perhaps they will fuel the narrative which Trump and his allies advanced in the immediate wake of the shooting – that a leftist radical was responsible, and that a wave of draconian repression must follow.
But after the shooter’s initial escape and a series of federal law enforcement mishaps, a large sector of Americans will likely never believe the official story. Nor will they ever know where Kirk’s turning point on Israel would have taken the conservative movement.
Four days before the assassination, frustration among pro-Israel commentators bubbled over in public during a Fox News interview in which Ben Shapiro launched a chilling attack on Kirk without naming him.
“The problem with a ‘big tent’ is that you may end up with many clowns inside,” Shapiro told Fox host and fellow Zionist gatekeeper Mark Levin in an apparent critique of TPUSA.
“Just because you’re saying somebody votes Republican—that doesn’t mean that they ought to be the preacher at the front of the church, they’re not the person that ought to be leading the movement, if they are spending all day criticizing the President of the United States as ‘covering up a Mossad rape ring’ or ‘being a tool of the Israelis for hitting an Iranian nuclear facility.’”
When Kirk took his usual place at the “front of the church” four days later, he was cut down by a sniper’s bullet.
Within 24 hours of Kirk’s death, Shapiro announced that he would be launching his own campus speaking tour, vowing: “We’re gonna pick up that blood stained microphone where Charlie left it.”
UN overwhelmingly endorses declaration on Palestinian state
Press TV – September 12, 2025
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly voted to endorse a declaration outlining “tangible, timebound, and irreversible steps” towards the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The 142-10 vote on Friday was to endorse the so-called New York declaration, a statement calling for a two-state solution, crafted by France and Saudi Arabia in July.
Joining Israel and the United States in opposing the resolution were Argentina, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Tonga. Twelve countries abstained.
Israel, US isolated
The seven-page declaration is the result of an international conference at the UN on the decades-long Israeli occupation. The United States and Israel boycotted the event.
The declaration, which excludes Hamas, also calls for “collective action to end the Israeli war in Gaza and effective implementation of the two-state solution.”
The declaration, was endorsed by the Arab League and co-signed in July by 17 UN member states, including several Arab countries
Long-time Western allies of Israel, including Belgium, France, the UK, Canada, and Australia, had earlier announced plans to recognize Palestinian statehood during the upcoming UN General Assembly sessions from September 8–23. They would join 147 nations that already formally recognize Palestine.
Around three-quarters of the 193 UN member states recognize the Palestinian state proclaimed in 1988 by the exiled Palestinian leadership.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, insisted on Thursday that Israel would never accept a Palestinian state.
Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, recently threatened that the Europeans’ recognition of Palestinian statehood would push Tel Aviv into “unilateral decisions”.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has announced plans to annex more than 80 percent of the occupied West Bank in a bid to block the establishment of a Palestinian state.
On August 14, Smotrich announced his intention to move forward with the highly contentious settlement project across the occupied West Bank that “buries the concept of a Palestinian state”.
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East al-Quds. All mere words.
The recognition of a Palestinian state comes as international pressure was mounting on the regime over its genocidal war in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Since the Israeli genocide began in October 2023, the death toll has surpassed 64,700, with more than 164,000 others wounded.
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The Balfour Declaration – A Century of Jewish Power
By Gilad Atzmon | May 17, 2017
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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