Dr. Meryl Nass Rejects Maine Medical Board’s Conditions for Reinstating Medical License
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 13, 2023
The Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine on Tuesday voted unanimously to extend the suspension of Dr. Meryl Nass’ medical license to a period of 39 months, saying she had violated rules set by the board in caring for three patients with COVID-19.
The board ruled that Nass, a biological warfare expert and an outspoken critic of federal COVID-19 policies, had “exhibited incompetency” or failed to meet standards of care in her treatment of the patients.
It imposed a fine of $10,000 toward hearing costs and a two-year probationary period during which Nass would be required to personally finance the costs of engaging professional oversight of her work, take courses in ethics and medical recordkeeping and undergo a competency evaluation, among other things.
The board issued its decision in a three-minute hearing during which neither side was permitted to present closing arguments.
Nass wrote on her substack that the hearing was an “anticlimactic finish” to a case that has dragged on since anonymous complaints were first filed against her in October 2021 for making “misleading” statements.
Those complaints were filed soon after the board issued a position statement, stating that licensees could face disciplinary action if they “generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation.”
Nass, a practicing internal medicine physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory board, was subsequently investigated by the Maine board and faced the initial suspension of her license on Jan. 12, 2022, for spreading COVID-19 “misinformation.”
The board also accused her of improperly prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for three patients for off-label uses of those drugs and failing to keep proper records and medical documentation.
Just prior to her first October 2022 hearing, the board suddenly dropped the charges of “misinformation,” but her license remained suspended and the board continued to investigate the charges related to her treatment of three patients with COVID-19, even though there were no patient complaints related to that treatment.
The board based their Tuesday decision on this set of charges.
Rather than conducting the hearings about the allegations against Nass over consecutive days, the board held single-day hearings about every other month since October 2022 — with Nass’s ability to practice medicine suspended the entire time.
During its seventh day of hearings in September, the board discussed its decision against her and a series of penalties that would be imposed on her. The six board members present and eligible to vote at the September hearing voted that her actions were grounds for discipline on eight of the 13 counts against her.
However, the board never formally finalized that decision and order, or responded to Nass’s inquiries about the decision until Tuesday’s hearing, Nass told The Defender.
Nass said she does not intend to comply with the conditions imposed by the board to recuperate her license, because “their interpretation of what happened and what I’m guilty of completely ignores all the testimony in the hearing that lasted almost a year.”
That included testimonies from Nass’ patients who, according to Nass’ attorney, all made “glowing comments” about her availability, her medical advice and her handling of their cases and expressed anger that Nass was being targeted by the board for their cases.
In total, Nass said that nine people’s testimonies and hundreds, or even thousands of documents demonstrating the legality and ethics of her practices were ignored by the board.
“What they essentially have done is said that I have to practice according to their way of looking at things, or I will never be able to get an unrestricted license back. So I will not be practicing medicine again, according to their requirements,” Nass said.
Instead, Nass is suing the board and its individual members in federal court, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution.
The complaint alleges the board engaged in retaliatory conduct against Nass, and suspended her medical license for publicly expressing her dissenting views on official COVID-19 policies, the COVID-19 vaccine and alternative treatments.
“Because she was outspoken, the board targeted Dr. Nass as someone to silence,” her attorney, Gene Libby told The Defender in August when Nass filed the lawsuit.
CHD President Mary Holland agreed. Speaking to Nass about the board hearings on CHD.TV in September, she said the hearing sounded like a “show trial” that is “really about showing a power dynamic” rather than about seeking justice or finding out what happened.
Holland said it seemed Nass was targeted “to send a message to doctors everywhere that, ‘You don’t get to do what you think is in the patient’s best interest. You do what we tell you to do.’”
The first round of oral arguments in Nass’ lawsuit against the board is scheduled for Jan. 10, 2024, before Judge Jon Levy in Portland, Maine.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
A New Standard By Which to Measure Infamy
Reality is just more collateral damage in the war on Gaza – and humanity (part II of a series)
(part I, on Israel’s experiments in televised genocide and the international community’s suicidally obsequious response, is here)
Helen of desTroy | December 12, 2023
With all eyes on the historically unprecedented bloodbath Israel is unleashing in Gaza, the transnational parasite class headquartered there is working overtime to accelerate the expansion—and criminalization—of “antisemitism” in the West, taking advantage of the geopolitical chaos they’ve unleashed to expand the sphere of attitudes and behaviors thus classifiable as rapidly as possible in the hope that even the most outrageous overreach will be perceived as the New Normal once the political atmosphere re-congeals. It’s a cynical gambit, but alarmingly likely to succeed, given their top-down control of the media and their previous success in both broadening the term’s definition beyond recognition and shoehorning that expanded definition into law (discussed at length elsewhere on this site) in both public and private life.
Smashing the Overton Window
When several dozen Harvard University campus organizations signed their names to an open letter stating “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the October 7 Hamas raid, the risibly-named hasbara group Accuracy in Media targeted the students with billboard trucks featuring their photos alongside the text “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” deploying the trucks first on campus and later to students’ parents’ neighborhoods with the stated goal of turning them into unemployable pariahs. Included on the display was a website urging the reader to petition Harvard’s board of trustees to expel these “despicable, hateful students” and their organizations — all over a letter that contained no references to Jews and limited its criticism to the Israeli government. AIM president Adam Guillette nevertheless boasted of rigging Google search results for the targeted students’ names to prominently display the smear site, telling the New York Post that the letter-writers’ failure to “explicitly condemn Hamas” constituted overt antisemitism. Similar libel-on-wheels campaigns were inflicted on Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, the latter targeting university president Elizabeth Magill herself for having allowed the campus to host a literary event featuring Palestinian writers that one detractor bizarrely referred to as an “antisemitic Burning Man” — weeks before the raid.
The same campuses were simultaneously deluged with complaints — cc’ed to any media outlet within kvetching range – from wealthy, mostly Jewish donors (including Jeffrey Epstein’s benefactor Leslie Wexner in high moral dudgeon) demanding crackdowns on the imaginary plague of “antisemitism on campus,” up to and including the firing of professors over their advocacy for Palestine and the ouster of university presidents for allowing that advocacy to take place. The Anti-Defamation League and other hasbara groups backed by compromised toadies like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio framed college fixtures like Students for Justice in Palestine as literal terrorists starting pogroms in the cafeteria. Astroturfed “student groups” like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Israel Alliance” fostered this delusion, bending the ear of domesticated media with claims that students lying on the floor to protest the slaughter in Gaza in a classic “die-in” protest somehow posed a threat to the safety of Jewish students, in a sick echo of Israel’s own claims that flattening entire Palestinian neighborhoods is necessary for “self-defense.” That none of these episodes of antisemitic “intimidation” were ever recorded on the thousands of smartphones in their vicinity was immaterial — the media establishment knew which side of its challah was buttered. After students at both Harvard and Columbia Law Schools reportedly had job offers rescinded for signing onto their respective schools’ open letters in support of Gaza, over two dozen of the largest law firms in the US leaned into the supposedly antisemitic trope of “Jews control the legal system” and wrote a sternly-worded directive to the nation’s top law schools to crack down on the scourge of “antisemitic harassment” or risk none of their graduates ever working in the industry again. Collective punishment — it’s not just for Palestinians anymore.
Within weeks, UPenn, Harvard, and Columbia had all announced antisemitism “task forces,” complete with plans of action lifted directly from the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a self-righteous panderfest that sank without a ripple when it was unveiled earlier this year. Columbia suspended its chapters of SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace. Pro-Palestinian professors targeted by petitions backed by the hasbara machine were forced to eat their words to keep their jobs — and more than a few were forced out anyway. Several of the Harvard student groups that signed the fateful open letter issued public retractions in a panicked bid to save their employment prospects as a growing swarm of hedge funders and corporate CEOs demanded the school furnish them with the membership rosters of those groups to use as a “do-not-hire” blacklist, and the Harvard Law Review spiked a thoroughly-vetted article on Israel’s genocide in Gaza (a piece the journal had commissioned from a Palestinian doctoral candidate just weeks before) not because it contained factual errors, but because a majority of the journal’s 100 editors feared for their own career prospects.
The individuals whose lives are upended by this kind of socioeconomic terrorism are mere collateral damage in a campaign that is clearly aimed at all of academia, the Frankfurt School’s tried-and-true shortcut to the American collective consciousness. The targeted schools were selected for their potential to set a nationwide trend, as hedge fund parasite and UPenn donor Marc Rowan acknowledged in his demand that university president Liz Magill be fired for not immediately begging forgiveness for allowing a student group to host a Palestinian writers’ festival on campus two weeks before the Hamas raid, rather than their vulnerability to pressure campaigns. Harvard has more money in its endowment than over half the countries on Earth and could easily weather the storm if a few snowflake donors opted to skip their usual conspicuous displays of philanthropy this year, and the other two aren’t far behind. That students at 100 colleges staged a walkout for Gaza even after weeks of this treatment speaks to a massive shift in public opinion, and ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt can be heard freaking out about the “major generational problem” Israel faces with regard to Generation Z on a leaked phone call with fellow Lobby bigwigs obtained by Iranian media last month.
The genocidal cat may be out of the bag, but Big Parasite is determined to ram it back in, tie the bag back up, and drown it in the Dead Sea. It was thus not especially surprising when Susan Sarandon, already reviled among liberals for her refusal to ditch her principles to support Hillary Clinton in 2016, was fired by United Talent Agency for suggesting Jews lacked a monopoly on suffering during a speech she gave at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York, or when screenwriter Aaron Sorkin fired his agent, Maha Dakhil, for accusing Israel of genocide in an Instagram post, or even when Lebanese-born porn star Mia Khalifa lost her Playboy podcast over tweets expressing empathy with Palestinians. Everyone knows Jewish elites have called the shots in the US entertainment industry since its birth. But with control of academia seemingly slipping away, anything less than total ideological lockstep in Hollywood has become suddenly intolerable. The industry’s failure to issue a full-throated demand for bloody vengeance immediately following the Hamas raid, the New York Times declared breathlessly, was not just an outrage, but an antisemitic one. And Hollywood’s faithful didn’t stop at denouncing their colleagues — they unloaded on everyone from the establishment media editors who correctly reported Israel’s airstrike on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, to the Writers’ Guild of America (which had just secured favorable contracts for its members after a months-long strike but hadn’t condemned Hamas fast enough), to the TikTok executives unable to inflate traffic for pro-Israel hashtags to the same level as pro-Palestine terms with the platform’s established censorship algorithms. By failing to suppress all pro-Palestine discourse, TikTok executives were enabling the next Holocaust, dozens of Jewish celebrities nearing their sell-by dates, including Amy Schumer, Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman, informed two of the platform’s Jewish executives in a Zoom struggle-session that would have been hilarious if not for its real-world repercussions. Armed with cooked data from the ADL, which had conveniently begun counting all pro-Palestinian protests and uses of phrases like “from the river to the sea” in its already-skewed accounting of “antisemitic incidents,” the industry’s dregs literally demanded TikTok (and other social media platforms) give them a magic button to press to disappear the “hate” — which the executives promised to do to the best of their ability. Calls to shut TikTok down have predictably surged among Republican politicians, particularly primary candidates who seem to be campaigning harder for Israeli political office than any in the US. Nikki Haley claimed during last week’s debate that every half-hour of TikTok use made a person 17% more antisemitic, a howler that met with zero laughter from an audience obediently spooked by the platform’s power after Israeli operatives had astroturfed a campaign around Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” to frame TikTok as a hive of antisemitism seducing impressionable young minds to the dark side. If they could not dupe young Americans into supporting Israel as they had their parents, Big Parasite would have to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
cleanliness is antisemitic
Selling savagery
To ensure opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza becomes guaranteed career suicide, the Israeli Lobby must widen the exception it has already (and wildly unconstitutionally) carved out of the First Amendment for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to include pro-Palestinian speech of any kind. Congress did the heavy lifting earlier this month with a full-frontal assault on the dictionary, explicitly expanding the already bursting-at-the-seams concept of “antisemitism” to include anti-Zionism. Adopted unanimously save for lonely vertebrate Rep. Thomas Massie, the resolution bemoans a world in which protesters can “spew hateful and vile language amplifying antisemitic themes” in the US’ capital and “4 masked men” can tear an Israeli flag off the wall of a Philadelphia restaurant but is apparently OK with 150 Palestinian children being blown sky-high every day by American-made bombs dropped by Israel’s finest.
But while simply declaring anti-Zionism is antisemitism makes Big Parasite’s job manufacturing consent for its Gaza genocide much easier, it is as fundamentally incompatible with reality as declaring steel a vegetable or Israel a democracy. Jewish religious doctrine has no place for Zionism — Jews aren’t supposed to return to the Holy Land until the Messiah shows up, and most of them don’t recognize any past or current claimants to that title — but then most of Israel’s inhabitants aren’t particularly religious, and the ones that are wouldn’t be caught dead fighting for the IDF, details generally left out of stateside hagiographies of the “special relationship.”
A who’s-who of controlled opposition has been deployed to sell Israel’s case for ethnic cleansing, led by purported free-speech crusaders from histrionic trainwreck Laura Loomer and Musk-anointed professional whiner Bari Weiss to conservative college blog CampusReform. The latter’s content transformed practically overnight on October 8 from criticism of woke damage and thought-policing in higher education to a baying chorus of self-righteous slopaganda-spewers suggesting those who oppose the IDF’s brutality should be not only deplatformed but personally harassed, many articles including lists of names of professors and even students whose only transgression was opposing the Israeli occupation. That such spiteful malingering brought this supposedly conservative outlet into ideological lockstep with professional Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Michael Rapaport, who not only conflated failure to condemn Hamas with antisemitism but threatened these newly-minted “antisemites” with the withdrawal of financial support from their projects, supposedly on behalf of a cabal of Jews who were “making a list” in order to punish the insufficiently-genocidal in the future, does not appear to bother anyone on the Right. Indeed, Rapaport has done a 180 and embraced the candidacy of the man he endearingly refers to as “Pig Dick” for president, thanks apparently to the latter’s unquestioned subservience to Israel, and his fellow grifters in the Trump camp have welcomed him as the prodigal son.
At the same time as the Right was extending its Big Tent to include anyone who could hold up an Israeli flag without shitting themselves, conservative influencers who strayed even slightly from the path dictated by Tel Aviv in the hours after Hamas’ incursion were publicly and messily sacrificed, no matter how enthusiastically they had deep-throated the Zionist cause in the past. Charlie Kirk, the founder of conservative campus group Turning Point who is regularly heckled at his own events for his slavish devotion for Israel, was publicly crucified as an antisemite for suggesting someone in Netanyahu’s government must have known about Hamas’ plans before October 7. Abandoned by the Zionist masters he’d relentlessly shilled at the cost of his early grassroots supporters, a suddenly-friendless Kirk began manically cucking to atone for his moment of doubt, even as those initial suspicions were completely validated by the news that Tel Aviv had not only had Hamas’ exact invasion plan in hand a year before October 7 but had ignored numerous warnings by IDF troops stationed at the Gaza border who observed Palestinian militants “rehearsing” the plan in the weeks preceding that invasion.
The most valuable horse in Netanyahu’s stable is billionaire troll Elon Musk, the self-appointed guru of “free speech absolutism” (now with more loopholes). Fresh off suing neoliberal-centrist smear merchant Media Matters over a ruinous outbreak of advertiser boycotts supposedly triggered by a manipulation of Twitter that forced ads to appear alongside neo-Nazi content, Musk simped his way across Israel earlier this month, dutifully parroting his hosts’ explanation that they were slaughtering the people of Gaza because Palestinians “think it’s OK to kill civilians” (the 18,000 civilians Israel has massacred in the space of two months having apparently been murdered only with extreme regret). He even repeated the claim that Palestinian hatred for Israelis must stem from antisemitic propaganda they’re taught as kids in school rather than the reality of living with those Israelis’ boots on their necks and spit in their eyes for generations. With regular condemnations from the Anti-Defamation League bolstering his anti-woke cred, Musk convinced millions of adoring fanboys that he had bought Twitter to return it to its mythical heyday as the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party™ by occasionally tweeting into the tamer fringes of the Narrative — despite ratcheting up obedience to government censorship requests, putting a World Economic Forum lackey in the driver’s seat, and building a privatized social credit score system far worse than anything ever actually seen in China. The Israeli trip punctuated his latest redemption arc, which began when he questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians and really caught fire with an acknowledgment that “Jewish communities” aren’t huge fans of white people before our hero learned a Valuable Lesson about the legitimacy of genocide in the service of real estate acquisition. When he flipped off New York Times DealBook smarm-meister (and close personal Musk friend of 16 years) Andrew Ross Sorkin onstage after coming home, credulous dissidents across the West swooned.
The Lobby deliberately courts influencers with cross-partisan appeal like Musk, Democratic congresswoman-turned-Fox News pundit Tulsi Gabbard, and vaccine safety advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to create the false impression that a Zionist consensus supersedes all the usual sociopolitical divides. These assets are allowed to gain political traction with vocal, even eloquent opposition to the US’ Israel-fellating neocon foreign policy, and only once their antiwar or pro-First Amendment bona fides are firmly established are they ordered to “come out” as pro-Israel. Their most devoted followers will dutifully embrace their incongruous drift into warmongering and censorship, accepting cognitive dissonance as the cost of doing business (don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good! ) and even coaxing some skeptics into riding that sunk cost fallacy all the way into the pasture of Righteous Goyim. A thick folder of compromising material is kept by these assets’ handlers, capable of being deployed piecemeal to ensure that anyone who starts to get cold feet over duping their followers into embracing the violent racist death cult currently occupying Palestine can be persuaded to resume full obedience before they’ve passed the point of no return. Big Parasite loves a good ritual humiliation, and there’s nothing like dangling the tapes from those long-ago trips through the friendly skies on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express in front of a hungry reporter to make even an intelligent person spout the most aggressively ignorant Ziofascist thuggery this side of a Likud party meeting while flanked with obscene grifters like Shmuley Boteach, declaring with a straight face that the IDF is not only the most moral army in the world but does not — has never! — deliberately target(ed) civilians.
On the record advocating for Palestine? They can probably still use you, given how few people can stand by what Israel is doing in Gaza without becoming violently ill. Just publicly recant your ideological crimes, preferably with a pained look on your face, and start puking out cult dogma, as Musk did while Israeli President Isaac Herzog clapped like a seal during the former’s apology tour. Countless social media influencers have come forward since October 7 showing off emails from Israeli PR firms offering insulting sums in exchange for “sponsored” content, a poisoned hook that not only renders the entire pool of Israel/Palestine social media content questionable but allows Israel to claim plausible deniability regarding its own dismal performance in TikTok’s metrics — see, those dastardly Palestinians must be paying for their traffic, maybe we should ban TikTok after all! And when Israel can’t get their (wo)man, they are not above using AI to fake it. Model Bella Hadid, whose Palestinian father’s family lost their home in Safed during the 1948 Nakba when a Jewish refugee family from Europe to whom the Hadids had given shelter took over their home while the Hadids were away, was deepfaked into an apology video in which “she” recanted her past support for Palestine and embraced Israel, claiming to have “taken time to truly learn the historical context.”
October 7 is the new January 6
Big Parasite’s efforts to collapse any daylight between “free-speech” crusaders and Zionist zealots is a desperate bid to prevent any empathy from developing between its own victims in Palestine and in Washington — specifically those who’ve found themselves in social-credit purgatory, unable to board a plane or open a bank account due to attending the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” protest. Despite similar experiences with over-the-top Orwellian surveillance and harassment by Big Brother and Big Tech for behavior which no reasonable person would define as crime, conservatives have been repeatedly lied to by Israel-affiliated “America First” sites like Breitbart and the Free Beacon that they have absolutely nothing in common with Palestinians and Palestine advocates who’ve been facing similar treatment from the US government for so long that an entire organization, Palestine Legal, arose to defend them in court. When hundreds of Jewish peace activists were arrested on Capitol Hill a week after the Hamas raid, J6 patron saint Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused her colleague and Congress’ sole Palestinian, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, of leading a “pro-Hamas insurrection,” demanding Tlaib be censured and the demonstrators receive the same harsh sentences as the Stop the Steal crowd. She justified her sudden embrace of the police-state tactics she’d railed against for the previous two years by offering up the stale hasbara nugget that to be pro-Palestinian was to support Hamas, citing the ADL — which has called Greene herself “somewhere between deranged and demented” — in her desperate reach to denounce Jewish Voice for Peace as an extremist group.
Similarly, when conservatives better known for fighting the Biden administration’s unconstitutional crackdown on social media had a chance to join hands across the aisle with liberal university presidents struggling to flex their own disused First Amendment rights against the Lobby’s McCarthyite demand for a loyalty oath during this month’s campus antisemitism hearing, they chose instead to join the neocons in piling on the Ivy League women. It wasn’t so much the universities’ insufficient bubble-wrapping of the Jewish Campus Experience™ that bothered what should have been natural allies, but not hiring “enough” conservative and/or pro-Trump faculty and for overdosing on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion kool-aid — claims that were at best irrelevant, at worst unproven, and made the questioners look like petty bullies trafficking in entitled male resentment.
Billed as a hearing on “college campus antisemitism,” the House Education and Workforce Committee’s sadistic four-hour interrogation of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT last week proved once again the impossibility of appeasing one’s way out of tyranny. Despite having cooperated promptly and exhaustively in reorienting their universities’ campus life around the fictional scourge of antisemitism after October 7, dropping everything to assemble a whole new layer of bureaucracy capable of protecting the Ivy League’s Jewish snowflakes from accidental contact with student activism, Claudine Gay (Harvard), Liz Magill (UPenn), and Sally Kornbluth (MIT) were bullied and harassed in the name of stopping antisemitic bullying and harassment by making speech the Lobby doesn’t like an actionable disciplinary offense. When none of the presidents cracked under the full gale force of Rep. Elise Stefanik’s pearl-clutching tantrum even after she revealed their universities would be turned inside out with Title VI investigations, a nasty little tactic capable of ripping a multi-million dollar hole in one’s institution, one of UPenn’s Jewish sugar daddies threatened to drill an even bigger hole in the school’s war chest if Magill was allowed to stay, claiming he had anonymously donated $100 million in options from his Stone Street Asset Management firm — and that those options could be yanked back the minute he felt the school was no longer representing his Values faithfully. Because the board didn’t want to play chicken with a $100 million gift — not when there was a nice responsible Jewish girl already standing by as vice-chair waiting to fill Magill’s uncooperative shoes — it was done.
Greenblatt was soon troping up a storm on CNN as he gloated about Magill’s demise, claiming he could have helped UPenn — they’d contacted him, after all, as had Harvard — but they just wouldn’t do what he wanted. This wishlist had somehow metastasized from establishing an antisemitism task force to ordering that task force to ‘solve’ antisemitism within a designated time frame, purging university curricula of references to Israeli apartheid, adopting a hate speech code prominently featuring the bloated-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness IHRA definition of antisemitism (long since rejected by its creator as unfit for purpose) to be centered within a revamped Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, and correspondingly stepped-up punishments meted out to students, professors, administrators, and even the university itself if a Jewish student felt momentarily uncomfortable. Meanwhile, for hesitating before stripping students of their rights, then apologizing for crimes they did not actually commit, these university presidents have been doubly condemned to eternal “Jewish media torture” (for some idea of what to expect, refer to the character assassination of British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn).
The aim of the elaborate and frankly absurd manipulations Big Parasite has visited upon the minds of the West over the last two months is to normalize the most severe punishments for the slightest deviation from total fealty to the Israeli line — not so much shifting the Overton window as throwing a cinderblock through it in an epistemological Kristallnacht while somewhere, Jonathan Greenblatt screams like a little girl. Such upheaval is deliberately, unmanageably chaotic to ensure it cannot be reversed without extreme difficulty. It is now supposedly normal to be blacklisted, to lose one’s job and to get suspended from school for uttering “free Palestine.” Being refused a hotel room — or one’s constitutional right against self-incrimination — because of perceived failure to adequately condemn events that transpired halfway around the world and have no bearing on one’s life is not only viewed as socially legitimate but expected. The popular pro-Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea” was alchemically transmuted in a matter of hours on October 7 into a terrorist threat meaning the genocide of all Jewish Israelis (when in reality Jews peacefully lived among the Arab population of Palestine when it stretched from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea before the 1948 Nakba), and merely uttering it on Twitter – or even using the word “decolonization” – is cause for suspension, courtesy of Elon “I pretended to sue the ADL so you’d let me hand over your biometrics to Israel” Musk. An entire Twitter account with accompanying website was created to cement a bogus equivalency between removing posters of Israeli hostages from the American walls they’ve been irrelevantly posted on and “Jew hate.” Such “hate” need not mention Israel or Jews at all — Starbucks sued its own employee union over their social media posts expressing solidarity with Gaza, and the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce launched a campaign against the popular cafe chain with the slogan, “Drinking a cup of Starbucks is drinking a cup of Jewish blood.” Wave a Palestinian flag at a protest? You might as well be heiling Hitler.
To make sure this avalanche of fraud stays put, Big Parasite has made a bold grab for the control room of the internet itself, consolidating what is already near-total control so as to prevent even the slightest pin-pricks of light from hitting the retinas of the populations they must keep in the dark to complete their atrocities unmolested. In October, the US Federal Communications Commission quietly passed a measure giving itself total control of the transmission of all content across US internet infrastructure in the name of upholding “equity,” leaning on an already legally-absurd concept in order to justify something so far outside the bounds of law it might as well have been written in feces on the walls of an asylum. The agency’s own commissioner, Brendan Carr, took to social media to warn Americans what was in the works, explaining that the plan “hands the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the country.” Just as the people of Gaza have been all but muzzled by Israel’s deliberate shutdown of electricity and internet and blockade of fuel deliveries to the enclave, so will Americans find that their words can no longer reach an audience — either inside the US or outside its borders — if the FCC thinks it might hurt an influential Jew’s feelings. This is not speculation — the ADL made the argument for targeting internet infrastructure to suppress wrongthink earlier this year, and especially after the Biden administration had its wrist slapped for playing Ministry of Truth at the platform level with the Missouri v Biden decision, it has become abundantly clear to Big Parasite that preventing the transmission of such material is a much more final solution than trying to prevent its publication.
Preemptive self-defense
By equating pro-Palestinian speech with the literal genocide of Jews, Big Parasite’s agents in the West are not just dismantling the last remaining safeguards against state-sponsored censorship — they are opening the door to monstrous acts of “preemptive self-defense,” a concept only the diseased minds running the Israeli government would ever have had the chutzpah to attempt in real life. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked cited just such a rationale for killing Palestinian children, whom she memorably referred to as “little snakes” in 2015, while the IDF’s “one shot, two kills” t-shirt has become a critical artifact for understanding the Israeli mind. As a desperate Israel runs out of threadbare narratives to brandish in the hope of distracting from the abattoir it’s operating in Gaza, American dissidents risk losing quite a bit more than just their jobs when they challenge Bibi the butcher.
coming soon to a boardroom near you
Israel has made it clear: support for Palestinians is support for Hamas. Anyone found to be supporting Hamas is a terrorist. All terrorists must die. And by the way, we’re gonna send the IDF around to all your countries — if Mossad isn’t already there — to make sure we got them all. Oh, and the US Congress has decided anti-Zionism makes you a terrorist too. Sleep tight!
The line between character assassination and actual assassination has never been thinner, especially with Big Parasite’s control of AI — both through operational algorithms and the feeder material, which is sourced from Wikipedia or its even less reliable cousin Wikidata more often than you’d like to think. They do not need TikTok users’ approval or even consent to insert the most aesthetically and morally repugnant content directly into the collective consciousness, especially once Musk fanboys start lining up for their Neuralinks and find themselves completely unable to question why their thoughts are suddenly expressed with an Israeli accent (“the tewwowists are coming!”)
Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer chillingly predicted his own demise as the result of “Bari Weiss and her likes” in a tweet less than a month before Israel bombed his sister’s house last week, killing him and half a dozen family members. Below a screenshot of his inbox, which was overflowing with poorly-spelled death threats, was a tweet from the perennially-butthurt Weiss spotlighting him for joking about whether an Israeli baby supposedly found in an oven in the world’s least original atrocity propaganda recipe had been cooked “with or without baking powder.” Weiss, like Musk, Gabbard, Kennedy, and any of countless other controlled-oppo personalities, presents herself as a fierce foe of cancel culture while hypocritically embracing it against anyone opposed to the genocide of Gaza, to the point that she has apparently moved up to helping cancel them for real.
the next butthurt loser you mock online might be working for Peter Thiel
Weiss last week retweeted an ominous message from Palantir, the Orwellian “security” firm founded by billionaire technofascist Peter Thiel. The company, it said, had opened its arms to Jewish students pissed that their universities wouldn’t evict pro-Palestinian students from campus wholesale. Palantir has offered such wannabe-Kissingers positions in a secretive new initiative apparently targeting those universities — and potentially anyone else who gets in the way, since putting killing machines in the hands of insecure nerds with grudges is not exactly self-limiting — with “actions on the battlefield.”
Witnessing the rollout of this repressive control agenda should only spur dissidents to greater activity, as many are beginning to understand — at least on a subconscious level — that if Gaza and the West Bank fall, these predators will come knocking on our doors (and while Jonathan Greenblatt may look like Nosferatu, he does not have to be invited in). Thousands of artists, writers and performers have hit back against the effort to delete Palestine from the discourse as a pretext for deleting it from history, fully aware that the censorship campaign they are facing off against represents an existential threat precisely because of the heavy-handed unpersoning of so many of their peers. One day we may find ourselves “deplatformed” only to realize we have to pay a toll to reenter the real world — and it’s Worldcoin or no world for you.
The twin spirals of silence and complicity are already twisting into an epistemological barbed wire fence, completing the Total Demoralization project that has been underway since Zionism took its first breath and shouted that this planet was not big enough for the both of us. They are correct — it isn’t big enough at all — but it is not we who have to go.
Britain secretly sent 500 extra troops to Cyprus base being used to supply weapons to Israel
By Matt Kennard | Declassified UK | December 12, 2023
Britain secretly deployed 500 additional troops to its bases on Cyprus after Israel began bombing Gaza, it can be revealed.
The UK government has said previously that it deployed 1,000 troops to the East Mediterranean to support Israel but it did not reveal how these troops were distributed.
But in a letter to Alba MP Kenny MacAskill, seen by Declassified, defence minister James Heappey wrote that on 27 November half these troops were in Cyprus.
Britain now has “approximately 500 additional service personnel deployed to Cyprus,” Heappey wrote in a surprising admission.
Britain has two “Sovereign Base Areas” on Cyprus – known as Dhekelia in the east of the island and Akrotiri in the west – which are large, highly secretive military and intelligence installations comprising 3% of the island’s land area.
The major UK air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, has long been the staging post for British bombing campaigns in the Middle East, and sits 180 miles from Tel Aviv. The flight time is 40 minutes.
The extra UK troops takes the number of British military personnel deployed on the island to 2,717. The UK bases also host 273 British civil servants.
The US military has also had a base on British territory on Cyprus for nearly half a century, but its size was kept secret from the public before Declassified recently revealed that 129 US airmen are permanently deployed to RAF Akrotiri.
It is not known if additional US personnel have also been deployed to Britain’s Cyprus bases to help support Israel’s bombing of Gaza, as the British government refuses to make public any information about American activities on the UK territory.
Defence minister James Heappey also revealed in his letter that Britain has sent extra troops to Egypt, Israel and Lebanon, but he refused to say at what levels. “I have withheld specific numbers for these countries for operational security reasons,” he wrote.
The UK military personnel were said to be deployed “to support contingency planning and UK humanitarian aid efforts”.
The 500 extra UK troops deployed to Cyprus do not include British special forces, which operate completely outside of democratic oversight.
The Sun reported on 27 October that Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS), the army’s elite special force, was on “standby” in Cyprus to – it was claimed – rescue British hostages held captive by Hamas and Britons who are trapped in Gaza.
The UK military’s “D-Notice” committee, which seeks to stop the media publishing information it claims would damage national security, requested on 28 October all media editors to not publish information relating to SAS operations in Gaza.
There has been no further reporting on the SAS’s role in Gaza, while the UK military refuses to confirm or deny if the SAS has been on the ground in Gaza since Israel began bombing the territory.
It is unclear if the Cypriot government has been told of the SAS deployment—or the extra UK troops.
Declassified recently revealed that over 30 military transport flights, operated by the RAF, had flown from RAF Akrotiri to Tel Aviv since the bombing of Gaza began.
But Cypriot government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis told the Cyprus Mail he had received no information about the flights. The UK, meanwhile, denied it is sending “lethal aid” or “military equipment” to Israel from RAF Akrotiri.
Declassified then reported the US was using RAF Akrotiri to transfer weapons to Israel. Respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that over 40 US transport aircraft have flown to RAF Akrotiri carrying equipment, arms and forces.
The planes have been loaded with cargo from strategic depots belonging to the US and NATO in Europe, Haaretz reported, with around half the US flights said to be “delivering military aid”.
The Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides was asked about the US deliveries in a press conference, and said: “There is no such information, our country cannot be used as a base for war operations”.
Kenny MacAskill, the MP who asked the questions in parliament, told Declassified: “We require openness and accountability about what is happening at Britain’s bases on Cyprus and the role they are playing in Israel’s criminal bombing of Gaza. 500 additional military personnel to Cyprus is a huge deployment given the large contingent already based there. What is their role?”
He added: “It’s 20 years since the UK was taken into a war in Iraq based on lies and deceit. That cost the lives of millions and still causes harm today as refugees and terrorism testify to. Iraq wasn’t in my name and neither are these actions. We need to be told what is being done by our government.”
Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt
From Dallas to Gaza: Was JFK’s Assassination Instrumental is Strengthening Zionist Israel?
By Rick Sterling | Global Research | December 13, 2023
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 60 years ago. If he had lived and won a second term, the Israeli Palestinian conflict would have evolved differently. Possibly the path toward Israeli apartheid and genocide in Gaza could have been avoided.
In his short time in office, Kennedy changed US foreign policy in significant ways. As documented in the book “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it still matters”, JFK resisted the CIA and military industrial complex in the policies he set regarding the Third World and Soviet Union. The Vietnam War, assassination of Indonesia’s President Sukarno, and continued hostility to Cuba and the Soviet Union would not have happened had Kennedy lived and won a second term.
Less well known, Kennedy’s policies also challenged and opposed the military and political ambitions of Zionist Israel. At the time, Israel had only existed for thirteen years. It was still evolving and the course was not totally set. There was significant international resolve to find a compromise solution regarding Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba. When Israel attacked Egypt and seized the Sinai peninsula in 1956, the Eisenhower administration demanded Israel withdraw from the captured territory. They complied.
At this time, in the early 1960’s, prominent Jewish voices criticized the racism and discrimination of the Israeli government. Israelis like Martin Buber assailed Ben-Gurion and noted that “At the inception of the state, complete equality with the Jewish citizens was promised to the Arab population.” Many influential Israelis realized their long term security and well-being depended on finding a just settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population.
In the United States, the Jewish community was divided and many were anti-Zionist. The American Council for Judaism was influential and anti-nationalist. The racist and militaristic character of Israel was not yet set in stone. Nor was American Jewish support for Israel. When Menachim Begin came to the United States in 1948 he was denounced by prominent Jewish leaders including Albert Einstein. They said Begin, who later became Israeli Prime Minister, was a “terrorist” who preached “an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.” Many American Jews had mixed feelings and did not identify with Israel. Others supported Israel but on the basis of there being peace with the indigenous Palestinians.
There are four key areas where the Kennedy policy was substantially different from what followed after his death.
Kennedy Was Not Biased in Favor of Israel
The Kennedy administration sought good relations with both Israel and the Arab nations. Kennedy aimed to extend US influence throughout the Middle East, including with nations friendly with the Soviet Union and at odds with NATO partners.
JFK personally supported Arab and African nationalism. As a senator in 1957, he criticized the Eisenhower administration for supporting and sending weapons to France in their war against the Algerian independence movement. In a 9,000 word presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he criticized “western imperialism” and called for the US to support Algerian independence. Algerian President Ben Bella, who France had tried to assassinate and considered far too radical by many in NATO, was given a huge and impressive welcome to the White House.
Kennedy changed the previous frosty relations with the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. For the first time, the US approved loans to them. Kennedy wrote respectful letters to the Arab presidents before he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion to Washington. The Arab leaders could see the difference and responded with appreciation. Those who claim there was no difference with Kennedy ignore the fact that Egypt’s Nasser, Algeria’s Ben Bella and other nationalist leaders saw a big difference.
In 1960, when Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he spoke at the Zionists of America Convention. He made complimentary remarks about Israel but also expressed the need for friendship with all the people of the Middle East. He said the US should “act promptly and decisively against any nation in the Middle East which attacks its neighbor” and “The Middle East needs water, not war; tractors, not tanks; bread, not bombs.”
Kennedy frankly told the Zionists, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.” By maintaining objectivity and neutrality on the Israeli Arab conflict, Kennedy wanted to steer the Jewish Zionists away from the racist, militaristic and ultra-nationalistic impulses which have led to where we are today.
Kennedy Wanted the Zionist Lobby to Follow the Rules
The second difference in Kennedy’s policy is regarding Zionist lobbying on behalf of Israel. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), organizations that promote or lobby on behalf of a foreign government are required to register and account for their finances and activities. Under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Department of Justice (DOJ) instructed the American Zionist Council (AZC) to register as agents of a foreign country. AZC is the parent organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC).
As documented in detail here, on 21 November 1962, the Assistant Attorney General wrote to them “the receipt of such funds from the American sections of the Jewish Agency for Israel constitutes the (American Zionist) Council an agent of a foreign principal… the Council’s registration is requested.”
The emergence of Israeli political influence was also scrutinized in the Senate. Under Senator William Fulbright, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings in May and August 1963. They revealed that tax free donations to the United Jewish Appeal, supposedly for humanitarian relief in Israel, were being channeled back to the US where the money was used for lobbying and Israeli public relations.
Attorneys for AZC stalled for time. On August 16, 1963, a DOJ analyst reviewed the case and concluded, “Department should insist on the immediate registration of the American Zionist Council under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
On October 11 the DOJ demanded that AZC register and “Department expects a response from you within 72 hours.”
On October 17, a DOJ memorandum reports that attorneys for AZC pleaded for not being required to register as foreign agents. They offered to provide the required financial disclosures but that registering as a foreign agent “would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement.” As indicated in this discussion, political zionism was not yet dominant in the American Jewish community and was actively opposed by the American Council on Judaism and other Jewish groups.
Kennedy Supported Palestinian Rights
A third difference is regarding Palestinian rights. Although he was only 44 when he became president, Kennedy had more international experience than most US presidents. In 1939 he spent two weeks in Palestine. In a lengthy letter to his father, he described the situation and difficulties. He wrote,
“The sympathy of the people on the spot seems to be with the Arabs. This is not only because the Jews have had, at least some of their leaders, an unfortunately arrogant, uncompromising attitude, but they feel that after all, the country has been Arabic for the last few hundred years … Palestine was hardly Britain’s to give away.”
In comments that are still true, Kennedy remarks how the Jewish residents are divided between “strongly Orthodox Jewish group, unwilling to make any compromise” and a “liberal Jewish element composed of the younger group who fear these reactionaries”. His analysis is sympathetic to both Jewish and Arab peoples and addresses the difficulty but necessity to find a compromise solution.
In the early 1960’s, the US State Department was not locked in to a biased acceptance or approval of Israeli policies. The US supported UN Resolution 194 resolving (in paragraph 11) that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” This has become known as the “right of return”.
On November 21, 1963, the day before Kennedy’s assassination, the NY Times has two news stories which exemplify the discord between Washington and Tel Aviv. A report from the United Nations is titled “Israel Dissents as U.N. Group Backs U.S. on Arab Refugees”. It begins,
“A United States resolution calling for continued efforts to resolve the predicament of the Palestinian Arab refugees was approved tonight 83 to 1… Israel cast the single negative vote… The issue centers on a 1948 resolution whose key section, paragraph 11, concerns the future of the Arabs who were displaced from their homes by the Palestine conflict. They have been living in the lands bordering Israel … The revised United States text calls on the Palestine Conciliation Commission to ‘continue its efforts for the implementation of Paragraph 11’.”
The second NYT story is titled “U.S. Stand Angers Israel”. It reports from Jerusalem that “Premier Levi Eshkol expressed extreme distaste today for the United States’ position in the Palestine refugee debate… Israel’s anger was conveyed ‘in the strongest terms’ to the US Ambassador … The Israeli Government is upset about the American resolution before the UN Political Committee and by American maneuvers over the issue.” Israel was angered and objecting because the Kennedy administration was trying to resolve the Palestinian refugee situation including the right of return.
Kennedy Tried to Stop the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program
The fourth and biggest contention between Kennedy and the Israeli leadership was regarding their developing nuclear weapons. This issue was kept so secret that crucial documents and letters have only been released in recent years.
President Kennedy was a strong advocate for stopping nuclear proliferation. After the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, he realized how easy it would be to intentionally or accidentally trigger a catastrophic nuclear war. If nuclear weapons were allowed to spread to more countries, the risks of global catastrophe would be all the greater. It was also predicted that if Israel acquired nuclear weapons capability, they would become more aggressive and less likely to reach a compromise agreement regarding Palestinian refugees.
When intelligence indicated that Israel might be trying to build a nuclear weapon at Dimona in 1962, Kennedy was determined to find out if this was true, and if so to stop it. This caused an intense diplomatic confrontation between JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The proof of this has recently been revealed in the exchange of letters between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his successor Levy Eshkol. They are all labeled “Top Secret” or “Eyes Only”.
It is important to see the sequence and some details to understand how intense this showdown was. These communications are all from 1963. (Note to reader: skip ahead to the next section if you become tired of the detail in the following exchanges.)
In March the US State Department instructed the US Ambassador to inform the government of Israel (GOI) that for “compelling reasons” the “USG seeks GOI assent to semi-annual repeat semi-annual visits to Dimona, perhaps May and November, with full access to all parts and instruments in the facility, by qualified US scientists.”
On April 19 the State Department instructed the US Ambassador to Israel to “press” for an “affirmative reply” to the earlier request for semi-annual inspections of Dimona.
On April 26, Israeli PM Ben Gurion replied to President Kennedy. He evaded the issue of nuclear facility inspections and instead expressed his concern regarding a recent proclamation from Egypt, Syria and Iraq. He compared Egyptian President Nasser to Germany’s Hitler.
On May 4 JFK responded to Ben Gurion’s concerns and underscored the US commitment to Israel and peace in the Middle East. He told the Israeli leader he is much less worried about an “early Arab attack” than the “successful development of advanced offensive systems”.
On May 8, a Special National Intelligence Estimate concluded, “Israel intends at least to put itself in a position to be able to produce a limited number of weapons” and that “unless deterred by outside pressure [the Israelis] will attempt to produce a weapon sometime in the next several years.” The analysis predicted that if Israelis had the bomb it would “encourage them to be bolder in their use of the conventional resources both diplomatic and military in their confrontation with the Arabs.”
On May 10, US State Department sent an “Eyes Only Ambassador” telegram to the US Ambassador to Israel. The ambassador was instructed to remind the Israeli leadership that they have previously agreed to the bi-annual inspections. The telegram also says Israeli concerns about Arab development of a nuclear bomb “are not valid” because there is nothing comparable to the “advanced Israeli program.”
The tensions between the Kennedy administration and Tel Aviv caused the Israel lobby to escalate pressure on the White House. This is revealed in a May 11 TOP SECRET State Department memo regarding “White House Concern with Arab-Israeli Matters”. It begins,
“In recent weeks, as you are aware, it has become increasingly clear that the White House is under steadily mounting domestic political pressure to adopt a foreign policy in the Near East more consonant with Israeli desires. The Israelis are determined to use the period between now and the 1964 Presidential election to secure a closer, more public security relationship with the Unites States, notably through a public security guarantee and a cooler, more antagonistic relationship beween the United States and the UAR [United Arab Repubic].”
Source
This is a highly interesting memo showing Israeli influence in US foreign policy and electoral politics. It further shows Kennedy’s effort to mitigate this influence while standing firm on the goal to stop nuclear proliferation.
On May 12, 1963 Ben Gurion wrote another long letter to President Kennedy. Again evading the US request, Ben Gurion gives a distorted history including the claim that Palestinian refugees left Palestine “at the demand of Arab leaders”. He again compares Nasser to Hitler and suggests the danger of a new Holocaust.
He says, “Mr, President, my people have the right to exist … and this existence is in danger.”
Source
On May 19, Kennedy responded to Ben Gurion emphasizing the importance he placed on not allowing the spread of nuclear weapons.
“We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel.”
Kennedy underscores the “deep commitment to the security of Israel” but says the commitment and support “would be seriously jeopardized” if the US is unable to obtain reliable information about “Israel’s efforts in the nuclear field.”
On May 27, Ben Gurion responded to Kennedy saying that the nuclear reactor at Dimona “will be devoted exclusively to peaceful purposes”. He counters Kennedy’s request for bi-annual visits starting in June by suggesting annual visits “such as have already taken place” starting at the end of the year. The condition is significant because the previous “visit” to Dimona was restricted in time and space.
The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center as viewed from a Corona satellite in the late 1960s (Public Domain)
On June 15, Kennedy wrote to Ben Gurion after he had received a scientific evaluation of the minimum requirements for a nuclear site inspection, After welcoming Ben Gurion’s assurances that Dimona will only be devoted to peaceful purposes, Kennedy issued a polite ultimatum. “If Israel’s purposes are to be clear to world beyond reasonable doubt, I believe the schedule which would best serve our common purpose would be a visit early this summer, another visit in June 1964, thereafter at intervals of six months.” He specifies that the “visit” must include access to all areas and “sufficient time be allotted for thorough examination.”
On June 16, the US Embassy in Israel reported that Ben Gurion resigned as Israel’s Prime Minister. This was a huge surprise; the explanation was that it was for “personal reasons”. It is likely that Ben-Gurion knew the contents of the forthcoming letter from Washington (received at the embassy the day before). The impact of his resignation was to stall for time. US Ambassador Barbour suggested waiting until the “cabinet problem is worked out” before sending JFK’s near ultimatum to the next Prime Minister.
Kennedy did not wait long. On July 4, he wrote to new Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol. After congratulating Eshkol on becoming new Prime Minister, he goes straight to the point “concerning American visits to Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona.” Kennedy says, “I regret having to add to your burdens to soon after your assumption of office, but …” He then goes on to request inspections as was requested in the letter to Ben-Gurion and that “support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized” if this is not done.
On July 17, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy that he needed to study the issue more before responding to Kennedy’s request for visits to Dimona. US Ambassador Barbour added that Eshkol verbally conveyed that he was “surprised” at Kennedy’s statement that US commitment to Israel might be jeopardized. Indicating Israeli defiance, Eshkol told the US Ambassador “Israel would do what it had to do for its national security and to safeguard its sovereign rights.”
On August 19, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy re-iterating the “peaceful purpose” of Dimona and ignoring the request for a summer inspection. He proposed the inspection take place “toward the end of 1963”.
On August 26, Kennedy wrote to Eshkol accepting the visit at year end but emphasizing it needs to be done “when the reactor’s core is being loaded and before internal radiation hazards have developed.” Kennedy set these conditions because they were essential for determining whether the facility could be used for developing a nuclear weapon.
On September 16, State Department prepared a Memorandum of Conversation with a counselor from the British Embassy. There was joint concern but agreement that Dimona would be visited and inspected “prior to the activation of the reactor.”
After the Assassination of JFK on November 22
After Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) became president, US mideast policy changed significantly. From the start, LBJ told an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend. But you have found a better one.” The Israeli publication Haaretz says, “Historians generally regard Johnson as the president most uniformly friendly to Israel.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs writes “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy with Israel’s Policies” and “Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his.”
On the crucial issue of Dimona inspection, the Israelis ignored JFK’s condition and the reactor went critical on December 26. When the inspection occurred three weeks later, they could not inspect the areas that had been irradiated. A handwritten comment on the report says, “We were supposed to see this first!” We do not know what would have happened it JFK had been in the White House but given the intensity of his effort, and deep convictions regarding the dangers of nuclear proliferation, it would not have been ignored as it was under LBJ.
Under LBJ, relations with Egypt deteriorated. The US stopped providing direct assistance loans and grants to Egypt. The US became increasingly antagonistic to President Nasser, as desired by the Israel lobby.
US support for a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue decreased and then stopped.
The Department of Justice efforts to require the American Zionist Council to register as foreign agents became increasingly weak until they were dropped under LBJ’s new Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The sequence of exchanges includes:
On December 11, 1963, the AZC attorney wrote to the DOJ saying, “Our client is not prepared to register as an agent of a foreign government.” Instead, he proposed to provide “voluntarily” the required financial information.
In January and February 1964, there were more exchange between AZC and the DOJ. AZC expressed concern because the American Council on Judaism publicly said that AZC was acting as “propaganda agents for the state of Israel and that the Jewish Agency was being used as a conduit for funds for the Zionist organization in the United States.”
In summer 1964 Nicholas Katzenbach becomes Attorney General. Negotiations continued. DOJ staff noted that AZC was “stalling” and not providing acceptable information despite the increasingly special and favorable treatment. In spring of 1965 the DOJ accepted that AZC was NOT required to register as foreign agent. Their financial information was kept in a unique expandable folder. In November 1967 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) applied for a federal tax exemption. The US Treasury Department granted it, backdated to 1953.
Increasingly Aggressive and Uncompromising Zionist Israel
The successful development of nuclear weapons added to Israel’s aggressive actions and unwillingness to resolve the Palestinian refugee crisis.
With intelligence information provided by Washington, Israel made a surprise attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967. The “Six Day war” was a crucial turning point in middle east history. Israel quickly defeated the unprepared combined armies. In the West, public perception of Israel changed overnight. The mythology of Israeli military (and general) superiority was created. Among the American Jewish population, doubts and concerns about Israel evaporated and support skyrocketed.
Israeli leaders arrogance and deceit is exemplified by the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War. The communications navy vessel was monitoring the air waves in the eastern Mediterranean when it was attacked by Israeli aircraft and boats. Thirty four US sailors were killed and 172 injured. Amazingly , the ship managed to stay afloat. The plan was evidently to sink the ship, blame it on Egypt and consolidate US support and hostility to Egypt and the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson over-ruled the calls for help from the vessel, saying “I will not have my ally embarrassed.”
The deadly incident was covered up for decades.
We do not know for sure what might have happened had JFK not been assassinated. It is possible that Israel would have been stopped from acquiring the bomb. Without that, they may not have had the audacity to launch the 1967 attacks on their neighbors, seizing the Golan, West Bank and Gaza Strip. If the Zionist lobby had been required to register as foreign agents, their influence would have been moderated. Perhaps Israel could have found a reasonable accommodation with Palestinians in one or two states.
Instead, Israel hardened into an apartheid regime committing increasingly outrageous massacres. As Kennedy warned in 1960, Israel has become a “garrison state” surrounded by “hate and fear”. The assassination of John F Kennedy insured Zionist control of Israel, suffering for Palestinians and permanent instability.
*
Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the San Franciso Bay Area of California. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Copyright © Rick Sterling, Global Research, 2023
Penn Students’ Lawsuit Shows Campus Antisemitism Uproar Is A Manufactured Crisis
Vast majority of “incidents” are merely expressions of unwelcome political views
By Brian McGlinchey | Stark Realities | December 12, 2023
Saturday’s resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill came after months of controversy — and a viral-video grilling of Magill in a congressional hearing — over allegations the school has become a hotbed of antisemitism.
While those allegations have been given widespread credence, a Stark Realities analysis of dozens of claimed antisemitic incidents at Penn finds that, apart from a small handful of cases, the great majority are merely instances in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engage in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with.
Conveniently, a catalogue of supposed examples of anti-Jew bigotry at Penn is laid out in a federal lawsuit filed last week against the school by two Jewish students who allege it “has transformed itself into an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment, and discrimination.” In the suit, dual American-Israeli citizen Eyal Yakoby and American Jordan Davis seek “substantial damages in an amount to be determined at trial.”
For those wanting to look beyond what’s been said about Penn by grandstanding politicians, click-seeking news outlets and sensationalist social media posters, the 84-page complaint is a valuable resource. Unlike the sloppy court of public opinion, real courts demand a detailed presentation of specific allegations.
However, scrutiny of the Penn complaint — prepared by Philadelphia lawyer and Penn law grad Eric Shore and New York City law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres — confirms the campaign against the Philadelphia school is just the latest component a broader, long-running drive to censor political expression that’s critical of the State of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians.
In support of that drive, conservatives who’d previously and rightfully bashed campus viewpoint censorship and crackdowns on flexibly-defined “hate speech” are among the most vocal advocates of installing a new censorship regime to keep students “safe” from anti-Israel rhetoric.
Objective readers of the complaint will quickly note a number of red flags, starting with strident, vitriolic language referring to “rabidly antisemitic professors” and “Jew-hating” speakers who “spew antisemitic venom” by “bellowing into bullhorns to express their hatred for Israel.”
However, the complaint’s foremost flaw is its repeated assumption that various political concepts, views and slogans promoted by critics of Israel are inherently antisemitic or genocidal. This kind of attack isn’t unique to the Penn complaint; it’s constantly used by Israel’s advocates to silence the opposition. Among the forbidden ideas:
- Anti-Zionism. A philosophy embraced by many Jews, anti-Zionism opposes the idea of a Jewish nation-state. Opposing the concept of such a Jewish state doesn’t automatically make someone a bigot any more than opposing a white state or a Christian state does. The Chavurah, a progressive Jewish group at Penn, recently rejected this charge, saying that “continual conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism undermines any chance for productive dialogue at Penn concerning Israel.”
- Questioning Israel’s “right to exist.” No country has a right to exist. Countries are mere political arrangements. There’s nothing inherently bigoted about campaigning for a different political order between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The State of Israel has no more “right to exist” than did the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, or does North Korea or the United States.
- “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” As I wrote last month, “while any slogan will mean different things to different people, this one has been used for decades by Palestinians seeking the same liberties as Israeli Jews throughout the entire territory ruled by the State of Israel.” For most, it’s a call for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement. While some may be reasonably concerned about how that would play out, the idea isn’t inherently genocidal or antisemitic.
- The Palestinian “right of return.” This concept argues that Palestinians displaced by the 1948 creation of Israel should be allowed to return to their homes. It isn’t inherently embedded with bigotry, as the complaint suggests. Indeed, its advocates would argue the concept is a counter to Israeli ethnocentrism.
- “Singling out” Israel for criticism. This preposterous standard, routinely advanced by Zionists, suggests that it’s antisemitic to criticize policies of the Israeli government if you don’t simultaneously criticize other governments guilty of the same sins.
- Calling Israel an “apartheid state.” A great many Jews say Israel satisfies the definition of apartheid — for starters, Hebrew University Holocaust professor Amos Goldberg, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
- Accusing Israel of genocide. While the suit is filled with accusations of genocidal intent on the part of pro-Palestinian activists, the plaintiffs would have us assume it’s antisemitic to argue that Israel’s bombardment of civilian areas in Gaza and displacement of Palestinians amounts to genocide.
- Urging boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In another display of double-standards, Israel’s backers cheer on economic warfare against Iran, but the BDS movement — which aims to achieve better treatment of Palestinians by using similar economic tactics — is supposedly a bigoted enterprise.
The most controversial term, “intifada,” has been chanted by pro-Palestinian protesters at Penn and around the world. Roughly translating to English as “shaking off,” intifada refers to an uprising against Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians have engaged in two previous intifadas. While the tactics included suicide bombings targeting civilians, Palestinians also engaged in peaceful protests, rioting, and attacks on Israeli government targets ranging from mere stone-throwing to deadly rocket attacks.
“It is not a term against Jews, it is a term against the Israeli government,” said Glenn Greenwald last week on his show, System Update. “Just like you’re allowed to say ‘I think we should bomb Iran’ or go to war in Iraq or ‘flatten Gaza,’ people are allowed to say, allowed to opine…in the United States of America, that the repression by the Israeli government has become sufficiently severe that an uprising or even violence against the State of Israel is warranted.”
“Intifida” played a key role in last week’s Capitol Hill grilling of then-Penn president Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
[…]
Finally, in what may be the complaint’s “jump the shark” moment, the plaintiffs accuse Penn of discriminating against Jews “by intentionally reducing its Jewish enrollment.” Jews represent about 2.4% of the US population, but occupy 16% of Penn’s prized enrollment slots.
The complaint decries the fact that the Jewish share has fallen from about a third of students in 2000, a trend they say the school has “intentionally engineered.” The plaintiffs don’t specify which non-Jewish populations are now over-represented at Jews’ expense. – Full article
Biden regime has no plans to restrict military aid to Israel, officials say
Press TV – December 13, 2023
US officials have revealed that the administration of President Joe Biden has no plans to withhold military aid from Israel despite the aggravating humanitarian situation caused by the regime’s relentless military campaign in Palestine’s Gaza.
The CNN quoted officials as saying on Wednesday that there will be no changes to US positions on the transfer of weapons and munitions to Israel despite growing calls by Democratic lawmakers and human rights organizations for Washington to stop its open support for Israel until the regime commits to a ceasefire or at least to measures that can protect civilians amid the Gaza war.
A US official said that Washington would rely on Israel’s assessment of whether its attacks on civilians in Gaza are proportional and legal rather than independently evaluating Israeli strikes on civilians that it deems unlawful and concerning.
A congressional source also said that the State Department had failed to provide any assurances to lawmakers that the Biden administration would monitor how Israel would use a consignment of tank ammunition that was recently supplied to the Israeli regime without congressional consent.
The State Department transmitted an emergency declaration to US lawmakers late on Friday notifying them of the sale of thousands of tank munitions to Israel, a move that had been done without observing the standard 20-day period that congressional committees normally have to review such sales.
Democratic lawmakers have called on Biden to stop supplying military aid to Israel as the regime goes on with its indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Gaza.
That comes as Biden said this week that he has had tough conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s military campaign but did not threaten to cut off aid and said his administration will do nothing other than protect Israel.
“We’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing,” said Biden while addressing Democratic donors in Washington.
More than 18,600 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli attacks that started on October 7, the day on which the Palestinian resistance group Hamas launched a major operation into the occupied territories near Gaza, killing some 1,200 Israeli settlers and military forces.
Ukraine’s Botched Counteroffensive Ignites New ‘Mantras’ in US – Lavrov
Sputnik – 13.12.2023
With Ukraine’s counteroffensive obviously failing, the United States has taken up a new rallying cry, which is to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from winning in Ukraine so that “NATO is not conquered,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
“After the collapse of the so-called counteroffensive, [people] in Washington stopped talking about Russia’s strategic defeat on the battlefield and, during Zelensky’s latest visit, activated a new mantra: ‘don’t let Putin win in Ukraine’, otherwise all of NATO will be conquered and then America won’t sit through it,” Lavrov said during the “government hour” in the Federation Council, upper house of the Russian parliament.
“We are ready for such a challenge and will continue to firmly defend our truth,” Lavrov emphasized.
The top Russian diplomat also noted that “it is not easy for our ill-wishers to come to grips with the fact that the bet on the sanctions blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has completely failed.”
“Therefore, those who launched the hybrid war against us won’t admit their mistakes, they are trying to use more and more illegitimate tools to wear down Russia, as they say, relishing the dream of eliminating our country as an independent geopolitical value,” the Russian diplomacy chief explained.
Mainstream propaganda machine doubles down on ‘Russia losing’ fantasies
By Drago Bosnic | December 13, 2023
Even before the start of the special military operation (SMO), the mainstream media had been running several propaganda narratives, almost simultaneously. Shortly before the SMO and in the first few days, there was the claim that Russia would take Kiev in three days and most of Ukraine in a week. However, as this didn’t happen (nor was it ever planned to unfold this way in the Kremlin), the mainstream propaganda machine went full afterburner in the opposite direction. Now, Moscow was suddenly losing, the Kiev regime forces are unbeatable, the Russians are suffering from extremely low morale due to massive losses, they’re running out of missiles, shells, fuel and so on, and so forth.
These ludicrous myths never stopped and continued until the failure of the much-touted counteroffensive. That was when many in the political West adopted a somewhat less propagandistic tone and tried mixing in some “realism”. However, this didn’t have the desired effect on the populace in Western Europe and North America. Thus, there’s a slow return to the most ridiculous propaganda one could possibly imagine. For instance, the Wall Street Journal claims that the Neo-Nazi junta will be “able to seize the initiative on the battlefield in 2025 if it can hold out against Russia until the end of next year”. This narrative is being pushed despite the fact that the United States, its primary backer, is about to stop the money flow.
The report initially doesn’t come off as propagandistic as one would expect, but towards the end, the authors still tried pushing debunked propaganda narratives. There are several instances of somewhat unexpected admissions, such as the obvious failure of the Kiev regime’s counteroffensive, as well as the dwindling financial support from the political West. The report also touched upon the growing divisions within the Neo-Nazi junta and the fact that its battered military will need time to recover. However, in a response to the WSJ, its Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba challenged this with a claim that “any pause in the fighting now would allow Russia to regroup and prepare for large-scale offensive operations”.
Kuleba even stated that the Kiev regime forces are preparing fresh brigades for “new counteroffensive and defensive operations”. The WSJ supported the idea and even went as far as to claim that “2024 will be the year of the recovery [for the Neo-Nazi junta troops]”. However, the authors admit that this comes with an important caveat, as the Kiev regime and its NATO overlords will need to “work through their current adversities and continue delivering supplies to troops, an emerging best-case scenario among Western strategists is that next year becomes a year of rebuilding for Kiev’s military“, adding that “the hope would be that a limited number of Ukrainian soldiers can hold Russian forces at bay”.
This would supposedly “allow NATO countries time to train fresh Ukrainian troops, expand armament production and restock Ukraine’s arsenals”. As indicated during a recent NATO meeting, the political West hopes that Russia’s incremental offensive operations will fail, “resulting in a depletion of its manpower and munitions, potentially offering Ukraine better prospects to retake the battlefield initiative in the spring of 2025, if it gets through next year”. However, the WSJ concluded the report with a not-so-optimistic remark of a Ukrainian infantry sergeant who said that when he talks to people at home he tells them that “everything is going well” and doesn’t describe what he sees or feels, which isn’t so upbeat.
“What is the point?”, the WSJ quoted the Ukrainian sergeant.
While the WSJ certainly is part of the mainstream, it’s still a bit more reputable than many other outlets of America’s massive propaganda machine. For instance, the infamous CNN is beating its own records in laughable claims by publishing that “Russia has lost a staggering 87% of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks”. Of course, this information came from “a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress”. The assessment was sent on December 11, as the Republican-dominated Congress was in the middle of effectively canceling the “Ukraine aid”.
The “intelligence” assessment supposedly found that “the war has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force”. Then came the numbers game, where CNN claims that “of the 360,000 troops that entered Ukraine, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, 2,200 of 3,500 tanks and 4,400 of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers have also been destroyed, a 32% loss rate”. CNN says it reached out to the Russian Embassy for comment, which is yet to respond. The most likely scenario is that His Excellency Ambassador Anatoly Antonov is still laughing uncontrollably after reading all this. And he certainly isn’t the only one.
“The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said on CNN’s State of the Union on December 10, adding: “So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?”
Even CNN had to admit that “Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable”, as its “highly anticipated counteroffensive stagnated through the fall”, and that “US officials believe that Kiev is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months”. As for the alleged “staggering losses” of the Russian military, the truth is that Moscow hasn’t been this strong militarily since at least the 1980s. In addition, the Kremlin is effectively returning to a Soviet superpower level with its latest military strategy shift. The very idea that Russia lost well over 300,000 soldiers is beyond ludicrous, as the country would be littered with new military cemeteries in virtually every major settlement. On the contrary, it’s precisely Ukraine that looks like that thanks to the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi junta.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Biden Announces He’s Signed ‘Another $200 Million Drawdown’ From Pentagon for Ukraine
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 12.12.2023
US President Joe Biden announced during a Tuesday joint meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he has “just signed another $200 million drawdown” from the Pentagon for Ukraine.
Biden used the “drawdown” provision in the Foreign Assistance Act that allows him to provide Defense Department stockpiles to countries without congressional approval. The $200 million package is the 53rd such drawdown package provided to Ukraine since March 2022, in addition to billions of dollars in aid authorized by Congress.
The announcement comes as Congress remains deadlocked on authorizing more aid to Ukraine. Biden has asked Congress to provide $60 billion in aid to Ukraine in a funding package that also includes aid for Israel and money to secure the southern US border.
However, some Republicans have asked for more concessions on the border, including changes to the asylum system, a non-starter for many Democrats, in exchange for increased funding in Ukraine. The House of Representatives also passed a standalone aid bill for Israel, which the Senate has refused to consider.
Zelensky visited Washington in what has been described by US media as a “last-ditch effort” to convince Congress to authorize more aid to his country. Part of that visit included separate meetings with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Both Johnson and Schumer said their meetings with Zelensky went well but had different opinions on the details of their meetings.
Johnson criticized the Biden administration for not articulating how Ukraine can win against Russia. “The Biden administration appears to be asking for billions of dollars without specifics, without a clear strategy for winning, and without the answers I think the American people deserve,” he said at a news conference following his meeting with Zelensky.
Meanwhile, Schumer, who has been extremely hawkish on Ukraine since the start of the special military operation, claimed that Zelensky explained Ukraine’s path to victory to him.
“He [Zelensky] described in detail what kind of help was needed and how it would help win. Even many of our Republican politicians were saying that we were winning this war,” Schumer claimed.
Schumer said he called Johnson and asked him to keep the House open after this week so the $61 billion aid package can be approved.
“Last night, I spoke with Speaker Johnson and urged him to keep the House in session a little longer to give the supplemental a chance to come together,” Schumer said at a briefing.
The much smaller aid package announced by Biden on Tuesday uses an authorization provided in the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) which allows the president to provide foreign aid using stocks the Defense Department has on hand without congressional approval.
This latest drawdown is at least the 53rd drawdown ordered by the Biden administration since the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
The last drawdown, costing $175 million, was ordered by the Biden White House last week.
According to US media, the latest package includes High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), anti-armor systems, artillery rounds, demolition munitions, small arms ammunition, high-speed anti-radiation missiles, generators and spare parts, among other equipment.
US media also reported the Defense Department has about $4.4 billion in weapons remaining that it can use through drawdown authorizations.
According to a 2004 Department of Defense Security Cooperation handbook on the drawdown procedure, all equipment sent using drawdown authorization must be replaced with operations and maintenance funds already part of the Defense Department budget.
During the meeting with Biden, Zelensky told reporters that he wants to use the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to fight the conflict if Congress will not provide more aid. When asked if his country could win against Russia without aid from Congress, Zelensky reportedly did not answer verbally, shrugging his shoulders instead.
Israeli regime turning to Western mercenary groups to back its war on Gaza
By Reza Javadi | Press TV | December 12, 2023
Apart from the lavish military aid offered by the United States and Europe, the Israeli military is turning to Western mercenary groups in its genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.
In a recent interview with Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Pedro Diaz Flores, a notorious Spanish mercenary, revealed that the Israeli regime is recruiting Private Military Companies (PMCs) to achieve its interests in the besieged territory.
He revealed that “many” mercenary groups have joined Israel’s army, which pays them “very well.”
“So I came for the economy, for money. They pay very well, they offer good equipment and the work is calm. It is 3,900 euros [$4,187] per week, complementary missions aside,” Flores said.
Flores, who fought alongside neo-Nazis in Ukraine, spoke of his group’s assistance to Israeli forces.
“We only provide security support to arms convoys or the troops of the Israeli armed forces that are in the Gaza Strip,” Flores said, confirming the presence of PMCs in Gaza.
“We are in charge of the security of the checkpoints and access control on the borders of Gaza and Jordan. There are many PMCs here and they share the work. Traditionally they have guarded border terminals between Eliat and Aqaba.”
According to the images posted by a leading American PMC, Forward Observations Group (FOG), the American PMCs seem to be active in the occupied Palestinian territories aiding the Israeli regime.
On their social media accounts, FOG posted numerous images and stories showing its recruits in Palestine, surrounded by a large cache of weapons and sporting combat gear.
Wearing the American flag on their uniforms, the mercenaries’ social media accounts show that they are stationed alongside the Gaza border in the occupied territories.
In a YouTube video posted back in January, the group revealed its presence on the frontlines of the Ukraine war, assisting the Ukrainian forces in their war against Russian forces.
On its social media channels and website, FOG has advertised its gear through its training videos.
The founder of FOG is US mercenary and ex-US paratrooper, Derrick Bales, who has taken heat for his association with Vadim Lapaev, a member of the far-right Azov Battalion in Ukraine.
Bales, the former US infantry soldier who also served in Afghanistan, apologized but downplayed the radical aspects of those Ukrainian fighters.
Lapaev was quoted as saying by Vice News that he regretted his past association with neo-Nazis.
Apart from unconventional forces, the US has deployed more than 15,000 military troops to the occupied territories since the regime launched its fresh aggression against Palestinians on October 7.
Deployments disclosed by the Pentagon back in October also include two US aircraft carriers and their associated escort ships, in addition to the repositioning of an amphibious task force made up of about 4,000 US Marines and sailors.
The task force of sailors and Marines embarked aboard the USS Bataan and two other warships, includes an infantry battalion of about 900 combat personnel, F-35B fighter jets, armored vehicles and other weapons.
Apart from billions of dollars of military aid to the Israeli regime, the US military still continues to ship weapons and has pledged to provide more missile interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome military system, small-diameter bombs and other GPS-guided weapons, Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed recently.
In this regard, the US is covertly providing 2,000-pound “bunker-busting” bombs to Israel’s air force to be used against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), some 100 of the BLU-109 bombs – designed to penetrate hardened surfaces to reach underground targets such as military bunkers – have been sent to Tel Aviv.
The bombs, which carry a warhead weighing more than 900 kilograms, are capable of penetrating hardened structures such as concrete before exploding, causing heavy casualties.
The covert arms transfers are being reported when the US claims that it is urging Israel to limit civilian casualties in its military campaign in Gaza. However, the US-provided weapons have been the main cause of high civilian casualties across Gaza.
According to US officials, an airstrike that hit the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza in the initial days of the war that killed over 100 people was conducted using US-provided bombs.
According to another latest report, phosphorus shells used by Israeli forces in an October attack on a Lebanese village were also provided by the US.
The revelation came after US officials expressed “concern” over the regime’s use of white phosphorous, which human rights campaigners say should be investigated as a war crime.
Meanwhile, some Russian news agencies and several experts have reported about mercenaries leaving Ukrainian soil and heading to the occupied territories to aid the regime forces against the Palestinian resistance movement.
“Assistance and attention to Kiev are noticeably decreasing due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which cannot but worry the Ukrainian authorities,” a Russian news agency posted on Telegram.
“The transfer of Foreign Legion fighters to participate in the war on the side of the Israel Defense Forces can greatly affect the morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” wrote another X account.
“Is the West ready to close the Ukraine project and devote all its attention to a new conflict in the Middle East?”
In this regard, the deployment of mercenaries in Gaza raises questions about accountability and the role of the international community, as it exacerbates the suffering of Palestinians.
Why the Pentagon is a multitrillion-dollar fraud
By Scott Ritter | RT | December 12, 2023
Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for the sixth year running.
The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the Pentagon has never successfully passed one.
This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of defense spending.
The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks $886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public – to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American establishment.
Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality. Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up.
Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021. Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its 20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria.
These numbers are mind-numbingly large – so large that they become meaningless to the average person. The US defense enterprise is so massive that it is literally a mission impossible to speak of balancing the books. The American people might be willing to shrug off an accounting error or two. But the defense budget equates to American military power and the perceptions of national worth that translate into notions of American exceptionalism.
The fact of the matter is that our cavalier approach to defense spending has resulted in fraud of a massive scale. The American people were sold a bill of goods – a military capable of projecting power world-wide to sustain the so-called “rules based international order” upon which the notion of American exceptionalism has been premised. As it turns out, the US military is as hollow as the numbers on the Pentagon ledgers. The American people have bought an apparatus that is incapable of fighting and winning a major war against any of the potential opponents arrayed against it. We failed to defeat Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. And we are not able to defeat either China or Russia, let alone regional powers like North Korea and Iran. And yet we will simply continue to invest, in seemingly unquestioning fashion, into this enterprise, expecting somehow that a system that cannot pass an audit will somehow magically produce a different result despite the fact that we, the American people, are doing nothing to demand such a result.
In short, the defense budget is the equivalent of “pay-to-play,” in which the American people pay the US government to produce the results necessary to sustain their overinflated sense of self-worth. We Americans have become so accustomed to being the biggest, baddest bully in the global arena that we assume that simply by pouring money into a system that had produced the desired results for more than seventy years that we could keep the good times rolling. But when you allocate money to a system that has been allowed to become conditioned to operate without accountability, don’t be surprised when the shiny mansion on the hill you thought you were buying turns out to be little more than a house of cards.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’
Russia’s goal “conquering Ukraine”, say Western media. Not so, say experts
By Uriel Araujo | December 12, 2023
The Ukrainian former defense minister Oleksii Reznikov recently stated that the Kremlin’s goal is to “destroy” Ukraine completely, “assimilating” its citizens into the Russian Federation. Such wild claims have not been much challenged by journalists and opinion-makers in the West. After all, according to Western media Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “plan” is and has always been “to conquer” Ukraine all along. This pervasive Western narrative, also pushed by Kyiv, far from being a kind of self-evident truth, is challenged by voices within the US Establishment such as Jeffrey Sachs and by many respected scholars in the West, including some who are very critical of Moscow. Such a one-sized narrative in fact removes any context regarding the current crisis and completely ignores Russian perspective, goals, and security concerns.
Although a harsh critic of Russia’s ongoing military campaign in Ukraine, Wolfgang Richter (a Senior Associate in the International Security Division at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik – SWP) acknowledged, for example, in a 2022 article that in December 2021, Moscow had “made clear in two draft treaties” what it was after: “preventing a further expansion of NATO to the east and obtaining binding assurances to this end.” The Alliance and Washington, however, according to Richter, “were not prepared to revise the principles of the European security order” and thus Moscow obviously “did not accept this and resorted to the use of force.”
According to this expert, although the US is “far from the theater of conflict in Europe”, French and British nuclear weapons and “the deployment of US sub-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe and NATO’s conventional forces on Russia’s borders” are indeed a security risk in the European continent from Moscow’s perspective. This is so, he argues, quite convincingly, because Russia understands that a future threat could arise from the new American intermediate-range weapons in the continent, which could even reach Russian strategic targets (in the European part of the country) “should Washington and NATO partners decide to deploy them.” Moreover, NATO’s enlargement “has created more potential deployment areas in Central and Eastern Europe.” The Kremlin sees the Atlantic Alliance today, after all, as merely an American tool to advance its geopolitical interests (to the detriment of Russian security).
Sometimes, critics claim that the fact that Moscow cooperated in varying degrees with NATO from the nineties to around 2010 “proves” that Russian claims about NATO’s enlargement should not be taken seriously. This fact, if anything, corroborates Moscow’s arguments.
In his 2018 associated professorship habilitation thesis, Sao Paulo University History Professor Angelo de Oliveira Segrillo describes Putin as a moderate (albeit ambiguously) “Westernist”, rather than an Eurasianist, citing as evidence for it the Russian President’s well know admiration for Peter the Great. Segrillo argues that Putin was never a radical Westernist such as Boris Yeltsin, but rather a pragmatic and moderate one, while also being a gosudarstvennik, that is, someone who advocates for a strong State, in line with Russia’s political tradition. The Brazilian professor thus compares Putin to the French leader Charles de Gaulle, who often opposed Washington and NATO not simply out of an “anti-Western stance” but as someone who is in a position of defending the national interests of one’s own country.
Alas, whether the aforementioned thesis is fully accurate or not, that being something which interests mostly historians and biographers anyway, one can in any case argue that far from being staunchly “anti-Western” due to the supposed personal inclinations of the President (as Western propaganda would have it), the Kremlin in fact has had to take a defensive and counter-offensive approach towards the US-led West over the latter’s many provocations and developments which, from a Russian perspective, constituted crossing red lines.
In the NATO-Russia Founding Act of May 1997, NATO in fact pledged to limit the number of stationed troops, promising not to bring about any “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces”, while claiming it had no plan to deploy nuclear weapons in the accession countries. Such agreements eroded over several episodes, as Richter demonstrates. Countries that did not belong to the CFE started joining the Alliance in 2004 and, to make matters worse, Washington in 2007 established a permanent military presence on the Black Sea. The US had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 which for the Kremlin was a threat to strategic stability, a perception enhanced by Washington’s 2007 bilateral agreements with the Czech and Poland to deploy missile defense systems in these countries (allegedly to counter an Iranian “threat”).
NATO’s war against Serbia in 1999 (denounced by Russia) had of course already violated the ban on the use of force, and the 1997 and 1999 agreements. Moreover, the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated America’s capacity and willingness to break international law, by relying on a “coalition of the willing” of new Eastern European partners and allies (even without NATO consensus). One could also cite Western recognition of Kosovo’s (unilateral) declaration of independence and the 2008 offer of the prospect of joining NATO to Ukraine and Georgia which, according to Richter, was “the breaking point in NATO’s relations with Russia.”
The 2014 Crimea referendum and the Donbass War might have been the culmination of the erosion of an already declining European security order, argues Richter but such erosion “had already begun in 2002 with the growing potential for conflict between Washington and Moscow”, George W. Bush having played an important role in this.
Which brings us to the current situation. For American political scientist John Mearsheimer, if Kyiv and Moscow had reached a deal, which could have happened if it were not for Western interference, Ukraine today would control a greater share of territory. As he writes, “Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022”. Regarding that, he adds: “everyone involved in the negotiations understood that Ukraine’s relationship with NATO was Russia’s core concern… if Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine, he would not have agreed to these talks.” The main issue was NATO.
To sum it up, although at times Russia considered the possibility of engaging in further dialogue and cooperation with NATO, there have always been tensions about the Atlantic Alliance’s expansion, and Moscow security concerns pertaining to it, far from being a mere excuse, are in fact well-founded.
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From the Archives
A Lesser “Grade” of Human
By Michael Hoffman | Revelation of the Method | January 3, 2024
Will the more than 100 Iranians killed by terrorist bombs today be mourned in the West as victims of terrorism? Certainly not. Allied doctrine has it that the killing of Israeli or American civilians is a crime of cosmic proportions, while shedding the blood of “enemy” women and children is perfectly acceptable; indeed commendable.
The West does not memorialize the hundreds of thousands of civilians bombed by the U.S. in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and every major German city 1943-1945. America’s fire-bombing of the city of Tokyo by General Curtis LeMay in March 1945 was followed by Harry Truman’s atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year. Truman never had a moment of doubt or regret over the murder of more than a 100,000 Asian children, mothers and non-combatant boys and men. It was business as usual for the “noble” Allies during the “Good War.”
In the West human rights signifies passionate concern only for civilians designated as truly human: Israelis first, then Americans and British, followed by their satraps.
This inhumanity is the legacy of Talmudic ideology, beginning with tractate Sanhedrin 57a from 400 A.D., concerning liability for capital punishment: “If a Jew murders a gentile, he is exempt.”
This teaching of contempt was reiterated in the dogma of Chabad Lubavitch founder Rabbi Shneur Zalman in the 18th century. … continue
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