The Finders: CIA Ties to Child Sex Cult Obscured as Coverage Goes from Sensationalism to Silence
By Elizabeth Vos | MintPress News | June 3, 2021
WASHINGTON — In February 1987, an anonymous phone tip was called into the Tallahassee police department reporting that six children were dirty, hungry, and acting like animals in the custody of two well-dressed men in a Tallahassee, Florida park. That phone call would kick off the Finders scandal: a series of events and multiple investigations even more bizarre than the initial report.
The trail would ultimately lead to allegations of a cult involved in ritual abuse, an international child-trafficking ring, evidence of child abuse confirmed and later denied, and ties with the CIA, which was alleged to have interfered in the case. No one was ever prosecuted in the wake of the initial 1987 investigation or a 1993 inquiry into the allegations of CIA involvement: official denials were maintained, and authorities stated that no evidence of criminal activity was ever found. However, documents that have emerged over time beg significant questions as to the validity of the official narrative.
In contrast with other historical human trafficking rings covered in the independent press, including those I have previously discussed, the Finders scandal presents as something of a phantom. This is in consequence of the lack of adult victims who have come forward, an absence of hard evidence viewable to the public, and an absence of extensive trials or convictions. Further impeding the willingness of most journalists to cover such a story were claims of ritualistic abuse that were hyped by corporate media at the time of the incident, as well as allegations of a CIA-led coverup that were less widely recognized by the legacy press.
The story is further complicated by the fact that it takes place in three basic stages: the initial 1987 investigation spread across multiple states and law enforcement agencies; a subsequent 1993 inquiry into allegations of a CIA coverup and interference in the 1987 investigation; and the emergence of Customs Service documents detailing new aspects of initial searches of Finders properties which was followed by the publication of hundreds of documents from both investigations to the FBI vault in 2019.
By initially sensationalizing the issue via the framing of the Finders as a satanic cult, the media profited from immediate shock value while permitting this very sensationalism to become the premise for dismissing other aspects of the story and Finders ties to the CIA to remain unexplored.
The 1987 Investigation
On February 4, 1987, two men dressed in suits and ties in the company of six bug-bitten, dirty, hungry children were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida, on charges of child abuse after a concerned citizen called local police. Initially, Tallahassee police were concerned that the children might have been kidnapped and were being trafficked across state lines. The U.S. Customs Service, the Washington Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), and the FBI became involved in the attempt to identify the two men based on suspicions of interstate criminal activity including the possibility of child pornography.
The story exploded on a national scale after investigators linked the pair, identified as Douglas Ammerman and Michael Houlihan (also referred to as Michael Holwell), with a Washington D.C.-based group known as the Finders, which authorities publicly referred to as a “cult.” Initially, Tallahassee police reported that at least two of the children showed signs of sexual abuse.
Houlihan and Ammerman first told police that they were transporting the children to a school for brilliant children in Mexico. However, this explanation as to the purpose of the children’s trip would change significantly, with Finders members later stating that the group were on an adventure in Florida. The Finders group was found to have multiple properties in Washington, D.C. and a farm in rural Madison County, Virginia. It also became clear that the Finders were highly skilled with early computer technology, which would become a major aspect of the case as it unfolded.
Doug Ammerman and Michael Holwell sit in Leon County Court during a bond hearing related to charges of child abuse. Credit | Tallahassee Democrat
News reports across the country headlined allegations of ritual abuse for approximately six days after the initial arrests, before a tidal shift by both the media and authorities began on February 10. The New York Times reported on that day:
Local police officials announced here today that six children found last week in Florida had apparently not been kidnapped and that there was no evidence to show that the secretive group that has been raising them is a cult involved in child abuse. The statement from the Metropolitan Police Department conflicted with accounts from the police in Tallahassee, Fla., where the children were found, unwashed and hungry, last week. Officials there said this morning that at least two of the children had signs of sexual abuse.
As described by the Times and the Chicago Tribune, the children were placed in police protective custody after threats were received at the shelters where they had originally been housed. Eventually, the mothers of the children were reported to have been Finders members and the children were said to be transported by Houlihan and Ammerman with the full consent of their parents. Hence, suspicions of kidnapping and trafficking rapidly lost credibility, though issues of abuse remained. The original strong allegations of sexual abuse of at least two of the six children were eventually contradicted by Florida authorities.
In March 1987, Houlihan and Ammerman were released with charges dropped for lack of evidence, and all of the children were eventually returned to their mothers. The official and media consensus was that the entire issue was a miscommunication blown out of proportion, and that the Finders were simply a 1960’s-esque “alternative lifestyle community” with unusual education methods.
The 1993 inquiry into an Intelligence Community coverup
U.S. Customs Special Agent Ramon J. Martinez claimed in a memorandum that during his participation in the searches of two of the Finder’s properties in Washington he witnessed evidence of the Finders’ intent to traffic children and other potentially criminal acts. Martinez wrote that he was unable to review the evidence collected at the locations after multiple attempts to do so, and that he was eventually told by a third party at the MPD precinct that the Finders group had come under the protection of the CIA, which had interfered with the investigation by deeming the issue an “internal matter,” and had the case files labeled “Secret,” with no further action to be taken or evidence available for review. Clearly, Martinez’s account detailing what he witnessed presents a strong counter-narrative to the official story.
A man named Skip Clements allegedly communicated the U.S. Customs documents and other records to then-Florida Rep. Tom Lewis (R) and North Carolina Rep. Charlie Rose (D). Stemming in part from their protests, as well as the prospect of CBS’s 48 Hours producing a segment on the Finders story (which never aired), the Department of Justice announced it would investigate allegations of CIA interference in the 1987 investigation in late 1993. The previously mentioned congressmen claimed publicly that the Finders may have benefited from protection of the U.S. government agencies, with U.S.News & World Report writing in December 1993, (as the DOJ investigation was getting underway), that Lewis had asked:
Could our own government have something to do with this Finders organization and [have] turned their backs on these children? That’s what the evidence points to…. I can tell you that we’ve got a lot of people scrambling, and that wouldn’t be happening if there was nothing here.”
The DOJ’s investigation resulted in a verdict of no evidence of CIA interference and no evidence of criminal activity on the part of the Finders, and it represented the official and legal end of the story.
The 2019 publication of FBI Vault documents
Eventually, Customs documents including Ramon Martinez’s memo made their way onto the internet. The exact method by which this occurred remains murky, with the best copy of the documents being hosted by the website of now-deceased Ted Gunderson, who served as an FBI special agent in charge and head of the Los Angeles FBI.
I contacted Martinez in 2017 and confirmed that he authored the document and that it is genuine, but to date, he has otherwise refused to go on record to comment on the matter with me. Martinez has had limited communication with some other independent journalists, including Derrick Broze of the Conscious Resistance, who produced a documentary on the Finders case in 2019. I also described aspects of the Martinez memo and the Finders case as part of a report on alleged intelligence-tied child abuse scandals penned in August 2019 in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s death and renewed public interest in the overall subject matter.
Just months after Epstein’s death, in October 2019, the FBI began releasing hundreds of Finders investigation documents to their Vault. The publication sparked a storm of attention, but virtually no corporate press coverage aside from a piece by Vice, which framed any interest in the subject as a conspiracy theory.
Mainstream media outlets have been quick to dismiss CIA ties to The Finder’s as little more than conspiracy
On their face, the contents of the FBI Vault documents appear to contradict the allegations made by former Special Agent Martinez: they include statements from multiple officers involved in the investigation from various agencies to the effect that they experienced no overt interference in their work from the CIA. Yet, when one looks closely, the documents also corroborate significant aspects of Martinez’s allegations and substantiate questions regarding the Finders’ links with intelligence.
There is the admission that Isabelle Pettie, the wife of Finders leader Marion Pettie, worked for the CIA during the Cold-War era (Pettie also admitted that his son worked for the CIA-linked, Iran Contra-era Air America), and that it was her visas to North Korea, North Vietnam, Russia and elsewhere that had been approved by the State Department. Key documents from the MPD investigation are labeled secret, just as Martinez had claimed, which is bizarre on its face if we are to believe that the Finders were simply an odd “alternative living” commune.
These and other corroborating details add credibility to Martinez’s claims regarding having witnessed other documents that indicated international child trafficking, as well as his assertion that he was told that the case had been deemed a “CIA internal matter.”
The FBI’s Vault publication includes records from the preliminary Tallahassee police department investigation, the MPD investigation, heavily redacted records from the U.S. Customs Service, documents from the Washington Metro Field Office (WMFO) of the FBI, and other agencies, as well as the correspondence and documentation of the 1993 inquiry, mostly from the WMFO to FBI Headquarters. The documents are scattered throughout the three published sections in no coherent order, and are interspersed with news reports from the time ranging from the initial arrests and the child custody issue to the 1993 inquiry into CIA connections with and protection of the group.
Bizarrely, a map relating to the McMartin Preschool scandal is also included in the publication for no known reason, since at this time the cases are completely unrelated aside from both having contained allegations of satanic abuse. Regardless of the intent behind the document’s inclusion, it serves to further associate the Finders with the so-called “moral panic” scandals of the era, which I would argue distracts from the issue of intelligence ties to the case.
A map of the McMartin Preschool inexplicably included in the FBI’s Vault release
A fresh look
Before moving further into analysis of the available evidence, it’s important to recognize a number of problems we face in understanding the information published in the FBI’s Vault. First, a multitude of large, often critically placed redactions plague the documents, the most important of which are not labeled with privacy exemptions but are instead labeled “S,” presumably meaning that the information is classified as secret.
Another problem involves the fact that information requested by some agencies — especially during the 1993 preliminary inquiry into a CIA coverup — was not provided to the relevant investigating agencies. Then there is the phenomenon of information disappearing outright, including vanishing evidence and instances of records never having been kept, resulting in conflicting accounts of the existence of critical pieces of evidence.
This series will challenge both the sensationalism and the silence of establishment media surrounding the Finders narrative by examining the allegations made by the U.S. Customs documents in view of the FBI’s more recent Vault publications, which shed fresh light on the connections between the Finders and the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
Elizabeth Vos is an independent journalist and MintPress News Contributor. Her work has appeared in many media outlets including Consortium News, where she co-hosts the CNLive! webcast.
Most Americans believe COVID came from Wuhan Lab; a quarter believe it was ‘released on purpose’
Only 13% are still buying that ‘it came naturally from bats’
By Steve Watson | Summit News | June 4, 2021
Most Americans believe that the coronavirus pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with almost a quarter saying they believe it was released on purpose, according to a YouGov poll.
A total of 58% of Americans agree that its is ‘definitely or probably true’ that the virus came out of the Wuhan lab.
The number represents a nine percent increase on findings from a year ago.
Even 43% of Democrats believe the virus came out of the lab.
Only 13% are still buying the ‘it mutated naturally from bats’ claim.
Indeed, YouGov notes “When it comes to the more specific circumstances of the virus’ emergence, 24% think it was created in a laboratory and was released on purpose, 18% think it was lab-created and escaped by accident, while a further 12% think it was a naturally occurring disease that was being examined in a laboratory but was released by accident.”
This is despite a massive co-ordinated attempt by the establishment media and big-tech to censor and dismiss the lab leak idea as a crazy ‘conspiracy theory’.
The real conspirators who lied about Covid’s origin, funded fraudulent trials of therapeutics, and controlled the Covid pandemic are the top public health leaders
By Meryl Nass, MD | June 3, 2021
In very early 2020 there was a lot of chatter about where the virus, later named SARS-CoV-2, actually came from. In an excellent, detailed article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former NY Times science writer Nicholas Wade describes how two short pieces published in The Lancet and Nature Medicine in Feb-March 2020 determined how this chatter would be channeled.
These two extraordinarily influential pieces, each simply titled as a “Correspondence,” were parroted by the mainstream media for a year. Each was plainly intended to shut down any discussion of a possible lab origin.
I happened to read both Correspondences in March 2020 and it was immediately apparent to me that each was designed as a propaganda tool. Neither had anything to do with science. In fact, the Andersen Correspondence butchered the science. Each had an unusual concatenation of authors.
I was so intrigued by these articles that I kept searching the net to understand them, and discovered that Francis Collins, the NIH Director, had blogged on March 26 about the Nature Medicine Correspondence, suggesting it should put an end to conspiracy theories about lab origin.
I further found the letter from the 3 heads of the US National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which had been referred to by the Lancet Correspondence authors. But it had not yet been published when the Lancet correspondence was written, suggesting again some hidden connection (or mutual effort) involving the author(s) of the National Academies letter and the Lancet Correspondence author(s).
I wondered why 5 otherwise credible scientists would sign their names to the Nature Medicine Correspondence, when the arguments made in the paper were nonsensical. I concluded that they had been put up to it by a ‘hidden hand,’ and when I was interviewed for the film that became Plandemic 2: Indoctornation I said so. (The film has been banned and shadowbanned, as have many of my writings, so it is impossible to find using google or a standard search engine. Here it is on Bitchute, using the Ecosia search engine.)
Months ago, in another email drop obtained by US Right to Know, we learned that Peter Daszac, CEO of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, was the primary but hidden author of the Lancet Correspondence. He was also the primary beneficiary, since his organization had been used as the pass through to send money from the NIAID to the Wuhan coronavirus lab. (Some might consider this method of giving out grants as a fancy way of money laundering.) Daszac, like Fauci, earned over $400,000/year. He was also a member of the WHO Covid origins investigative team, and had been selected as the head of the Lancet Covid origins investigative team. But the Lancet-sponsored investigation looks like it is now dead in the water. The WHO and the Lancet thus seem to be co-conspirators, choosing the fox (Daszac) to guard the henhouse (the natural origin theory of Covid).
Today, I was sent a link to a specific one of Fauci’s emails, and the mystery of why 5 well known scientists coauthored drivel, which the venerable Nature Medicine journal published, and which was then used as the foundation supporting the claim of Covid’s natural origin, was solved. Here’s the email.
The first author of the Nature Medicine paper thanks 3 incredibly important people for their “advice and leadership” regarding the paper. All 3 are MD researchers, and they dole out more money for medical research than anyone else in the world, perhaps excepting Bill Gates. Fauci runs the NIAID; Collins is the NIH Director (nominally Fauci’s boss) and Sir Jeremy Farrar is the director of the Wellcome Trust. Jeremy also signed the Lancet letter. And he is the Chair of the World Health Organization R&D Blueprint Scientific Advisory Group, which put him in the driver’s seat of the WHO’s Solidarity trial, in which 1000 unwitting subjects were overdosed with hydroxychloroquine in order to sink the use of the drug for Covid. Jeremy had worked in Vietnam, where there was lots of malaria, and he had also been involved with SARS-1 there. He additionally was central in setting up the UK Recovery trial, where 1600 subjects were overdosed with hydroxychloroquine. I think he had some idea of the proper dose of the chloroquine drugs from his experience in Vietnam. But even if he didn’t, Farrar, Fauci and Collins would have learned about such overdoses after Brazil told the world about how they mistakenly overdosed patients in a trial of chloroquine for Covid, published in the JAMA in mid April 2020. Thirty-nine percent of the subjects in Brazil who were given high doses of chloroquine died, average age 50.
Yet the Solidarity and Recovery hydroxychloroquine trials continued into June, stopping only after their extreme doses were exposed.
Fauci made sure to control the treatment guidelines for Covid that came out of the NIAID, advising against both chloroquine drugs and ivermectin. Fauci’s NIAID also cancelled the first large-scale trial of hydroxychlorquine treatment in early disease, after only 20 of the expected 2,000 subjects were enrolled.
What does all this mean?
- There was a conspiracy between the five authors of the Nature Medicine paper and the heads of the NIH, NIAID and Wellcome Trust to cover up the lab origin of Covid.
- There was a conspiracy involving Peter Daszac, Tony Fauci and others to push the natural origin theory.
(See other emails in the recent drop.)
- There was a conspiracy involving Daszac to write the Lancet letter and hide its provenance, to push the natural origin theory and paint any other ideas as conspiracy theory. Collin’s blog post is another piece of this story.
- Farrar was intimately involved in both large HCQ overdose trials (in which about 500 subjects total died).
- Farrar, Fauci and Collins withheld research funds that could have supported quality trials of the use of chloroquines and ivermectin and other repurposed drugs that might have turned around the pandemic.
- Are the 4 individuals named here intimately involved in the creation of the pandemic, as well as the prolongation and improper treatments used during the pandemic?
Below are my two early posts on this subject from March and April 2020, and a snippet from the Lancet Correspondence, with a list of signatories.
I don’t want to take credit improperly. Dan Sirotkin noticed the Nature Medicine article before I did, and wrote lucidly about it. I did not see his writing until much later.
Thursday, March 26, 2020
There are many ways the novel coronavirus may have come about/ Nass
Nature Medicine ran a 3 page article that claimed to explain why the novel coronavirus is not a lab construct. USA Today wrote a summary piece explaining it:
“If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness,” the report said. “But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins.”—USAT
Yet it turns out to be a specious argument, relying on the fact that the novel coronavirus backbone sequence was not already known in the open virology literature.
- While starting from a known RNA sequence is one easy way to create a pathogen, it is certainly not necessary to do so.
- Nor is it likely that biodefense/biowarfare programs share knowledge of all their creations. They never have before.
- a) Finally, it is relatively easy to detect the human hand when a chimera of known virulence factors is strung together.
- b) But because plausible deniability is a critical component of a bioweapons attack, I doubt that a chimera using known sequences is the path that would have been followed by a modern biowarrior.
I will briefly mention some of the old techniques for creating bioweapons, none of which require that a known, published RNA backbone would be required to build a novel, virulent coronavirus:
- China has unique bats. So do other countries. Unique bats likely harbor unique viruses. Bits of these viruses can be strung together, while no outside parties are aware that these particular RNA threads exist in nature.
- You take an already virulent RNA virus, subject it to high rates of mutation via chemical or radiological exposure, and test the viruses that survive for the acquisition of new virulence characteristics.
- You simply passage the virus through tens, hundreds or thousands of lab animals or cell cultures and test the results for acquisition of new virulence characteristics.
- You mix different viruses together with different virulence characteristics, allow them to grow together, and seek recombinants that have obtained the desired new mix of virulence factors.
All these possibilities result in viruses that are hard to pin on lab production. I dare the Nature Medicine scientists to dismiss these scenarios.
Still, I doubt that any national program would deliberately release this coronavirus onto the people of the earth, because it is so hard to control.
Historically, bio-weaponeers have required their creations to be controlled at all costs. In one well-documented example of biowarfare, unleashing African swine fever on a Caribbean island was associated with no spread beyond the island. In another, anthrax spores were used because they stay put– their use did not cause anthrax cases beyond the borders of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
So why do we have a coronavirus epidemic now?
An accidental biowarfare laboratory release is the best current hypothesis, in my opinion. Such accidental releases have been documented for many decades, throughout the world. But I could certainly be wrong.
Update April 29: Newsweek has been delving into “gain of function” (which means increasing the virulence of a pathogen) coronavirus research in Wuhan, China which might have contributed to the formation of SARS-CoV-2… and the interesting fact (which I posted about here) that the US government provided financial support for this research. Newsweek’s pieces were posted April 27, and 29. My other pieces questioning the origin of SARS-CoV-2 are here and here.
Thursday, April 2, 2020
Why are some of the US’ top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?
- I know about biological warfare/biodefense. I am the first person in the world (according to publicly available literature) to have analyzed an epidemic and demonstrated that the epidemic was due to biological warfare. (1992 study of the 1978-1980 Rhodesian anthrax outbreak, published in Medicine and Global Survival, aka Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly (name changed), hosted by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War).
https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/mgs/psr-2-4-nass.pdf
- Prior to genetic engineering techniques being developed (1973) and widely used (since late 1970s), more ‘primitive’ means of causing mutations, with the intention of developing biological weapons, were employed. Such methods were used by the Japanese beginning in the 1930s, by the US beginning in the 1940s, and by a number of other countries. They resulted in biological weapons that were tested, well-described, and in some cases, used. Such methods were also used subsequent to the 1970s.
- These methods can result in biowarfare agents that lack the identifiable signature of a microbial agent constructed in a lab from known RNA or DNA sequences. In fact, it would be desirable to produce such agents, since it would be difficult to prove they were deliberately constructed in a lab. Here are just a few possibilities for how one might create new, virulent mutants:
- a) exposing microorganisms to chemical or radiological agents that cause high mutation rates and selecting for desired characteristics
- b) passaging virus through a number of lab animals or tissue cultures
- c) mixing viruses together and seeking recombinants with a new mix of virulence factors
- Top scientists circled their wagons to protest against “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,”in a statement published in the LancetMarch 7. (It was published earlier online.) Their reported aim was to “stand with” public health professionals and scientists in China. Many who signed the statement have worked in biodefense. Signers include Rita Colwell, former director of the National Science Foundation, and James Hughes, former director of CDC’s National Center for Infectious Diseases and former assistant Surgeon General.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext
Science magazine wrote an article in support of these scientists, which included the following:
The authors of The Lancet statement note that scientists from several countries who have studied SARS-CoV-2 “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” just like many other viruses that have recently emerged in humans. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” the statement says.
Five additional scientists soon provided the “scientific evidence” to back up the natural origin claim. These 5 scientists have been affiliated with signers of the statement above, they too have worked in biodefense, and their article was published in Nature Medicine (in the print version) on March 17, 2020.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
These scientists set up a straw man to knock down: they claimed that had the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 is the official name of the virus) been created in a lab: “if genetic manipulation had been performed,” then a known coronavirus backbone would have been used. But because no known backbone forms part of SARS-CoV-2, “the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus.”
As USA Today summarized this:
“If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness,” the report said. “But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins.”
Their work was then discussed by Francis Collins, the current director of the NIH.
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/26/genomic-research-points-to-natural-origin-of-covid-19/
Dr. Collins says,
“Some folks are even making outrageous claims that the new coronavirus causing the pandemic was engineered in a lab and deliberately released to make people sick. A new study debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally…
this study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19…
Finally, next time you come across something about COVID-19 online that disturbs or puzzles you, I suggest going to FEMA’s new Coronavirus Rumor Control web site…”
I know that the groups of scientists who wrote these pieces in the Lancet and Nature Medicine, as well as NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, know that you don’t need genetic engineering methods to create a bioweapon. Like me, they are old, they recall a world before genetic engineering, they know the history of biowarfare, and they know the score. Why then are they participating in this charade?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext
Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19
published online February 19, 2020
CORRESPONDENCE| VOLUME 395, ISSUE 10226, E42-E43, MARCH 07, 2020
- Charles Calisher
- Dennis Carroll
- Rita Colwell
- Ronald B Corley
- Peter Daszak
- Christian Drosten
- Luis Enjuanes
- Jeremy Farrar
- Hume Field
- Josie Golding
- Alexander Gorbalenya
- Bart Haagmans
- James M Hughes
- William B Karesh
- Gerald T Keusch
- Sai Kit Lam
- Juan Lubroth
- John S Mackenzie
- Larry Madoff
- Jonna Mazet
- Peter Palese
- Stanley Perlman
- Leo Poon
- Bernard Roizman
- Linda Saif
- Kanta Subbarao
- Mike Turner
… The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),
and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
as have so many other emerging pathogens.
,
This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine
and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.
Response to Fauci emails proves everything is fake, narrative management trumps reality, and those in power want it so
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | June 3, 2021
Watching the media coverage – or lack thereof – of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails and what they mean for the origin of the coronavirus, one is struck by how relentlessly fake everything is, from public health experts to science.
One of the things the emails suggest is that Fauci colluded with Peter Daszak – head of the EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled US research funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – to suppress and dismiss any notion that the virus causing Covid-19 may not have evolved naturally.
Thing is, Daszak actually went around giving interviews about his work in China throughout last year, and nobody in the media thought to connect the dots. Simply put, Donald Trump said the virus came from China and might have come from a lab, therefore that had to be wrong and racist, end of story, case closed.
That’s just one, most recent and most acute example of Narrative trumping reality at all cost. Millions of deaths, widespread destruction of the economy, tectonic changes in society itself? Small price to pay for “progress” and ensuring the “correct” outcome of the 2020 election, the fortifiers of Our Democracy might say, without anyone batting an eye. “Build back better!” the press parrots instead.
Trump disagreeing with CNN is a mortal threat to democracy and free speech, but Biden telling a reporter he’d rather run her over with an electric truck than answer a question about the war currently going on in Israel is a funny joke, haha, how hilarious. What flavor of ice cream did you order, sir?
This may seem partisan at first blush, but let’s remember this is the same media that once proudly carried water for the narrative about “Saddam’s WMDs.” So the old Democrat-vs-Republican dichotomy doesn’t really work here, and misses the bigger picture to boot.
A truly free society would have no official narratives, Australian columnist Caitlin Johnstone wrote earlier this week. Thing is, modern societies are not free, and official narratives are all they really have. Where would Joe Biden’s legitimacy be without the January 6 Capitol “insurrection” narrative?
American founders codified the First Amendment because they regarded a free press necessary for a free republic. Yet the corporate media complex and their Big Tech counterparts have become a lapdog, not a watchdog, of power. Even the agencies, once thought neutral and objective, are in on it. AP literally rewrote its stylebook to limit the use of “riot” last summer. Reuters “fact-checked” Biden’s eulogy for Robert Byrd as false because the Democrat senator wasn’t a “grand wizard” of the KKK but merely an “exalted cyclops.”
What this Orwellian replacement of facts with narratives does is condition the public to echo Hillary Clinton’s infamous Benghazi defense: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
“Facts” mean nothing to this crowd. “Science” isn’t a rigorous process of finding the truth, but a word-totem invoked to grant authority and banish dissent. “Truth” is whatever they declare it is at the moment, and when it stops being convenient they’ll shamelessly go back and rewrite their own words, pretending all along that that’s what they’ve always believed. Yes, it’s literally Orwellian behavior, but they don’t seem to care.
After all, what are you going to do, change the channel? Actually, that’s happening. Month after month, ratings reports show CNN and MSNBC getting their clock cleaned by Fox News – and Tucker Carlson in particular. The response is to triple down on wokeness and Democrat talking points, while waging a veritable jihad against Fox for “misinformation.”
To think that the media will come to their senses when the reality of ratings hits them in the face, therefore, is foolish. They simply don’t give a damn. Could it be that they don’t care for money as much as they care about power? And not just proximity to political power, but the power to shape and control reality itself, to remake society according to their utopian ideas. Even assuming those ideas are good – and that’s debatable at best – having that sort of power corrupts absolutely, to borrow the expression from Lord Acton.
The media were meant to be a means through which the public collectively perceives reality – not the creators of reality itself! Yet they act as if the latter is true and intended. That’s dangerous. They believe themselves in control of reality, to the point where they’re impossible to reason with. Confront them with actual facts, or principles, or laws of physics, and they either censor you – or cackle and carry on.
Biden’s behavior starts making sense when you understand he exists in a fantasy world, entirely conjured by the press and his staff. As do thousands of activists, ‘NGOs’ and cultist consumers of US government grants around the world. How does one reach these people, who have internalized the “logic” of Who/Whom? That might be the most important question facing not just the US, but the world, very soon.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator
The FBI’s Strange Anthrax Investigation Sheds Light on COVID Lab-Leak Theory and Fauci’s Emails
By Glenn Greenwald | June 3, 2021
One of the most significant events of the last two decades has been largely memory-holed: the October, 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S. Beginning just one week after 9/11 and extending for another three weeks, a highly weaponized and sophisticated strain of anthrax had been sent around the country through the U.S. Postal Service addressed to some of the country’s most prominent political and media figures. As Americans were still reeling from the devastation of 9/11, the anthrax killed five Americans and sickened another seventeen.
As part of the extensive reporting I did on the subsequent FBI investigation to find the perpetrator(s), I documented how significant these attacks were in the public consciousness. ABC News, led by investigative reporter Brian Ross, spent a full week claiming that unnamed government sources told them that government tests demonstrated a high likelihood that the anthrax came from Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program. The Washington Post, in November, 2001, also raised “the possibility that [this weaponized strain of anthrax] may have slipped through an informal network of scientists to Iraq.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) appeared on The David Letterman Show on October 18, 2001, and said: “There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.” Three days later, McCain appeared on Meet the Press with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and said of the anthrax perpetrators: “perhaps this is an international organization and not one within the United States of America,” while Lieberman said the anthrax was so finely weaponized that “there’s either a significant amount of money behind this, or this is state-sponsored, or this is stuff that was stolen from the former Soviet program” (Lieberman added: “Dr. Fauci can tell you more detail on that”).
In many ways, the prospect of a lethal, engineered biological agent randomly showing up in one’s mailbox or contaminating local communities was more terrifying than the extraordinary 9/11 attack itself. All sorts of oddities shrouded the anthrax mailings, including this bizarre admission in 2008 by long-time Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen: “I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.” At the very least, those anthrax attacks played a vital role in heightening fear levels and a foundational sense of uncertainty that shaped U.S. discourse and politics for years to come. It meant that not just Americans living near key power centers such as Manhattan and Washington were endangered, but all Americans everywhere were: even from their own mailboxes.
Letter sent to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, along with weaponized anthrax, in September, 2001
The FBI first falsely cast suspicion on a former government scientist, Dr. Steven Hatfill, who had conducted research on mailing deadly anthrax strains. Following the FBI’s accusations, media outlets began dutifully implying that Hatfill was the culprit. A January, 2002, New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof began by declaring: “I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall,” then, without naming him, proceeded to perfectly describe Hatfill in a way that made him easily identifiable to everyone in that research community. Hatfill sued the U.S. Government, which eventually ended up paying him close to $6 million in damages before officially and explicitly exonerating him and apologizing. His lawsuit against the NYT and Kristof was dismissed since he was never named by the paper, but the columnist also apologized to him six years later.
A full seven years after the attack, the FBI once again claimed that it had found the perpetrator: this time, it was the microbiologist Bruce Ivins, a long-time “biodefense” researcher at the U.S. Army’s infectious disease research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Yet before he could be indicted, Ivins died, apparently by suicide, to avoid prosecution. As a result, the FBI was never required to prove its case in court. The agency insisted, however, that there was no doubt that Ivins was the anthrax killer, citing genetic analysis of the anthrax strain that they said conclusively matched the anthrax found in Ivins’ U.S. Army lab, along with circumstantial evidence pointing to him.
But virtually every mainstream institution other than the FBI harbored doubts. The New York Times quoted Ivins’ co-workers as calling into question the FBI’s claims (“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody”), and the paper also cited “vocal skepticism from key members of Congress.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), one of the targets of the anthrax letters, said explicitly he did not believe Ivins could have carried out the attacks alone. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and then-Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a physicist, said the same to me in interviews. The nation’s three largest newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal — all editorially called for independent investigations on the grounds that the FBI’s evidence was inconclusive if not outright unconvincing. One of the country’s most prestigious science journals, Nature, published an editorial under the headline “Case Not Closed,” arguing, about the FBI’s key claims, that “the jury is still out on those questions.”
When an independent investigation was finally conducted in 2011 into the FBI’s scientific claims against Ivins, much of that doubt converted into full-blown skepticism. As The New York Times put it — in a 2011 article headlined “Expert Panel Is Critical of F.B.I. Work in Investigating Anthrax Letters” — the review “concludes that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce E. Ivins.” A Washington Post article — headlined: “Anthrax report casts doubt on scientific evidence in FBI case against Bruce Ivins” — announced that “the report reignited a debate that has simmered among some scientists and others who have questioned the strength of the FBI’s evidence against Ivins.”
An in-depth joint investigation by ProPublica, PBS and McClatchy — published under the headline “New Evidence Adds Doubt to FBI’s Case Against Anthrax Suspect” — concluded that “newly available documents and the accounts of Ivins’ former colleagues shed fresh light on the evidence and, while they don’t exonerate Ivins, are at odds with some of the science and circumstantial evidence that the government said would have convicted him of capital crimes.” It added: “even some of the government’s science consultants wonder whether the real killer is still at large.” The report itself, issued by the National Research Council, concluded that while the components of the anthrax in Ivins’ lab were “consistent” with the weaponized anthrax that had been sent, “the scientific link between the letter material and flask number RMR-1029 [found in Ivins’ lab] is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary.”
In short, these were serious and widespread mainstream doubts about the FBI’s case against Ivins, and those have never been resolved. U.S. institutions seemingly agreed to simply move on without ever addressing lingering scientific and other evidentiary questions regarding whether Ivins was really involved in the anthrax attacks and, if so, how it was possible that he could have carried out this sophisticated attack within a top-secret U.S. Army lab acting alone. So whitewashed is this history that doubts about whether the FBI found the real perpetrator are now mocked by smug Smart People as a fringe conspiracy theory rather than what they had been: the consensus of mainstream institutions.
But what we do know for certain from this anthrax investigation is quite serious. And because it is quite relevant to the current debates over the origins of COVID-19, it is well-worth reviewing. A trove of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was the government’s top infectious disease specialist during the AIDS pandemic, the anthrax attacks, and the COVID pandemic — was published on Monday by BuzzFeed after they were produced pursuant to a FOIA request. Among other things, they reveal that in February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory — Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab.
Last week, BBC reported that “in recent weeks the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory — once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory — has been gaining traction.” President Biden ordered an investigation into this lab-leak possibility. And with Democrats now open to this possibility, “Facebook reversed course Thursday and said that it would no longer remove posts that claim the virus is man-made,” reported The Washington Post. Nobody can rationally claim to know the origins of COVID, and that is exactly why — as I explained in an interview on the Rising program this morning — it should be so disturbing that Silicon Valley monopolies and the WHO/Fauci-led scientific community spent a full year pretending to have certainty about that “debunked” theory that they plainly did not possess, to the point where discussions of it were prohibited on social media.
What we know — but have largely forgotten — from the anthrax case is now vital to recall. What made the anthrax attacks of 2001 particularly frightening was how sophisticated and deadly the strain was. It was not naturally occurring anthrax. Scientists quickly identified it as the notorious Ames strain, which researchers at the U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick had essentially invented. As PBS’ Frontline program put it in 2011: “in October 2001, Northern Arizona University microbiologist Dr. Paul Keim identified that the anthrax used in the attack letters was the Ames strain, a development he described as ‘chilling’ because that particular strain was developed in U.S. government laboratories.” As Dr. Keim recalled in that Frontline interview about his 2001 analysis of the anthrax strain:
We were surprised it was the Ames strain. And it was chilling at the same time, because the Ames strain is a laboratory strain that had been developed by the U.S. Army as a vaccine-challenge strain. We knew that it was highly virulent. In fact, that’s why the Army used it, because it represented a more potent challenge to vaccines that were being developed by the U.S. Army. It wasn’t just some random type of anthrax that you find in nature; it was a laboratory strain, and that was very significant to us, because that was the first hint that this might really be a bioterrorism event.
Why was the U.S. government creating exotic and extraordinarily deadly infectious bacterial strains and viruses that, even in small quantities, could kill large numbers of people? The official position of the U.S. Government is that it does not engage in offensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to create weaponized viruses as weapons of war. The U.S. has signed treaties barring such research. But in the wake of the anthrax attacks — especially once the FBI’s own theory was that the anthrax was sent by a U.S. Army scientist from his stash at Fort Detrick — U.S. officials were forced to acknowledge that they do engage in defensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to allow the development of vaccines and other defenses in the event that another country unleashes a biological attack.
But ultimately, that distinction barely matters. For both offensive and defensive bioweapons research, scientists must create, cultivate, manipulate and store non-natural viruses or infectious bacteria in their labs, whether to study them for weaponization or for vaccines. A fascinating-in-retrospect New Yorker article from March, 2002, featured the suspicions of molecular biologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who had “strongly implied that the F.B.I. was moving much more slowly in its anthrax investigation than it had any reason to.” Like The New York Times, the magazine (without naming him) detailed her speculation that Dr. Hatfill was the perpetrator (though her theory about his motive — that he wanted to scare people about anthrax in order to increase funding for research — was virtually identical to the FBI’s ultimate accusations about Dr. Ivins’ motives).
But the key point that is particularly relevant now is what all of this said about the kind of very dangerous research the U.S. Government, along with other large governments, conducts in bioweapons research labs. Namely, they manufacture and store extremely lethal biological agents that, if they escape from the lab either deliberately or inadvertently, can jeopardize the human species. As the article put it:
The United States officially forswore biological-weapons development in 1969, and signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, along with many other nations. But Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won’t allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored.
If the government is saying that the perpetrator was probably an American, it’s hard to imagine how it couldn’t have been an American who worked in a government-supported bioweapons lab. Think back to the panicky month of October [2001]: would knowing that have made you less nervous, or more?
Having extensively reported on the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax case and ultimate claim to have solved it, I continue to share all the doubts that were so widely expressed at the time about whether any of that was true. But what we know for certain is that the U.S. government and other governments do conduct research which requires the manufacture of deadly viruses and infectious bacterial strains. Dr. Fauci has acknowledged that the U.S. government indirectly funded research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into coronaviruses, though he denies that this was for so-called “gain of function” research, whereby naturally occurring viruses are manipulated to make them more transmissible and/or more harmful to humans.
We do not know for sure if the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, another lab, or jumped from animals to humans. But what we do know for certain — from the anthrax investigation — is that governments most definitely conduct the sort of research that could produce novel coronaviruses. Dr. Rosenberg, the subject of the 2002 New Yorker article, was suggesting that the F.B.I. was purposely impeding its own investigation because they knew that the anthrax actually came from the U.S. government’s own lab and wanted to prevent exposure of the real bio-research that is done there. We should again ponder why the pervasive mainstream doubts about the F.B.I.’s case against Ivins have been memory-holed. We should also reflect on what we learned about government research into highly lethal viruses and bacterial strains from that still-strange episode.
Abby Martin Beats the Israel Lobby: Attack on Free Speech and Association Fails Court Test
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 3, 2021
Many Americans who follow developments overseas would concede that Israel and its supporters in the United States exercise a fairly high level of control over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Some are also aware of Congressional attempts to introduce legislation that would define criticism of the Jewish state as a federal hate crime. That would narrow the options for discussion, infringing on First Amendment free speech rights, and further tighten the grip on policy. It would also make violators of the new law subject to fines and even imprisonment at the hands of the Department of Justice, which has traditionally responded favorably on issues of concern to Israel and its supporters.
Still fewer Americans, however, are aware of the ability of the Lobby to promote legislation favorable to Israel and its perceived interests at state and local levels. Possibly the most insidious program being advanced by the friends of Israel is the attempt to make boycotts and public criticism of Israel a punishable offense. Legislation is now in place in many states that requires prospective recipients of government jobs, services or compensation to agree not to participate in boycotting or otherwise seeking to damage the Israeli economy. The details on how the legislation works and what exactly it covers varies from state to state, but the intention is to create disincentives for anyone who seeks to harm Israel as defined by Israel itself. It particularly targets the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is popular on many university campuses. And the prohibition goes beyond just sanctioning those who are taking action personally, as in a number of states one also cannot publicly or even privately encourage others to take action that might be damaging to the Jewish state. In some U.S. states, the recipient must even sign a legal document under oath indicating that he or she will not engage in anti-Israeli activity.
One might well ask by what authority state governments can demand that citizens not be free to discuss or even peacefully oppose the activity engaged in by a foreign government, particularly as the government in question is an apartheid regime that is a serial violator of international law and guilty of numerous war crimes. Indeed, many who have observed the corruption of constitutional government in the United States by Israel and its friends have asked just that and have predictably not received any credible response. Recently, some believers in the Bill of Rights have, however, gone one step further, going to court after refusing to swear fealty to Israel. Highly respected international journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin is one of the latest to do so.
Abby’s tale will strike many as bizarre, but it has been verified by multiple independent sources and is absolutely true. It demonstrates how in 21st century America government at all levels can strip citizens of their fundamental rights with the stroke or a pen and how the lawmakers will feel absolutely no remorse after they have done so.
In 2016 in Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signed off on a law designated SB 327, which is similar to legislation currently active in at least thirty states. The bill is entitled “State Purchasing; prohibit the state from entering into certain contracts unless such contracts contain a certification; does not presently conduct a boycott of Israel” and reads “A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Part 1 of Article 3 of Chapter 5 of Title 50 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to general authority, duties, and procedure relative to state purchasing, so as to prohibit the state, including all of its subdivisions and instrumentalities, from entering into certain contracts with an individual or company unless such contracts contain a certification that such individual or company does not presently conduct a boycott of Israel and will not conduct such a boycott for the duration of such contract; to exclude certain contracts from these requirements; to provide for definitions; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.”
In simple language, the law requires any person or company that enters into a contract with the State of Georgia worth $1,000 or more to sign a loyalty oath pledging not engage in political boycotts of the Israeli government based on its treatment of Palestinians.
Abby Martin had agreed to give the keynote address at the International Critical Media Conference that was to be held at Georgia Southern University in 2020, but her participation was canceled by the authorities controlling the University System of Georgia when she refused to sign the document. Her advocacy for BDS was already well known to college authorities when she agreed to speak. She responded with a lawsuit filed on her behalf by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund seeking to overturn both the decision and the law, arguing that her speech was protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Last Monday, Judge Mark Cohen of the Federal District Court in Atlanta ruled in her favor, declaring that the University System of Georgia had violated Martin’s constitutional rights when it cancelled her speaking engagement over her refusal to sign the state-mandated oath pledging not to engage in boycotts of Israel, which the court determined to be protected by the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution.
The Georgian government defense argued absurdly that it had canceled Martin’s speech because it had “an interest in furthering foreign policy goals regarding relations with Israel.” Dismissing that contention, the judge countered with “Defendants fail to explain how Martin’s advocacy of a boycott of Israel has any bearing on Georgia’s ability to advance foreign policy goals with Israel.” One might also add that the U.S. Constitution grants to the federal government alone the conduct of foreign affairs for the entire United States, so, in a sense, Georgia has no foreign policy.
The judge specifically cited how the law’s clear intention to stifle discussion of BDS “prohibits inherently expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment,” and therefore “burdens Martin’s right to free speech.” He also observed that requiring Martin to sign under oath to refrain from certain otherwise legal activity is “no different than requiring a person to espouse certain political beliefs or to engage in certain political associations.”
Abby Martin was, of course, pleased over the outcome of her case, even though the judge has not yet gone so far as to overturn the law itself. She enthused “I am thrilled at the judge’s decision finding this law unconstitutional as it so clearly violates the free speech rights of myself and so many others in Georgia. My First Amendment rights were restricted on behalf of a foreign government, which flies in the face of the principles of freedom and democracy. The government of Israel has pushed state legislatures to enact these laws only because they know that sympathy and support for the population they brutalize, occupy, ethnically cleanse and subject to apartheid, is finally growing in popular consciousness ––they want to hold back the tide of justice by preemptively restricting the right of American citizens to peacefully take a stand against their crimes.”
Abby Martin’s efforts must be applauded for she has won a major victory in the struggle to maintain freedom of speech in the United States. May it be one of the first in the many battles that will have to be fought to have the courts finally determine decisively that laws drafted by states (and the federal government) specifically to serve Israel’s perceived interests are all unconstitutional and will have to be overturned.
Biden allies prompt Facebook to scrutinize allowing spread of election fraud conversations
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim the Net | June 3, 2021
An advocacy group, closely tied to [proclaimed] President Joe Biden, has called on Facebook to review whether its actions, or lack thereof, led to the spread of election fraud claims, according to a report on POLITICO.
The call follows a similar recommendation by Facebook’s Oversight Board, last month.
On Wednesday, Building Back Together, a non-government coalition formed mostly by Biden allies and his campaign advisers, sent a letter to Facebook, calling on the social media giant to commit to an internal review of its contribution to allowing people to make election fraud claims.
Last month, when the Oversight Board upheld Facebook’s decision to suspend Trump (but criticized the indefinite suspension), it made a similar recommendation, calling on the company to conduct “a comprehensive review of Facebook’s potential contribution to the narrative of electoral fraud and the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence in the United States on January 6.”
The Board gave Facebook until this Friday to respond to the recommendation.
The Board is a team of 20 individuals with the power to overturn some of Facebook’s content moderation decisions. The ruling on Trump’s suspension is binding; Facebook is supposed to comply. However, the board’s recommendations, such as the one highlighted above, are not binding. That could be part of the reason why Biden allies are pressuring Facebook to take action on the recommendation before the Friday deadline.
Building Back Together senior adviser for voting rights Bob Bauer urged Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to provide “an unequivocal commitment to the complete public review suggested by the Oversight Board.”
According to Bauer, who served in Obama’s White House and was an adviser in the Biden presidential campaign, if Facebook fails to conduct the review, it would be undermining the credibility of the Oversight Board.
“Unless Facebook engages in the transparent evaluation and review that the Oversight Board demands, it will have discredited the board’s very reason for being within 30 days of its only noteworthy action,” Bauer wrote.
Facebook declined to provide a comment on the Building Back Together letter. However, a Facebook spokesperson said the company would include a response to the review in its formal reply to the Board’s recommendations.
The letter is the coalition’s first significant move into the online misinformation and social media accountability debates. Mostly, Building Back Together has focused on boosting Biden’s policies such as the infrastructure proposal and COVID-19 recovery plan.
So far, Biden’s White House has been cautious about commenting on the issues relating to social media platforms, such as online misinformation.
Speaking to POLITICO, Bauer described allowing election fraud claims as “a profound threat to the health of American democracy.” He added that the Jan 6 riots in the US Capitol proved “what can happen when platforms like Facebook fail to protect against the gross abuse of its platform and amplify those who spread lies.”
According to POLITICO, Building Back Together will continue focusing on election misinformation on online platforms, and is keen to see how Facebook responds to the recommendations by the Oversight Board.
The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun — Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants
By Glenn Greenwald | June 2, 2021
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized.
The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized). Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized).
Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.” And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure:
Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.
Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.
Americans have seen this scam before. Throughout the first War on Terror, DHS, which was created in 2002, was frequently used to keep fear levels high and thus foster support for draconian government powers of spying, detention, and war. Even prior to the Department’s creation, its first Secretary, Tom Ridge, when he was still the White House’s Homeland Security Chief in early 2002, created an elaborate color-coded warning system to supply a constant alert to Americans about the evolving threat levels they faced from Islamic extremists.
DHS Bulletin on domestic extremists, Jan. 27, 2021; DHS Bulletin on domestic extremists, May 14, 2021.
In 2004, Ridge admitted that he had been repeatedly pressured by Bush officials to elevate the warnings and threat levels for political gain and to keep the population in fear. He claims that he, in particular, was coerced against his will to raise the threat level just prior to the 2004 presidential election and resigned for that reason shortly thereafter. DHS’s color scheme became “the brunt of endless jokes and derision,” concluded a 2007 scholarly study in the journal International Security, noting that it “became perceived as being politically motivated” largely due to the complete lack of specific information about what Americans were supposed to fear or avoid. Moreover, “its designers assumed that the population would trust in the national leadership and believe in the utility of the system’s information.” It failed because of how often the alleged threats failed to materialize, and because the warnings were rarely accompanied by any specificity that could permit action to be taken or avoided.
Though Obama scrapped the unpopular color-coded system in 2011, he — in a classic Obama gesture — merely replaced it with an equally vague and fear-generating bureaucratic alternative that was also subject to political manipulation. National security writers at Lawfare ultimately acknowledged that “like the [Bush/Ridge] system, there were no clear triggers for alerts [under Obama’s new scheme,] so the system remained objective and opaque.” As a result, they said, “the lack of specificity over time has resulted in similar levels of confusion as surrounded the [Bush/Ridge] color alerts.”
Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.
I saw first-hand how this dynamic functions when doing the Snowden-enabled reporting on mass domestic NSA surveillance under the Obama administration. By the time we broke the stories of mass domestic surveillance on Americans — twelve years after the 9/11 attack — fear levels over Al Qaeda in the U.S. had diminished greatly, especially after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. As a result, anger over Obama’s sprawling domestic surveillance programs was pervasive and bipartisan. A bill jointly sponsored by then-Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) — which would have greatly reined in NSA domestic spying powers — was on its way to easy, bipartisan victory as a result of that anger over NSA spying. But suddenly, the Obama White House convinced Nancy Pelosi to whip enough Democratic votes to ensure its defeat and save NSA domestic spying from reform. But the momentum which that bill had — it would have been the first since 9/11 to rollback rather than expand government powers — along with anti-surveillance-and-pro-privacy polling data, proved how significantly the playing field had shifted as a result of those revelations and, especially, the reduction in fear levels experienced by Americans.
But shortly thereafter, a new group — ISIS — emerged to replace Al Qaeda. It had a two-year stint with middling success in scaring Americans, but it was sufficient to turn back the tide of pro-privacy sentiment (at one point in 2014, the U.S. intelligence community claimed out of nowhere that a Syria-based group that virtually nobody in the U.S. had ever heard of previously or since — “the Khorasan Group” — was “a more direct and imminent threat to the United States,” but that new villain disappeared as quickly as it materialized). After ISIS’s star turn in the role of existential threat, the Democrats, during the 2016 campaign, elevated Russia, Putin and the Kremlin to that role, abandoning without explanation Obama’s eight-year argument that Russia was merely a regional power of no threat to the U.S. This revolving carousel of scary villains ensured that the pressure to reduce the powers and secrecy of the U.S. security state eroded in the name of staying safe.
Before Joe Bidenwas even inaugurated, he and his allies knew they needed a new villain. Putin never generated much fear in anyone beyond MSNBC panels, the CNN Green Room, and the newsrooms and op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. While negative views of Russia increased in the U.S. during Russiagate mania, few outside of hard-core Democratic partisans viewed that country as a genuine threat or primary enemy. Few Americans woke up shaking in fear about what the Kremlin might do to them.
The search for a new enemy around which the Biden administration could coalesce and in whose name they could keep fear levels high was quickly settled. Cast in that role would be right-wing domestic extremists. In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
Pending Domestic War on Terror legislation favored by the White House — sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — would simply amend the old War on Terror laws, which permitted a wide range of powers to fight foreign terrorist organizations, so as to now allow the U.S. government to also use those powers against groups designated as domestic terror organizations. Just as was true of the first War on Terror, this second one would thus vest the government with new, wide-ranging powers of surveillance, detention, prosecution and imprisonment, though this time for use against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
Even while that legislation is pending, the U.S. government is already waging an aggressive new domestic war on terror that has largely flown under the radar. Grave warnings from DHS are now just as common, vague and unreliable — but also fear-inducing — as they were in the days of Tom Ridge. Domestic surveillance is also on the rise. Last month, CNN reported that “the Biden administration is considering using outside firms to track extremist chatter by Americans online, an effort that would expand the government’s ability to gather intelligence but could draw criticism over surveillance of US citizens.”
CNN, May 3, 2021
The security mindset has subsumed the Democratic Party in particular. Just last week, the same Party that spent the summer of 2020 denouncing the police approved $1.9 billion in additional spending for Capitol security and police. The very faction of that party which chanted “Defund the Police” — the Squad — had the power to stop that expenditure, but half of them instead voted “present,” ensuring its passage.
Meanwhile, one of the most repressive features of the first War on Terror — due-process-free no-fly lists against American citizens — is now back in full force. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) have both been demanding that the FBI ban January 6 protesters and other “domestic extremists” from air travel without being convicted of any crime or even given a hearing to determine whether this prohibition is justified. Rep. Thompson even demanded that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) be put on the no-fly list, then took to Twitter to boast of how proud he was of this demand.
Beyond the DHS bulletins, that agency and other intelligence operatives continue to issue reports, for both public and classified consumption, warning that the greatest national security threat the U.S now faces is domestic extremism. As we reported here last month, that “domestic extremist” designation includes not just anti-Biden and anti-government protesters on the right but also leftist groups including animal rights activists — essentially anyone who objects to prevailing ruling class dogma and wants to use their constitutional rights to advance those views. To compile these reports, the CIA appears clearly to be breaking the law in using its vast intelligence weapons for domestic monitoring and control.
Online censorship, of course, is also rapidly increasing in the name of stopping the threat of domestic extremism. The extraordinary destruction of Parler in January by three Silicon Valley monopolies — Apple, Google and Amazon — occurred after leading Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — publicly demanded the platform’s removal from the internet. And Democratic-led Congressional committees continue to summon Silicon Valley executives to demand they impose greater degrees of political censorship against their political adversaries or else face legislative and regulatory reprisals.
These are all the same weapons as the ones invoked for the first War on Terror. Yet what is perhaps most notable about comparing this new domestic War on Terror to the first one is not the common weapons invoked to fight it but rather how identical are the rhetorical strategies used to demand submission to it.
No nuance or questioning is permitted when it comes to discussions of how much danger America really faces from domestic extremists. The parallels with the first War on Terror are manifest.
I know of nobody who dismissed the significance of the 9/11 attacks. A one-day attack that wipes out 3,000 human beings and crashes four passenger jets into three large buildings is a gravely serious event. But there were plenty of people — including myself — who spent years arguing that the threat reflected by that attack was being aggressively and deliberately exaggerated by U.S. officials and both political parties in order to justify extraordinary power grabs for themselves.
In response, a standard tactic was deployed against those who, after 9/11, urged that the threat be placed in rational context rather than melodramatically and cynically inflated. Anyone urging sober restraint was instantly accused of being sympathetic toward if not outright supportive of anti-American terrorism. The Bush administration demanded a binary framework most vividly expressed by the then-president’s decree in his late September, 2001, address to the Congress: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” And thus was any middle ground — I condemn the 9/11 attack but oppose dangerous overreaction or authoritarian power grabs in the name of combatting it — abolished.
That Bush “with-us-or-with-the-terrorists” directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party. I do not know a single prominent commentator or political figure who, after seeing what transpired, expressed support for the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Quite the contrary: all of them, at least to my knowledge, condemned the conduct of at least some of the protesters on that day. From the start, that group certainly included me (on January 7, I wrote: “It is not hard to understand why [the Capitol riot] has generated intense political passion and pervasive rage: the introduction of physical force into political protest is always lamentable, usually dangerous, and, except in the rarest of circumstances that are plainly inapplicable here, unjustifiable”). That is still my view, even as I denounce the Biden administration’s expansive domestic powers and attempts to exaggerate the threats and dangers that protest illustrated.
But that position is disallowed, or at least not recognized. Just as was true of the first War on Terror, any attempt to place the actual lingering threat in context (by rejecting the claim that the danger is so grave that it requires vast new powers), or to suggest it is being manipulatively exaggerated (by calling it The Insurrection), or to document actual lies being told in service of the prevailing narrative (such as the ongoing lie that a pro-Trump crowd murdered Officer Brian Sicknick) provokes furious accusations that one must be sympathetic to if not supportive of the January 6 rioters and any groups associated with them. Attempts to suggest that those charged in connection with the January 6 riot are being excessively prosecuted and punished provoke even greater rage — despite the fact that not a single one of them has been charged with treason, sedition, insurrection or domestic terrorism, and despite the fact that concerns about overzelaous prosecutors and the carceral state are supposed to be staples of liberals politics (though ones which, like anti-police sentiment and opposition to killing unarmed protesters, instantly disappear when convenient, such as when it comes time to exploit Officer Sicknick or cheer the fatal point-blank shooting of the unarmed Ashli Babbitt).
Objections to new powers vested in the U.S. security state in the name of fighting domestic terrorism are met with still greater scorn. If you oppose new anti-terrorism legislation for use on U.S. soil or are deeply concerned about the invocation of civil-liberties-destroying weapons such as no-fly lists, online censorship, and heightened domestic surveillance, then it is assumed that you must support domestic extremists — just as those who opposed the war in Iraq or the Patriot Act or NSA spying or torture were accused of supporting Al Qaeda.
It is a shoddy, anti-intellectual and deceitful tactic, to be sure, but it is now commonplace. And that is particularly concerning as the Democrats’ devotion to a new War on Terror continues to grow. On Monday, President Biden, citing “the intelligence community,” asserted that white supremacist terrorism is “the most lethal threat to the Homeland today.”
Opposing this new domestic War on Terror and all those new powers and secrecy authorities that go with it does not require support for or even indifference toward what happened at the Capitol on January 6. It merely requires a basic knowledge of recent U.S. history and how these powers are invariably used by the secretive U.S. security state when government-generated fears lead to their widespread enactment. The dangers of the first War on Terror were grave enough. Transferring it to “the Homeland,” as President Biden calls it, is bound to be far more dangerous still.
Escape from New York?
By Stephen Lendman | June 2, 2021
Is the Big Apple headed toward becoming something like what’s portrayed in the 1981 Hollywood Escape from New York science fiction film?
That plot involves a future crime-ridden USA that transformed New York City into a maximum security prison, trapping residents.
Empire State governance is becoming draconian on all things covid.
Passed by New York state senators in April, oppressive NY State Assembly Bill A416 states the following:
“Upon determining by clear and convincing evidence (sic) that the health of others is or may be endangered (sic), the governor may order the removal and/or detention of such…person(s) or group of such persons by issuing a single order (sic).”
“Identifying such persons either by name or by a reasonably specific description of the individuals or group being detained,” they shall be indefinitely be held “in a medical facility or other appropriate private facility.”
The measure targets individuals unwilling to self-inflict harm by getting jabbed for covid and risking irreversible harm.
Under federal law, experimental drugs cannot be mandated.
The Nuremberg Code requires voluntary consent on matters relating to health.
If the above measure is enacted into state or federal law, the health, well-being and safety of affected Americans will be jeopardized more greatly than ever before in US history.
Last March, New York Governor Cuomo announced the launch of Excelsior Pass — a digital health passport to push mass-jabbing with hazardous, experimental, unapproved covid drugs.
“Attend sporting events, arts performances and more,” according to promotional material for the scheme, adding:
“Excelsior Pass supports a safe reopening of New York (sic) by providing a free, fast and secure way to present digital proof of (covid jabs) or negative test results.”
“Think of it as a mobile airline boarding pass, but for proving you received a (covid jab) or negative test.”
Along with pushing hazardous covid mass-jabbing, the Excelsior Pass scheme may be step one toward requiring passport proof of the above for employment, education, air travel, other public transportation, hotel reservations, restaurant dining, in-store shopping, attending a sporting event, and other social interactions.
No proof, no access to the above, no normal daily routines, social isolation instead like lepers.
Is that where things are heading in New York and elsewhere in the US? Will federal legislation mandate it?
On Friday, GOP Senator Ted Cruz went the other way, announcing that he’ll introduce legislation to ban vaccine passports — called the No Vaccine Passports Act.
“(T)here’s a real potential for government overreach,” he warned, adding:
“I don’t believe anyone should be forced to” be jabbed for covid. “It should be your personal choice.”
“You should make the choice based on your health, based on the decisions you want.”
Promoting covid jabs as safe and effective is diabolical mass deception to harm maximum numbers of people.
Excelsior Pass was the first of its kind introduced in the US.
Developed in cahoots with IBM, the company said New York “is modeling for the rest of the country how new, technology-enabled approaches can help safely reinvigorate economies (sic) while also striving to protect public health (sic).”
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project executive director Albert Cahn expressed concern about the scheme, saying:
“I have more detailed technical documentation about the privacy impact of nearly every app on my phone than I do for this health pass,”adding:
“IBM and the governor are using lots of buzzwords, but they’re not explaining their cryptographic model.”
“They’re not explaining the security, implementation.”
“(T)he pass itself is incredibly revealing” by disclosing people’s health status and other personal data.
Among establishment media, the NYT is a leading source of Big Lies and mass deception on all things covid.
On June 1, the broadsheet promoted Excelsior passes, saying the following:
“This magic ticket (sic) is New York State’s first and only government-issued vaccine passport in the country, accessible, for now, only to people who have been (jabbed for covid) in the state,” adding:
“About 1.1 million Excelsior passes had been downloaded onto phones and computers as of last week, according to the state.”
Perhaps dark forces in New York and nationwide may mandate covid-jabbed passport proof ahead for access to most everything essential for normal social, business, and other interactions as things were pre-2020.
As of late May, numerous US states either partially or entirely banned issuance of vaccine passports, or rejected their mandatory use for normal access to facilities or events.
They include Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
Many states haven’t indicated support or opposition to use covid passports so far.
Most likely, they’ll all go one way or the other on this issue ahead.
So far in New York, most business establishments don’t require proof of being jabbed for covid to enter.
A number of sports, other entertainment and arts venues went the other way.
Fraud is another issue. Surveillance Technology Oversight Project executive Cahn quoted above said he downloaded someone else’s Excelsior Pass in 11 minutes from information posted on social media, adding:
“(A)s much as we want a magic piece of software to be able to tell us whether the person next to us is (jabbed for covid), these apps really can’t.”
“At the end of the day, it’s largely built on trust.”
The bottom line is that we’ve been lied to and mass-deceived on virtually all things covid since the designation came from renaming seasonal flu.
Revealed: The American Money Entwined with Israel’s Jewish Terrorist Groups
By Jessica Buxbaum | MintPress News | May 28, 2021
JERUSALEM — As Israel rained rockets down on Gaza in mid-May, inside 1948-occupied Palestine (Historic Palestine and modern-day Israel), another kind of Israeli terror emerged. Jewish supremacists stormed cities with high Palestinian populations chanting “Death to Arabs!,” attacking scores of Palestinians and vandalizing their properties.
The mob violence killed two Palestinian citizens of Israel, according to the Mossawa Center: the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of Israel. And despite calls for calm, the attacks are ongoing. On Thursday, a Jewish mob dragged a Bedouin driver out of his car and beat him with glass bottles in northern Historic Palestine. Earlier, footage posted on social media showed Arab gas station workers lying on the ground after being surrounded and beaten by a Jewish mob in the town of Binyamina:
The American Jewish community condemned the wave of anti-Palestinian violence, under the assumption these attacks stem from the fringes of Jewish society. In reality, however, these Jewish supremacists receive financial support from a network of charities in the United States.
Jewish extremists organizing online
As the Israeli government orchestrated a bombing campaign on Gaza, right-wing Israeli activists were coordinating their own war-like operations online.
According to HaBloc, an Israeli nonprofit organization monitoring anti-democratic activity, tens of new groups have been created in the last two weeks on WhatsApp and Telegram. The number of participants in each group ranged from the tens, hundreds, and even thousands. About 2,200 people in total were active in these groups.
HaBloc’s observation of these ultra-right-wing groups reveals how they used social media to organize attacks in advance offline. The groups exchanged information, sold weapons like knives, bats, and pepper spray, used inflammatory rhetoric such as calling for revenge against Palestinian citizens of Israel and documented themselves rioting in the streets.
“This is far more than what’s happening on a daily basis within the far right in Israel,” Ran Cohen, co-founder of HaBloc, said of the extremist activity.
News media reported that the main groups behind the recent rampage were Lehava, a Jewish supremacist organization opposing assimilation and coexistence, and La Familia, a far-right group supporting the Israeli Premier League football club Beitar Jerusalem.
The Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the public and legal advocacy arm of the Reform Movement in Israel, has been monitoring Lehava’s activity for more than a decade.
“Lehava is an organization that claims to work against assimilation, but basically wants to create a Jewish-only space in Jerusalem and in Israel in general,” Rabbi Noa Sattath, IRAC’s director, told MintPress News. “In this last wave of violence, they were certainly instigators in several of the cases.”
IRAC demanded Lehava be labeled a terrorist organization in a letter sent this week to Israeli Minister of Defense Benny Gantz, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, and Head of the Shabak (General Security Service) Nadav Argaman.
Researchers within HaBloc, cautioned, though, attaching the violence to specific organizations.
“The role of Lehava in what happened is not direct,” HaBloc said. “It’s not like there was a central command and they’re sending people into the streets. It was really something that sort of spread out in a more organic way.”
“But the infrastructure and the ideology of Lehava is present and it contributes to what happened in the past few weeks,” HaBloc added.
The American charities bankrolling Lehava
Ben-Zion Gopstein is the leader of Lehava (or “flame” in Hebrew) and founded the organization in 2005. He is a notorious right-wing activist and disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American-Israeli extremist who founded the Kach Party, a political movement espousing racist beliefs.
After a brief stint in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) in the 1980s, the Kach Party was banned from Israeli politics and deemed a terrorist organization by both Israel and the U.S.
Kahane called for the expulsion of Palestinians and Arabs from the Holy Land and advocated for the outlawing of marriage between Jews and non-Jews.
Four years after Kahane’s assassination in 1990, Baruch Goldstein, an ardent Kahane follower, opened fired at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron—killing 29 worshippers.
Kahane and Goldstein have become revered within the Israeli settler movement. Settlers have shared Kahane’s teachings on social media and have prayed at his grave.
Lehava is considered the successor to Kach, and Kahane’s racist ideology, Kahanism, runs deep within Lehava circles.
In addition to following right-wing interactions online, HaBloc’s research has also found a complex web of nonprofits in Israel and the U.S. connected to Lehava.
Lehava is not a registered charity in Israel so it can’t accept donations. Instead, money is funneled to Lehava through the Israeli nonprofit, the Foundation for the Salvation of the People of Israel, or Hakeren Lehazalat Am Israel in Hebrew. Israeli fund, Chemla or “mercy” in Hebrew has also been linked to Lehava until about 2014, according to HaBloc.
The Foundation for the Salvation of the People of Israel did not respond to requests for comment via email. The email address may be Gopstein’s as “benzion” is part of it. When contacted at the telephone number associated with the organization’s GuideStar (a nonprofit database) profile, the person said this was not the foundation and hung up. Contact information for Chemla is not publically available.
Two tax-exempt charities in the U.S. fund Kahanist activity in Israel: Charity of Light and the American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi.
Charity of Light funnels money to Chasdei Meir (which translates roughly into “charity which shines” in Hebrew). Chasdei Meir was named after Kahane, according to the fund’s website. As evidenced on Charity of Light’s tax returns, Chasdei Meir is related to the Chemla Fund. Charity of Light donated $72,000 to Chasdei Meir/Chemla Fund in 2018, according to its most recent tax filing.
Armed members of Chasdei Meir are shown wearing jumpsuits emblazoned with portarts of Meir Kahane
The American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi directly supports Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi or the Jewish Idea Yeshiva, a Jewish education institution founded by Kahane.
“This is sort of the place for indoctrination of Kahanist ideology,” HaBloc said. “It’s where Benzi Gopstein studied and other prominent Kahanist figures.”
The charity gave $154,000 to Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi in 2018, according to the most recent tax report. The yeshiva is even classified as a terrorist organization by the United States. The yeshiva’s dean, Rabbi Yehuda Kroizer, is also part of Chasdei Meir. The yeshiva did not return a request for comment.
The nonprofits’ tax filings list Levi Chazan as the director of Charity of Light and American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi, and Steven Goldrich is listed as a director of Charity of Light and treasurer of American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi. Chazan was convicted in a 1984 bus shooting in the Occupied West Bank, which wounded seven Palestinians. Both did not respond to requests for comment.
HaBloc explained this entanglement of Israeli and American organizations is not directly supporting Lehava with monetary contributions, but rather aiding the network around it.
“The relationship between [Lehava] and groups that are funded with American money are two separate issues,” HaBloc’s Cohen said. “There are connections, of course, but we cannot say that these groups that were active in the last two weeks were funded with American dollars.”
Other financial players
The aforementioned charities are largely linked to Kahanism and Lehava, but other American foundations have also been tied to Israeli extremism.
The Traditional Fund gave $51,000 to American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon and $11,500 to American Friends of Chasdei Meir in 2018. The American Friends of Chasdei Meir is not listed in any available nonprofit database, however, Chasdei Meir’s website does name the American Friends of Chasdei Meir as its contact. The Traditional Fund did not respond to press inquiries.
According to T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, the Central Fund of Israel (CFI) funds Chemla and Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi. The organization filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2018 to revoke CFI and the American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon’s charitable status on the grounds these groups are funding terrorism.
IRS charity law states that terrorist activities are considered substantial means for disqualifying an organization’s tax-exempt status. This is in accordance with engaging in illegal acts contrary to standard U.S. policy.
A litany of private foundations supports the CFI. Most notably, the foundations belonging to the late American billionaires Sheldon Adelson and Irving Moskowitz. The Moskowitz family foundations have contributed more than $8 million to CFI since 2018 and Adelson’s foundation gave $50,000 to CFI in 2018.
Israeli soldiers and settlers attack Palestinian protesters in the Occupied West Bank town of Salfit, Nov. 30, 2020. Majdi Mohammed | AP
Jay Marcus of CFl said in a statement to MintPress News that, “The Central Fund of Israel absolutely rejects violence and does not support any organizations that promote violence. Furthermore, if an organization that we once supported ever started promoting violence, CFI would not support them in the future.”
Marcus claims that he hasn’t heard of Lehava, adding, “having had rockets indiscriminately showered down on my head, I would certainly disagree with your myth about which ‘groups start violence.’”
The Falic family, owners of the major retail chain Duty Free Americas, has supported The Fund for Saving the People of Israel in the past, providing a total of $60,000 to the association from 2007-2017. The money is wired through the Falic’s Israel-based foundation, the Segal Fund. The Falics could not be reached for comment.
Kahanism’s surge in Israel
Kahane’s Kach Party was banned from entering Israeli politics in 1988. But thanks to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Kahanists are now infiltrating the halls of the Knesset (Israeli parliament).
In the lead-up to Israel’s March election, Netanyahu pushed for a right-wing alliance with Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Kahanist, a defense lawyer for price tag campaigners, and leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party. Otzma Yehudit partnered with the anti-LGBTQ Noam Party and the National Union-Tkuma faction to form the Religious Zionism bloc in the last election. The coalition allowed the electoral list to secure six seats in the Knesset and for a Kahanist to gain political power. Rabbi Sattath pins the blame squarely on Netanyahu for Jewish supremacists’ rise in government.
A Jewish settler wears a T-shirt with the image of Meir Kahane near the city of Ramallah. Bernat Armangue | AP
“Because the prime minister was in such a dire situation and was desperate for every vote, he gave [Otzma Yehudit] the legitimacy,” Rabbi Sattath said. “What we’re seeing here in Israel and around the world is that one of the symptoms of democracies in decline is when the extreme right takes over the center right. The fact that the prime minister and some of the right-wing parties gave the Jewish Power Party legitimacy has then increased their power. And that’s what enabled them to use these methods they’ve used for over a decade on a large scale in the last wave of violence.”
Upon reflecting back to Kahane’s short time in the Knesset, Rabbi Sattath said he faced opposition from every politician and was immediately ostracized.
“When he got into the Knesset, he got the bare minimum [of votes] to get one seat. But what happened in the eighties was he was boycotted by every other Knesset member. Nobody would sit in the plenum when he was speaking,” Rabbi Sattath said. “Everybody from the left and the right understood that these ideas were dangerous and extreme and had to be restrained.”
Today, the political climate in Israeli politics is different.
“What we’re seeing now is that the restraint is completely over,” Rabbi Sattath continued. “And we’re hoping that by shedding light on the past weeks’ violence, we can return to the understanding that there needs to be a red line, that these violent militias and racist, Jewish supremacists have to be stopped.”
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist for MintPress News covering Palestine, Israel, and Syria. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye, The New Arab and Gulf News.
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Zionism’s Violent Legacy
By Donald Neff | Washington Report On Middle East Affairs | January 1996
On January 4, 1948, Jewish terrorists drove a truck loaded with explosives into the center of the all Arab city of Jaffa and detonated it, killing 26 and wounding around 100 Palestinian men, women and children.[1] The attack was the work of the Irgun Zvai Leumi – the “National Military Organization,” also known by the Hebrew letters Etzel – the largest Jewish terrorist group in Palestine. The Irgun was headed by Revisionist Zionist Menachem Begin and had been killing and maiming Arabs, Britons and even Jews for the previous ten years in its efforts to establish a Jewish state.
This terror campaign meant that at the core of Revisionist Zionism there existed a philosophical embrace of violence. … continue
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