Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 6, 2024
I think the striking events we have witnessed in American society over the last few months—and especially the last few days—are best understood if we consider a shrewd observation widely misattributed to Voltaire:
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who are not allowed to criticize.
From the years of my childhood I’d always been aware that political activism and protests were a regular feature of college life, with the 1960s movement against our Vietnam War representing one of its peaks, an effort widely lauded in our later textbooks and media accounts for its heroic idealism. During the 1980s I remember seeing a long line of crudely constructed shanties protesting South African Apartheid that spent weeks occupying the edges of the Harvard Yard or perhaps it was the Stanford Quad, and I think around the same time other shanties and protesters at UCLA maintained a long vigil in support of the Jewish Refusedniks of the USSR. Political protests seemed as much a normal aspect of college years as final exams and had largely replaced the hazing rituals and wild pranks of traditional fraternities, which were increasingly vilified as politically incorrect by hostile social censors among the students and faculty.
Over the last decade or so, the Black Lives Matter movement raised such nationwide protests by college students to new heights, both on and off campus, often involving large marches, sit-ins, or vandalism, and this was possibly propelled by the increasing influence of smartphones and social media. Meanwhile, the mainstream media regularly praised and promoted this “racial justice movement,” which reached its sharp peak following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Soon afterward, a massive wave of generally youthful political protests, riots, and looting engulfed some 200 cities across our entire nation, the worst urban unrest since the late 1960s. But unlike during that earlier era, most of our establishment media and political class fiercely denounced as outrageous any suggestions that the police be deployed to quell that violence. Indeed, in many or most cases local law enforcement stood down and did nothing, even as some of their political masters loudly raised the outcry “Defund the Police!”
During those years many universities became heavily caught up in such controversies with Yale renaming its Calhoun residential college in early 2017 and the list of name changes due to the 2020 George Floyd protests is so long that it warrants its own Wikipedia page, a list that notably included some of our most storied military bases such as Ft. Bragg and Ft. Hood. Verbal or even physical attacks against the symbols and statues of America’s most famous presidents and national heroes became quite common and were often favorably reported in the media, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Christopher Columbus all being vilified and denounced, sometimes with elite endorsement. A lead opinion piece in the New York Times called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced with a towering statue of a black woman while one of the regular Times columnists repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington should suffer a similar fate. Many observers argued that 2020 America almost seemed to be undergoing its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, amid widespread claims that much of our entire historical past was irretrievably tainted and therefore had to be expunged from the public square.
Most of these political protests, especially those on college campuses, were widely hailed by those holding the media megaphones as representing one of the greatest virtues of American democracy. The many elite defenders of these social and cultural upheavals argued that these events demonstrated the great strength of our society, which freely allowed the fiercest public attacks against our most sacred national icons and heroes, providing the sort of searing self-criticism that would surely be permitted almost nowhere else in the world.
That long history of permitted or even glorified public protests against perceived injustices had naturally been absorbed and taken to heart by the young college students who began their classes in September 2023. Then within weeks, a remarkably daring surprise raid by the Hamas militants of long-besieged Gaza caught the Israelis napping and surmounted the high-tech defenses that had cost them perhaps a half-billion dollars to construct. Many hundreds of Israeli soldiers and security officers were killed along with similar numbers of civilians, with most of the latter probably dying from the friendly-fire of Israel’s own panic-stricken and trigger-happy military units. Some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners, with Hamas hoping to exchange them for the freedom of the many thousands of Palestinian civilians who had been held for years in Israeli prisons, often under brutal conditions.
As usual, our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media portrayed the attack in extremely one-sided fashion, devoid of any historical context, a pattern that had been followed for three generations. As a result, Israel received an enormous outpouring of public and elite sympathy as it mobilized for a retaliatory attack against Gaza. Within days, our own Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel declaring that he came “as a Jew” and pledging America’s unwavering support in that moment of crisis, sentiments completely echoed by President Joseph Biden and his entire administration. But the Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives were hidden in a network of fortified tunnels and rooting them out might produce heavy casualties, so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors decided upon a different strategy.
Instead of attacking Hamas, Netanyahu took advantage of the wave of global sympathy by unleashing an unprecedented military assault against Gaza’s more than two million civilians, apparently intending to kill huge numbers of them and drive the remainder into Egypt’s Sinai desert, allowing Israel to annex their territory and resettle it with Jews. Soon afterward, the Israeli government began distributing assault rifles to the Jewish Settlers of the West Bank, ordering some 24,000 of those automatic weapons for that purpose. Putting such armaments in the hands of religious fanatics would surely lead to local massacres and these might provide an excuse for driving all the millions of Palestinians over the border in Jordan. The ultimate result would be the creation of a racially-pure Greater Israel stretching “From the River to the Sea,” the longstanding dream of the Zionist movement. And if he were successful, Netanyahu’s place in Jewish history might become a glorious one, with his many venal sins and blunders easily overlooked.
As American airlifts supplied an unending flood of the necessary munitions, the Israelis began a massive aerial bombardment campaign against densely-populated Gaza and its helpless residents. Secure in their underground tunnels, relatively few Hamas fighters were killed, but Gaza’s civilians suffered devastating losses, much of it inflicted by two thousand pound bombs, almost never previously deployed against urban targets. Large portions of Gaza were soon transformed into moonscapes, with some 100,000 buildings destroyed, including hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, universities, government offices, bakeries, and all the other infrastructure necessary for maintaining civilian life. After just a few weeks, the Financial Times reported that the destruction inflicted upon much of Gaza was already worse than had been suffered by German cities after years of Allied bombing attacks during World War II.
Although Netanyahu was strictly secular, he played to his religious base by publicly declaring the Palestinians to be the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Many other top Israeli leaders voiced very similar genocidal sentiments, and some of the more zealously religious Israeli soldiers and commanders probably took those statements quite literally.
This gigantic bloodlust was further inflamed as the Israeli government and its supportive propagandists began promoting outrageous Hamas atrocity-hoaxes such as beheaded or roasted Israeli babies, sexual mutilations, and gang-rapes. The notoriously pro-Israel global media credulously reported these stories, using them to deflect attention from the enormous ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians. To ensure that the coverage remained one-sided, the Israelis targeted independent journalists in Gaza for death, killing some 140 of them over the last few months, a figure as large as the combined total in all the world’s other wars over the last several years.
With Israel’s leaders publicly declaring their genocidal plans for their Palestinian enemies and their troops committing the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world, international organizations gradually came under serious pressure to involve themselves in the ongoing conflict. In late December, South Africa filed a 91-page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide. Within a few weeks the ICJ jurists issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those accusations and declaring that the Gazans were at serious risk of suffering a potential genocide at Israel’s hands, with Israel’s own appointed judge, a former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, concurring in most of those verdicts.
But instead of backing off, Netanyahu government merely redoubled his attacks against Gaza, tightening the blockade of food shipments by banning the UN organization responsible for distributing them, believing that starvation together with bombs and missiles would be the most effective means of killing or driving out all the Palestinians.
Over the last few months I discussed these unfortunate developments in a long series of articles, with most of the material also summarized in a couple of interviews with Mike Whitney:
- Gazacaust: Placing the Blame Where It Belongs
Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 5, 2024 • 4,600 Words - The Jewish Roots of the Gaza Rampage
Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 11, 2024 • 5,900 Words
In past decades, these horrifying events might have gone relatively unnoticed, with the overwhelmingly pro-Israel gatekeepers of our mainstream media ensuring that little if any of this distressing information reached the eyes or ears of ordinary Americans. But technological developments had changed this media landscape and video on relatively uncensored social platforms such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter now easily circumvented that blockade. Despite their decades of suffering and oppression, Gaza’s Palestinians were a fully modern people, well-equipped with smartphones, and the scenes they filmed were shared worldwide, quickly attracting huge audiences among the younger Americans who relied upon social media as their primary source of news.
For generations, college students had been heavily indoctrinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, endlessly told that they must never remain silent while helpless men, women, and children were brutally attacked and slaughtered by cruel oppressors. The images they now saw of devastated cities and dead or dying children seemed exactly like something out of the movies, but they were instead happening in real-time in the physical world.
A couple of years earlier, the Trump and the Biden Administrations had both jointly proclaimed that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide” against its Uighur minority despite failing to provide any evidence that significant numbers of Uighurs had been harmed let alone killed. So by that standard, the total destruction of Gaza and the massive slaughter or deliberate starvation of its population obviously constituted an enormous “genocide,” and within weeks student activists all across college campuses had taken up that cry and begun organizing public protests against the horrendous massacre that Israel was committing:
Three years earlier, a lifelong career criminal named George Floyd had died of a drug overdose while in police custody, and a single, highly-misleading video of his last moments had provoked the greatest wave of American public protests since the 1960s. So it was hardly surprising that the widespread dissemination of hundreds or thousands of videos showing dead and mutilated Gazan children inspired a powerful protest movement. But this time, instead of being praised for their humanitarian commitment, those students—and the university administrators who allowed their protests—were ferociously attacked and punished as I described at the time:
With graphic images of devastated Gaza neighborhoods and dead Palestinian children so widespread on Twitter and other social media outlets, polls have revealed that a majority of younger Americans now favor Hamas and the Palestinians in their ongoing struggle with Israel. This is a shocking reversal from the views of their parents, which had been shaped by generations of overwhelmingly pro-Israel material across broadcast television, films, and print publications, and such trends are only likely to continue now that Israel is being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice by South Africa and 22 other nations, accused of committing genocide in Gaza.
As a consequence of these strong youthful sentiments, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted at many of our universities, outraging numerous pro-Israel billionaire donors. Almost immediately, some of the latter launched a harsh retaliatory campaign, with many corporate leaders declaring that they would permanently blacklist from future employment opportunities any college students publicly supporting the Palestinian cause, underscoring these threats with a widespread “doxxing” campaign at Harvard and other elite colleges.
A few weeks ago, our uniformly pro-Israel elected officials entered the fray, calling the presidents of several of our most elite colleges—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—to testify before them regarding alleged “antisemitism” on their campuses. Members of Congress severely brow-beat these officials for permitting anti-Israel activities, even ignorantly and absurdly accusing them of allowing public calls for “Jewish genocide” on their campuses.
The responses of these college leaders emphasized their support for freedom of political speech but were deemed so unsatisfactory by pro-Israel donors and their mainstream media allies that enormous pressure was exerted to remove them. Within days, the Penn president and her supportive Board chairman had been forced to resign, and soon afterward Harvard’s first black president suffered the same fate, as pro-Israel groups released evidence of her widespread academic plagiarism to drive her from office.
I am unaware of any previous case in which the president of an elite American college had been so rapidly removed from office for ideological reasons and two successive examples within just a few weeks seems an absolutely unprecedented development, having enormous implications for academic freedom.
I’d think that most of the students involved were absolutely stunned at that these developments. For decades, they and their predecessors had freely protested on a wide range of political causes without ever encountering a sliver of such vicious retaliation, an organized campaign that quickly forced the resignation of two of the Ivy League presidents who had allowed their protests. Some of their student organizations were immediately banned and the future careers of the protesters were harshly threatened, but the horrifying images from Gaza continued to reach their smartphones. As Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL had previously explained in a leaked phone call, “We have a major TikTok problem.”
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Swarming Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found tied and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.
Although the official Gazan death-toll reported in our media has remained relatively constant in recent weeks, this is almost certainly an illusion. During the first month or two of the massive Israeli attack, the Gazan Public Health Ministry had maintained very detailed rosters of the dead, including the names, ages, and ID codes of the victims, and regularly released updates of the total, so those numbers seemed absolutely solid. But the Israeli assault soon targeted all of Gaza’s government offices and hospitals, and by early December, the Gazan officials responsible for tabulating the dead had themselves been killed or gone missing, so the count naturally tended to stagnate, even as conditions horrifically worsened for the surviving Gazans.
After less than three months of the Israeli slaughter, some 22,000 Gazans had officially been reported dead, but now after more than seven months of starvation and continuing attacks, including the destruction of all of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities, the official body-count reported in our media has only increased to around 34,000, which seems highly implausible. In early March, progressive icon Ralph Nader focused attention on that point, noting that Gazan fatalities must surely be massively under-reported, and he speculated that the true number of deaths might have already reached 200,000. Although that total seemed quite high to me at the time, Nader’s figure usefully emphasized the absurdly low numbers widely quoted in the media.
A recent front-page story in the New York Times reported the tragic case of a particular Palestinian-American pharmacist living in New Jersey, who had personally lost 200 relatives killed in Gaza, including his parents and siblings, and that sort of single datapoint suggests the magnitude of the media under-count after seven months of horror, with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia suggesting the same thing in a recent interview. Although solid estimates are impossible, I’d think a civilian death toll of 100,000 or even something considerably higher seems perfectly plausible at this date.
These grim circumstances have naturally sparked a continuing wave of public student protests against Israel for committing these monstrous crimes and against our own Biden Administration for enabling it with money and munitions. Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is one of our highest-ranking mainstream academics, a very sober-minded scholar of the Realist School, and in an interview last week he expressed little surprise at these matters. After all, he pointed out, Israel was obviously an Apartheid-state currently committing a genocide before the eyes of the entire world so political protests on college campuses were only to be expected.
Throughout these last few months, pro-Israel partisans have regularly denounced the the anti-Zionism of their opponents as antisemitic and insisting that it be suppressed. Back in February I had noted the ironic implications of their position:
This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.
But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.
These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.
It is rather surprising for the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world to be loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.
- American Pravda: Gaza, Jewish Power, and the Holocaust
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 19, 2024 • 10,400 Words
An important turning point may have come on April 17th when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, herself of Egyptian origins, was raked over the coals by a Congressional Committee for permitting anti-Israel protests on her campus. Her interrogators claimed that these were “antisemitic” acts and caused some of Columbia’s Jewish students to “feel unsafe,” a dire situation that seemingly trumped both freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Shafik may or may not have agreed with those arguments, but she surely remembered that just a few months earlier her counterparts at Harvard and Penn had both been summarily purged for giving the wrong answers, and she hardly wished to share their fate. So she firmly promised to root out all public antisemitism at her university and soon afterward 100 helmeted NYC riot police were invited onto the campus to crush the demonstrations and arrest the protesters, mostly charging the latter with “trespassing,” a rather strange accusation given that they were enrolled students on the grounds of their own campus.
This sort of harsh and immediate police crackdown seems almost unprecedented in the modern history of college political protests. Back in the 1960s, there were a few scattered cases of police being called in to arrest militant protesters who had seized and occupied administrative offices at Harvard, paraded around with firearms at Cornell, or burned down a campus building at Stanford. But I have never heard of peaceful political protesters being arrested on the grounds of their own college merely for the content of their political speech.
Although those Congressional demands for a crackdown at Columbia were obviously intended to quell American campus protests, it predictably had the opposite effect. Scenes of burly, helmeted riot police arresting peaceful college students on their own campus went viral on social media, inspiring a wave of similar protests at numerous other colleges across the nation, with police arrests quickly following in most locations. By latest count, some 2,300 students have now been arrested at dozens of universities.
The actions by the Georgia State Police at Emory University seemed particularly outrageous, and a Tweet containing a clip of one of those incidents has already viewed some 1.5 million times. A 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was concerned at seeing one of her own students being wrestled down to the pavement and walked towards him only to find herself be brutally thrown to the ground, hogtied, and arrested by a couple of hulking officers led by a sergeant, something that utterly shocked CNN anchor Jim Acosta when he reported it.
Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History described her outrage as the police on the scene stood by and did nothing as UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, then arrested some 200 of the former. According to local journalists, the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.
I have never heard of any American case in which organized mobs of outside thugs were allowed to violently assault peaceful student protesters on their own campus, and this seems far more reminiscent of turbulent Latin American dictatorships than our own country’s history. The closest example from our own history might be the notorious 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City in which hundreds of pro-Nixon construction workers battled similar numbers of anti-war protesters on the streets of lower Manhattan, an incident so infamous that it has an extensive Wikipedia page of its own.
However, a somewhat different but much closer and more recent analogy does come to mind. After Donald Trump launched his unexpectedly successful presidential campaign, right-wing, pro-Trump speakers invited to college campuses were regularly harassed and assaulted together with their audiences by mobs of violent antifa, with many of the latter apparently recruited and paid for the purpose.
This sort of very physical “deplatforming” was intended to ensure that their threatening ideas never reached impressionable college students and as a consequence conservatives soon began organizing their own groups such as the Proud Boys aimed at providing physical protection. Violent clashes occurred at Berkeley and some other colleges, while similar antifa riots in DC and elsewhere had disrupted Trump’s inauguration. From what I remember, most of the organizers and financial backers of these violent antifa groups seemed to be Jewish, so it’s hardly surprising that other Jewish leaders have now begun employing very similar tactics to suppress different political movements that they regard as distasteful.
Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.
Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought as well as academic freedom, and may also serve to put enormous pressure on other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and donor-controlled Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the citizens have Christian roots.
While I doubt that any arrests along those lines would occur or stand up to legal challenge, once controversial ideas are increasingly banned from all respectable venues, much of the public, perhaps even including some confused law enforcement officers, may vaguely begin to assume that they have actually become illegal.
Put in simple form, “antisemitism” is the dislike or criticism of Jews and “Anti-Zionism” is the same thing with regard to the State of Israel. So potentially banning any criticism of Jews or Israel would certainly be a remarkable legal development in our society.
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.”
They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.
Although it’s difficult to be sure, I personally think that passage of that controversial House bill may have been a major strategic blunder for the pro-Israel forces, the ADL, and the other Jewish groups behind it. Jews only constitute about 2% of American population and over the last several generations many of them seem to have waged a successful campaign to gain control over the key nodes of our society, but this has always required that their growing strength and influence remain invisible. However, the absolutely lock-step and uniform American political support for Israel’s ongoing massacre of the Palestinians has raised the awareness of some elements of our population and this legislative attempt to essentially outlaw criticism of Jews and Israel may have a similar impact. Views that had previously only circulated in extreme fringe circles may now begin to gain much greater traction.
For example, cartoonist Scott Adams has become a popular commentator in conservative, anti-Woke circles and he just released a blistering denunciation of the proposed legislation in which he sounded no different than far more extreme figures.
During the early decades of the Twentieth Century the enormous Russian Empire was only about 4% Jewish, but after the heavily Jewish Bolsheviks seized power, the top political leadership of that country became overwhelmingly of that one ethnicity. This enormous, blatant mismatch between ruled and rulers naturally provoked a great deal of hostility in the broader public, and the Bolsheviks responded to this problem by outlawing antisemitism, with the penalty sometimes even including summary execution.
Since America’s Jewish groups do not possess such extreme administrative power, they have been forced to rely upon concealment and political manipulation to achieve their ends, and they may have severely over-reached themselves with that latest legislative effort to outlaw criticism. More and more people may start to pay closer attention to the seemingly inexplicable political decisions taken by so many of our elected officials while also noticing the unusual composition of the top ranks of our government. On that last point, one of my 2023 articles pointed out the obvious:
Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and National Security Advisor. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.
- President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)
- Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)
- Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (Jewish), replacing Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)
- Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)
- Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)
- Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)
- Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)
- National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (White Gentile, Yale)
- Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)
- Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)
Oddly enough, while America’s current political predicament might have alarmed some important individuals from the first half of the last century, it probably would hardly have surprised them. Five or six years ago I read a fascinating book by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, an academic historian specializing in Holocaust Studies and the history of Nazi Germany. As I wrote at the time:
Bendersky devoted ten full years of research to his book, exhaustively mining the archives of American Military Intelligence as well as the personal papers and correspondence of more than 100 senior military figures and intelligence officers. The “Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages, including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed archival sources alone occupying seven full pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely compelling case that during the first half of the twentieth century and even afterward, the top ranks of the U.S. military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Put simply, U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.
In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world. While some of these Communist leaders were “idealists,” many of the Jewish participants were cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power. Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.
Although Bendersky’s claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky’s book.
Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.
Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.
I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.
These same views were also fully articulated in the later books and memoirs of prominent former Military Intelligence officers such as Prof. John Beaty and Prof. Revilo Oliver.
- American Pravda: Secrets of Military Intelligence
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2019 • 12,500 Words
When we consider a government run by individuals who seem to have little political independence, it is interesting to consider the means by which control is actually exercised over these nominal leaders. Several years ago I discussed some strong indications of the possible means, perhaps explaining strange decisions or reversals that seem to defy logic.
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
- American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 29, 2019 • 6,400 Words
More and more thoughtful Americans are becoming aware that on so many important matters our two major political parties often seem more like separate wings of a single political entity, sometimes labeled the “uniparty.” I discussed this disturbing phenomenon in the closing paragraphs of my original American Pravda article:
Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.
Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.
Several months ago a young military serviceman named Aaron Bushnell from a strongly Christian background became so distraught at his country’s active involvement in what he regarded as the supreme crime of genocide that he set himself on fire and died as an act of protest, an event certainly without precedent in American history and extraordinarily rare elsewhere in the world. Although the story quickly vanished from our own media, the coverage on global social media was enormous, and may have lasting consequences.
After discussing that tragic incident, I then went on to say that the dire fate of Gaza’s Palestinians might ultimately be seen as having played a similar role, suddenly allowing both Americans and others around the world to glimpse the long-hidden rulers of our own country:
For similar reasons, I think that the tens of thousands of dead Gazans did not lose their lives in vain. Instead, their martyrdom has dominated the global media for the last five months, conclusively revealing to the entire world the moral bankruptcy of the international system that had condemned them to their fate.
Probably hundreds of millions of people worldwide have now begun asking themselves questions that they never would have previously considered. I suspect that those responsible for the destruction of Gaza may come to rue the day when they helped open doors that they may eventually wish had been kept tightly shut.
IS A CLIMATE LOCKDOWN ON THE HORIZON?
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 2, 2024
A recent article by the LA Times editorial board claims that California is experiencing record high temperatures. Jefferey Jaxen does a fact check on their claims. As President Joe Biden mulls the idea of declaring a climate emergency, we look into the potential powers that could be gained from this move. Will we have a climate lockdown on our horizon?
Ukraine’s creditors want their money back – WSJ
RT | May 5, 2024
A group of foreign bondholders have taken steps to force Ukraine to begin repaying its debts as soon as next year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. If they succeed, Kiev could hemorrhage $500 million every year on interest payments alone.
The group, which includes investment giants Blackrock and Pimco, granted Kiev a two-year debt holiday in 2022, gambling that the conflict with Russia would have concluded by now.
With no end to the fighting in sight, the lenders have now hired lawyers at Weil Gotshal & Manges and bankers from PJT Partners to meet with Ukrainian officials and strike a deal whereby Ukraine would resume making interest payments next year in exchange for having a significant chunk of its debt written off, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal.
The group holds around a fifth of Ukraine’s $20 billion in outstanding Eurobonds, the newspaper reported. While this figure represents a fraction of Ukraine’s total external debt of $161.5 billion, servicing the interest on these bonds would cost the country $500 million annually, the bondholders said.
Should the bondholders fail to strike a deal with Kiev by August, Ukraine could default. This would damage the country’s credit rating and restrict its ability to borrow even more money in the future.
According to the newspaper, Ukrainian officials are hoping that the US and other Western governments will take its side during talks with the bondholders. However, a group of these countries have already offered Ukraine a debt holiday on around $4 billion worth of loans until 2027, and are reportedly concerned that any deal with the bondholders would see private lenders being repaid before them.
Ukraine already relies on foreign aid to keep government departments open and state employees paid. The country’s military is almost entirely dependent on foreign funding; officials in Kiev and the West were predicting imminent defeat until the US Congress approved a foreign aid bill last month which included $61 billion for Ukraine and US government agencies involved in the conflict.
The bill provides almost $14 billion to Ukraine for the purchase of weapons, and includes $9 billion in new “forgivable loans.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, some bondholders have suggested that the US and EU could use frozen Russian assets to pay off Ukraine’s debts. While around $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank have been frozen in American and European banks since 2022, the US only passed legislation allowing for their seizure last month, and no similar legal mechanism exists in Europe, where the vast majority of these assets are held.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) have both urged governments not to steal this money, with ECB chief Christine Lagarde warning last month that doing so would risk “breaking the international order that you want to protect.”
Book Burning Goes Digital
Brownstone Institute | May 4, 2024
In March 2021, the Biden White House initiated a brazenly unconstitutional censorship campaign to prevent Americans from buying politically unfavorable books from Amazon.
The effort, spearheaded by White House censors including Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, began on March 2, 2021, when Slavitt emailed Amazon demanding to speak to an executive about the site’s “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation.”
Their subsequent discussions remain unknown, but recently released emails from the House Judiciary Committee reveal that the censors achieved their intended result. Within a week, Amazon adopted a shadow ban policy.
Company officials wrote in internal emails, “The impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to, and should be handled urgently.” They further clarified that the policy was “due to criticism from the Biden people,” presumably meaning Slavitt and Flaherty.
At the time, “vaccine misinformation” was parlance for inconvenient truths. Five months after the Amazon censorship crusade, Twitter banned Alex Berenson at the Government’s behest for noting that the shots do not prevent infection or transmission. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) favorably cited his Twitter ban in a September 2021 letter to Amazon calling for increased censorship of books.
A similar process occurred at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in internal emails that the platform decided to ban claims related to the lab-leak theory in February 2021 after “tense conversations with the new Administration.” Facebook executive Nick Clegg similarly wrote that the censorship was due to “pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more.” Another internal Facebook email from August 2021 wrote that the company had implemented new “misinformation” policies “stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”
Not only does the Biden regime’s call for de facto book bans lead to the suppression of true information regarding lockdowns, vaccine injuries, and the lab-leak theory; it was also a clear violation of the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court weighed in on a nearly identical case over sixty years ago.
In 1956, the Rhode Island legislature created a “Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth.” Like “public health” or “inclusivity,” the innocuous language was a Trojan Horse for censorship.
The Commission sent notices to bookshops and book dealers that potentially violated Rhode Island’s obscenity laws. The book dealers challenged the constitutionality of the Commission, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court in Bantam Books v. Sullivan.
The New York Times’ description of the case from 1962 could be transposed to a modern article on the Amazon Files, but The Gray Lady has deemed the news unfit to print and has ignored the revelations entirely.
The challengers argued that the Commission acted “as a censor” while the Government “contended that its purpose was only to educate people,” the Times explained. The Government, desperate to maintain its benevolent facade, insisted its “hope [was] that the dealer would ‘cooperate’ by not selling the branded books and magazines.”
But the Government’s call for “cooperation” was a thinly veiled threat. The Commission did not just notify the booksellers; they also sent copies of the notices to the local police, who “always called dealers within 10 days of the notice to see whether the offending items had been withdrawn,” according to the book dealers.
“This procedure produced the desired effect of frightening off sale of the books deemed objectionable,” a book dealer told The Times. They complied, “not wanting to tangle with the law.”
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the Committee’s reports violated the Constitutional rights of the book dealers. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a concurring opinion: “This is censorship in the raw; and in my view the censor and First Amendment rights are incompatible.”
Here, we again see censorship in the raw; bureaucratic thugs, using the power of the US federal government, call for the suppression of information that they find politically inconvenient. They hide behind the innocuous language of “public health” and “public-private partnerships,” but the Leviathan’s “requests” carry an implicit threat.
As we wrote in “The Censors’ Henchmen,” the censorship demands from White House lackeys Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt are like mobsters’ interrogations. Just months after the Amazon demands, Flaherty wrote to Facebook, “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period.” Then came the demands: “We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game… This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
In other words, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Nice company you have here – it would be a shame if something happened to it.
When companies refused to comply, Biden’s henchmen responded with scorn. Facebook ignored one censorship request, and Flaherty exploded: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
Failure to comply would threaten Amazon’s substantial government contracting operations. In April 2022, Amazon received a $10 billion contract from the NSA. Later that year, the US Navy granted Amazon a $724 million cloud computing contract, and the Pentagon awarded Amazon an additional $9 billion in contracts. Amazon also has ongoing contracts with the CIA that could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars.
“Cooperation” is a prerequisite for these lucrative agreements. Sixty years ago, the Court recognized the threat that Government demands for “cooperation” posed to liberty in Bantam Books. Ten years later, the Court held in Norwood v. Harrison that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
Since then, skyrocketing government spending and public-private partnerships have further blurred the line between state and private persons at the cost of our liberties.
The recent Amazon revelations add to the censors’ parade of horribles that have been uncovered in recent years. The Supreme Court will rule on the crux of the battle between free speech and Biden’s cosa nostra next month in Murthy v. Missouri.
Meanwhile, the revelations keep pouring in, adding to what we know but still concealing the fullness of what might actually have been happening. Adding to the difficulty is that the revelations themselves are not being widely reported, raising serious questions concerning just how much in the way of independent media remains following this brutal crackdown on free speech that took place with no legislation and no public oversight.
Hand of Soros: Georgian Prime Minister Denounces US Color Revolution Tactics
By John Miles – Sputnik – 05.05.2024
The leader of the country of Georgia has criticized US efforts to interfere in the country dating back several years.
A major scandal emerged in 2016 over the disproven conspiracy theory of Russian interference in the United States presidential election. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Americans were told, had spent vast sums of money to influence the outcome of the vote via social media. According to the conspiracy’s most dedicated adherents, US democracy had been near-fatally wounded by the pernicious meddling of a hostile foreign power.
What adherents of the unfounded Russiagate narrative failed to acknowledge is that the United States is guilty of precisely the same type of political interference it accuses others of, and on a far larger scale.
Claims of such foreign meddling came to a head Friday when Georgia’s head of state slammed US support for “violence” and “revolution attempts” amidst anti-government protests in the country’s capital of Tbilisi.
“Spoke to [US ambassador Derek Chollet] and expressed my sincere disappointment with the two revolution attempts of 2020-2023 supported by the former US Ambassador and those carried out through NGOs financed from external sources,” wrote Irakli Kobakhidze, Georgia’s prime minister and head of the social democratic Georgian Dream party, on social media.
The prime minister also criticized “false statements” from the US and European Union concerning draft “Transparency of Foreign Influence” legislation currently working through the country’s parliament.
The proposed law, which is currently the subject of protests in the country’s capital, is aimed at disclosing foreign influence over organizations and media outlets operating in Georgia. Kobakhidze claims the legislation is necessary to promote “transparency and accountability of relevant organizations vis-à-vis Georgian society.” Western critics have portrayed it as a clampdown on civil society, likening it to Russia’s “foreign agents law” – protesters have even taken to deriding the bill “the Russian law.”
But such legislation is common throughout the world, with similar regulation taking place in Canada, Australia, the European Union, and elsewhere. The US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires foreign-affiliated news outlets, such as the one you’re reading now, to register with the US Department of Justice and send copies of all “informational materials” to US authorities.
The United States has frequently opposed such legislation in countries it deems to be foreign adversaries because it threatens the influence of US “soft power.” The United States frequently funds foreign activists, media outlets, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to spread US influence in foreign countries. The US has specifically focused on former Soviet-aligned nations after the end of the Cold War, seeking to ensure leaders are elected who will orient such countries towards the West and away from Russia.
When necessary, the United States has even sought to foment regime change in foreign countries through such methods, paving the way for unrest that generates a change in leadership. Such events are commonly known as “color revolutions,” after a series of such incidents such as Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a primary tool of such “revolutions.”
Investigation by Sputnik has uncovered the historical influence of the United States and allied groups in influencing Georgian politics. USAID’s website boasts that the organization has poured a staggering $1.9 billion into the country since 1992. The agency reports funding 39 ongoing projects in Georgia “with a total value of approximately $373 million, and an annual budget of more than $70 million.”
Additionally, USAID’s Georgian Media Partnership Program backs a range of opposition media outlets in the country, including TV Pirveli, Radio Marneuli, Formula TV, and Mtavari Arkhi. The US agency allocated $10 million in 2021 alone. Samira Bayramova, an administrator of the program, has been noted as a prominent leader of the current protests in Tbilisi.
The Georgian Young Lawyers Association (GYLA) has also strongly backed the ongoing demonstrations. The organization partners with USAID under the pretense of promoting “fair electoral processes in Georgia.”
Additionally, the US allies with partnered “philanthropic” foundations to further strengthen opposition forces. The Georgian branch of George Soros’ Civil Society Foundation openly promotes the current protests, backing a petition initiative to promote hostility toward the current government. The Civil Society Foundation has operated in the country for 30 years, claiming to have poured $100 million into political interference.
Political opposition leader Nika Gvaramia, whose party has helped organize the ongoing protests, is promoted on the foundation’s website.
The US, naturally, has attempted to coerce Georgia’s government to shelve the current draft law, with Chollet expressing “concern for Georgia’s current trajectory.” Senators from both major US political parties have warned the country could face sanctions for attempts to move forward with the transparency legislation.
The United States’ foreign subterfuge has increasingly come to light in recent years, with former President Donald Trump offering a rare acknowledgment of US efforts in Iran, Belarus, and Hong Kong.
Still, millions of others remain uninformed about the destructive influence of the United States and billionaire oligarchs like George Soros.
U.S. Intelligence Operatives Appear to Have Intentionally Groomed Mass Murderer Charles Manson
Status As a Police Informant Raises Suspicion That He Was an FBI and CIA Asset Out to Discredit the 1960s Counterculture
Source: dagospia.com
By Daniel Borgström – CovertAction Magazine – May 1, 2024
The Sharon Tate murders were as bizarre as they were bloody, and the story behind the story is even stranger.
Journalist Tom O’Neill spent 20 years researching, interviewing and digging in his effort to get to the bottom of it. His book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, co-authored by Dan Piepenbring, is an account of O’Neill’s personal odyssey as well as a presentation of his findings which unfold, page after page, in tragedy, weirdness and irony.
Charles Manson’s hit-team killed ten people, perhaps more. That was in California, back in the summer of 1969, while the U.S. Armed Forces were busily slaughtering millions of Asians in Vietnam. And in opposition to that war, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched in mass protests—the anti-war movement.
Even GIs and military veterans were speaking out against the war. The counterculture movement was in full bloom, having started for at least since “the summer of love” two years earlier. Woodstock, an historic occasion which drew 400,000 people to a music event in Upstate New York, also took place the year of the Manson murders in that same month of August.
War, anti-war, and counterculture—it was all going on when Charles Manson and his “family” suddenly stole the show and took center stage with that series of infamous killings. First there was the Gary Hinman murder, then the Sharon Tate killings, followed by the LaBianca murders. Two more victims about whom we do not often hear were Donald Shea, a caretaker at the Spahn Ranch, and Filippo Tenerelli, who was found dead in a Bishop, California, motel.
Source: cbsnews.com
The FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS programs were also in play—part of intelligence’s covert war on dissent. Several shadowy characters, apparently CIA operatives, turn up in this story and appear to have crossed paths with Charles Manson. Among them was Dr. Louis Jolyon West of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind-control project. Another was Reeve Whitson who somehow knew of the Tate killings 90 minutes before anyone else did, and reported it in a phone call to Tate’s photographer. O’Neill devotes a chapter to each of them.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West [Source: jamanetwork.com
Thirty years had passed since the killings when O’Neill began work on his project in 1999. Several of the key players had already died, but Charles Manson was still in prison, and memories of the killings remained painfully alive. The topic was initially assigned to O’Neill as a magazine article, and the editor gave him three months to complete it.
However, as he launched into it, interviewing dozens—eventually hundreds—of cops, DA lawyers, clerks, Hollywood personalities, drug dealers and others, he found there was far more to the story than he had ever imagined.
He missed his deadline, then his next deadline, and the one after that. The project became his obsession, and the digging and research continued on through 20 long years of plowing through troves of documents: court records, old newspaper files, FOIA requests, and interviews. Research can be frustrating, and clearly it was. “Behind every solid lead, quotable interview, and bombshell document, I put in weeks of scut work that led to dozens of dead ends,” O’Neill tells us. His book finally came out in 2019.
Tom O’Neill – Source: warwicks.com
Told in the first person, the book is a gripping detective story that I could not put down—actually an audio that I could not turn off. It is well written, and the audio by Kevin Stillwell is well read. My partner wanted to know what I kept listening to all the time. So I took off my headset and played it out into the room. She caught the bug and we listened to it together day after day, smitten by Tom O’Neill’s obsession.
At Charles Manson’s orders, people were murdered. This is a “mystery” where we know the “who-done-it” part of the story, but we are left to wonder and speculate about almost everything else—motives, the roles of intel and law enforcement, facts that were covered up, and who or what else might have been operating behind the scenes.
Crime novels typically end with the pieces all falling into place to form a coherent picture. Not so in most real-life crime mysteries, O’Neill cautions us. Some pieces are missing; others do not seem to belong, but they are there nonetheless, often in some grotesquely misshapen form.
A good many pieces are left over; they may seem important, but we do not know what to make of them. In this book, the author takes us into a world where cops, judges, prosecutors, witnesses and others do not function in ways that seem rational or above board.
Among the strange pieces in this picture puzzle is something O’Neill calls “Charlie Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card.”
After having spent much of his life in various prisons, in 1967 Charles Manson was finally out on “federal parole for grand theft auto.” Being on probation is almost like living on the doorstep of a jailhouse.
A parolee can get thrown back in prison for the slightest mis-step. However, Charles Manson went around committing one offense after another—stealing cars, credit cards and firearms, sex with underage women, drugs, etc. Whatever a parolee was not allowed to do, Charles Manson did. He even flouted it. He was caught repeatedly, but none of his numerous violations landed him in jail for more than a few days at a time.
“We were told not to bother those people,” former Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Preston Guillory told O’Neill. It was a policy handed down from on high, Guillory said: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”
Cops who had clues, evidence or solid proof of Manson’s violations were pulled back from their investigations. On the occasions when Manson was arrested, judges would let him go. His probation officer, Roger Smith, wrote glowing letters about Manson’s supposedly wonderful progress.
Normally, a probation officer would supervise 20 to 100 parolees; but Roger Smith was supervising only one person—Charles Manson. It was with the encouragement of Probation Officer Roger Smith that Manson spent a year in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, at the time a Mecca of the hippie counterculture.
There Charlie acquired his “family” of followers, and morphed into the Charles Manson known to history and legend—the charismatic guru and apocalyptic cult leader, acid-dropping mystic, guitarist and songwriter, con artist, car thief and general predator, manipulator and abuser, and evangelist who expatiated on the Book of Revelation.
Members of the Manson family. Source: reprobatepress.com
Manson was well-connected with Hollywood celebrities and music personalities: Doris Day’s son, music producer Terry Melcher, the Beach Boys, and many more, though most did not wish to have it known that they had been associated with him. Even after 30 years had passed, many refused to be interviewed by Tom O’Neill. The refusers’ list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood stardom. Cops and prosecutors were more inclined to talk, and some of them opened the author’s way to troves of documents and records.
Reading the accounts of these interactions, I sense that O’Neill must be something of a Will Rogers-type person who rarely met a person he did not like. And people in turn seemed to like him. Even officials who worked hard to cover things up seemed to warm up to him. Several, of course, including legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, eventually screamed at him and threatened to sue for millions of dollars.
Bugliosi was the attorney who had prosecuted Manson and afterwards wrote the best-selling Helter Skelter. In the courtroom and later in his book, Bugliosi presented Manson’s murder rampage as a scheme to blame the Black Panthers and thus spark a race war between blacks and whites. That became the official narrative, though it was doubted by people who had researched the case. Tom O’Neill devoted a chapter to reviewing “Holes in Helter Skelter”; he exposes Bugliosi’s handling of the case and does the coup de grâce on that theory.
Vince Bugliosi surrounded by reporters when he was prosecuting the Manson case in 1971. Source: nytimes.com
However, by the time O’Neill’s book came out, Bugliosi had passed on, and thus far his ghost has not risen up to carry out the threatened lawsuit. Another person who had threatened to sue O’Neill was music producer Terry Melcher, also dead by the time the book came out. There can be upsides to being a slow writer, taking a long time to do research.
Terry Melcher Source: alchetron.com
“I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence,” O’Neill tells us.
So he kept going, finding more pieces of the picture. And it reads like the script of a film noir.
Throughout the drama, Charles Manson was being closely monitored by law enforcement agencies and intel. And yet, even while they were watching him, he sent his acolytes out on those brutal killing sprees of August 1969. Incredibly enough, despite the surveillance, it took law enforcement four long months to eventually arrest him and his hit team. During those extra months of free rein, Manson killed Shea and Tenerelli and perhaps more.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives had almost immediately found clues leading to Charles Manson; many Hollywood people also suspected him. So why did it take law enforcement so long to catch him? It appears that the “hands off Manson policy” was still in effect.
Actually, Manson was not the only person in this story who seemed to be immune to prosecution; similar immunity appears to have been granted to two or three Hollywood drug dealers who turn up in the story. That seems to be a fairly common practice in law enforcement.
“A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, ‘We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets,’” former Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Guillory told O’Neill. “My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason.”
Former head deputy DA of Van Nuys, Lewis Watnick, gave a similar opinion. “Sometimes this is explained by just pure incompetence,” he said. “But this is not that. It dovetails right in. Manson was an informant.” Of course, that was just his guess, Watnick conceded, but it was an educated one, based on his 30 years of experience. “They’d been watching this guy for something large.”
Looking at the tolerance that authorities had for Manson’s lawbreaking, his relationship with probation officer Roger Smith, and more, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that somebody up there had a major investment in Mr. Charles Manson. They must have wanted him to do something. But what?
Along with his findings, O’Neill shares his uncertainties. “My work had left me, at various points, broke, depressed, and terrified that I was becoming one of ‘those people’: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist… I don’t consider myself credulous, but I’d discovered things I thought impossible about the Manson murders and California in the sixties.” Further on, he tells us, “I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement… It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was.”
Something darker than Charles Manson? Our leaders, and the establishment they work for, have a lot of closely guarded secrets—secrets that occasionally make their way out by way of researchers, whistleblowers, hackers, and even congressional hearings.
For background on the political environment of the late 1960s, O’Neill reviews the establishment’s war against the anti-war movement. That includes cases of people who were murdered as a result of FBI and CIA activities and manipulations here in the U.S. He ties this brutality to U.S. actions overseas.
Anthony Herbert – Source: ronsherman.com
O’Neill looks at the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, a kill-capture campaign, which resulted in the death of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. He quotes from a Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, about his time in the Phoenix Program: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”
A mission shared by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS was to disrupt and discredit the anti-war movement, and that, O’Neill points out, was one effect of the Manson murders. Of course, Charles Manson was not an anti-war activist; it is doubtful that he ever attended an anti-war rally. He was a product of the prison system who somehow found his way into the fringes of the counterculture movement, and there was a lot of overlap between the anti-war and counterculture movements. Many hippies were anti-war, and many activists smoked grass and grew their hair long.
Scene from the 1967 Summer of Love that Manson and the CIA/FBI were out to destroy. Source: allthatsinteresting.com
The corporate media, then as now, was the voice of the establishment elite, and dutifully presented the murderous Manson and his “family” to the world as poster children of the “hippie movement.” A lot of people bought that framing. Even people who self-identified as countercultural were saying, “Manson ended the Summer of Love!”—a message the corporate media pushed.
Although the killings were billed as the “crime of the century” and have received massive newspaper coverage ever since, few articles went beyond the sensational aspects and asked truly penetrating questions. When (in 1971) whistleblower LA Sheriff’s Detective Guillory went public with what he knew about Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card, the media showed little interest. Nor did many journalists work out a related source and connection between these killings and a society waging a brutal and unjust war.
We assume that our leaders in Washington care about the lives of ordinary people. Our experience with them shows otherwise.
We remember Vietnam. There have been several murderous wars since then, and now Gaza. As I write this, our president and our Congress are in the sixth month of funding, arming and giving diplomatic support to apartheid Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Our leaders are not averse to promoting mass murder. We have the immortal words of former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: When asked in 1996 about U.S. sanctions causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, she replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
The powers that be are a bloodthirsty lot when it serves their interests, every bit as murderous as Charles Manson himself. But who might have been the local- or regional-level functionaries authorizing immunity for such criminals?
O’Neill tells us about several high-placed California officials. One was Evelle Younger, then Los Angeles DA. Younger was a former FBI agent who, during World War II, was with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and also oversaw the prosecution of Sirhan Sirhan; he went on to be California Attorney General from 1971 to 1979.
Evelle J. Younger Source: wikiwand.com
Another was California Governor Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the “Task Force on Riots and Disorders,” William W. Herrmann. Herrmann was a veteran of the CIA’s Phoenix Program; he had also been a lieutenant with the LAPD. However, O’Neill was not able to establish a definite connection between them and the on-the-ground operatives. We do get an idea of who they seem to have been.
In this book of strange dark characters, one of the stranger ones was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, known to his friends as “Jolly” West. He was a pioneering scientist of the CIA’s mind-control project—MK-ULTRA. In 1966 he came to San Francisco, shortly before Manson arrived, and his project was to study and manipulate hippies.
So there they were, the two of them, in the Haight-Ashbury. Tom O’Neill, with meticulous documentation, suggests that Manson became a product of Jolly West’s experiments.
Another dark character who seems to have worked for the CIA was Reeve Whitson, a friend of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. He somehow knew of the killings before anyone else did, and telephoned the awful news to Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami. That was 90 minutes before the bodies were discovered by Polanski’s maid.
Both Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Reeve Whitson are dead and gone, West in 1999 and Whitson in 1994, and are, thus, not available for interviews or comment.
In this book Tom O’Neill shows us convincing evidence that Charles Manson was some sort of operative, maybe unwittingly. It looks like the purpose of his handlers—presumably from the CIA’s CHAOS or the FBI’s COINTELPRO—was to set him up to create a bloody scene such as the one on August 9, 1969.
It needs to be recognized that Charles Manson and his followers served the establishment well. Nevertheless, they went to prison where they remained for the rest of their lives. Only one, Leslie Van Houten, was finally released last year on parole.
IS BIRD FLU THE NEXT COVID?
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 2, 2024
As America faces an unlikely bird flu ‘outbreak’ in chickens and cows, many are speculating on when this rare illness will jump to humans. Jefferey Jaxen looked into the previous gain-of-function lab work on H5N1 funded by Tony Fauci and NIAID, and found something very interesting.
Head of Nonprofit With Ties to Wuhan Lab Should Face Criminal Investigation, House Committee Says
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | May 2, 2024
A House committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday called for a criminal investigation into Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, and further investigation into failures in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-funding procedures.
In a statement released after the hearing — accompanied by a 59-page report — the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic called for permanently terminating funding for EcoHealth Alliance, which has ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Both Republican and Democrat representatives explicitly called for defunding EcoHealth Alliance, which Daszak said receives about $16 million in government grants annually.
However, journalist Paul D. Thacker cautioned against allowing Daszak to become “the fall guy” — because the NIH and Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), aided Daszak “in this multi-year cover-up,” he said.
Thacker, who has extensively covered Daszak and other COVID-19 origins-related news, told The Defender the Democrats seemed more concerned during the hearing about EcoHealth’s paperwork and conflicts of interest than the core allegations of dangerous gain-of-function research.
“The American people deserve accountability, and Daszak should be prosecuted for helping to misdirect USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] funds to create the Global Virome Project,” Thacker said.
He pointed to a 2022 U.S. Right to Know investigation showing Daszak co-founded the Global Virome Project with then-director of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Program Dennis Carroll, who “siphoned taxpayer funds” to launch the project.
The Global Virome Project aims to collect more than 1 million viruses from wildlife for research to forecast future pandemics.
Thacker also noted the change in the Democrats’ messaging throughout the hearing, which was more critical of Daszak. “No great evidence came to light,” he said. “But something is going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about yet.”
The House report confirms many of the same allegations laid out in “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” by Children’s Health Defense founder and chairman on leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The book was published in 2021.
Dems admit SARS-CoV-2 may have come from a lab
Daszak appeared before the committee to answer questions about his organization’s ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and allegations of conducting risky coronavirus research.
Committee members pressed him on claims that EcoHealth was conducting gain-of-function research, failed to report on experiments showing excessive viral growth and repeatedly missed deadlines for progress reports.
Led by Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Ranking Member Paul Ruiz (D-Calif.), the subcommittee also examined the circumstances surrounding EcoHealth’s NIH grant termination in 2020, and the ongoing dispute over access to virus samples collected at the Wuhan lab.
In his opening statement, Wenstrup said Daszak “comes across as disingenuous” when using “highly technical definitions in order to assert that a certain project really isn’t gain-of-function.”
Acknowledging EcoHealth’s failure to comply with grant-reporting requirements, Ruiz said Daszak’s actions “draw into question whether [he] sought to deliberately mislead regulators at NIH and NIAID.”
Daszak faced tough questioning from members on both sides of the aisle about his organization’s transparency and handling of taxpayer funds, biosafety standards at the Wuhan lab, efforts to downplay the role of Chinese scientists in his proposals, and communications with government officials through private emails.
Maintaining a composed and technical demeanor throughout, Daszak frequently cited government regulations, grant terms and scientific evidence to defend EcoHealth’s actions.
However, at times Daszak appeared evasive or uncertain when challenged on specific details. Many subcommittee members expressed skepticism about his forthrightness.
In a noteworthy departure from previous hearings, Democrats admitted that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have come from a lab, although several underscored the lack of definitive evidence for the lab-leak theory.
“I’m hoping someday that we are going to get to the bottom of the truth of this,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said at the hearing. “I don’t know that we ever are because I’m hearing totally opposite information from reliable sources.”
Substack author Maryam Henein, noting the extensive documentation and testimony already gathered by the subcommittee and its failure to get to the bottom of COVID-19 origins, asked, “So, are all these hearings and reports for optics?”
Dispute over gain-of-function research definition
A central focus of the hearing was whether EcoHealth was conducting gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
According to the subcommittee’s May 1 interim staff report, this research violated the terms of NIH grant R01AI110964 awarded to EcoHealth in 2014 for its five-year study, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
Majority Counsel Mitch Benzine pointed out that NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, Ph.D., and coronavirus expert Ralph Baric, Ph.D., testified that the experiments described in EcoHealth’s year 5 progress qualified as gain-of-function research.
This contradicts claims Daszak made in November 2023 during a transcribed interview before the subcommittee.
Daszak disputed the allegation, citing a letter from NIH stating that the work was not subject to gain-of-function regulations. “I tend to go with the regulatory authority on this, which is NIH,” he said.
The subcommittee’s interim report states that the definition of gain-of-function research on the NIH website was “unceremoniously removed … the same day the EcoHealth experiment was reported to Congress.”
The report alleges this change occurred before Fauci testified before the U.S. Senate claiming NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research and that Fauci therefore “misled the public” about funding such research at the Wuhan lab.
Public concerns about the research resulted in NIH reviewing EcoHealth’s grant, which it eventually suspended on April 24, 2020, the report states.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) questioned “NIAID’s approval and oversight of risky experiments involving potential pandemic pathogens,” calling the oversight “lax,” “a farce” and “grossly negligent.”
Congress will “have to put some adults in place to independently review proposed gain-of-function research” that federal agencies want to fund, Griffith said.
Daszak conceded that the Wuhan lab could have been conducting gain-of-function research on human coronaviruses without his knowledge.
He also emphasized that EcoHealth’s 15 years of work in China “provided direct public health benefits to the American people.”
“The viruses that we identified in bats in China were used by U.S. labs throughout the COVID pandemic and continue to be used to test drugs, vaccines and therapies that saved countless lives,” Daszak said.
Daszak: ‘Zero evidence’ virus emerged from a lab
The debate over the origins of COVID-19 was a central point of contention throughout the hearing.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) asked Daszak whether U.S. intelligence agencies “suspected something fishy was going on at the Wuhan lab” — including bioweapons manufacturing — before the pandemic.
“Well, that’s really for the intelligence community to answer,” Daszak said, claiming that only two agencies had “low to moderate confidence” of a lab-leak origin.
Daszak repeatedly stated that the available evidence strongly points to a natural zoonotic spillover. “There is zero evidence that it emerged from a lab.”
When Lesko cited a 2021 U.S. Department of State fact sheet alleging the Wuhan lab collaborated with the Chinese military on secret projects, Daszak denied knowing anything about a military connection to the lab.
Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) questioned Daszak’s past statements dismissing the lab-leak origins as a “conspiracy theory,” noting this contradicted Daszak’s current testimony acknowledging the possibility.
Democratic Chief Counsel Giancarlo Pellegrini also interrogated Daszak on the issue, citing the following statement he and other scientists made in The Lancet in 2020: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Daszak defended the comments, arguing the claims at the time were that the virus had HIV inserts and snake DNA and that it was bioengineered.
“Those are pure conspiracy theories,” he said. “There is no evidence at all for them. And they’re based on myth and legend.”
Under repeated questioning about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, Daszak doubled down on his claim, telling Comer, “The evidence that this came from a natural spillover is huge and growing every week.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) probed Daszak over EcoHealth’s DEFUSE proposal — developed with Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., of the Wuhan lab, and presented to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 2018 — and its planned “experiments to introduce furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”
She said the altered furin cleavage site is an attribute of SARS-CoV-2 and suggested some of Daszak’s actions were “intended to mislead DARPA about the extent of Wuhan’s involvement.”
Daszak countered that the proposal was never accepted or funded and that he was transparent about his relationship with the Wuhan lab in his prior discussions with DARPA.
EcoHealth failed to report on coronavirus-infected mice
The subcommittee report stated that EcoHealth failed to report an experiment at the Wuhan lab that showed the chimeric virus had enhanced growth compared to the control, violating NIH grant terms.
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) questioned Daszak about EcoHealth’s year 5 progress report, which describes an experiment where mice infected with a chimeric coronavirus WIV1-SHC014 had a much lower survival rate (25%) compared to mice infected with just the WIV1 virus (71.4%).
Daszak argued the NIH rules did not apply to bat coronaviruses. “It was not considered of any risk to human health because they’ve never been shown to infect people,” he said.
Pellegrini pressed Daszak on the lack of the control virus data in EcoHealth’s year 4 grant report, which made it impossible to verify compliance with NIH’s rule for reporting a significantly increased level of virulence.
“We did the experiment, reported it back,” Daszak said. “Nobody came back to us and said, ‘This is highly concerning,’ because it wasn’t. The results were unremarkable.”
Daszak argued the experimental results showed “normal variations within a small group of mice.”
“I also want to remind the committee, these are SARS-CoV-related bat viruses,” Daszak said. “They’re not known to be infectious to people. They’re nothing to do with COVID-19.”
Daszak blamed late report on NIH website lockout
The subcommittee report found that EcoHealth submitted the NIH grant year 5 progress report nearly two years late, in August 2021, despite the report being due on September 28, 2019.
Daszak claimed his staff attempted to submit the report on time but the NIH system “locked us out.” However, an NIH investigation found no evidence to corroborate Daszak’s excuse, Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) said.
Ross grilled Daszak, challenging his claim that EcoHealth staff only made phone calls and noting EcoHealth’s typical pattern of communicating with NIH by email.
Daszak acknowledged there was no email on the issue, only phone calls from his staff that could not be verified, but promised to look again for any evidence of email communications concerning the lockout.
‘You didn’t tell me the truth’
EcoHealth’s failure to submit the report on time may have been due to ulterior motives, Griffith argued.
He pointed out discrepancies between the May 2020 draft of the year 5 report — the one EcoHealth claimed to have attempted to upload in 2019 — and the report submitted to NIH in August 2021.
In the 2020 version, EcoHealth claimed that bat coronavirus spillover in Southeast Asia and South China is a rare event, whereas the later report stated that “spillovers infected potentially a million people each year,” Griffith said.
“Rare or up to a million?” Griffith asked, telling Daszak that in his November 2023 closed-door testimony, he claimed there were no significant differences between the two versions of the report.
“You changed perhaps one of the most important findings — the likelihood of bat coronavirus spillover into humans,” Griffith said. “There’s no new data. There’s no new paper cited. Just a complete 180 reversal on the conclusion.”
Griffith told Daszak he assumed “Dr. Fauci or others at NIAID” pressured him to change the conclusion “to satisfy NIAD or others in the scientific community or to cover potential liability.”
Daszak responded that it was possible that EcoHealth conducted further scientific research after the initial draft, resulting in a revised conclusion.
Griffith pushed back, telling Daszak, “You didn’t tell me the truth” in the November interview.
Citing his experience in the criminal courts, Griffith said, “If you were my client, I would tell you that ‘That dog won’t hunt’ and the judge ain’t gonna believe that.”
Subcommittee posts key takeaways after hearing
In its statement released after the hearing, the subcommittee shared the following takeaways:
- EcoHealth Alliance used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
- EcoHealth Alliance violated its NIH grant terms and conditions by failing to report a potentially dangerous gain-of-function experiment conducted at the WIV.
- EcoHealth Alliance also violated its NIH grant terms and conditions by failing to submit a required research update report — which included details about its gain-of-function work at the WIV — until nearly TWO YEARS after the NIH deadline.
- The Trump Administration identified serious concerns with EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and instructed NIH to fix the problem. Then, NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant. Without the intervention of the Trump Administration, EcoHealth may have been allowed to continue its dangerous research.
- NIH is currently violating the terms of the WIV’s formal debarment by funding EcoHealth Alliance’s research.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
Israel’s Plan for Postwar Gaza Ignores Will of Palestinians
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 04.05.2024
Israeli government officials have been quietly discussing a scheme to rule Gaza once the war is over, according to the New York Times.
Citing individuals familiar with the talks, the newspaper wrote that Israel appears to be ready to share oversight of the strip with a number of Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as with the US.
Under the plan, the coalition of nations would govern the strip for about 7-10 years and then allow Palestinians residing in Gaza to vote on whether to become subordinate to the united Palestinian administration. The Israeli military would maintain its presence in Gaza in the meantime, as per the proposal. The NYT emphasized that Tel Aviv would agree to the scenario in exchange for normalization of relations with Riyadh.
According to the newspaper, Arab officials and analysts have largely denounced the plan since it does not contain provisions opening the door to legalizing the Palestine state.
“I don’t see the possibility for this plan to become a reality,” Dr. Mehmet Rakipoglu, assistant professor at Mardin Artuklu University and researcher at the Dimensions for Strategic Studies London-based think tank, told Sputnik. “Even if it’s implemented, I don’t see any concrete solution for the problem, because the problem is all about the US and Israel.”
Rakipoglu argued that the proposal directly contradicts a two state solution, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1947 and then upheld by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. The expert noted that the peace solution formulated by King Abdullah in 2002 and endorsed by the Arab League in 2002, 2007 and 2017 appears unacceptable to Tel Aviv.
The Abdullah plan envisaged a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golan Heights and the establishment of a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem in exchange for normalization of relations between Israel and Arab nations.
“Netanyahu has no intention not only to end the [Gaza] war but also they don’t have any intention to withdraw,” Rakipoglu said.
Eyal Pinko, an Israeli military expert, is similarly skeptical about the proposal described by the NYT. According to Pinko, Washington is interested in finding a quick solution ahead of the US presidential elections in November. According to the expert, the challenge lies in the impossibility of reaching a swift resolution due to the conflicting interests of various state and non-state actors regarding the future of the Gaza Strip.
Similarly, Palestinians residing in Gaza are unlikely to accept the plan: almost 85% of the Gaza population supports Hamas and doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern the strip, according to the military expert.
What’s more, most Israeli politicians would have preferred to stay out of Gaza and not solve this tricky dilemma. Per Pinko, just a small group of conservative hardliners in the Israeli government want to maintain total control of the strip in a bid to overhaul it and eradicate Hamas.
“The majority of Israeli public opinion – from the right, from the center, from the left, – the majority of the Israeli people want to stay out of Gaza like it was in the last 17 years. Not going back over there. Not to put any kind of civilian authority over there. Nobody wants it, really. We understand this is like a hornet nest.”
Even though Arab states want to normalize with Israel to ensure regional stability, they cannot do this without solving the Palestine dilemma first, Rakipoglu highlighted. The only way to start untying the Gordian knot is to bring Iran, Russia, Turkiye and Qatar along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to the negotiating table in order to work out a balanced solution, according to the analyst.
“Hamas has announced that four countries must be at the negotiation table: one of them is Turkiye, the second one is Russia, as well as Qatar and Egypt. Without bringing these countries to the negotiation table, Hamas and other resistance movements will not accept any plan. It will only empower the anger for Hamas to be against the Western countries,” the analyst concluded.
Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook
BY WYATT REED AND MAX BLUMENTHAL · GRAYZONE · MAY 2, 2024
The violent crackdown carried out on Columbia University students protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip was led by a member of the school’s own faculty, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has declared.
During a May 1 press conference, just hours after the New York Police Department arrested nearly 300 people on university grounds, Adams praised adjunct Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who moonlights as the head of the NYPD counter-terrorism bureau, for giving police the green light to clear out anti-genocide students by force.
“She was the one that was monitoring the situation,” Adams explained, adding that the crackdown was carried out after “she was able to — her team was able to conduct an investigation.”
On April 30, dozens of police in riot gear descended on Columbia’s Hamilton Hall after students seized the building earlier in the day, citing a request from the administration. Several hours later, officers used a heavily armored NYPD BearCat vehicle to enter the building through the window on the second floor and arrested those inside, while another team swept up members of the encampment outside.
Starting on April 17, students at Columbia escalated their ongoing protest against Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. They encamped on school grounds, stating their refusal to leave until the university fully divested from its Israeli-related investments. That protest model has since spread to over 100 other universities in the US, and even been taken up abroad, with similar actions occurring at Leeds University in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Just a few hundred meters from the Gaza protest encampment, Weiner maintained an office at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Her SIPA bio describes her as an “Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs” who simultaneously serves as the “civilian executive in charge of the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau.”
In that role, according to SIPA, Weiner “develops policy and strategic priorities for the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau and publicly represents the NYPD in matters involving counterterrorism and intelligence.”
The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York.
A 2011 AP investigation revealed that a so-called “Demographics Unit” operated secretly within the NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. This shadowy outfit spied on Muslims around the New York City area, and even on students at campuses outside the state who were involved in Palestine solidarity activism. The unit was developed in tandem with the CIA, which has refused to name the former Middle East station chief it posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division.
The “Demographics Unit” appears to have been inspired by Israeli intelligence as well. As a former police official told the AP, the unit attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”
A lawyer by training, Weiner oversaw negotiations between the NYPD and lawyers for local Muslims who had their civil liberties violated by its “Demographics Unit.”
Weiner is the granddaughter of Stanislaw Ulam, the Polish Jewish mathematician who helped conceive the hydrogen bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. “I’m very proud of that legacy,” Weiner said of her grandfather’s work upon being appointed as NYPD intelligence chief.
NYPD/Columbia’s Weiner: militarized raid was response to student “rhetoric associated with terrorism,” Tiktok posts
During the NYPD’s triumphant May 1 post-raid press conference, Weiner blamed “outside agitators” for triggering the military-style police crackdown at Columbia. However, she refused to name the outsiders supposedly on the scene.
According to Weiner, the police response was not necessitated by any criminal behavior, but by the radical language and symbols of the students. “This is not about students expressing ideas,” she claimed. The real problem, Weiner maintained, was the alleged “change in tactics” by protesters, which she said represented “a normalization and mainstreaming of rhetoric associated with terrorism.”
Proof of this dynamic, Weiner suggested, could be seen in what she claimed was the “common” trend of wearing of “headbands associated with foreign terrorist organizations” on college campuses; the “reissuing of Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 letter to America” on TikTok; and a brief visit to Columbia by Nahla Al-Arian, who Weiner incorrectly described as “the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism.”
“That’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia,” Weiner commented.
Nahla’s husband, Palestinian academic Sami Al-Arian, had been indicted on flimsy terrorism charges in 2003, but a jury refused to convict him. Nevertheless, her brief stop at the Columbia encampment — where she says she did not even interact with any demonstrators — was cited by Adams during three separate media engagements to justify the police repression.
Throughout the press conference, Mayor Adams repeatedly cast the city’s crackdown on student speech as the only possible solution to ongoing campus encampments, citing undefined threats to the minds of impressionable youth.
“There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not gonna wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it,” Adams proclaimed.
“Young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children,” he insisted, without specifying. “And I’m not gonna allow that to happen as the mayor of the city of New York.”
After angrily proclaiming that his “uncle died defending this country,” Adams declared: “It’s despicable that schools will allow another country’s flag to fly in our country.”
However, as an enthusiastic participant in New York City’s annual Celebrate Israel parade, Adams is no stranger to waving another country’s flag.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams waves Israel’s flag during the Celebrate Israel parade on June 4, 2023
Hostile Takeover: How NATO Annexed Macedonia
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | May 3, 2024
In Macedonia – or North Macedonia, or FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) – a counter-revolution impends. On April 24th, citizens went to the polls to choose their next President. Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova of Russophilic, pro-Serbian VMRO-DPMNE trounced Western-backed incumbent Stevo Pendarovski, albeit not by an absolute majority. The second round will be held May 8th, although opinion polls point to the challenger’s crushing victory. As we shall see, this development is a devastating blow to NATO, which could have far-reaching consequences regionally.
Pendarovski is a darling of EU and US officials. His upset win in 2019 was widely hailed in the mainstream media as illustrative of Macedonians’ yearning to at last become fully-fledged members of the transatlantic community, and rejection of VMRO-DPMNE’s “anti-Western” politics, which prominently included resisting NATO membership. His success also removed the last remaining barrier to Skopje joining the military alliance – a bitter, fraught, and protracted process, opposed by a significant proportion of the local population.
How Macedonia reached that point is largely unknown outside the country. It is a sordid tale of election meddling, subverted democracy, brazen swindles, high crimes and misdemeanours, and expansive American and British skullduggery, the full dimensions of which may never publicly surface. Now, Siljanovska-Davkova’s seemingly inevitable victory threatens to not only overturn those malign machinations, but reverse the US Empire’s ongoing effort to forcibly enmesh the entire Former Yugoslavia within NATO.
As with the election of Robert Fico in Slovakia, VMRO-DPMNE’s triumph comes at a very bad time for Washington. Across the West, public and state support for the proxy war in Ukraine is rapidly deteriorating, while Kiev faces total frontline collapse, and its forces are retreating everywhere. The prospect of Skopje’s withdrawal from NATO risks kickstarting another destabilising domino effect. The question of how, and whether, the alliance would be able to prevent this is an open one. Although it’ll undoubtedly try.
Dropping ‘Bombs’
NATO’s oft-repeated official mantra is that countries are free to choose their own security arrangements. As residents of the Balkans know only too well, in practice this simply isn’t true. For example, The Grayzone has previously exposed how alliance membership was violently imposed upon Montenegro in 2017, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the population. Macedonians were slightly more amenable to joining, although there was for many years a seemingly insurmountable hurdle preventing accession – their country’s name.
Following Yugoslavia’s breakup, Macedonia applied to join a welter of international organisations and institutions. Athens, worried Skopje’s nationalist leaders might use their newfound independence to make irredentist claims on its own territory, successfully lobbied the United Nations et al for Macedonia to be forever referred to as FYROM in international fora. Officials charged there was no connection between the modern state, populated by ethnic Slavs, and the Greek land of antiquity.
In 2008 however, Greece blocked Skopje’s bid to begin NATO’s accession process under the FYROM moniker, explicitly due to its official name. Athens proposed the country rebrand itself New or Upper Macedonia, before trying again. Three years later, the International Court of Justice judged this was improper and discriminatory, although did nothing to prevent a subsequent repeat. Both the alliance and EU remained steadfast that the issue needed to be resolved, before membership negotiations for either body could begin.
Contemporary polls showed 82.5% of Macedonians opposed changing the country’s name, a position wholeheartedly shared by the government. VMRO-DPMNE was in office at this time, led by hardline nationalist Nikola Gruevski. Pledging that Macedonia would always be called Macedonia, as if to specifically spite Athens, he thereafter launched an ambitious construction project, “Skopje 2014”. Swaths of the capital’s brutalist architecture were razed to make way for faux neoclassical buildings, and a giant statue of Alexander the Great was constructed in the city centre.
From NATO’s perspective, however, Macedonia’s alliance “aspirations” were “set in stone” when Skopje inked a “Membership Action Plan” in 1999. VMRO-DPMNE’s popularity, and Gruevski’s leadership, were therefore highly problematic for Washington. In the year following Russia’s March 2014 reunification with Crimea, NATO’s efforts to expand into Moscow’s “near abroad” became turbocharged. As if on cue, opposition party SDSM’s leader Zoran Zaev began regularly dropping what he and domestic media dubbed “bombs”.
These were highly incriminating audio recordings and wiretaps of private conversations between prominent local government officials, businesspeople, journalists, and judges. Purportedly captured illegally by Skopje’s intelligence agencies, and provided to Zaev by whistleblowers, they appeared to implicate Gruevski and his ministers in gross wrongdoing, and abuses of power. For his part, the Macedonian premier claimed SDSM was attempting to blackmail him into holding a snap general election, and had threatened to publicise damaging intelligence “gathered with the help of a foreign spy service.”
‘Only Consultative’
A political crisis duly erupted in Macedonia. The EU and US stepped in, mediating a deal whereby SDSM would appoint ministers to government departments in an interim administration, Gruevski would resign by January 2016, and new elections would be held in June that year. USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a component of the intelligence cutout concerned with “political transition” – in other words, regime change – subsequently set up shop in Skopje.
OTI went on to funnel tens of millions of dollars to anti-government, pro-NATO groups, political parties, and NGOs. In all, $16.2 million was allocated for ensuring Macedonia’s untroubled entry to NATO alone. George Soros’ Open Society Foundations was also handed vast sums to cause chaos. A final report on these efforts produced by USAID bragged that its “Macedonia Support Initiative” had “reinforced the US Government’s foreign policy goal of strengthening Macedonia’s democratic reform processes leading to greater Euro-Atlantic integration.”
Yet, in the resultant election, SDSM fell short of victory, and was forced to scrape together a fragile coalition government. Incongruously, around 70,000 Albanians in Macedonia – one third of the country’s total population – supported Zaev, when they would normally vote for ethnic Albanian parties. They hadn’t backed SDSM before in significant numbers, and haven’t since. Local sources suspect Skopje’s US and British embassies “worked with village elders, imams, and local mafia elements, to get Albanians to switch their vote this one time.”
Despite its vulnerability, the coalition administration was the breakthrough necessary to end Skopje’s name dispute once and for all. So it was in June 2018, the Greek and Macedonian foreign ministers met by Lake Prespa to sign a historic agreement. North Macedonia was born, and its NATO membership was imminent. Or so the alliance thought. While parliament rubberstamped the move, President Gjorge Ivanov of VMRO–DPMNE refused, pointing out the agreement contravened Skopje’s constitution.
Panicking, the Macedonian government opted to hold a referendum on the name change that September. In the intervening three months, authorities – backed and financed by the EU and US – bombarded citizens with slick advertising and propaganda, intended to sell the public on the benefits of joining NATO. Simultaneously, vast protests raged throughout the country, under the banner of “Never North, Always Macedonia”. Ivanov, and countless posters in major cities, urged voters to boycott the plebiscite. As a constitutional scholar explained:
“The name of a country is a name that comes from and is created by the people who created this country and live in it. The state created by the Macedonian people is called the Republic of Macedonia. The Macedonian people will never refer to their country with [another] name… We can never accept to change something that we’ve used for centuries, a name that has been carried by this state for more than 50 years.”
When the referendum’s results trickled in, Western leaders and Zaev hailed how a staggering 94% voted in favour of renaming Macedonia. They neglected to mention turnout was just 37%, therefore nullifying the result. Under Skopje’s constitution, 50% of the public must vote for the government to honour a referendum’s outcome. No matter – Zaev simply shifted goalposts, claiming the plebiscite was “only consultative”. The name change could and would go ahead regardless.
In January 2019, parliament approved dubious and highly controversial constitutional “reforms”, allowing the country to be renamed without a public vote, or even the President’s blessing. This required corralling two thirds of lawmakers to back the changes. The SDSM-led coalition achieved this feat by bribing, intimidating, and blackmailing MPs, pardoning MPs facing prosecution for serious crimes, and other cynical connivances. Subsequent investigations uncovered “serious breaches” of domestic laws and international standards perpetrated by authorities during the referendum campaign.
The next month, NATO’s 29 members accepted North Macedonia’s accession. The alliance welcomed its newest inductee on March 27th 2020. How extraordinary it would be, if the country was the last one in, and first one out. Although, long before the latest Presidential election, there were unambiguous indications Skopje sensed geopolitical breezes have begun to blow in new directions. In November 2023, Macedonian officials announced their airspace would open to Russia, allowing Sergei Lavrov to visit a local OSCE ministerial summit.
Sweden rules out international Nord Stream probe
RT | May 4, 2024
There is no need for an international investigation into the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines, Sweden’s Foreign Ministry has told RIA Novosti news agency.
Last week, China’s deputy envoy to the UN, Geng Shuang, called for a probe into the September 2022 blasts that ruptured the pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. Countries should work together on an investigation “to bring the perpetrators to justice in order to prevent the reoccurrence of similar incidents,” Geng said.
When asked about Beijing’s proposal by RIA Novosti on Friday, the Swedish Foreign Ministry insisted that “there is no need for an international investigation. It’s going to achieve nothing.”
“An investigation into the incidents was carried out by the Swedish authorities in accordance with the fundamental principles of independence, impartiality and the rule of law. Other national investigations are still ongoing,” the ministry stated.
Sweden conducted its own probe as the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines occurred in the country’s exclusive economic zone. Germany and Denmark carried out separate inquiries. However, in February, the Swedish and Danish investigations were aborted. Stockholm said it had come to the conclusion that the case did not fall under Swedish jurisdiction, while Copenhagen concluded that “there was deliberate sabotage” of the pipelines, but found insufficient grounds to pursue criminal proceedings.
Russia is carrying out its own investigation into the Nord Stream blasts despite the refusal of Western nations to cooperate. Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said earlier that Moscow had sent more than a dozen requests for legal assistance to Germany, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden, but only received a single formal reply from Copenhagen.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials suggested previously that the pipelines were targeted by the US or on Washington’s behalf.
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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