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Germany Should Pursue Charges for Nord Stream Blasts & Point Out US Role – Bundestag MP

Sputnik – 30.09.2024

The German federal government should immediately bring charges for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and point out the violation of anti-terrorism treaties by the United States or other countries involved, Bundestag member Steffen Kotre told Sputnik.

In a conversation on the sidelines of Russian Energy Week, he suggested that Washington had probably been involved in the destruction of the gas pipelines. Kotre does not know to what extent Kiev was involved, but, from his point of view, it is difficult to believe that Ukraine could have carried out such an action without outside help. Kotre also believes that the German authorities know who is guilty of what happened, and if not, then the information will certainly be found in the Swedish, Norwegian or US intelligence services.

“That is why the federal government must immediately press charges and, of course, point out that the United States or other countries have violated international treaties, namely agreements aimed at preventing terrorism. And anyone who helps and encourages this violates these international agreements aimed at preventing the spread of terrorism. And all this must be said. And, of course, claims for damages in international courts and much more,” the lawmaker emphasized.

The explosions on two Russian export gas pipelines to Europe — Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 — occurred on September 26, 2022. Germany, Denmark and Sweden have not ruled out deliberate sabotage. Nord Stream AG, the operator of Nord Stream, said that the destruction of the gas pipelines was unprecedented, and it was impossible to estimate the repair time. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office initiated a case on an act of international terrorism. Russia has repeatedly requested data on the explosions on Nord Stream, but has never received it, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

The Russian Energy Week was held in Moscow from September 26 to 28. Sputnik acted as the forum’s media partner.

September 30, 2024 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , | Leave a comment

30 Lawmakers Sponsor Bill to End Liability Protection for Vaccine Makers

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024

A bill introduced late last week in the U.S. House of Representatives would end the liability protections Congress gave vaccine makers under the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

Thirty Republican lawmakers signed on as co-sponsors to House Bill 9828, End the Vaccine Carveout Act. The proposed legislation would end the broad protection from liability for injuries resulting from vaccines listed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Childhood Immunization Schedule.

“The … vaccine makers are criminal enterprises that have paid tens of billions in criminal penalties over the past decade,” Children’s Health Defense (CHD) founder and chairman on leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement on the bill.

Kennedy, who has long advocated for eliminating liability protection for vaccine manufacturers, added, “By freeing them from liability for negligence, the 1986 statute removed any incentive for these companies to make safe products. If we want safe and effective vaccines we need to end the liability shield.”

CHD, React19 and The American Family Project also supported the development of the bill, the press release said.

REACT19 founder Brianne Dressen, who experienced a debilitating COVID-19 vaccine injury as a volunteer in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial, announced the bill and its co-sponsors in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“People harmed are long overdue for a compensation process that actually works, and it’s time for the drug companies to pick up the tab,” she said.

‘Complex sham compensation program’ in place since 1986 act

Congress passed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to address the risks of vaccines — which Congress and vaccine makers acknowledged had “unavoidable” side effects.

The act set up a “no-fault” system whereby instead of suing the manufacturers, people injured by vaccines can file a claim with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which adjudicates the claims.

The VICP was meant to insulate vaccine makers from lawsuits that could bankrupt them while ensuring that injury victims had a straightforward, non-adversarial and fair path to compensation.

The program is funded by a 75-cent-per-dose tax, paid by vaccine makers, for every vaccine included in the program.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services administers the VICP, also known as the “vaccine court.” Court-appointed “special masters” — typically lawyers who previously represented the U.S. government — manage and decide the individual claims.

The proceedings are more informal than a typical courtroom. There is no judge or jury, and the rules of evidence, civil procedure and discovery do not apply.

In practice, getting compensation through the VICP has been notoriously difficult. Critics say the program has devolved to protect government agencies and corporations rather than the health of vaccinated children.

CHD CEO Mary Holland said the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act effectively left parents and children injured by vaccines with no substantive way to get any compensation while giving vaccine makers a free pass.

“For over 35 years, parents of children injured and killed by government-recommended vaccines have been left with no meaningful redress — only a complex, sham compensation program that pits grieving families against the government, while Big Pharma enjoys no liability,” she said.

“During that same time, chronic health conditions in children — autism, ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], severe allergies, asthma — have skyrocketed,” Holland said.

In some cases, people who are dissatisfied with the outcome of their case in the VICP, or who don’t get a timely decision, can sue the manufacturer for limited causes of action, such as fraud — as is the case in many of the over 200 gardasil injury lawsuits currently being argued against Merck in federal court.

Special protections for COVID drugmakers

Vaccines administered under emergency use authorization (EUA), such as the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, aren’t covered by the VICP.

Instead, COVID-19 vaccine makers are protected from all liability by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which grants producers of vaccines, medications and medical devices total freedom from liability for any injuries arising from “countermeasures” used to address a public health or national security threat.

The PREP Act directs such “countermeasures” to be covered by the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).

While the FDA fully licensed versions of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for people ages 12 and up, it’s unclear if the fully licensed formulations are being administered, or if some people are still receiving EUA formulations.

COVID-19 vaccines for infants and children ages 6 months through age 11 have not yet been fully licensed — however, they were added to the childhood schedule.

Still, all COVID-19 vaccine injuries  — whether from a fully licensed or EUA formulation — remain covered only through the CICP.

However, for the tens of thousands of people injured by the COVID-19 vaccine, compensation through this program has proven nearly impossible.

To date, the CICP has paid only 16 claims for COVID-19 vaccine injuries, totaling $425,301.55. Except for one payment, all of the claims resulted in compensation of $8,962 or less.

The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for people ages 12 and up, however those vaccines continue , and added to the childhood schedule, they are still not even included in the VICP process.

During the pandemic, Pfizer and Moderna generated the largest profits in history for a drug from their COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Pfizer made $37 billion in 2021, and slightly more in 2023 from the COVID-19 vaccine alone. Moderna generated over $18 billion in profits in 2021 and $19 billion in 2022.

The most current data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) show that between Dec. 14, 2020, and Aug. 30, 2024, a total of 1,602,516 total adverse events related to the COVID-19 vaccine were reported to VAERS, including 37,390 deaths. There were 311,544 serious injuries reported.

Research also shows that VAERS tends to provide an underestimation of vaccine injuries. Most people don’t report their vaccine injuries to VAERS. Research also has shown that many VAERS reports are delayed or deleted from public view for reasons that are not transparent.

Several lawsuits are currently challenging the constitutionality of the PREP Act, and others have made legal arguments that the PREP Act doesn’t apply in particular cases. However, recently many of these cases have been dismissed in state and federal courts.

Last week, after the Nevada Supreme Court dismissed a case against a man injured by remdesivir, a drug covered by the Prep Act, Kim Mack Rosenberg, general counsel for CHD, told The Defender the decision highlighted “that we need legislative action to undo the damage created by acts such as PREP and the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.”

What the ‘urgently needed’ legislation will do

Holland said the End the Vaccine Carveout Act is “urgently needed”:

“This legislation will help end Big Pharma’s reign over government. The corrupt public-private partnership of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act has suppressed science, stacked the deck against families, subverted the democratic marketplace of checks and balances, and removed citizens’ rights to a trial by jury.

“Americans deserve better.”

The bill proposes to remove the requirement for vaccine-injured people to pursue compensation in the vaccine court. Under the law, someone injured by a vaccine would be able to pursue civil action against a vaccine maker, and to seek compensation through the VICP or both.

However, once a person is awarded compensation in civil court, they will no longer be eligible for compensation through the VICP.

The 1986 law also set a short statute of limitations for seeking injury compensation to two or three years of the death or injury, respectively. However, it often takes longer than that for people to realize that a vaccine caused their injury or illness.

The proposed law would allow anyone injured since the program became effective in 1988 to file a lawsuit.

Finally, the bill would end the protection from liability for the COVID-19 vaccines, allowing people injured by the vaccine to sue the vaccine makers in court.

“COVID-19 vaccines must be redefined as vaccines and not ‘countermeasures,’ so that the PREP Act’s liability carveout can no longer apply,” according to a white paper that provided justification for the bill.

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.

September 30, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024

Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”

When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.

According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”

The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.

Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”

“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.

Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”

“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”

These latest revelations come as other entities ramp up their own efforts to target purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) and TikTok announced a new partnership to promote “science-based information.” Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a Big Pharma lobbying group, this month urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products.”

‘Red-carpet treatment’ for government to ‘silence critics and manage dissent’

Calling it a “fast lane for speech suppression,” Reclaim the Net reported that Facebook “built a slick ‘end-to-end workflow’ tailored to the White House’s censorship needs,” which provided CDC staff with a four-step process to flag COVID-19 “misinformation” for removal.

“This was the red-carpet treatment for anyone in the Biden Administration looking to silence critics and manage dissent,” Reclaim the Net reported. “The system could handle up to twenty censorship requests simultaneously.”

The Facebook document stated, “We empower and safeguard users with policies that are: Principled, Operable, Explicable.” These policies were aligned with Facebook’s “community standards” and adopted “a multi-pronged approach to combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.”

The policies — aimed at “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” — included the removal of “false information that has been debunked by public health experts.”

Other types of content Facebook explicitly targeted include claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous to people than the common flu or cold, and content discouraging “good health practices” — such as wearing a face mask, social distancing, getting tested for COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against COVID-19.

Claims about the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, side effects and efficacy also were targeted for removal, as were “widely debunked vaccine hoaxes” — including claims that vaccines cause autism.

The document also revealed that as of 2021, Facebook and Instagram had removed “more than 16 million pieces of content … for violating our COVID-19 and vaccine policies.”

Repeat offenders faced restrictions, including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations, or “removal from our site.”

The platform also allowed government officials to bypass federal transparency laws.

“By using this specialized portal, and not email, the government could skirt those pesky federal record-keeping laws. FOIA requests? Public oversight? Forget about it. The new system made sure government actions were neatly tucked away in proprietary software,” Reclaim the Net reported.

‘The closest thing to a Ministry of Truth’

According to Reclaim the Net, Robert Flaherty, then-White House director of Digital Strategy and now a member of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, was “barking orders at Facebook to tighten the leash.”

“Twitter Files” documents have shown that Flaherty pressured social media platforms to censor the accounts of public figures such Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then-chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense (now chairman on leave). Kennedy was one of the figures named in “The Disinformation Dozen” report.

“The bureaucratic whims of entrenched CDC personnel and leadership determined what Americans could and could not say — the closest thing to a Ministry of Truth you can imagine in the United States,” Hamilton said.

Author Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of DailyClout, told The Defender, “This shocking new revelation of still more unlawful pressure by the U.S. government on social media companies to strip Americans of First Amendment rights, also fails to shock as it is evidence added to a mountain of documentation of such collusion.”

According to Hamilton, these and other documents may affect several ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration on First Amendment grounds.

“As more records are uncovered through our lawsuit and other open records requests, as well as discovery in litigation, we are confident that courts will have the definitive links necessary to show the government’s facilitation of an unconstitutional censorship enterprise,” Hamilton said.

The latest revelations came just a month after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram — admitted that Biden administration officials pressured Meta to censor content related to COVID-19 during the pandemic.

“If the government can exert that much pressure on one of the largest platforms and its CEO, then it can do it to anybody,” Hinchliffe said.

In an interview earlier this month on “The Kim Iversen Show,” former U.S. State Department official Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. government coerced social media platforms to use “weapons of mass deletion” to censor content and as a workaround to the First Amendment.

According to Benz, this includes government coercion obliging these platforms to adopt automated censorship tools which employ artificial intelligence to sweep platforms for specific keywords or narratives. Benz said many of these tools were initially developed a decade ago for the fight against ISIS.

Benz said the U.S. government urged authorities in the United Kingdom and European Union (EU) to pass censorship laws, in order to then sidestep the First Amendment at home by obliging social media platforms to comply with more restrictive foreign laws.

Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender the EU uses legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) “to stop free speech outside EU borders.”

“According to the EU, the DSA prevents illegal and harmful activities online and protects fundamental rights,” Terhorst said. This means that the EU Commission can decide what is right and what is wrong, including ‘harmful disinformation.’”

TikTok ‘a propaganda arm’ of the United Nations?

TikTok and the WHO on Sept. 26 announced a new collaboration targeting health-related “misinformation.” The year-long partnership is “aimed at providing people with reliable, science-based health information.”

According to the WHO, the new collaboration will promote “evidence-based content and encourage positive health dialogues.”

The WHO quoted Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, who said, “This collaboration can prove to be an inflection point in how platforms can be more socially-responsible.”

Farrar collaborated with Dr. Anthony Fauci and key virologists to draft “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published March 2020 in Nature Medicine. The paper has been used by media and the U.S. government to debunk the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 outbreak and accuse its proponents of being “conspiracy theorists.”

According to public health physician Dr. David Bell, partnerships like the one between the WHO and TikTok are inappropriate. He told The Defender :

“WHO, as an organization subject to member states and with no direct standing over their citizens, should not be involved in such direct messaging. This is a clear infringement of the rights, role and sovereignty of the states themselves.

“WHO acts increasingly like a tool of colonialist corporate interests as it pushes their messages over the top of legitimate authorities and interferes in the running of health systems within countries.”

According to Hinchliffe, this is not the first TikTok partnership with the United Nations (U.N.). As part of a previous project, Team Halo, “the U.N. trained scientists and doctors on TikTok and worked with TikTok to boost their profiles in an effort to combat ‘misinformation’ while promoting ‘authoritative sources’ during the pandemic.”

“This latest partnership shows that TikTok is honored to once again be a propaganda arm for the U.N.,” Hinchliffe said.

The WHO previously established similar partnerships with other social media platforms, including YouTube, which last year revised its “medical misinformation” policy to allow for the deletion of content that contradicts WHO guidance.

The announcement of the TikTok partnership with the WHO — a U.N. agency — comes just days after U.N. member states passed the Pact for the Future.

The pact’s “Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief addresses “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation,” calling for the promotion of “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge” — without clarifying how this “consensus” would be determined.

The TikTok partnership with the WHO also comes before the January 2025 legislative deadline for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations or face shutdown in the U.S.

Pharma wants expanded powers to ‘correct misinformation’

In another related development lobbyists for Big Pharma earlier this month asked the FDA “to expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products, including by allowing them to respond to opinions, value judgments or personal experiences and communications made offline,” Fierce Pharma reported.

The call was a response to the FDA’s draft guidance on “Addressing Misinformation About Medical Devices and Prescription Drugs.” Released in July and now open for public comment, the guidance would allow pharmaceutical companies to issue “tailored” responses to internet-based posts about their products, and “general medical product communications” that would address “misinformation.”

According to Fierce Pharma, “The FDA proposed prohibiting companies from posting tailored responsive communications in response to misinformation spread offline and in response to an individual’s posts about their own experience, opinion and value judgments. PhRMA wants the FDA to lift those restrictions.”

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.

September 30, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Joe Biden Is Responsible for Burning Lebanon

By Daniel Larison | The Libertarian Institute | September 30, 2024

The Joe Biden administration claims to be pushing for a “temporary ceasefire” between Israel and Hezbollah to avert a larger conflict, but this is very late in the day and it is not a serious effort to prevent a new war in Lebanon. It is at best a desperate, last-minute exercise in going through the motions of diplomacy. The administration would like to pretend that it is a passive bystander pleading from the sidelines instead of the chief patron and arms supplier of the main belligerent in the conflict, and it designs its entreaties to be toothless so that Israel can safely ignore them.

The United States has refused to exert any pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for the last eleven months, and it has continued supplying Israel with weapons no matter how those weapons have been used to commit war crimes against Palestinians. Now American officials say that they don’t want further escalation in Lebanon, but once again the administration won’t back up those words with action. The U.S. could use its leverage to rein Israel in and insist on the de-escalation that the administration says that it wants, but the president has shown that he has no interest in doing that.

The empty Gaza ceasefire negotiations prove as much. The ceasefire talks have become an interminable process designed to lead nowhere. The administration has catered to the Netanyahu government’s preferences at every turn. Each time that Netanyahu adds new deal-breakers or otherwise seeks to derail negotiations with new attacks, the administration has dutifully taken his side and pretended that Hamas is the sole obstacle to securing an agreement. The United States cannot be a credible diplomatic actor in the region when its primary role is acting as Netanyahu’s PR agent.

The Israeli government assumes that the U.S. won’t withhold weapons, diplomatic support, or military protection under any circumstances, and that has encouraged Netanyahu to pursue increasingly aggressive goals. Because the U.S. shields Israel from military reprisals, as it did earlier this year during Iran’s missile and drone strikes, it has given Netanyahu free rein to lash out whenever and wherever he wants. The administration has dressed all of this up as preventing a wider regional war, but the reality is that they have simply delayed the conflagration while making it more likely that it will be even more destructive when it occurs.

The total failure of the administration’s policy is there for all to see. The region is likely facing a new Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and that invasion will have serious destabilizing effects on the wider region. This is the disaster that the United States has claimed to oppose all along, but in practice it has done nothing to stop it. Had the U.S. truly wanted the war in Gaza not to spread, it would have demanded a lasting ceasefire months ago. Had the U.S. wanted to prevent escalation in Lebanon, it would be cutting off arms transfers and pulling back its forces from the region rather than rushing more troops to the Middle East. Instead the United States has done everything that one would expect it to do if it wished to set the region ablaze.

The U.S. is at great risk of being ensnared in this larger war. It is imperative that our country avoid direct involvement in Israel’s conflicts. The U.S. has no vital interests at stake in these fights. The president has no authority to involve American forces directly. It is not the responsibility of the United States to bail out a reckless client state when it gets in over its head. The quickest way to force the Israeli government to deescalate is to deprive it of the support and protection that it takes for granted.

Once the current crisis is over, U.S. foreign policy in the region has to be radically overhauled. To avoid future entanglements in the wars of client states, the U.S. should downgrade its relationships with the Middle Eastern governments that rely heavily on American weapons supplies and protection. The United States has no formal commitments to defend these states, and it should not extend security guarantees to any of them. The U.S. also needs to reduce its military presence in the region to the bare minimum required to secure our embassies. Decades of extensive American military involvement in this part of the world have been ruinous for the countries of the region and for American interests, and it is in the best interests of all concerned for the United States to get out.

September 30, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

“under the Intermediate Scenario”

Tony Heller | September 24, 2024

NOAA has launched a new sea level website which is based on unsupportable claims and appeals to authority.

September 29, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Of Cool Heads and Hot Heads

By Philip Kraske • Unz Review • September 29, 2024

Ever more desperate, Israel is working hard to start a world war with the United States on its side. The elimination of Hassan Nasrallah won’t make much difference to Hezbollah’s fight; the new leader will soon step up. But Israel might regret the absence of the cool-headed Nasrallah.

Cool-headedness has actually been the norm this past year, and is among the few hopeful notes on the international scene. Lots of leaders are keeping calm, holding back the factions in their governments that would love to take a crack at the folks thumbing their military noses at them.

China merely tut-tuts about foreign navy ships traversing the Strait of Taiwan, Hezbollah keeps its big missiles in their silos, Iran responds to Israeli attacks with a few half-hearted firecrackers, and Vladimir Putin frowns and issues warning after warning when Ukraine, with Nato help, hits Russian refineries and radar installations. Meanwhile Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Syria, and Turkey — and I’ve probably missed a few — itch to put holes in Israeli runways.

But restraint is the watchword. Unlike before World War One, when governments decided to declare war from one day to the next, countries are looking before they leap. Why? To what do the world’s citizens owe this clear shift to reluctance among national leaders to jump into conflict? It’s often been observed that nuclear weapons have kept the peace among the great powers. Nowadays, however, other elements keep the peace just as well. Here are the three most important ones.

The first is economic. It’s true that capitalist consumerism has atomized the citizenry, but it also keeps people quiet. National leaders figure that the only way to keep everybody fed and employed and hypnotized by Netflix series is to keep the economy running. Take tourism, for example — a labor-intensive industry that absorbs a lot of workers with little formal education. Israel’s has been hammered. Who wants to retrace the steps of Christ in the Holy Land amidst the squall of sirens announcing incoming missiles from Hezbollah? Israel now has to rotate its forces in and out of the military just to keep the economy going. But they’re finally going to throw the Palestinians out, and figure it’s worth the tradeoff.

Other touristy countries have much less to gain. In Turkey, tourism makes up more than ten percent of the economy, and is still growing. In Egypt, it’s 24 percent. Take that away, and the ensuing unrest will topple governments. But their leaders have less to gain from tackling Israel.

The second element is strategic. Just over the last several years, war has turned into a video game of missiles and missile-defenses and drones of all different kinds. As the commentator Alistair Crooke has observed, American aircraft carriers parked in the eastern Mediterranean look like something out of the 1950s. A couple of missiles sent from Crimea would send them to the bottom of the sea in a question of minutes.

Conventional war has all but disappeared. Imagine what would happen to American troop and supply ships traversing the Atlantic. If German U-boats sank nearly three thousand, Russians would sink every one of them, and not from a dank submarine but from a cosy office in Moscow. And crossing the Pacific to attack China would be a suicide mission.

National governments see the destruction wrought by Russian missiles — not its army shelling villages, but the attacks from afar on major cities and infrastructure — and they quickly figure that restraint is the better part of valor.

The third element that makes governments hesitate to get into a fight is that societies are far more fragile than before. Imagine what would happen if the Chinese got mad at the Americans and dropped a few missiles on highway overpasses, which then collapsed highways, between San Diego and San Francisco. Of course, hackers could wreak havoc on just about everything, but if software defenses proved troublesome to them, a couple of missiles — or just bombs placed by hired thugs — on data centers would quickly affect the internet in all kinds of random ways. Well-paid jokers could send drones flying around Atlanta and Chicago airports — or Istanbul’s or Frankfurt’s or Tokyo’s — closing them down. And if some leader were in a bloody frame of mind, he could order the downing of just two commercial airliners, one taking off in Paris and the other in Miami — and watch every flight reservation in the the western hemisphere get canceled in an hour. Citizens of the world’s poorest countries would finally have the last laugh.

In fact, there is a never-declared Mutually Assured Destruction that restrains governments, or quasi-governments like Hezbollah. All to the good, except that conventional war seems to be morphing into terrorism. Now that Israel has opened the Pandora’s box of booby-trapping consumer items, how long will it be before desk lamps — or shoes or avocados — begin to explode in Tel Aviv? Will Kurds need to take apart their Turkish-made earphones? As readers of Unz.com know, attacking China is far more cost-effective through untraceable biological attacks against its people and livestock, and invites no revenge — at least for the moment.

Israel’s attack with pagers and radios, Ukraine’s worthless drone strikes on Moscow apartment buildings, America’s aimless pecking at “terrorists” in Syria and Iraq — these are harbingers of the terrorist world to come.

And as defeat approaches, the losers are bound to raise the ante — especially the Israelis and Ukrainians. As in World War Two, the years of war have corroded their last vestige of ethics, and they know that the Washington elite will ultimately excuse their tactics. The western media would give nothing but dashing accounts of how Zelensky and Netanyahu — harried, exhausted, yet persevering — listened to their advisers, rubbed their necks, and gave the green lights to “limited” chemical or nuclear attacks against advancing enemies. For an excellent example of how flexible, how downright protean, mainstream journalists can be, read New York Times columnist Amanda Taub’s article on the legality of Israel bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus: “Israel Bombed an Iranian Embassy Complex. Is That Allowed?” She concludes that it was.

In short, if Hezbollah’s next leader, not so restrained as Nesrallah, unleashes missile hell down the whole length of Israel, Netanyahu and his hard-eyed friends may come to regret finishing him off. Doesn’t history tell the best jokes?

September 29, 2024 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama was a ‘simp’ for the deep state – brother

RT | September 29, 2024

Barack Obama courted the ‘deep state’ during his rise to power, and once in office was powerless to disobey their orders, the former US president’s half-brother has told Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi.

In an interview set to air on Monday, Malik Obama told Rattansi that before he entered the corridors of power, Barack Obama “was a really humble, really nice person.”

However, “to be the president of the USA, he had to have the backing of certain people like the Clintons” and “the [George] Soros people… the ones who are really controlling everything out there.”

Keeping their backing, along with the support of the deep state, was crucial to Barack Obama, and Malik suggested that his half-brother wouldn’t have dared oppose the 2014 coup in Ukraine or the 2011 regime-change operation against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

“He would have lost his support,” Malik said. “He would not be what he is today, because those people are the ones that propped him up and he had to play to them.”

“That’s why I like President Trump,” he continued, “because he does things his own way. He reached out to North Korea and met the leader there. [Obama] could have done that for Muammar Gaddafi. I think he’s just… he’s a simp.”

The term ‘deep state’ refers to the unelected and often unknown government bureaucrats who steer government policy, particularly the leaders of intelligence agencies and the military.

Malik Obama has the same father as the ex-president, and visited the White House several times during his brother’s first term in office. However, he later claimed that Barack was “cold and ruthless,” and blasted him for abandoning his Kenyan family. He has since made a series of bizarre claims about the former president, apparently announcing last year that Barack Obama is “definitely gay,” and alleging in 2017 that he was born in Kenya.

Malik Obama is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, who before running for office in 2016 challenged Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate over doubts he was born in the US. Trump later abandoned the dispute and admitted that Obama was born in the US.

During the full interview with Rattansi, Malik Obama discussed the current state of his relationship with his brother, and Barack’s alleged role in forcing President Joe Biden to end his reelection campaign.

September 29, 2024 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Nasrallah assassination aimed at provoking US-Iran war: Russia’s Lavrov

Press TV – September 29, 2024

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says that Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah may have been intended to provoke a war between the United States and Iran.

Lavrov told reporters at a news conference after addressing the UN General Assembly on Saturday that a lot of people believe Israel’s assassination of Nasrallah was aimed at provoking Iran and the US “to unleash a full-blown war in the entire region.”

Killing the Hezbollah leader was “not simply a political assassination. It’s very cynical as an act,” Lavrov said.

“I think – well not even, I think, but a lot of people say – that Israel wants to create the grounds to drag the US directly into this and so to create these grounds, it is trying to provoke Iran,” Lavrov added.

“The Iran leadership, I think, are behaving extremely responsibly. And this is necessary. This is something that we should take due note of.”

Speaking at the UN Security Council meeting on Friday, Lavrov said, “the Middle East is once again on the brink of a big war,” calling for active diplomatic efforts to prevent the “most catastrophic scenario.”

In his UN General Assembly speech, Lavrov condemned the Israeli regime for its “inhumane attack on Lebanon.”

“Another glaring example of terrorist methods as a means of achieving political aims is the inhumane attack on Lebanon that transformed civilian technology into a lethal weapon,” Lavrov said, calling for an immediate international investigation.

‘US knew about Israel’s pager attacks’

Lavrov also told reporters that the US was likely aware of the Israeli regime forces’ plans to launch a “terrorist attack” against Lebanon using communication devices.

He said the complexity of the attack and the leaking of details to Western media indicate Washington’s possible complicity in the terrorist operation.

Last week, thousands of hand-held pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon simultaneously, killing dozens and injuring thousands, including many civilians. The attack, widely blamed on Israeli spy agency Mossad, drew international condemnation, with UN Human Rights Commissioner Volker Turk calling it a “shocking” and “unacceptable” act that violates human rights laws.

Tel Aviv has not claimed responsibility for the pager attacks, and its allies have denied any knowledge. However, according to Lavrov, Western media reports regarding the details and preparations “indicate to varying degrees the involvement and, at the very least, awareness of Washington concerning the preparation of that terrorist attack.”

September 29, 2024 Posted by | War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Life, Pre-empted

What would you do to save Democracy? To save America? To save the world? How will you vote in November?

By Scott Ritter | September 25, 2024

If you’re not thinking about the end of the world by now, you’re either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news.

Last week we came closer to a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Today we are even closer.

Most scenarios being bandied about in the western mainstream media that involve a nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States have Russia initiating the exchange by using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in response to deteriorating military, economic, and/or political conditions brought on by the US and NATO successfully leveraging Ukraine as a proxy to achieve the strategic defeat of Russia.

Understand, this is what both Ukraine and the Biden administration mean when they speak of Ukraine “winning the war.”

This is a continuation of the policy objective set forth by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in April 2022, “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” meaning that Russia should “not have the capability to very quickly reproduce” the forces and equipment that it loses in Ukraine.

This policy has failed; Russia has absorbed four new territories—Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk—into the Russian Federation, and the Russian defense industry has not only replaced losses sustained in the Ukrainian conflict, but is currently arming and equipping an additional 600,000 troops that have been added to the Russian military since February 2022.

It is the United States and its NATO allies that find themselves on their back feet, with Europe facing economic hardship as a result of the extreme blowback that has transpired because of its sanctioning of Russian energy, and the United States watching helplessly as Russia, together with China, turns the once passive BRICS economic forum into a geopolitical juggernaut capable of challenging and surpassing the US-led G7 as the world’s most influential non-governmental organization.

As a result of this abysmal failure, policymakers in both the US and Europe are undertaking increasingly brazen acts of escalation designed to bring Russia to the breaking point, all premised on the assumption that all so-called “red lines” established by Russia regarding escalation are illusionary—Russia, they believe, is bluffing.

And if Russia is not bluffing?

Then, the western-generated scenario paints an apocalyptic picture which has a weak, defeated Russia using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in a last, desperate act of vengeance.

According to this scenario, which the US and NATO not only war-gamed out but made ready to implement when these entities imagined that Russia was preparing to employ nuclear weapons back in late 2022-early 2023, the US and NATO would launch a devastating response against Russian targets deep inside Russia designed to punitively degrade Russian command and control, logistics, and warfighting capacity.

This would be done using conventional weapons.

If Russia opted to retaliate against NATO targets, then the US would have to make a decision—continue to climb the escalation ladder, matching Russia punch for punch until one side became exhausted, or preemptively using nuclear weapons as a means of escalating to de-escalate—launch a limited nuclear strike using low-yield nuclear weapons in hopes that Russia would back down out of fear of what would come next—a general nuclear war.

The Pentagon has integrated such a scenario into the range of nuclear pre-emption options available to the President of the United States. Indeed, in early 2020 US Strategic Command conducted an exercise where the Secretary of Defense gave the launch instructions for a US Ohio class submarine to launch a Trident missile carrying W-76-2 low yield nuclear warheads against a Russian target in a scenario involving Russian aggression against the Baltics in which Russia used a tactical nuclear weapon to strike a NATO target.

The insanity of this scenario is that it ignores published Russian nuclear doctrine, which holds that Russia will respond with the full power of its strategic nuclear arsenal in the case of a nuclear attack against Russian soil.

Once again, US nuclear war planners believe that Russia is bluffing.

There is another twist to this discussion.

While the US might assess that Russia would not seek a general nuclear war following the use by the US of low yield nuclear warheads, the problem is that the means of employment of the W-76-2 warhead is the Trident submarine launched ballistic missile.

While the February 2020 scenario had Russia using nuclear weapons first (something which, at the time, represented a gross deviation from published Russian nuclear doctrine and the declaratory policy statements of the Russian President), the fact is the US will not necessarily wait for Russia to kick things off on the nuclear front.

The United States has long embraced a nuclear posture which not only incorporates the potential of a nuclear first strike, but, through declaratory policy statements, actively encourages America’s potential nuclear adversaries to believe such an action is, in fact, possible. David J. Trachtenberg, the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy during the Trump administration, said in a speech at the Brookings Institution in 2019 that a key aspect to the US nuclear posture was “keeping adversaries such as Russia and China guessing whether the US would ever employ its nuclear weapons.”

But the US takes the guesswork out of the equation. Theodore Postol points out, in a recent article in Responsible Statecraft, that a new fuse used on the W-76 nuclear warhead (not the low yield W-76-2, but rather the 100 kiloton version) has turned the 890 W-76 warheads loaded on the Trident missiles carried onboard the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines into weapons capable of destroying hardened Russian and Chinese missile silos with a single warhead.

This means that, firing in a reduced trajectory profile from a position close to the shores of either Russia or China, the United States possesses the ability to launch a nuclear first strike that has a good chance of knocking out the entire ground-based component of both the Chinese and Russian strategic nuclear deterrent. As a result, Russia has been compelled to embrace a “launch on detect” nuclear posture where it would employ the totality of its silo-based arsenal the moment it detected any potential first strike by the United States.

Return, for a moment, to the scenario-driven employment of the W-76-2 low yield nuclear weapon as part of the “escalate to de-escalate” strategy that underpins the entire reason for the W-76-2 weapon to exist in the first place.

When the United States launches the Trident missile carrying the low yield warhead, how are the Russians supposed to interpret this act?

The fact is, if the US ever fires a W-76-2 warhead using a Trident missile, the Russians will assess this action as the initiation of a nuclear first strike and order the launching of its own nuclear arsenal in response.

All because the United States has embraced a policy of “first strike ambiguity” designed to keep the Russians and Chinese guessing about American nuclear intentions.

And, to put icing on this nuclear cake, Russia’s response appears to have been to change its nuclear posture to embrace a similar posture of nuclear pre-emption, meaning that rather than wait for the US to actually launch a nuclear-armed missile or missiles against a Russian target, Russia will now seek to pre-empt such an attack by launching its own pre-emptive nuclear strike designed to eliminate the US land-based nuclear deterrent force.

In a sane world, both sides would recognize the inherent dangers of such a forward-leaning posture, and take corrective action.

But we no longer live in a sane world.

Moreover, given the fact that the underlying principle guiding US policies toward Russia is the misplaced notion that Russia is bluffing, any aggressive posturing we might engage in designed to promote and exploit the ambiguity derived from the first-strike potential inherent in existing US nuclear posture will, more likely than not, only fuel Russian paranoia about a potential US nuclear pre-emption, prompting Russia to pre-empt.

Russia isn’t bluffing.

And our refusal to acknowledge this has embarked us on a path where we appear more than willing to pre-empt life itself.

We need to pre-empt nuclear preemption by embracing a policy of strict no first use principles.

By choosing deterrence over warfighting.

By deemphasizing nuclear war.

By controlling nuclear weapons through verifiable arms control treaties.

And by eliminating nuclear weapons.

It truly is an existential choice—nuclear weapons or life.

Because they are incompatible with one another.

September 29, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

As the West tries to silence RT, the Global South speaks out

The US-led “diplomatic campaign” to suppress RT worldwide is not getting the warm reception Washington hoped for

By Anna Belkina | RT | September 28, 2024

The United States government has recently issued new sanctions against RT, with the State Department announcing a new “diplomatic campaign” whereby – via US, Canadian, and UK diplomats – they promise to “rally allies and partners around the world to join us in addressing the threat posed by RT.”

In other words, the plan is to bully countries outside of the Collective West into shutting off their populations’ access to RT content in order to restore the West’s almost global monopoly on information. Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa appear to be of particular concern to the State Department’s James Rubin, as it is in those regions where US foreign policy has failed to find universal purchase.

As Rubin said during a press conference, “one of the reasons… why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be… is because of the broad scope and reach of RT.”

Clearly not trusting anyone outside of the Western elite circles to think and decide for themselves which news sources people should or should not have access to, Rubin promised that the US will be “helping other governments come to their own decisions about how to treat” RT.

The statement reeks of patronizing and neo-colonialist attitudes, especially when you consider the countries that are being targeted.

Therefore, it has been reassuring to observe over the past couple of weeks the diversity of voices that have spoken out against this latest US-led crusade.

The Hindu, one of India’s newspapers of record, was among the first, reporting that while “US officials have spoken to [India’s] Ministry of External Affairs about joining their actions” against RT, “government officials said that the debate on sanctions is not relevant to India, while a former diplomat said that banning media organizations showed ‘double standards’ by Western countries.”

This position was seconded by Indian business newspaper Financial Express : “India is unlikely to act on this request [to ban RT], given its longstanding friendly relations with Russia and its own position on media censorship… In India, RT enjoys significant viewership, with its content reaching a large number of English-speaking audiences and also expanding its reach through a Hindi-language social media platform. RT has grown in popularity in India and other parts of the world, claiming that its main mission is to counter the Western narrative and offer Russia’s perspective on global affairs.”

In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s Okaz paper said, “it is paradoxical, that when [free] speech becomes a threat to the US and the West, they impose restrictions on it, as it happened with the ban on RT under the pretext of lack of transparency, spreading false information, interfering in internal affairs and inciting hatred – something that Washington and the West themselves do in relation to other countries.”

Leading Lebanese daily Al Akhbar wrote: “despite all the attempts to ban it… RT continues to broadcast and causes concern among supporters of imperial wars. These efforts also demonstrate the hypocrisy of their authors and their false claims about ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘freedom of the press,’ among their other loud proclamations. They claim that RT is a ‘mouthpiece of disinformation,’ but if this is so, then why is there such fear of it? If the channel really is spreading lies, won’t the viewers be able to notice? [This only works] if Western rulers view their citizens as simple-minded and easily deceived, which in turn explains the misinformation coming from every side of the Western media.”

It is safe to say that “Western rulers” view with such disregard and distrust not only their own citizens, but most of the world’s population… But I digress.

In Latin America, Uruguay-based current affairs magazine Caras y Caretas praised RT for “maintain[ing] a truthful editorial line, beyond being a state media outlet, and [it] has increased its popularity and credibility by exposing a perspective that makes it creative, original and authentic… RT has helped open the eyes of a very large part of the world’s population and of increasingly numerous governments and countries. That is the reason for the sanctions that the US and hegemonic media conglomerates such as Meta and Facebook have imposed on RT and its directors, adjudicating against them with the charges that are not believable, and are ridiculous. The statements of top US administration officials claiming to be defenders of press freedom and accusing RT of being a front for Russian intelligence is only an expression of impotence in the face of an alternative narrative to the hegemonic imperialist story.”

Rosario Murillo, the vice president of Nicaragua, sent RT a letter of support. In it, she berated the US authorities for their actions against the network, asking when they will “learn that the aggressions that they shamelessly call Sanctions, (as if they had divine powers to dispense punishments)… have no more sense than establishing their claims to the position [of] dictators of the World.” She praised RT’s “work and the creative, thoughtful, illustrative, sensitive and moving way” that RT “manage[s] to communicate.”

A number of African outlets have also spoken out about the hypocrisy of America’s global censorship. Nigerian newspaper The Whistler summarized the latest Western media diktat and its colonialist undertones thusly: “The Americans got into some quarrel with Russia and then shut down this Russian news channel. An order signed by some American politician in Washington got the European company supplying Multichoice to stop streaming RT… The result? We in Nigeria woke up one day to find we could no longer watch RT on TV or stream them on Facebook because of some drama happening in Washington and Moscow. Imagine the audacity! It was a decision made by Americans and Europeans without asking anybody here in Africa how we felt about it. They decided what we could and could not watch on our own TVs.”

It is heartening to see that so many different countries, with incredibly varied politics, societies, and cultures, speaking out against Washington’s imposing its world order on them. They prove that RT’s voice continues to be not just necessary, but welcomed and sought after.

Last night, as part of RT’s response to the actions of the US government, the bright green RT logo lit up the facade of the US Embassy building in Moscow with the message: “We’re not going away.”

Not in the US, not in the West at large, not in other parts of the world.

See you around!

September 28, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

EPA LOSES HISTORIC FLUORIDE CASE

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | September 26, 2024

September 27, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Let’s Force Antony Blinken to Resign

No, it would be even better to arrest him for war crimes

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • September 27, 2024

Some might argue that Antony Blinken is the worst Secretary of State that the United States has ever had to suffer under even though the competition for that accolade is fierce and includes his recent predecessor Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who more than anyone launched the war against Africa’s most developed nation, is remembered fondly for her giggled, grinning response when she was informed how deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had died after having a bayonet inserted in his anus when he was captured by rebels while on the run after being removed from power by the US and its NATO allies. She said “We came, we saw and he died!” All right, so it wasn’t exactly Julius Caesar’s terse description of the outcome of his Second Civil War battle against Pharnaces II of Pontus at Zela (modern-day Zile, Turkey) in 47 BC. Caesar said “Veni, vidi, vici!” (I came, I saw, I conquered) but it was likely the best plagiarism that a Clinton could come up with.

Joe Lauria of Consortium News observes how deep the State Department rot goes as “Barack Obama also let Hillary Clinton, the ‘Queen of Warmongers,’ bring Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland into his administration. Donald Trump let neocons John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into his. And Biden has Blinken (and for a time Nuland too.) Instead of banishing these people, they are allowed to linger and drag the US into evermore perilous failures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind a mountain of squandered dollars and an ocean of blood.”

To be sure, the United States has developed a politico/economic system based on corruption by special interests and tribalism that fails to benefit the country and its citizens in almost every respect. Due in part to runaway military spending on unnecessary and avoidable wars, the country is running a deficit so huge that it will inevitably lead to a financial crash that will be devastating to ordinary Americans. The nation’s health care system is both broken and often prohibitively expensive, with the US delivering the worst results in medical services for any developed nation. To pretend that everything is just fine, the politicians lie and lie and lie, so much so that the joke has become current “How do you know that a politician is lying?” Answer: “When his or her lips are moving!”

My favorite recent big lies by a politician have to be President Joe Biden’s assertions crammed into an 11 minute speech on July 24th which included that he had ended his candidacy for reelection as president in order to “save democracy” in the United States. The president is 81 and his failing mental state has been widely observed but in his first White House appearance since he quit the race on July 21st, he felt compelled to say that he felt his record as president “merited a second term” but that “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.” Of course, one might well argue that if democracy is failing it must largely be the fault of the president and his cabinet which control the courts and justice department and run both police and intelligence services as well as having the ability to place disinformation to counter criticism in the national media. Who’s driving the car Joe?

Biden also claimed that “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” even though it is engaged in a military occupation of one quarter of Syria to include combat operations against government forces, bombing Yemen, and conducting counterterrorism operations in Iraq in spite of the fact that the country’s parliament and government have three times asked the US to leave. The US is as well supporting and enabling financially, logistically and with intelligence the large and bloody conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, which did not threaten the US and could have been avoided completely.

Israel is, of course, a special case even given the appalling record exhibited by US foreign policy “experts in place” screwing up the world since 9/11. Before Israel’s likely demolition/destruction of the World Trade Center towers on that day, one would never have imagined the control that the Jewish Lobby has since obtained over the US foreign policy as well as over many domestic policies. This is largely thanks to the alarmingly pro-Israel measures that have been advanced by an ignorant and reckless Donald Trump followed by the totally mindless and heedless Joe Biden. Biden has a majority of Jews occupying senior positions in his administration and it is fair to say that Jews are at the controls for Middle Eastern policy as well as what is playing out in Ukraine. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is little more than a spokesman and advocate for Israel as he made clear when he arrived in Ben Gurion Airport a day after the Hamas October 7th 2023 attack and announced that “I come before you as a Jew…” and followed that up with his family holocaust history, though he failed to mention that his stepfather Samuel Pisar worked as private secretary for Robert Maxwell, a leading Israeli spy. That fact plus the occasional claims that he is an Israeli-American dual national, like Biden’s top Middle East negotiator Amos Hochstein, makes me wonder how Blinken ever got a security clearance in the first place. And let’s not forget about Congress, where pro-Israel fanatics have taken complete control (with the sole exception of Tom Massie) of the Republican Party.

This corruption and control of the federal government is exercised through over-the-top political donations and favorable media coverage dependent on each Congressman’s support for Israel. It also means using prominent Jewish journalists to discredit critics as antisemites and holocaust deniers. And it is all bought with cash on the line. A story is currently circulating indicating that Miriam Adelson, Israel-born heiress to the Sheldon Adelson multi-billion dollar casino fortune, has offered Trump $100 million as a political campaign contribution if he will promise to enable Israeli annexation of all of historic Palestine after he wins the November election. Just watch it happen if he wins.

Blinken is more into the straight-faced lie, particularly when he is on guard to protect Israel from any criticism up to and including a clearly visible genocide that is taking place, and that is where the latest saga involving him has gained momentum. It has picked up speed to such an extent that people who normally are afraid to challenge the Israel Lobby are beginning to take notice and are calling for Blinken’s resignation. I would personally prefer that he be flat out fired as an accessory to war crimes and genocide and imprisoned, with a black mark in perpetuum etched next to his name. But I would regret that either outcome would only free him up to take a salary increase as a front office toady with any one of a number of deep-pockets Israel Lobby components. Somehow folks who betray their loyalty oaths and ignore their allegiance to this country to “help” Israel when taking senior level government jobs always land on their feet when their betrayal becomes too obvious and they have to step down. Note for example the case of Victoria Nudelman who was recently the number two top official at the State Department and was the driving force behind war between Ukraine and Russia.

The most recent bit of over-the-top lying to cover up Israeli crimes has plenty of blood all over it, which is a development that doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Blinken as long as it is nearly all Palestinian. He is now, however, facing calls for his resignation after he had reportedly ignored assessments by two government agencies which concluded that Israel was deliberately and maliciously blocking American humanitarian aid to Gaza. Blinken’s monstrous behavior was recently exposed in an investigation by ProPublica which revealed that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s refugee bureau had both communicated their concerns about what was happening to Blinken and other top government officials in April. According to US law, countries that block US humanitarian aid cannot receive arms shipments, but Washington has provided Tel Aviv with billions of dollars in military aid and arms sales with only one short pause throughout the course of the entire Israeli assault on Gaza.

The 17-page USAID report that was presented to Blinken detailed “instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.” Nevertheless, on May 10th, Blinken delivered a State Department report to Congress asserting that Israel had not blocked aid to Gaza despite the findings of the report, which went on to describe the situation in Gaza as “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.” USAID officials also specifically recommended that all arms exports to Israel be paused until the situation is resolved. The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, concurred and recommended that the Foreign Assistance Act be triggered to freeze the $830 million in US aid for arms for Israel that was already in the pipeline. Senior officials in the department concluded that “facts on the ground indicate US humanitarian assistance is being restricted.” One State Department official, Stacy Gilbert, resigned over Blinken’s final report to Congress, saying in a statement following her departure that “there is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid” and that “to deny this is absurd and shameful.”

Israel for its part has not been shy about how it is “security controlling” aid shipments as part of its full siege of the enclave, blocking entry of food, medical equipment and supplies, and even water and electricity. Truck convoys of food have been allowed to rot at checkpoints. At least 34 children have died of malnutrition due to the blockade in 2024 alone and the war crime of deliberate starvation is one of the charges that has been levelled against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s application for arrest warrants in May.

Calls for Blinken to resign from his post have followed from some of the numerous critics of US policy. “Antony Blinken lied to Congress even though he knew Israel was deliberately starving Gaza – all to keep arming the genocide. We demand that @SecBlinken resign and that @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris stop illegally arming Israel NOW!” tweeted Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also called for Blinken to step down. “We’re calling for the resignation of @SecBlinken after @propublica reports revealed he misled Congress about Israel’s deliberate blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza – a violation of US law. The American people deserve leaders who tell the truth. It’s time to hold the Biden administration accountable for its ongoing complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. #ResignBlinken #FreeGaza #EndTheBlockade,” the group wrote on X.

So what will happen next? Probably nothing. One observer opined that Congress was very pleased to be lied to in “defense” of Israel and would have certainly denounced Blinken for speaking the truth. So the fact that Blinken is lying should really surprise no one as he knows he will get away with it. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone explains it this way: “Israel must be protected because it is the last bastion of freedom and democracy in the middle east, no matter how many journalists it has to assassinate, no matter how many press institutions it needs to shut down, no matter how many protests its supporters need to dismantle, no matter how much free speech it needs to eliminate, no matter how many civil rights it needs to erase, and no matter how many elections its lobbyists need to buy.” Nevertheless, international charitable organizations that aren’t affiliated with any single nation have been waking up to the reality of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, with some also saying repeatedly for months that Israel is blocking humanitarian aid as also independent journalists have been reporting, some of whom, like targeted aid workers, have been killed by Israel while investigating the story. And yet the United States has consistently denied knowledge of these war crimes, with the denials being most particularly verbalized by Tony Blinken. Since Congress and the White House have the power to decide which lies are okay and which lies are not, Blinken will shrug and continue to lie and will probably continue to serve as Secretary of State if Kamala Harris is elected. That has unfortunately become the American way.

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.

September 27, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

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