• Ukrainian ‘Caliphate’: What the West prefers not to notice when blaming ISIS for the terrorist attack in Moscow
    Kiev’s connections with terrorist groups and Islamists are recognized even in the West. Could Ukrainians be behind the massacre in Crocus City Hall?

    Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorMarch 27, 2024

    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    On March 22, Russia suffered one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history, in the course of which 137 people were killed and 182 others were injured. The four terrorists who carried out the attack chose one of the largest exhibition and concert venues in the country, Crocus City Hall, in the city of Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of Moscow, which hosts large events every day.

    Even though the investigation is still ongoing, the West has already claimed that the Islamic State (IS) is responsible for the tragedy. This was first reported by some media outlets, including Reuters and CNN, and was later picked up by Western officials. For example, on Monday, this was stated by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

    However, when we compare this terrorist attack with other IS attacks, we notice more differences than similarities.

    How IS kills

    On that fateful Friday night, a concert by Picnic, a St. Petersburg rock band, was supposed to take place in Crocus City Hall. This fact gave rise to comparisons with the horrible terrorist attack in France in November 2015. Back then, terrorists broke into the Bataclan Theater in Paris, where a concert of the US band Eagles of Death Metal was taking place. IS claimed responsibility for the crime, which left 89 people dead.

    Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack?

    Read more

    Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack?

    In those years, IS became increasingly active throughout the world – but this was actually a sign of its decline. In its heyday, IS didn’t urge its supporters to carry out terrorist attacks, but instead called on them to “fulfill the hijrah” – i.e., move to the territories controlled by the organization. Over ten years ago, this was quite easy to do, since part of the Syrian border with Turkey was controlled by the jihadists, which allowed people to freely cross it and join their ranks.

    However, as the terrorists lost many of their territories, their rhetoric changed. Through its information resources, IS urged its followers to commit terrorist acts in places where they lived. This caused an upsurge in violence in Europe: a wave of terror swept through France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, and other countries. In Russia, the North Caucasus became a point of tension.

    The strategy was simple – anyone who supported the jihadists, wherever they lived, could record a video with an oath of allegiance to the “caliph,” send it via an automated feedback bot, and then commit a terrorist act. Often it was only the perpetrator who died, but for IS, this didn’t matter – it only cared about being mentioned in connection with the terrorist activity, which is why the organization occasionally took responsibility for crimes that it had nothing to do with.

    The terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk, however, doesn’t match this straightforward strategy usually adopted by IS. In fact, the choice of a rock concert as the site of the terrorist attack is almost the only common feature between this attack and other acts of terror it has committed.

    What preceded the events at Crocus City Hall

    Four people who had not previously known each other were recruited to carry out the terrorist attack. One of them, Shamsidin Fariduni, was in Türkiye in February, and from there he flew to Russia on March 4. He spent at least ten days in Türkiye and investigators are currently determining who he communicated with while there.

    According to unofficial information, he met with a certain “Islamic preacher” in Istanbul. However, it is also known that the terrorists corresponded with the “preacher’s assistant.” According to Fariduni, this anonymous person sponsored and organized the terrorist attack.

    RT

    After arriving in Russia, Fariduni visited Crocus City Hall on March 7 in order to see the site where the crime was to be committed. From this, we may conclude that the attack was to take place soon after his arrival from Türkiye. On the same day, the US embassy in Russia warned its citizens to avoid large gatherings “over the next 48 hours” due to possible attacks by extremists.

    The next concert at Crocus City Hall was given by the singer Shaman, who is known for his patriotism. However, his concert on Saturday, March 9 passed without incident. In the following days, there were other performances at the venue, but apparently the terrorists were forced to adjust their plans.

    As a result, they chose the concert by the band Picnic, scheduled for March 22. Although this band is not as popular as Shaman, it is also known for its patriotic stance and for donating funds for the needs of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine.

    ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters

    Read more

    ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters

    What happened afterwards

    None of the terrorists planned to “join the Houris in paradise,” as is usual for IS followers. After shooting people in Crocus City Hall and setting the building on fire, they did not attack the special forces which arrived at the scene and instead got in a car and fled from Moscow. Neither did they wear “suicide belts” – a characteristic detail of IS followers who are ready to die after committing their crime.

    Another detail which is uncharacteristic for IS is the monetary reward promised to the terrorists. The payment was supposed to be made in two installments – before and after the attack. The terrorists had already received the first payment, amounting to 250,000 rubles ($2,700).

    The most important detail is the location where the terrorists were detained. Traffic cameras allowed intelligence services to monitor where they were headed. They were eventually detained on the federal highway M-3 Ukraine – a route which used to connect Russia and Ukraine but lost much of its international importance after the deterioration of relations between the two countries in 2014, and particularly after the start of Russia’s military operation in 2022.

    The terrorists were detained after passing the turn to route A240, which leads to Belarus. At that moment, it became obvious that there was only one place where they could be headed: Ukraine.

    Despite the fact that the terrorists were armed, only one of them, Mukhammadsobir Fayzov, put up resistance. All of the terrorists were detained alive, which was most likely an order given to the security forces involved in the operation. However, as we mentioned above, the terrorists themselves did not want to die.

    RT

    Moreover, they knew where to go to save their lives: to the Ukrainian border. Later, in his address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a “window” for passage had been opened for them on the Ukrainian side.

    This, too, is uncharacteristic for IS, since someone who carries out a terrorist act, especially an outsider, is always considered “disposable.” Even if he makes it out alive, no one will help him. Moreover, in earlier years, IS usually didn’t take responsibility for an attack if the perpetrator remained alive, as this could harm him during the investigation. However, later the organization no longer cared about this due to the deplorable state in which it found itself.

    All this comes down to the fact that compared to other attacks carried out by IS in the past few years, this one is strikingly different when it comes to the level of preparation, detailed planning, and financial compensation.

    Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up

    Read more

    Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up

    What does Ukraine have to do with it?

    Having already mentioned Ukraine several times, we must note its links with terrorists. Since 2015, it has been known that the Security Service of Ukraine tried to recruit radical Islamists with the goal of carrying out sabotage and terrorist attacks, etc. on Russian territory. Ukraine’s intelligence services were also active among the terrorists in Syria. This cooperation was marked in particular by the arrival in Ukraine of Chechen terrorist Rustam Azhiev, who served in the International Legion controlled by the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.

    Azhiev participated in the second Chechen campaign against the Russian Armed Forces and eventually fled to Türkiye. In 2011, he moved to Syria, where he headed the terrorist group Ajnad Al-Kavkaz. Under his command, the militants participated in hostilities against the Syrian Armed Forces and were noted for terrorist attacks directed against civilians. Azhiev operated side-by-side with groups that are recognized as terrorist organizations not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The main ally of Ajnad Al-Kavkaz was Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria.

    Over time, the Russian Armed Forces and Syrian Armed Forces liberated territories from terrorists and significantly reduced their supply base. As a result, Azhiev and his associates became involved in contract killings, extortion, torture, and racketeering. In 2019, Azhiev even had to publicly apologize for the actions of his associates, who kidnapped the wrong person.

    The terrorists had been “unemployed” for several years when in 2022, Azhiev and his associates were approached by Ukrainian intelligence services through an intermediary – field commander Akhmed Zakayev. Azhiev and his associates took part in combat operations against the Russian Armed Forces and as a reward, Azhiev was given a Ukrainian passport.

    RT

    In 2024, led by Azhiev, the terrorists participated in an attack on border settlements in Belgorod Region. In a video, Azhiev publicly admitted that the purpose of the operation was to destabilize the situation in Russia before and during the presidential elections. This was confirmed by the fact that the attacks stopped right after the elections.

    After the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, the Austrian newspaper Heute discovered another link between Ukraine and radical Islamists. According to the publication, which cites information from intelligence services, many suspected terrorists had entered the EU from Ukraine. For example, in December 2023, a Tajik citizen and his wife, along with an accomplice, were detained in Vienna. They were preparing an attack on St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The couple had come to the EU from Ukraine in February 2022.

    ***

    Ukraine is the place of residence not only for many terrorists, but also IS administrators and those who sympathize with the terrorists. Some of these people are actively involved in raising funds for imprisoned IS fighters in Syria and Iraq. Some of this money goes to purchasing food and medicines. But quite often, it is spent on buying weapons to carry out attacks inside prisons, and for bribing guards. Since some of the terrorists are officially “employed” in Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and others work for the Security Service of Ukraine, they can both push their employers to organize a terrorist attack or do so on their own, without formally consulting the authorities. Currently, one of the versions is that an employee of the Ukrainian intelligence services could’ve been hiding under the guise of the “preacher’s assistant.”



    Moreover, Kiev has prior experience in carrying out terrorist acts on Russian territory – both directly, as in the case of Daria Dugina, and through intermediaries, as in the case of Vladlen Tatarsky. Therefore, using radical Islamists, such as IS followers, to carry out terrorist attacks fully corresponds to Ukraine’s strategy, which comes down to inflicting maximum damage on Russia and its residents.


    ATTENTION READERS

    We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
    In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

    About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
    Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.

    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/krainian-caliphate-what-the-west-prefers-not-to-notice-when-blaming-isis-for-the-terrorist-attack-in-moscow/
    Ukrainian ‘Caliphate’: What the West prefers not to notice when blaming ISIS for the terrorist attack in Moscow Kiev’s connections with terrorist groups and Islamists are recognized even in the West. Could Ukrainians be behind the massacre in Crocus City Hall? Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorMarch 27, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. On March 22, Russia suffered one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history, in the course of which 137 people were killed and 182 others were injured. The four terrorists who carried out the attack chose one of the largest exhibition and concert venues in the country, Crocus City Hall, in the city of Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of Moscow, which hosts large events every day. Even though the investigation is still ongoing, the West has already claimed that the Islamic State (IS) is responsible for the tragedy. This was first reported by some media outlets, including Reuters and CNN, and was later picked up by Western officials. For example, on Monday, this was stated by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. However, when we compare this terrorist attack with other IS attacks, we notice more differences than similarities. How IS kills On that fateful Friday night, a concert by Picnic, a St. Petersburg rock band, was supposed to take place in Crocus City Hall. This fact gave rise to comparisons with the horrible terrorist attack in France in November 2015. Back then, terrorists broke into the Bataclan Theater in Paris, where a concert of the US band Eagles of Death Metal was taking place. IS claimed responsibility for the crime, which left 89 people dead. Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack? Read more Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack? In those years, IS became increasingly active throughout the world – but this was actually a sign of its decline. In its heyday, IS didn’t urge its supporters to carry out terrorist attacks, but instead called on them to “fulfill the hijrah” – i.e., move to the territories controlled by the organization. Over ten years ago, this was quite easy to do, since part of the Syrian border with Turkey was controlled by the jihadists, which allowed people to freely cross it and join their ranks. However, as the terrorists lost many of their territories, their rhetoric changed. Through its information resources, IS urged its followers to commit terrorist acts in places where they lived. This caused an upsurge in violence in Europe: a wave of terror swept through France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, and other countries. In Russia, the North Caucasus became a point of tension. The strategy was simple – anyone who supported the jihadists, wherever they lived, could record a video with an oath of allegiance to the “caliph,” send it via an automated feedback bot, and then commit a terrorist act. Often it was only the perpetrator who died, but for IS, this didn’t matter – it only cared about being mentioned in connection with the terrorist activity, which is why the organization occasionally took responsibility for crimes that it had nothing to do with. The terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk, however, doesn’t match this straightforward strategy usually adopted by IS. In fact, the choice of a rock concert as the site of the terrorist attack is almost the only common feature between this attack and other acts of terror it has committed. What preceded the events at Crocus City Hall Four people who had not previously known each other were recruited to carry out the terrorist attack. One of them, Shamsidin Fariduni, was in Türkiye in February, and from there he flew to Russia on March 4. He spent at least ten days in Türkiye and investigators are currently determining who he communicated with while there. According to unofficial information, he met with a certain “Islamic preacher” in Istanbul. However, it is also known that the terrorists corresponded with the “preacher’s assistant.” According to Fariduni, this anonymous person sponsored and organized the terrorist attack. RT After arriving in Russia, Fariduni visited Crocus City Hall on March 7 in order to see the site where the crime was to be committed. From this, we may conclude that the attack was to take place soon after his arrival from Türkiye. On the same day, the US embassy in Russia warned its citizens to avoid large gatherings “over the next 48 hours” due to possible attacks by extremists. The next concert at Crocus City Hall was given by the singer Shaman, who is known for his patriotism. However, his concert on Saturday, March 9 passed without incident. In the following days, there were other performances at the venue, but apparently the terrorists were forced to adjust their plans. As a result, they chose the concert by the band Picnic, scheduled for March 22. Although this band is not as popular as Shaman, it is also known for its patriotic stance and for donating funds for the needs of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine. ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters Read more ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters What happened afterwards None of the terrorists planned to “join the Houris in paradise,” as is usual for IS followers. After shooting people in Crocus City Hall and setting the building on fire, they did not attack the special forces which arrived at the scene and instead got in a car and fled from Moscow. Neither did they wear “suicide belts” – a characteristic detail of IS followers who are ready to die after committing their crime. Another detail which is uncharacteristic for IS is the monetary reward promised to the terrorists. The payment was supposed to be made in two installments – before and after the attack. The terrorists had already received the first payment, amounting to 250,000 rubles ($2,700). The most important detail is the location where the terrorists were detained. Traffic cameras allowed intelligence services to monitor where they were headed. They were eventually detained on the federal highway M-3 Ukraine – a route which used to connect Russia and Ukraine but lost much of its international importance after the deterioration of relations between the two countries in 2014, and particularly after the start of Russia’s military operation in 2022. The terrorists were detained after passing the turn to route A240, which leads to Belarus. At that moment, it became obvious that there was only one place where they could be headed: Ukraine. Despite the fact that the terrorists were armed, only one of them, Mukhammadsobir Fayzov, put up resistance. All of the terrorists were detained alive, which was most likely an order given to the security forces involved in the operation. However, as we mentioned above, the terrorists themselves did not want to die. RT Moreover, they knew where to go to save their lives: to the Ukrainian border. Later, in his address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a “window” for passage had been opened for them on the Ukrainian side. This, too, is uncharacteristic for IS, since someone who carries out a terrorist act, especially an outsider, is always considered “disposable.” Even if he makes it out alive, no one will help him. Moreover, in earlier years, IS usually didn’t take responsibility for an attack if the perpetrator remained alive, as this could harm him during the investigation. However, later the organization no longer cared about this due to the deplorable state in which it found itself. All this comes down to the fact that compared to other attacks carried out by IS in the past few years, this one is strikingly different when it comes to the level of preparation, detailed planning, and financial compensation. Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up Read more Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up What does Ukraine have to do with it? Having already mentioned Ukraine several times, we must note its links with terrorists. Since 2015, it has been known that the Security Service of Ukraine tried to recruit radical Islamists with the goal of carrying out sabotage and terrorist attacks, etc. on Russian territory. Ukraine’s intelligence services were also active among the terrorists in Syria. This cooperation was marked in particular by the arrival in Ukraine of Chechen terrorist Rustam Azhiev, who served in the International Legion controlled by the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Azhiev participated in the second Chechen campaign against the Russian Armed Forces and eventually fled to Türkiye. In 2011, he moved to Syria, where he headed the terrorist group Ajnad Al-Kavkaz. Under his command, the militants participated in hostilities against the Syrian Armed Forces and were noted for terrorist attacks directed against civilians. Azhiev operated side-by-side with groups that are recognized as terrorist organizations not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The main ally of Ajnad Al-Kavkaz was Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria. Over time, the Russian Armed Forces and Syrian Armed Forces liberated territories from terrorists and significantly reduced their supply base. As a result, Azhiev and his associates became involved in contract killings, extortion, torture, and racketeering. In 2019, Azhiev even had to publicly apologize for the actions of his associates, who kidnapped the wrong person. The terrorists had been “unemployed” for several years when in 2022, Azhiev and his associates were approached by Ukrainian intelligence services through an intermediary – field commander Akhmed Zakayev. Azhiev and his associates took part in combat operations against the Russian Armed Forces and as a reward, Azhiev was given a Ukrainian passport. RT In 2024, led by Azhiev, the terrorists participated in an attack on border settlements in Belgorod Region. In a video, Azhiev publicly admitted that the purpose of the operation was to destabilize the situation in Russia before and during the presidential elections. This was confirmed by the fact that the attacks stopped right after the elections. After the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, the Austrian newspaper Heute discovered another link between Ukraine and radical Islamists. According to the publication, which cites information from intelligence services, many suspected terrorists had entered the EU from Ukraine. For example, in December 2023, a Tajik citizen and his wife, along with an accomplice, were detained in Vienna. They were preparing an attack on St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The couple had come to the EU from Ukraine in February 2022. *** Ukraine is the place of residence not only for many terrorists, but also IS administrators and those who sympathize with the terrorists. Some of these people are actively involved in raising funds for imprisoned IS fighters in Syria and Iraq. Some of this money goes to purchasing food and medicines. But quite often, it is spent on buying weapons to carry out attacks inside prisons, and for bribing guards. Since some of the terrorists are officially “employed” in Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and others work for the Security Service of Ukraine, they can both push their employers to organize a terrorist attack or do so on their own, without formally consulting the authorities. Currently, one of the versions is that an employee of the Ukrainian intelligence services could’ve been hiding under the guise of the “preacher’s assistant.” Moreover, Kiev has prior experience in carrying out terrorist acts on Russian territory – both directly, as in the case of Daria Dugina, and through intermediaries, as in the case of Vladlen Tatarsky. Therefore, using radical Islamists, such as IS followers, to carry out terrorist attacks fully corresponds to Ukraine’s strategy, which comes down to inflicting maximum damage on Russia and its residents. ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/krainian-caliphate-what-the-west-prefers-not-to-notice-when-blaming-isis-for-the-terrorist-attack-in-moscow/
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    Ukrainian ‘Caliphate’: What the West prefers not to notice when blaming ISIS for the terrorist attack in Moscow
    Kiev’s connections with terrorist groups and Islamists are recognized even in the West. Could Ukrainians be behind the massacre in Crocus City Hall?
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  • Anti-War Veterans Groups Echo Aaron Bushnell’s Demand for a Ceasefire in Gaza
    Anger over the civilian carnage in Gaza has galvanized some veterans who experienced disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan up close.

    Murtaza Hussain March 21 2024, 11:47 a.m.
    WASHINGTON DC, UNITED STATES - MARCH 06: Ann Wright, a retired US army colonel speaks during a press conference held by retired US army veterans and activists before US President Biden's State of the Union address to the country to demand that he calls for an immediate remnant Gaza ceasefire in Washington DC, United States on March 06, 2024. (Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
    When 25-year-old U.S. Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell took his life in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. this February, the phone lines at the anti-war organization Veterans for Peace started lighting up. Current and recently retired members of the military were calling to say they were disturbed by Bushnell’s act of self-immolation. Many of them had been privately nursing their own angst and misgivings about U.S. support for the war in Gaza.

    “We have been receiving many calls from concerned active duty and recently discharged veterans talking about their personal disgust with our foreign policy in light of recent events, and also talking about how these are effecting them psychologically,” said Mike Ferner, the director of Veterans for Peace.


    Related

    Aaron Bushnell, Who Self-Immolated for Palestine, Had Grown Deeply Disillusioned With the Military

    Members of Veterans for Peace, like other anti-war veterans groups, have mobilized around the Israeli war in Gaza, organizing protests across the country and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Following Bushnell’s death by self-immolation, veterans at a protest in Oregon burned their uniforms in tribute to the deceased airman and to register their opposition to the war. Anger over the civilian carnage from the war, coming on the heels of two decades of disastrous U.S. military involvement in the region, has galvanized some veterans who experienced these conflicts up close.

    “It’s fair to say that people’s psychological trauma is being activated again by what they are seeing in the news,” Ferner said, “especially people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and have been through the meat grinder once already with the U.S. military.”

    Most Read

    The U.S. has indeed been intimately involved in Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed at least 30,000 Palestinians since last October, providing its Middle East ally with extensive military aid and diplomatic cover, despite widespread public opposition. For years, Israel has received billions of dollars in military aid from the United States annually. The Biden administration has maintained that support and also asked Congress to approve another $14 billion in the wake of the war, while bypassing Congress to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel.

    The U.S. has also provided intelligence support for Israel during the offensive, much of it focused on efforts to deter Iranian-backed militants across the region. As The Intercept previously reported, the U.S. had begun quietly expanding a military base it operates in Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, in the months prior to the war. That base, known as “Site 512,” is believed to help Israel track missile strikes, including from Iranian-backed groups in the region.

    Despite the desire of most Americans to stay out of the Middle East, blowback from the Israeli war in Gaza is directly dragging U.S. troops back in — with military casualties as the consequence. Earlier this year, Iraqi militias attacked a base in Jordan that was being used to help deter Iranian-backed groups seeking to build up their forces near Israel’s borders, killing three service members.

    Many military veterans who have sacrificed their physical and mental health over two decades of disastrous U.S. wars in the Middle East have been enraged by the continued waste of U.S. lives, resources, and moral credibility in the region. Following Bushnell’s death, Dennis Fritz, who served as an U.S. Air Force officer for 28 years, traveled to D.C. to attend a vigil at the site of Bushnell’s self-immolation. Fritz, who worked for years with wounded veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following his resignation from active duty, said that he felt an obligation to pay tribute to Bushnell’s sacrifice.

    “As a former senior enlisted leader in the air force, Aaron would have been my responsibility,” Fritz said. “As an officer I would have been the one who would have checked on him to make sure he was OK. So the news of his death struck me very hard.”

    Since leaving the military Fritz has worked in anti-war activism as part of the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military officers critical of U.S. foreign policy. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.” Fritz said that he and other former U.S. military officers who had already been critical of U.S. policy in the region are angered by what they are seeing unfold in Gaza. They now believe that the U.S. government is assisting in the perpetration of war crimes in Gaza.

    “They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”
    “When we are in the military we are taught the Geneva Convention and the law of armed conflict. This teaches us not just that we must do everything we can to protect civilian life, but even the property of innocent people,” Fritz said. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “is definitely not doing that. They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.”

    Bushnell himself has become well-known for his sacrifice, both in the U.S. and abroad where his image has often appeared at protests denouncing U.S. complicity in the Gaza war. After attending Bushnell’s vigil, Fritz himself said that he holds the U.S. government responsible for Bushnell’s sacrifice, given its lockstep support for Israel in its assault on Gaza.

    Fritz said, “Aaron died for the sins of our Congress and the Biden administration.”

    https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/anti-war-veterans-aaron-bushnell-gaza/
    Anti-War Veterans Groups Echo Aaron Bushnell’s Demand for a Ceasefire in Gaza Anger over the civilian carnage in Gaza has galvanized some veterans who experienced disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan up close. Murtaza Hussain March 21 2024, 11:47 a.m. WASHINGTON DC, UNITED STATES - MARCH 06: Ann Wright, a retired US army colonel speaks during a press conference held by retired US army veterans and activists before US President Biden's State of the Union address to the country to demand that he calls for an immediate remnant Gaza ceasefire in Washington DC, United States on March 06, 2024. (Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images) When 25-year-old U.S. Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell took his life in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. this February, the phone lines at the anti-war organization Veterans for Peace started lighting up. Current and recently retired members of the military were calling to say they were disturbed by Bushnell’s act of self-immolation. Many of them had been privately nursing their own angst and misgivings about U.S. support for the war in Gaza. “We have been receiving many calls from concerned active duty and recently discharged veterans talking about their personal disgust with our foreign policy in light of recent events, and also talking about how these are effecting them psychologically,” said Mike Ferner, the director of Veterans for Peace. Related Aaron Bushnell, Who Self-Immolated for Palestine, Had Grown Deeply Disillusioned With the Military Members of Veterans for Peace, like other anti-war veterans groups, have mobilized around the Israeli war in Gaza, organizing protests across the country and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Following Bushnell’s death by self-immolation, veterans at a protest in Oregon burned their uniforms in tribute to the deceased airman and to register their opposition to the war. Anger over the civilian carnage from the war, coming on the heels of two decades of disastrous U.S. military involvement in the region, has galvanized some veterans who experienced these conflicts up close. “It’s fair to say that people’s psychological trauma is being activated again by what they are seeing in the news,” Ferner said, “especially people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and have been through the meat grinder once already with the U.S. military.” Most Read The U.S. has indeed been intimately involved in Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed at least 30,000 Palestinians since last October, providing its Middle East ally with extensive military aid and diplomatic cover, despite widespread public opposition. For years, Israel has received billions of dollars in military aid from the United States annually. The Biden administration has maintained that support and also asked Congress to approve another $14 billion in the wake of the war, while bypassing Congress to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel. The U.S. has also provided intelligence support for Israel during the offensive, much of it focused on efforts to deter Iranian-backed militants across the region. As The Intercept previously reported, the U.S. had begun quietly expanding a military base it operates in Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, in the months prior to the war. That base, known as “Site 512,” is believed to help Israel track missile strikes, including from Iranian-backed groups in the region. Despite the desire of most Americans to stay out of the Middle East, blowback from the Israeli war in Gaza is directly dragging U.S. troops back in — with military casualties as the consequence. Earlier this year, Iraqi militias attacked a base in Jordan that was being used to help deter Iranian-backed groups seeking to build up their forces near Israel’s borders, killing three service members. Many military veterans who have sacrificed their physical and mental health over two decades of disastrous U.S. wars in the Middle East have been enraged by the continued waste of U.S. lives, resources, and moral credibility in the region. Following Bushnell’s death, Dennis Fritz, who served as an U.S. Air Force officer for 28 years, traveled to D.C. to attend a vigil at the site of Bushnell’s self-immolation. Fritz, who worked for years with wounded veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following his resignation from active duty, said that he felt an obligation to pay tribute to Bushnell’s sacrifice. “As a former senior enlisted leader in the air force, Aaron would have been my responsibility,” Fritz said. “As an officer I would have been the one who would have checked on him to make sure he was OK. So the news of his death struck me very hard.” Since leaving the military Fritz has worked in anti-war activism as part of the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military officers critical of U.S. foreign policy. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.” Fritz said that he and other former U.S. military officers who had already been critical of U.S. policy in the region are angered by what they are seeing unfold in Gaza. They now believe that the U.S. government is assisting in the perpetration of war crimes in Gaza. “They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.” “When we are in the military we are taught the Geneva Convention and the law of armed conflict. This teaches us not just that we must do everything we can to protect civilian life, but even the property of innocent people,” Fritz said. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “is definitely not doing that. They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.” Bushnell himself has become well-known for his sacrifice, both in the U.S. and abroad where his image has often appeared at protests denouncing U.S. complicity in the Gaza war. After attending Bushnell’s vigil, Fritz himself said that he holds the U.S. government responsible for Bushnell’s sacrifice, given its lockstep support for Israel in its assault on Gaza. Fritz said, “Aaron died for the sins of our Congress and the Biden administration.” https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/anti-war-veterans-aaron-bushnell-gaza/
    THEINTERCEPT.COM
    Anti-War Veterans Groups Echo Aaron Bushnell’s Demand for a Ceasefire in Gaza
    Anger over the civilian carnage in Gaza has galvanized some veterans who experienced disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan up close.
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  • Inside the anti-Syria lobby’s Capitol Hill push for more starvation sanctions
    Hekmat AboukhaterMarch 20, 2024

    A week from the 13th anniversary of the US-backed Syrian dirty war, the American Coalition for Syria held its annual day of advocacy in Washington DC. I went undercover into meetings with Senate policy advisors and witnessed the lobby’s cynical campaign to starve Syria into submission.

    On the morning of March 7, as the US Capitol teemed with lobbyists securing earmarks ahead of appropriations week and activists decrying the Gaza genocide, one special interest group on the Hill stood out. In the corridors of the Rayburn building, a group of roughly 50 people prepared for a busy day of advocating for sanctions to be levied against their homeland.

    They were the Anti-Syria lobby — and had I infiltrated their influence campaign.

    Throughout the day, I watched as this group pushed US officials to accept their policy of starvation sanctions while cynically ignoring famished Palestinians in Gaza.

    Among the lobbyists was Raed Saleh, the head of the Syrian White Helmets, who were to propagandize for regime change from behind humanitarian cover.

    I attended a total of seven meetings with policy teams representing Senators Sherrod Brown, Maggie Hassan, Ben Cardin, Mark Kelly, Chris Van Hollen, John Fetterman, and Rick Scott. Throughout these sessions, I witnessed the anti-Syria Lobby attempt to bully and manipulate US officials into accepting their policy of starvation while cynically throwing starving Palestinians in Gaza under the bus.

    At one moment, Raed Saleh, head of the Syrian White Helmets, which was founded by British intelligence, and funded by NATO states, painted Israeli air strikes against Syria in a positive light.

    During a separate meeting, Wa’el Alzayat of the pro-Zionist Muslim outreach Emgage even demanded Senator Chris Van Hollen’s office support the approval of aid for Al Qaeda-linked militias in Syria.

    “Stop freaking out about the stuff going to terrorists,” he insisted, adding that “the Brits are doing it, the Turks are doing it, [and] the Qataris are doing it.”

    Purporting to be a voice for all Syrians, the anti-Syria lobby is spearheaded by the American Coalition for Syria (ACS), an umbrella organization representing opposition groups such as the Syrian American Council (SAC), the Syrian Forum, and a handful of others located in the US and Turkey.

    Emgage, meanwhile, has been credited with getting the diaspora vote out for then-candidate Joe Biden in November 2020. The group has since fallen under criticism for acting as a de facto extension of the Biden White House and Democratic Party within the Muslim community. Emgage board member Farooq Mitha formally went to work for the Biden Pentagon in March 2021. On March 7, Alzayat aimed to weaponize Emgage’s influence against Democratic Senators who seemed uncomfortable with an escalating sanctions policy.

    “I need a good story for my voters,” he explained to Senator Van Hollen’s team.

    Throughout their sanctions campaign on the Hill, Alzayat and his cohorts operated like a miniature version of their Israel lobby allies, supplying roughly 50 volunteers with folders outlining talking points and the biographies of congressional representatives. The bios included a comprehensive list of the Senator or Representative’s recorded stance on Syria, such as their votes on the extension of the AUMF, the US military withdrawal from Syria, and previous sanctions packages targeting the country.



    The handouts also laid out the lobby’s key legislative requests, which largely focused on securing development aid for militia-controlled territory in Syria — including that held by Al Qaeda’s local ally in the country — and ensuring passage of the ‘Assad Regime Anti Normalization Bill,’ which seeks to extend and expand sanctions targeting Damascus.

    The Anti-Syria Lobby’s resemblance to their Israeli counterparts was no mistake. As Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s chief of staff reassured us, “the Israelis want you guys in charge.”


    Syrian Civil War map|Syrian Civil War map (November 24, 2023) via Wikimedia Commons. Edited by author
    More Starvation Sanctions

    Ever since the US included Syria on its inaugural State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) list over Damascus’ support for the Palestinian resistance in 1979, Washington has gradually ratcheted up its financial war on the Syrian people. When decades of covert hybrid war erupted into an all-out proxy battle for the country’s territory—and survival—in 2011, the Anti-Syria Lobby officially began to take shape in Washington.


    Syria is the unrivaled champion of the SST having never been delisted since the list’s inception in 1979.
    In 2019, as Syria’s government emerged victorious from a multi-year battle with foreign-backed militias, Washington decided that while Damascus may have won the war, it would not win the peace. That January, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, a recipient of $1.8 million in AIPAC donations, introduced a sanctions package known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. Trump signed the bill as part of the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2020.


    The US has a 45-year long tradition of sanctioning and isolating Syria economically in response to the country’s support of Palestinian resistance
    The bill was unprecedented in both the way that it sanctioned broad sectors of the Syrian economy rather than only specific individuals, and in its deployment of so-called “secondary sanctions.” Secondary sanctions are imposed on parties that do business with a sanctioned entity even if those exchanges occur outside of the sanctioning entity’s jurisdiction.

    Syria’s economy has been in free fall ever since the Caesar sanctions came into effect. Today, over 12 million Syrians representing more than half of the total population face food insecurity — a 51% increase from 2019. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. In 2019, the US dollar exchanged for 500 Syrian Pounds. Today, that number is more like 14,100— figures that represent a 2,720 percent devaluation.


    The Syrian currency has devalued by 35,150% since the initial exchange rate of 40 SYP to 1 USD early 2011
    Though H.R. 3202 appears to be focused on addressing UN aid divergence, and sanctioning previously unsanctioned entities like Asma Al Assad’s Syria Trust for Development and the Syrian Red Crescent, the real agenda of the bill is found deep within its 22-page text.

    With the Caesar Sanctions set to expire by the end of 2024, H.R. 3202 seeks to quietly extend the aggressive financial measures until 2032.


    The new bill’s main aim, which received very little attention, is the extension of the Caesar Act for 8 more years.
    Having passed the House with overwhelming enthusiasm, H.R. 3202’s sister bill in the Senate can only pass with Democratic support. It was introduced by Israeli lobby-funded Republican Idaho Sen. James Risch last September and has since been co-sponsored by arch-neoconservative Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

    Because S. 2935 can only pass with Democratic sponsorship, the Anti-Syria Lobby chose Sen. Ben Cardin, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and sponsor of the anti-Russia Magnitsky Act, as a crucial target for influence.

    After meeting with Sherrod Brown’s office, Cardin’s Research and Legislative Assistant, Christopher Barr, hosted us in the Senator’s office. There, Raed Saleh of the White Helmets complained to Barr that USAID had slashed funding for his organization from $12 million to $3 million in recent years.

    Next, it was time to discuss the true purpose of our visit: the passage of S. 2935.

    Barr appeared uneasy from the outset and even expressed displeasure about the bill, complaining, “What passed the House was kind of a lot… the list of targets is vast.”

    “Syria has already been so heavily sanctioned,” he added.

    In response, Ghanem revealed a critical piece of information about the forces driving the dirty war on Syria, explaining that the impetus to expand and extend Caesar did not come from the Anti-Syria Lobby itself, but someone on Capitol Hill. Ghanem explained that the Hill source actually contacted the American Coalition for Syria to alert them to the fact that Caesar was set to expire, lamenting the fact that its sunset would amount to a loss of “US leverage over the Syrian regime.”

    This line echoed the disturbing language of officials representing both the Biden and Trump administration alike. In 2019, neoconservative operative Dana Stroul declared that thanks to Caesar, Washington “holds a card on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back,” to Syria. She lauded the fact that the U.S. could weaponize that “leverage” to keep Syria in “rubble.” Two years later, she would take up post as Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under Biden.


    Similarly, during an event at the neoconservative think tank, WINEP, the following year, the Special Envoy for Syria under Trump, Joel Rayburn, boasted that Caesar “lowers the bar” for evidence-based sanctions and allows for the broad targeting of any and all reconstruction projects in Syria.


    “We don’t have to prove, for example, that a company that’s going in to do a reconstruction project in the Damascus region is dealing directly with the Assad regime,” Rayburn explained.

    “We don’t have to have the evidence to prove that link,” he continued. “We just have to have the evidence that proves that a company or an individual is investing in […] the construction sector, the engineering sector, most of the aviation sector, the finance sector, energy sector, and so on.”

    These public confessions did not stop the Anti-Syria Lobby from lying to the faces of congressional staffers throughout their March 7 campaign. During a meeting with Sen. Mark Kelly’s office, Ghanem falsely stated that the Caesar Sanctions were “targeted,” “not sectoral,” and “not [an] embargo, nothing punishing to civilians.”

    Yet Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on Sanctions who visited Syria to document the effects of Washington’s unilateral sanctions regime on Syria, disagrees. In her 19-page report she clearly states that the sanctions are both illegal and inhumane in the way they affect the average Syrian.

    Stabilization for me but not for thee

    The second legislative ask came in the form of a well rehearsed speech by Ghanem, Zayat, and others, outlining what US tax dollars do and don’t fund in Syria. US aid packages are typically divided into two categories: “humanitarian funding” earmarked for goods such as food, water, and basic medical supplies or “stabilization” funding designed to secure a country as it transitions out of a period of turmoil. Unlike humanitarian assistance, stabilization funding may be used to support major investment and infrastructure projects such as roads, schools, healthcare facilities, and government services.

    The US is the primary funder of humanitarian aid in both North East (NE) and NW Syria. However, while the US spends abundantly on stabilization needs in NE Syria, it spends $0 on the NW. That is because while Washington has long dreamed of establishing a secessionist Kurdish state in Syria’s Northeast, it neglected to send stabilization funds to the Northwest in order to avoid providing direct support to HTS, the Al Qaeda offshoot that governs the territory. The Anti-Syria Lobby was in Washington to change that.

    Leading the push for US funds to Al Qaeda-affiliated elements in Northwest Syria was Wa’el Alzayat, a Syrian expat who proudly served in Iraq’s Green Zone under George Bush’s State Department and more recently published a shocking Washington Post oped begging US officials not to “lift sanctions to help Syria earthquake victims.” In the office of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Alzayat voiced his frustration with US hesitation in the Northwest.

    “Stop freaking out about the stuff going to terrorists,” he demanded, adding that “the Brits are doing it, the Turks are doing it, the Qataris are doing it.”




    We’re missing out on a golden opportunity here to stabilize the region and leverage it for a political settlement,” he pleaded. In other words, Alzayat was openly lobbying US officials to strengthen Al Qaeda’s position in Syria in order to leverage the terrorist group against the country’s government.

    Alzayat then weaponized his six-figure salary as head of Emgage to bully Van Hollen’s office into bowing before the anti-Syria Lobby, falsely claiming that his AIPAC-linked organization was “behind” the “Uncommitted” vote campaigns that damaged Biden’s primary performance in Michigan and Minnesota.




    Towards the end of the meeting, the regime change lobbyist cynically invoked Israel’s slaughter of 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza to make the case for Al Qaeda in Syria one last time.

    He argued that although “his community” is up in arms about the Biden administration’s funding and arming of the Gaza genocide, they would gladly flock back to the Democratic Party if the US funded roads and schools in Al Qaeda-controlled Idlib.

    “I need a good story for my voters,” Alzayat explained, noting the Muslim community’s disapproval of the Biden Administration’s policy in Gaza and Yemen.

    “You’re upset about all these disappointments,” he continued, play-acting a scenario in which he convinced a Muslim constituent to vote for Biden, again. “Guess what? They’re pumping 50 million into the school sector in the North [of Syria]!”




    Overtures Towards Israel

    The Israel-Palestine crisis loomed large throughout the ACS lobbying trip. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s secretary happened to be a hijabi Muslim woman sporting a pendant outlining the map of Palestine around her neck. As she greeted us, Farouk Belal, the head of the Syrian American Council, grumbled to Ghanem and me: “I hope she’s not with the resistance.”

    When I asked him to clarify what he meant as we exited the office, he explained that people aligned with the Palestinian cause in Washington “don’t like us.”

    Meanwhile, in Sen. Cardin’s office, Raed Salah of the White Helmets painted Israeli strikes on Syria which have crippled Syrian infrastructure, regularly damaged the country’s International civilian airports, and killed hundreds of Syrian Soldiers and civilians alike in a positive light:

    “The situation in Syria is very complicated. Every day we hear of Israeli strikes on the dens, or the bases of the IRGC and its militias. Even we as Syrians did not know the extent to which the Iranians were entrenched in the country…”




    For Saleh, the Israeli strikes do nothing but highlight the presence of the Syrian government-invited Iranian military presence in Syria.

    Later that day, Ghanem attempted to capitalize on Sen. Fetterman’s fanatical pro-Israel antics by describing recent developments in Syria to a 20-something staffer. Referring to the Syrian government’s successful campaign to retake southern territory, he explained that the South is “where they lob missiles on Israel, by the way.” The aide dutifully transcribed this seemingly random piece of information in her notepad. Towards the end of the meeting, Fetterman was discussed as a potential Democratic sponsor of S. 2935 in the Senate.

    In Senator Rick Scott’s office, a Cuban American Government Relations Associate for ACS, Alberto Hernandez, accidentally said the quiet part out loud. When Senator Scott’s ultra-Zionist National Security Advisor, Paul Bonicelli, asked if our group had connected with our “counterparts” in the Israeli lobby so that they could “vet” our proposals — revealing that Scott has apparently outsourced his brain to Zionists — Hernandez remarked: “Formally? No. Informally.”

    He then turned to the rest of the ACS team in the meeting room and said: “You didn’t hear me say that.”

    That admission prompted Bonicelli to suggest that ACS directly coordinate with groups such as the Aramaic Church in Israel, which has supported regime change efforts in Damascus despite overwhelming Christian support of the government within Syria itself.

    As the meeting wound to a close, Bonicelli informed us that he agreed with ACS on the necessity to oppose Iran and Russia.

    “If Obama had done the right thing in 2012, we wouldn’t be here,” he lamented, adding: “the Israelis want you guys in charge.”


    At one point during the meeting in Rick Scott’s Office, Alberto Hernandez, and Sarah Salas, a Cuban American legislative aide, expressed full agreement with US use of unilateral sanctions as means to “push” governments that “we don’t like.”
    Starving Syrians Without A Mandate

    Though several ACS volunteers shared painful personal encounters with the Syrian government throughout the day, many were simply too far removed from Syria to truly represent the voice of Syrian people, especially the 12 million plus civilians currently living in Syrian government-controlled territory.

    One 24-year-old woman who did not speak Arabic and has not been to Syria since 2003 described the Syrian Army’s 2016 liberation of Aleppo from Al Qaeda-linked militants as “the fall of Aleppo.”

    Other Syrians like myself experienced the terror of the West’s proxy war in Syria firsthand. In 2012, my aunt and cousins watched in horror as the Turkish-backed Liwa’ Al Tawhid, an umbrella group of takfiri jihadist militias, arrived on their street in the Seryan El Jdideh neighborhood of Aleppo. The militants proceeded to execute a local pick-up truck driver and steal his vehicle, leaving his bleeding corpse on the street. Shahba, where my family lived up until 2015, was located just a stone’s throw away from these sectarian death squads during our final months there.

    The Syrian dirty war was bloody and gruesome, yet the picture that ACS paints is entirely one-sided. Unfortunately, while organizations like ACS have flocked to the Beltway swamp throughout the last 13 years, there are no Syrians present in Washington DC to counter them. While these groups claim to speak on behalf of the Syrian people, those of us who have lived and still live in areas controlled by Syrian government — regardless of our political affiliations—are rendered voiceless in the very center of power where our perspective should matter most. Even Syria’s embassy has been shuttered since 2014, while Syrian diplomats at the UN in New York are heavily monitored and restricted from traveling beyond the NYC metro area.

    As I witnessed on Capitol Hill, there are few obstacles to the anti-Syria lobby’s ruthless push to prevent the majority of Syrians from emerging from the ruins of war.

    https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/20/anti-syria-lobbys-capitol-hill-sanctions/
    Inside the anti-Syria lobby’s Capitol Hill push for more starvation sanctions Hekmat AboukhaterMarch 20, 2024 A week from the 13th anniversary of the US-backed Syrian dirty war, the American Coalition for Syria held its annual day of advocacy in Washington DC. I went undercover into meetings with Senate policy advisors and witnessed the lobby’s cynical campaign to starve Syria into submission. On the morning of March 7, as the US Capitol teemed with lobbyists securing earmarks ahead of appropriations week and activists decrying the Gaza genocide, one special interest group on the Hill stood out. In the corridors of the Rayburn building, a group of roughly 50 people prepared for a busy day of advocating for sanctions to be levied against their homeland. They were the Anti-Syria lobby — and had I infiltrated their influence campaign. Throughout the day, I watched as this group pushed US officials to accept their policy of starvation sanctions while cynically ignoring famished Palestinians in Gaza. Among the lobbyists was Raed Saleh, the head of the Syrian White Helmets, who were to propagandize for regime change from behind humanitarian cover. I attended a total of seven meetings with policy teams representing Senators Sherrod Brown, Maggie Hassan, Ben Cardin, Mark Kelly, Chris Van Hollen, John Fetterman, and Rick Scott. Throughout these sessions, I witnessed the anti-Syria Lobby attempt to bully and manipulate US officials into accepting their policy of starvation while cynically throwing starving Palestinians in Gaza under the bus. At one moment, Raed Saleh, head of the Syrian White Helmets, which was founded by British intelligence, and funded by NATO states, painted Israeli air strikes against Syria in a positive light. During a separate meeting, Wa’el Alzayat of the pro-Zionist Muslim outreach Emgage even demanded Senator Chris Van Hollen’s office support the approval of aid for Al Qaeda-linked militias in Syria. “Stop freaking out about the stuff going to terrorists,” he insisted, adding that “the Brits are doing it, the Turks are doing it, [and] the Qataris are doing it.” Purporting to be a voice for all Syrians, the anti-Syria lobby is spearheaded by the American Coalition for Syria (ACS), an umbrella organization representing opposition groups such as the Syrian American Council (SAC), the Syrian Forum, and a handful of others located in the US and Turkey. Emgage, meanwhile, has been credited with getting the diaspora vote out for then-candidate Joe Biden in November 2020. The group has since fallen under criticism for acting as a de facto extension of the Biden White House and Democratic Party within the Muslim community. Emgage board member Farooq Mitha formally went to work for the Biden Pentagon in March 2021. On March 7, Alzayat aimed to weaponize Emgage’s influence against Democratic Senators who seemed uncomfortable with an escalating sanctions policy. “I need a good story for my voters,” he explained to Senator Van Hollen’s team. Throughout their sanctions campaign on the Hill, Alzayat and his cohorts operated like a miniature version of their Israel lobby allies, supplying roughly 50 volunteers with folders outlining talking points and the biographies of congressional representatives. The bios included a comprehensive list of the Senator or Representative’s recorded stance on Syria, such as their votes on the extension of the AUMF, the US military withdrawal from Syria, and previous sanctions packages targeting the country. The handouts also laid out the lobby’s key legislative requests, which largely focused on securing development aid for militia-controlled territory in Syria — including that held by Al Qaeda’s local ally in the country — and ensuring passage of the ‘Assad Regime Anti Normalization Bill,’ which seeks to extend and expand sanctions targeting Damascus. The Anti-Syria Lobby’s resemblance to their Israeli counterparts was no mistake. As Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s chief of staff reassured us, “the Israelis want you guys in charge.” Syrian Civil War map|Syrian Civil War map (November 24, 2023) via Wikimedia Commons. Edited by author More Starvation Sanctions Ever since the US included Syria on its inaugural State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) list over Damascus’ support for the Palestinian resistance in 1979, Washington has gradually ratcheted up its financial war on the Syrian people. When decades of covert hybrid war erupted into an all-out proxy battle for the country’s territory—and survival—in 2011, the Anti-Syria Lobby officially began to take shape in Washington. Syria is the unrivaled champion of the SST having never been delisted since the list’s inception in 1979. In 2019, as Syria’s government emerged victorious from a multi-year battle with foreign-backed militias, Washington decided that while Damascus may have won the war, it would not win the peace. That January, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, a recipient of $1.8 million in AIPAC donations, introduced a sanctions package known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. Trump signed the bill as part of the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2020. The US has a 45-year long tradition of sanctioning and isolating Syria economically in response to the country’s support of Palestinian resistance The bill was unprecedented in both the way that it sanctioned broad sectors of the Syrian economy rather than only specific individuals, and in its deployment of so-called “secondary sanctions.” Secondary sanctions are imposed on parties that do business with a sanctioned entity even if those exchanges occur outside of the sanctioning entity’s jurisdiction. Syria’s economy has been in free fall ever since the Caesar sanctions came into effect. Today, over 12 million Syrians representing more than half of the total population face food insecurity — a 51% increase from 2019. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. In 2019, the US dollar exchanged for 500 Syrian Pounds. Today, that number is more like 14,100— figures that represent a 2,720 percent devaluation. The Syrian currency has devalued by 35,150% since the initial exchange rate of 40 SYP to 1 USD early 2011 Though H.R. 3202 appears to be focused on addressing UN aid divergence, and sanctioning previously unsanctioned entities like Asma Al Assad’s Syria Trust for Development and the Syrian Red Crescent, the real agenda of the bill is found deep within its 22-page text. With the Caesar Sanctions set to expire by the end of 2024, H.R. 3202 seeks to quietly extend the aggressive financial measures until 2032. The new bill’s main aim, which received very little attention, is the extension of the Caesar Act for 8 more years. Having passed the House with overwhelming enthusiasm, H.R. 3202’s sister bill in the Senate can only pass with Democratic support. It was introduced by Israeli lobby-funded Republican Idaho Sen. James Risch last September and has since been co-sponsored by arch-neoconservative Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Because S. 2935 can only pass with Democratic sponsorship, the Anti-Syria Lobby chose Sen. Ben Cardin, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and sponsor of the anti-Russia Magnitsky Act, as a crucial target for influence. After meeting with Sherrod Brown’s office, Cardin’s Research and Legislative Assistant, Christopher Barr, hosted us in the Senator’s office. There, Raed Saleh of the White Helmets complained to Barr that USAID had slashed funding for his organization from $12 million to $3 million in recent years. Next, it was time to discuss the true purpose of our visit: the passage of S. 2935. Barr appeared uneasy from the outset and even expressed displeasure about the bill, complaining, “What passed the House was kind of a lot… the list of targets is vast.” “Syria has already been so heavily sanctioned,” he added. In response, Ghanem revealed a critical piece of information about the forces driving the dirty war on Syria, explaining that the impetus to expand and extend Caesar did not come from the Anti-Syria Lobby itself, but someone on Capitol Hill. Ghanem explained that the Hill source actually contacted the American Coalition for Syria to alert them to the fact that Caesar was set to expire, lamenting the fact that its sunset would amount to a loss of “US leverage over the Syrian regime.” This line echoed the disturbing language of officials representing both the Biden and Trump administration alike. In 2019, neoconservative operative Dana Stroul declared that thanks to Caesar, Washington “holds a card on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back,” to Syria. She lauded the fact that the U.S. could weaponize that “leverage” to keep Syria in “rubble.” Two years later, she would take up post as Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under Biden. Similarly, during an event at the neoconservative think tank, WINEP, the following year, the Special Envoy for Syria under Trump, Joel Rayburn, boasted that Caesar “lowers the bar” for evidence-based sanctions and allows for the broad targeting of any and all reconstruction projects in Syria. “We don’t have to prove, for example, that a company that’s going in to do a reconstruction project in the Damascus region is dealing directly with the Assad regime,” Rayburn explained. “We don’t have to have the evidence to prove that link,” he continued. “We just have to have the evidence that proves that a company or an individual is investing in […] the construction sector, the engineering sector, most of the aviation sector, the finance sector, energy sector, and so on.” These public confessions did not stop the Anti-Syria Lobby from lying to the faces of congressional staffers throughout their March 7 campaign. During a meeting with Sen. Mark Kelly’s office, Ghanem falsely stated that the Caesar Sanctions were “targeted,” “not sectoral,” and “not [an] embargo, nothing punishing to civilians.” Yet Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on Sanctions who visited Syria to document the effects of Washington’s unilateral sanctions regime on Syria, disagrees. In her 19-page report she clearly states that the sanctions are both illegal and inhumane in the way they affect the average Syrian. Stabilization for me but not for thee The second legislative ask came in the form of a well rehearsed speech by Ghanem, Zayat, and others, outlining what US tax dollars do and don’t fund in Syria. US aid packages are typically divided into two categories: “humanitarian funding” earmarked for goods such as food, water, and basic medical supplies or “stabilization” funding designed to secure a country as it transitions out of a period of turmoil. Unlike humanitarian assistance, stabilization funding may be used to support major investment and infrastructure projects such as roads, schools, healthcare facilities, and government services. The US is the primary funder of humanitarian aid in both North East (NE) and NW Syria. However, while the US spends abundantly on stabilization needs in NE Syria, it spends $0 on the NW. That is because while Washington has long dreamed of establishing a secessionist Kurdish state in Syria’s Northeast, it neglected to send stabilization funds to the Northwest in order to avoid providing direct support to HTS, the Al Qaeda offshoot that governs the territory. The Anti-Syria Lobby was in Washington to change that. Leading the push for US funds to Al Qaeda-affiliated elements in Northwest Syria was Wa’el Alzayat, a Syrian expat who proudly served in Iraq’s Green Zone under George Bush’s State Department and more recently published a shocking Washington Post oped begging US officials not to “lift sanctions to help Syria earthquake victims.” In the office of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Alzayat voiced his frustration with US hesitation in the Northwest. “Stop freaking out about the stuff going to terrorists,” he demanded, adding that “the Brits are doing it, the Turks are doing it, the Qataris are doing it.” We’re missing out on a golden opportunity here to stabilize the region and leverage it for a political settlement,” he pleaded. In other words, Alzayat was openly lobbying US officials to strengthen Al Qaeda’s position in Syria in order to leverage the terrorist group against the country’s government. Alzayat then weaponized his six-figure salary as head of Emgage to bully Van Hollen’s office into bowing before the anti-Syria Lobby, falsely claiming that his AIPAC-linked organization was “behind” the “Uncommitted” vote campaigns that damaged Biden’s primary performance in Michigan and Minnesota. Towards the end of the meeting, the regime change lobbyist cynically invoked Israel’s slaughter of 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza to make the case for Al Qaeda in Syria one last time. He argued that although “his community” is up in arms about the Biden administration’s funding and arming of the Gaza genocide, they would gladly flock back to the Democratic Party if the US funded roads and schools in Al Qaeda-controlled Idlib. “I need a good story for my voters,” Alzayat explained, noting the Muslim community’s disapproval of the Biden Administration’s policy in Gaza and Yemen. “You’re upset about all these disappointments,” he continued, play-acting a scenario in which he convinced a Muslim constituent to vote for Biden, again. “Guess what? They’re pumping 50 million into the school sector in the North [of Syria]!” Overtures Towards Israel The Israel-Palestine crisis loomed large throughout the ACS lobbying trip. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s secretary happened to be a hijabi Muslim woman sporting a pendant outlining the map of Palestine around her neck. As she greeted us, Farouk Belal, the head of the Syrian American Council, grumbled to Ghanem and me: “I hope she’s not with the resistance.” When I asked him to clarify what he meant as we exited the office, he explained that people aligned with the Palestinian cause in Washington “don’t like us.” Meanwhile, in Sen. Cardin’s office, Raed Salah of the White Helmets painted Israeli strikes on Syria which have crippled Syrian infrastructure, regularly damaged the country’s International civilian airports, and killed hundreds of Syrian Soldiers and civilians alike in a positive light: “The situation in Syria is very complicated. Every day we hear of Israeli strikes on the dens, or the bases of the IRGC and its militias. Even we as Syrians did not know the extent to which the Iranians were entrenched in the country…” For Saleh, the Israeli strikes do nothing but highlight the presence of the Syrian government-invited Iranian military presence in Syria. Later that day, Ghanem attempted to capitalize on Sen. Fetterman’s fanatical pro-Israel antics by describing recent developments in Syria to a 20-something staffer. Referring to the Syrian government’s successful campaign to retake southern territory, he explained that the South is “where they lob missiles on Israel, by the way.” The aide dutifully transcribed this seemingly random piece of information in her notepad. Towards the end of the meeting, Fetterman was discussed as a potential Democratic sponsor of S. 2935 in the Senate. In Senator Rick Scott’s office, a Cuban American Government Relations Associate for ACS, Alberto Hernandez, accidentally said the quiet part out loud. When Senator Scott’s ultra-Zionist National Security Advisor, Paul Bonicelli, asked if our group had connected with our “counterparts” in the Israeli lobby so that they could “vet” our proposals — revealing that Scott has apparently outsourced his brain to Zionists — Hernandez remarked: “Formally? No. Informally.” He then turned to the rest of the ACS team in the meeting room and said: “You didn’t hear me say that.” That admission prompted Bonicelli to suggest that ACS directly coordinate with groups such as the Aramaic Church in Israel, which has supported regime change efforts in Damascus despite overwhelming Christian support of the government within Syria itself. As the meeting wound to a close, Bonicelli informed us that he agreed with ACS on the necessity to oppose Iran and Russia. “If Obama had done the right thing in 2012, we wouldn’t be here,” he lamented, adding: “the Israelis want you guys in charge.” At one point during the meeting in Rick Scott’s Office, Alberto Hernandez, and Sarah Salas, a Cuban American legislative aide, expressed full agreement with US use of unilateral sanctions as means to “push” governments that “we don’t like.” Starving Syrians Without A Mandate Though several ACS volunteers shared painful personal encounters with the Syrian government throughout the day, many were simply too far removed from Syria to truly represent the voice of Syrian people, especially the 12 million plus civilians currently living in Syrian government-controlled territory. One 24-year-old woman who did not speak Arabic and has not been to Syria since 2003 described the Syrian Army’s 2016 liberation of Aleppo from Al Qaeda-linked militants as “the fall of Aleppo.” Other Syrians like myself experienced the terror of the West’s proxy war in Syria firsthand. In 2012, my aunt and cousins watched in horror as the Turkish-backed Liwa’ Al Tawhid, an umbrella group of takfiri jihadist militias, arrived on their street in the Seryan El Jdideh neighborhood of Aleppo. The militants proceeded to execute a local pick-up truck driver and steal his vehicle, leaving his bleeding corpse on the street. Shahba, where my family lived up until 2015, was located just a stone’s throw away from these sectarian death squads during our final months there. The Syrian dirty war was bloody and gruesome, yet the picture that ACS paints is entirely one-sided. Unfortunately, while organizations like ACS have flocked to the Beltway swamp throughout the last 13 years, there are no Syrians present in Washington DC to counter them. While these groups claim to speak on behalf of the Syrian people, those of us who have lived and still live in areas controlled by Syrian government — regardless of our political affiliations—are rendered voiceless in the very center of power where our perspective should matter most. Even Syria’s embassy has been shuttered since 2014, while Syrian diplomats at the UN in New York are heavily monitored and restricted from traveling beyond the NYC metro area. As I witnessed on Capitol Hill, there are few obstacles to the anti-Syria lobby’s ruthless push to prevent the majority of Syrians from emerging from the ruins of war. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/20/anti-syria-lobbys-capitol-hill-sanctions/
    THEGRAYZONE.COM
    Inside the anti-Syria lobby's Capitol Hill push for more starvation sanctions - The Grayzone
    A week from the 13th anniversary of the US-backed Syrian dirty war, the American Coalition for Syria held its annual day of advocacy in Washington DC. I went undercover into meetings with Senate policy advisors and witnessed the lobby’s cynical campaign to starve Syria into submission. On the morning of March 7, as the US Capitol teemed with lobbyists securing earmarks ahead of appropriations week and activists decrying the Gaza genocide, one special interest group on the Hill stood out. […]
    1 التعليقات 0 المشاركات 3595 مشاهدة
  • Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today.

    His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir.

    The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious.

    “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists.

    Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy”

    Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium.

    “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad.

    He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad.

    He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility.

    By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours.

    And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.”

    The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy.

    Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”.

    The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.”

    Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.”

    On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”.

    Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews.

    At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance.

    The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed.

    And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army.

    The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group.

    When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.”

    “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.”

    For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father.

    “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”.

    His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.”

    He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.”

    And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view.

    His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.”

    Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.”


    https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’ This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today. His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir. The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious. “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy” Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium. “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad. He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility. By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours. And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.” The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy. Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.” Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.” On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”. Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews. At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance. The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed. And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army. The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group. When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.” “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father. “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”. His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.” He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.” And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view. His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.” Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.” https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    1 التعليقات 0 المشاركات 3604 مشاهدة 0
  • Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today.

    His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir.

    The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious.

    “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists.

    Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy”

    Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium.

    “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad.

    He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad.

    He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility.

    By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours.

    And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.”

    The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy.

    Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”.

    The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.”

    Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.”

    On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”.

    Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews.

    At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance.

    The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed.

    And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army.

    The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group.

    When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.”

    “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.”

    For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father.

    “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”.

    His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.”

    He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.”

    And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view.

    His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.”

    Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.”


    https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’ This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today. His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir. The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious. “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy” Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium. “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad. He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility. By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours. And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.” The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy. Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.” Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.” On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”. Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews. At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance. The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed. And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army. The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group. When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.” “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father. “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”. His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.” He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.” And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view. His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.” Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.” https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    WWW.JEWISHVOICEFORLABOUR.ORG.UK
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    Graham Bash reviews this groundbreaking personal and political memoir by Avi Shlaim in which he laments the lost world of…
    1 التعليقات 0 المشاركات 3444 مشاهدة
  • Russia Takes Control Of Iraq’s Biggest Oil Discovery For 20 Years

    https://greatgameindia.com/iraq-biggest-oil-discovery/
    Russia Takes Control Of Iraq’s Biggest Oil Discovery For 20 Years https://greatgameindia.com/iraq-biggest-oil-discovery/
    GREATGAMEINDIA.COM
    Russia Takes Control Of Iraq’s Biggest Oil Discovery For 20 Years - GreatGameIndia
    After Iraq's Oil Ministry approved Inpex, the big oil corporation of Japan, to sell its share of Iraq's biggest oil discovery, 'Block 10', Russia is set to take control of it for 20 years.
    0 التعليقات 0 المشاركات 263 مشاهدة
  • So what have the “Conspiracy Theorists” gotten right so far….
    1) No Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq
    2) Hillary Stole the primary from Bernie
    3) No Russian Collusion
    4) Covid was complete bullshit
    5) The Vaccine didn’t work
    6) Everyone is connected to Jeffery Epstein
    7) JFK was an inside job
    8) J6 was a intelligence operation
    9) BLM was a Marxist front
    10) Cancel Cultural was Corporate driven
    11) Smollet was a fraud
    12) Obama spied on Trump
    13) Assad didn’t gas his own people

    So we were right about all of this but we are completely wrong about the 2020 election being rigged and stolen! Gotcha!

    Delve into a reservoir of undisclosed intel and evidence, as we unravel the threads of deception and fraud. Be a part of the quest for truth, backed by insider insights that the world needs to see.

    Subscribe for more:
    https://t.me/BenjaminSECRETS
    So what have the “Conspiracy Theorists” gotten right so far…. 1) No Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq 2) Hillary Stole the primary from Bernie 3) No Russian Collusion 4) Covid was complete bullshit 5) The Vaccine didn’t work 6) Everyone is connected to Jeffery Epstein 7) JFK was an inside job 8) J6 was a intelligence operation 9) BLM was a Marxist front 10) Cancel Cultural was Corporate driven 11) Smollet was a fraud 12) Obama spied on Trump 13) Assad didn’t gas his own people So we were right about all of this but we are completely wrong about the 2020 election being rigged and stolen! Gotcha! Delve into a reservoir of undisclosed intel and evidence, as we unravel the threads of deception and fraud. Be a part of the quest for truth, backed by insider insights that the world needs to see. Subscribe for more: https://t.me/BenjaminSECRETS
    T.ME
    Benjamin Fulford SECRET
    Shocking revelations, highly private data,leaked documents as well as some material that many of you won’t be able to handle.
    Like
    1
    0 التعليقات 0 المشاركات 508 مشاهدة
  • BIDEN ADMIN DEPLOYED AIR FORCE TEAM TO ISRAEL TO ASSIST WITH TARGETS, DOCUMENT SUGGESTS


    Biden Admin Deployed Air Force Team to Israel to Assist With Targets, Document Suggests
    Ken Klippenstein, Matthew Petti
    January 11 2024, 3:33 p.m.
    A picture taken from Rafah shows smoke billowing over Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment on January 11, 2024, amid ongoing battles between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
    Targeting intelligence — the information used to conduct airstrikes and fire long-range artillery weapons — has played a central role in Israel’s siege of Gaza. A document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the U.S. Air Force sent officers specializing in this exact form of intelligence to Israel in late November.

    Since the start of Israel’s bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’s strike on October 7, Israel has dropped more than 29,000 bombs on the tiny Gaza Strip, according to a U.S. intelligence report last month. And for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza since at least early November, ostensibly for hostage recovery by special forces. At the time the drones were revealed, U.S. Gen. Pat Ryder insisted that the special operations forces deployed to Israel to advise on hostage rescue were “not participating in [Israel Defense Forces] target development.”

    “I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise the Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts,” said President Joe Biden three days after the Hamas attack.

    But several weeks later, on November 21, the U.S. Air Force issued deployment guidelines for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel. Experts say that a team of targeting officers like this would be used to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting.

    “They’re probably targeting people, targeting officers,” Lawrence Cline, who served as an intelligence engagement officer in Iraq before retirement, told The Intercept. Targeting intelligence refers to the identification and characterization of enemy activities including missile and artillery launches, location of leadership and command and control centers, and key facilities. “What I can see is we’ve got a lot of global assets in terms of satellites and the like and the Israelis have a lot in terms of more localized radar coverage.”

    The deployment guidelines were issued by the Pentagon’s Air Force component command for the Middle East, Air Forces Central, on November 21. The document provides deployment instructions to air personnel sent to the country, including an “Air Defense Liaison Team” as well as “airmen assigned as the Intelligence Engagement Officer (IEO).”

    Intelligence engagement officers, Cline explained, coordinate intelligence between the U.S. and partner militaries. When deployed in Iraq, Cline, who now works as an instructor for the Defense Department Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, recalled that he and other IEOs comprised a small team who spent “probably three quarters of our time working with the Iraqis, the other quarter checking in with headquarters,” adding that “it was sort of half and half a liaison and advising.”

    Asked about the airmen’s mission, the Defense Intelligence Agency referred questions to the Air Forces Central, which did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the Office of the Secretary of Defense nor Central Command responded to requests for comment.

    Most Read

    The intelligence engagement process provides a low-profile mechanism through which the U.S. can coordinate with the Israeli military, a valuable tool amid the political sensitivity of the conflict.

    A U.S. Army primer defines intelligence engagement as a “powerful” tool that is useful “especially when U.S. policy might restrict our interaction,” as it “often does not require large budgets or footprints.” Experts say that may be the case here.

    Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, a website specializing in national security law, said that there seems to be an “Israel exception” to the U.S. rules around military assistance.

    Past presidents have issued several executive orders banning the U.S. government from carrying out or sponsoring assassinations abroad. This ban has been interpreted to include wartime targeting of civilians, according to a recent Foreign Affairs article by Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department who now works for Crisis Group.

    And the so-called Leahy law, a set of budget amendments named for Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the U.S. government to vet foreign military units for “gross violations of human rights” when providing training or aid to those units. Several progressive members of Congress have raised concerns that U.S. aid to Israel — both before and during the present war — violates that requirement.

    “For air advisory missions, which I imagine involve intelligence sharing and training, specific domestic legal restrictions such as the Leahy law and the assassination ban would likely come into play,” McBrien said. But the Leahy vetting process is “reversed” for Israel; rather than vetting Israeli military units beforehand, the U.S. State Department sends aid and then waits for reports of violations, according to a recent article by Josh Paul, who resigned from his post as a State Department political-military officer over his concerns with U.S. support for Israel.

    “As a general matter, U.S. officials who are providing support to another country during armed conflict would want to make sure they are not aiding and abetting war crimes,” Finucane told The Intercept. He emphasized that the same principle applies to weapons transfers and intelligence sharing.

    The Israeli military intentionally strikes Palestinian civilian infrastructure, known as “power targets,” in order to “create a shock,” according to an investigation by the Israeli news website +972 Magazine. Targets are generated using an artificial intelligence system known as “Habsora,” Hebrew for “gospel.”

    “Nothing happens by accident,” an Israeli military intelligence source told +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

    The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to conceal the nature of its support for the Israeli military. The Pentagon quietly tapped a so-called Tiger Team to facilitate weapons assistance to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported. The administration has also declined to reveal which weapons systems it’s providing Israel and at which quantities, insisting that the secrecy is necessary for security reasons.

    “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters during a press briefing in October.

    This contrasts with its support for Ukraine, about which it has been far more transparent. The administration has provided an itemized list of its weapons assistance to Ukraine, a country facing at least as much of a threat amid the invasion of Russia. The White House has never addressed the incongruity. Past administrations have also provided detailed public information about U.S. targeting support for the Saudi and Emirati military campaigns in Yemen, which U.S. officials claim was meant to reduce civilian casualties.

    The secrecy “may reflect the fact that the U.S. has interests that are in tension, the Biden administration has interests that are in tension,” Finucane said. “On the one hand, they want to publicly embrace Israel and support Israel, providing what seems to be unconditional support. On the other hand, they don’t want to be perceived as taking the country into another war in the Middle East.”

    https://theintercept.com/2024/01/11/israel-air-force-targeting-intelligence/
    BIDEN ADMIN DEPLOYED AIR FORCE TEAM TO ISRAEL TO ASSIST WITH TARGETS, DOCUMENT SUGGESTS Biden Admin Deployed Air Force Team to Israel to Assist With Targets, Document Suggests Ken Klippenstein, Matthew Petti January 11 2024, 3:33 p.m. A picture taken from Rafah shows smoke billowing over Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment on January 11, 2024, amid ongoing battles between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images) Targeting intelligence — the information used to conduct airstrikes and fire long-range artillery weapons — has played a central role in Israel’s siege of Gaza. A document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the U.S. Air Force sent officers specializing in this exact form of intelligence to Israel in late November. Since the start of Israel’s bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’s strike on October 7, Israel has dropped more than 29,000 bombs on the tiny Gaza Strip, according to a U.S. intelligence report last month. And for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza since at least early November, ostensibly for hostage recovery by special forces. At the time the drones were revealed, U.S. Gen. Pat Ryder insisted that the special operations forces deployed to Israel to advise on hostage rescue were “not participating in [Israel Defense Forces] target development.” “I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise the Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts,” said President Joe Biden three days after the Hamas attack. But several weeks later, on November 21, the U.S. Air Force issued deployment guidelines for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel. Experts say that a team of targeting officers like this would be used to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting. “They’re probably targeting people, targeting officers,” Lawrence Cline, who served as an intelligence engagement officer in Iraq before retirement, told The Intercept. Targeting intelligence refers to the identification and characterization of enemy activities including missile and artillery launches, location of leadership and command and control centers, and key facilities. “What I can see is we’ve got a lot of global assets in terms of satellites and the like and the Israelis have a lot in terms of more localized radar coverage.” The deployment guidelines were issued by the Pentagon’s Air Force component command for the Middle East, Air Forces Central, on November 21. The document provides deployment instructions to air personnel sent to the country, including an “Air Defense Liaison Team” as well as “airmen assigned as the Intelligence Engagement Officer (IEO).” Intelligence engagement officers, Cline explained, coordinate intelligence between the U.S. and partner militaries. When deployed in Iraq, Cline, who now works as an instructor for the Defense Department Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, recalled that he and other IEOs comprised a small team who spent “probably three quarters of our time working with the Iraqis, the other quarter checking in with headquarters,” adding that “it was sort of half and half a liaison and advising.” Asked about the airmen’s mission, the Defense Intelligence Agency referred questions to the Air Forces Central, which did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the Office of the Secretary of Defense nor Central Command responded to requests for comment. Most Read The intelligence engagement process provides a low-profile mechanism through which the U.S. can coordinate with the Israeli military, a valuable tool amid the political sensitivity of the conflict. A U.S. Army primer defines intelligence engagement as a “powerful” tool that is useful “especially when U.S. policy might restrict our interaction,” as it “often does not require large budgets or footprints.” Experts say that may be the case here. Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, a website specializing in national security law, said that there seems to be an “Israel exception” to the U.S. rules around military assistance. Past presidents have issued several executive orders banning the U.S. government from carrying out or sponsoring assassinations abroad. This ban has been interpreted to include wartime targeting of civilians, according to a recent Foreign Affairs article by Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department who now works for Crisis Group. And the so-called Leahy law, a set of budget amendments named for Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the U.S. government to vet foreign military units for “gross violations of human rights” when providing training or aid to those units. Several progressive members of Congress have raised concerns that U.S. aid to Israel — both before and during the present war — violates that requirement. “For air advisory missions, which I imagine involve intelligence sharing and training, specific domestic legal restrictions such as the Leahy law and the assassination ban would likely come into play,” McBrien said. But the Leahy vetting process is “reversed” for Israel; rather than vetting Israeli military units beforehand, the U.S. State Department sends aid and then waits for reports of violations, according to a recent article by Josh Paul, who resigned from his post as a State Department political-military officer over his concerns with U.S. support for Israel. “As a general matter, U.S. officials who are providing support to another country during armed conflict would want to make sure they are not aiding and abetting war crimes,” Finucane told The Intercept. He emphasized that the same principle applies to weapons transfers and intelligence sharing. The Israeli military intentionally strikes Palestinian civilian infrastructure, known as “power targets,” in order to “create a shock,” according to an investigation by the Israeli news website +972 Magazine. Targets are generated using an artificial intelligence system known as “Habsora,” Hebrew for “gospel.” “Nothing happens by accident,” an Israeli military intelligence source told +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.” The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to conceal the nature of its support for the Israeli military. The Pentagon quietly tapped a so-called Tiger Team to facilitate weapons assistance to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported. The administration has also declined to reveal which weapons systems it’s providing Israel and at which quantities, insisting that the secrecy is necessary for security reasons. “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters during a press briefing in October. This contrasts with its support for Ukraine, about which it has been far more transparent. The administration has provided an itemized list of its weapons assistance to Ukraine, a country facing at least as much of a threat amid the invasion of Russia. The White House has never addressed the incongruity. Past administrations have also provided detailed public information about U.S. targeting support for the Saudi and Emirati military campaigns in Yemen, which U.S. officials claim was meant to reduce civilian casualties. The secrecy “may reflect the fact that the U.S. has interests that are in tension, the Biden administration has interests that are in tension,” Finucane said. “On the one hand, they want to publicly embrace Israel and support Israel, providing what seems to be unconditional support. On the other hand, they don’t want to be perceived as taking the country into another war in the Middle East.” https://theintercept.com/2024/01/11/israel-air-force-targeting-intelligence/
    THEINTERCEPT.COM
    Biden Admin Deployed Air Force Team to Israel to Assist With Targets, Document Suggests
    Guidance issued for intelligence officers in Israel appears to show the U.S. military providing intelligence for airstrikes in Gaza.
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  • FREEMASONRY & ZIONISM – 1. Apocalyptic “Cataclysms” by Synagogue of Satan | VT Foreign Policy
    February 24, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    “To the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan”.
    Saint John Apostle and Evangelist – Book of the Revelation (Rev. 2, 8-10)

    In the cover image the prime minister of the Israeli Zionist Regime Benjamin Nethanyau and the “Pope of Freemasonry” Albert Pike

    NB – some quotes of American persons have been translated from sources in Italian so forgive any stylistic errors or differences with the original ones

    By Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio

    VERSIONE IN ITAIANO

    «The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near».

    This Prologue to the Book of the Revelation (Apocalypse) of Saint John the Evangelist, the only Apostle who died without martyrdom as a reward for his loyalty to Jesus under the cross of Golgotha, reread in recent days, after almost a million deaths caused in recent years by the wars in Ukraine, Syria. Iraq and Libya (to name the best known) and after the genocide of the Israeli army in Palestine in which over 8 thousand children were massacred by bombs in a few weeks together with around 22 thousand adults, we should be inspired by a profound spiritual reflection also by virtue of the prophecy on Armageddon, the final battle of the armies foretold in the Holy Land in the same text on the Apocalypse which in Greek, it is good to remember it only means “revelation”, “prophecy” and not “catastrophe”.

    They take on an equally tragic meaning if we think of the holocaust of millions of victims caused both by the pandemic triggered by a SARS-Cov-2 built in the laboratory and by the killer vaccines with which unscrupulous Big Pharma is testing the world population like a massive human guinea-pig to reach the transhumanist goal of eugenic health culture: denial of Nature and the Almighty God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has survived 7 thousand years of attempts at annihilation.

    THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS AND THE HOLOCAUST OF THE VACCINATED

    Faced with this extraordinary “pande-medic holocaust” made invisible by the denialism of those who govern politics and science in obedience to the powers of the New World Order clearly theorized as an evolution of NATO by the Hungarian-American plutarch George Soros in 1993, the Palestinian victims , Ukrainian, Syrian conflicts caused precisely by military conflicts plotted by the Atlantic Alliance and by Anglo-Saxon intelligence appear as the ordinary, inevitable consequence of the hatred and ferocity that has plagued human history since the time of Cain. This name will come back later…

    Therefore, the biblical reference in the Book of Revelation to “those who proclaim themselves Jews and are not, but belong to the synagogue of Satan” does not appear in vain in the case of the Zionist leader Netanyahu who is carrying out a genocide of Palestinians after having mass vaccinated his fellow Israelis for a gigantic transversal business between the Weapons Lobby and Big Pharma with American President Joesph Biden.

    Modern telecommunications means – where not blocked as in Gaza to prevent reckless reporters from documenting the war crimes ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already renamed “the Hitler of the 21st Century” by Turkish lawyers who demand his indictment – have made the bloody genocide tacitly legalized by the West and carried out in the churches and hospitals of Palestine terrifying, bringing before the eyes and ears cries that implore revenge and make the sense of forgiveness waver even in Christians, all this satanic torment appears comparable screams from the silence imploded in the hearts of children torn by lethal myocarditis or in the brains devoured by turbo-cancer of the victims of adverse reactions to the mRNA Covid vaccines.

    Precisely because their roar against death is silent, broken in the throat by a sudden illness of which political, health and judicial authorities too often do not want to detect and reveal traces of the FAILURE OF A SYSTEM. Precisely that of the New World Order which is seeking God’s mercy with the merciless human reason capable of killing an 8-month-old baby girl, Indi Gregory, although she had a concrete hope of being assisted.

    THE CATACLYSM FORECAST BY THE “POPE” OF AMERICAN FREEMASONRY

    If all this happening is not a coincidence but appears to be an international and historical conspiracy foreseen in very remote times by the American “Pope of Freemasonry”, a Southern general, about whom we have already written, who was among the Confederate supporters of the Civil War but also among the founders of the KuKluxKlan and among the followers of satanic rites: Albert Pike.

    We have already mentioned his extensive correspondence with the 33rd degree Freemason of the Supreme Council of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite Giuseppe Mazzini who, thanks to the financing of the hooded friends of the London lodges ready to host him even though he was a fugitive terrorist in Europe, planned the Expedition of the Thousand of Masonic guerrilla Giuseppe Garibaldi with whom the Kingdom of Italy wrested a part of Rome from the Papal State in the gigantic and crude plot against Christianity and the Catholic Church, partly attenuated only by the faith of the Ruling Savoy Dynasty.

    But we had missed some passages which in the light of today’s events take on monstrous relevance, furthermore proving the imprint of Freemasonry, like a Mark of the Beast, in every religious and political conflictual drift, prodigiously foreseen in detail by General Pike.

    In these first episodes we will analyze the conspiratorial complicity of Freemasonry with Zionism. In the next one with Nazism and Jihadist Islamism, where in a previous investigation we have analyzed the role of hooded men between Capitalism and Communism.

    «The Third World War will have to be fomented by taking advantage of the differences stirred up by the agents of the Illuminati between political Zionism and the leaders of the Islamic world. The war will have to be oriented so that Islam (including the State of Israel) destroy each other, while at the same time the remaining nations, once again divided and opposed to each other, will then be forced to fight each other until to complete physical, mental, spiritual and economic exhaustion».

    This is what Pike wrote to Mazzini on 15 August 1871 in a letter according to the revelations made by the commodore of the Canadian navy William Guy Carr which he later reported in his famous 1954 book Pawns in the Game. He stated that he learned about the letter from the anti-Mason, Cardinal José María Caro Rodríguez of Santiago, Chile, the author of The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled (Hawthorne, California, Christian Book Club of America, 1971).

    The Navy official can be considered very reliable as worked also for the Canadian Intelligence Service during World War II, and in 1944 he published Checkmate in the North, a book about an invasion by the Axis forces to take place in the area of the CFB Goose Bay (Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay).

    Carr’s books often discuss a Luciferian conspiracy by what he called the “World Revolutionary Movement,” but he later attributed the conspiracy more specifically to the “Synagogue of Satan.”

    The term was not a reference to Judaism as he wrote: “I wish to make it clearly and emphatically known that I do not believe the Synagogue of Satan (S.O.S.) is Jewish, but, as Christ told us for a definite purpose, it is comprised of ‘I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.’ (Rev. 2:9 and 3:9)


    Albert Pike, the Pope of American Freemasonry
    The Canadian commodore reported what we had already mentioned in the previous investigation on Pike and which we will try to contextualize both in the biblical, esoteric and historical context in the following lines.

    «The First World War had to be fought to allow the “Illuminati” to overthrow the power of the czars in Russia and transform this country into the fortress of atheist communism. The differences stirred up by “Illuminati” agents between the British and German Empires were used to foment this war. After the war was over, communism had to be built and used to destroy other governments and weaken religions».

    Citing Confederate General Pike who was Grand Master of the Mother Lodge of Charleston (but also, in all probability, the only Southerner to have had, until recently, a statue in his memory in the USA sculpted by an Italian but recently destroyed by vandals), the commodore added:

    «The Second World War had to be fomented by taking advantage of the difference between fascists and political Zionists. The war had to be fought in order to destroy Nazism and increase the power of political Zionism, in order to allow the establishment of the sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, a Communist International had to be established as strong as the whole of Christianity. At this point the latter had to be contained and kept under control until required for the final social cataclysm».

    Rereading these sentences after having published an investigation into the recent Israeli military plan for the genocide and forced exodus of Palestinians in Egypt and Europe represents a disturbing and burning confirmation but is not enough to understand the deepest motivations of the diabolical NWO conspiracy.

    On 15 August 1871, as revealed by Carr, the Pope of American Freemasonry Pike revealed to Mazzini that at the end of the Third World War those who aspire to World Government would cause the greatest social cataclysm ever seen.

    «We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion».

    And then again:

    «Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time».

    GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE THIRD WORLD WAR IN FRAGMENTS

    If we carefully analyze what has happened in the last twenty years, rereading them with the lens of a geopolitical intelligence analysis, we can put together these dramatic events that prove the gradual increase of the Third World War “in a patchy pattern, in fragments, or in small pieces” as defined several times by Pope Francis.

    September 11, 2001 – From the World Trade Center to the War in Afghanistan

    Avoidable massacre of the attacks on the Twin Towers facilitated by the obstacles posed by the American counter-espionage of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the investigations of the director of anti-terrorism of the FBI John O’Neill (who died in the World Trade Center where he was hired after being fired following sabotage of his professional activity). The hidden role of the Israeli counter-intelligence Mossad came to light immediately, recently with the disconcerting confirmation that two of the hijackers were collaborating with the CIA.

    Thanks to that event, the USA, led by the Weapons Lobby controlled by investment funds of Zionist financiers such as Larry Fink, began the terrible and unsuccessful war in Afghanistan

    July 18, 2007 – Hamas conquers Gaza

    Palestinian President Abbas issued a decree outlawing the Hamas militias who defeated Fatah (a Palestinian political and paramilitary organization, part of the PLO, of which Yasser Arafat was leader) and therefore removed the Gaza Strip from the control of the Authority Palestinian national authority.

    According to various intelligence experts including a former CIA director, Hamas, linked to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood (sons of another Masonic history…), was financed by the USA and Israel precisely to lead to the Palestinian exodus plan that was configured in recent days after the attacks of 7 October which took the highly expert Israeli secret services (Shin Bet, Mossad and the military Aman) by surprise.

    March 15, 2011 – Civil War in Syria

    The Syrian Civil War begins thanks to the Color Revolution financed by Soros and armed by the CIA’s MOM operation with the supply of TOW anti-tank missiles to extremist jihadist factions related to Al Qaeda.

    In 2014, ISIS founded by Caliph Al Baghdadi entered the war shortly after his liberation from Camp Bucca where he was detained by the US Army for terrorist activity in Iraq. He was believed to be a Mossad and CIA agent

    February 20, 2014 – Start of the War in Ukraine

    The second Orange Revolution financed by the Zionist Soros in Kiev explodes in all its violence due to the shooting of mysterious mercenary snipers on Ukrainian policemen and the crowd. It seems like a repeat of what the CIA hatched in 2002 in Caracas. The coup financed by NATO countries materializes with the escape of the legitimately elected president Viktor Fedorovyč Yanukovych to friendly Russia.

    From there begins the Donbass Civil War which became a Global Conflict after the start of Moscow’s military operation to protect the pro-Russian victims of genocide by the neo-Nazi guerrillas of the Azov Battalion led by the Kiev Regime and also armed by Israel in an apparent, crazy paradox …

    April 2014 – “Sabotaged” elections in Palestine

    Fatah and Hamas sign agreements in Gaza for the return to voting in all PNA territories, foreseeing elections for the following October.

    In July, however, the Israelis launched Operation Protective Edge to destroy clandestine tunnels into their country, triggering a resurgence of military clashes. Only on 28 August was a ceasefire declared by both sides but the electoral consultations were postponed and never agreed upon again.

    October 2023 – Genocide Planned and Legalized in Gaza

    Hamas captures hostages from an Israeli Rave Party and several kibbutz settlers in the illegally occupied territories. Israel responds disproportionately by bombing everyone, women, children, hospitals, churches, UN officials. Few Western politicians denounce a GENOCIDE which instead appears LEGALIZED by almost all NATO countries.

    If we correlate the recurring subjects of these events it is easy to deduce that the Third World War in fragments has already been implemented for at least two decades with an enormous occult direction of that NATO evoked by Soros to embody the New World Order.

    ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL CATALYSM: MANMADE VIRUS PANDEMIC

    Let’s go back to the tired “forecasts” of the Freemason Albert Pike and reread a significant phrase:

    «We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion».

    Since 2001, the American virologist Anthony Fauci began playing with dangerous viruses manipulated in the laboratory as biological weapons thanks to enormous funding provided by both the Department of Health and Defense, including through Pentagon agencies such as DARPA.

    https://www.gospanews.net/en/2024/01/09/faucis-testimony-before-us-congress-uncovered-drastic-failures-in-public-health-systems-and-pandemic-origin/

    In 2004 the European Commission chaired by Romano Prodi, a Soros associate, financed the Wuhan Institute of Virology strengthened by the son of President Jiang Zemin, the Executioner of Tiananmen, also in light of an agreement on collaborations for research in the bacteriological field signed with the American president Bill Clinton in 1999.

    In December 2019 the first outbreak of SARS-Cov-2 was discovered in Wuhan and for over 2 years the USA blamed the Chinese while the scientific community of Fauci & Co. tried to cover up the artificial orgone ascertained by the Senate Health Commission and the House Investigation Committee of the US Congress only in 2023.

    Now even many US politicians admit their nation’s role in building the laboratory virus. This is denied by the National Intelligence Directorate led by Avril Haines who was deputy CIA director expert in bio-weapons when Fauci was carrying out experiments on Coronaviruses on behalf of the Obama-Biden administration together in Wuhan.

    European Union politicians continue to ignore or deny the artificial origin of the virus. While almost everyone has welcomed, so much so as to impose them as mandatory even for many professional categories, the experimental mRNA genetic serums based on the toxic Spike protein and promoted by a swirl of billionaire interests of Big Pharma with governments and the usual Zionist lobbies who also invest in Warlord corporations.

    Even the Catholic Church genuflects to the Vaccine GOD.

    Let’s reread Pike’s prophecy again, a truly disturbing name when associated with the almost homonymous Covid-19 protein.

    «Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same Time»

    HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FREEMASONRY AND ZIONISM

    The detractors of the military geopolitical analyst and writer William Guy Carr who refers to the diabolical plan of the Pope of American Freemasonry are based on the fact that Albert Pike in 1871 could not have known about the birth of Communism, nor of Nazism, nor of Zionism.

    Nor even knowing about the two world wars. Unless you were among those who designed them.

    This observation can easily be refuted by citing some historical references already mentioned and which we will highlight.

    «In July 1782 the Order of the Illuminati allied itself with Freemasonry during the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, which the historian Freemason Albert Mackey defined as ‘the most important Masonic Congress of the eighteenth century’ – we read on the website Freemasonry Unmasked, full of anecdotes and authoritative historical sources – The participants in that Congress had to swear not to reveal the decisions they had made to anyone (see Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution, 1921, page 31)».

    Wilhelmsbad Castle was owned by the Ashkenazi Jewish banker (of Khazar-European origins) Mayer Amschel Rothschild who, according to various historians, in 1777 brought together twelve of his most influential friends and convinced them that if they pooled their resources they could dominate the world: this is how the Bavarian Illuminati was born.

    The French Revolution confirms their success with the annihilation of the first important Catholic Monarchy. It will be the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, the regurgitation of the regime of terror, that will inspire Lenin in his plan for the subsequent Bolshevik and Communist revolution.

    So Pike was not only still alive at the time but knew the details.

    The Independent Order B’nai B’rith or Bené Berith (Hebrew: בני ברית, “sons of the covenant”) is a Jewish lodge founded in 1843 during the presidency of John Tyler and still existing and active. It was founded at the Sinsheimer Café, in the Wall Street neighborhood of New York, by Henry Jones and eleven other people on October 13, 1843. The original name was in German “Bundes-Brueder” (which means “League of Brothers”), in the current one which retains the initials (“BB”).

    Most of the founders were German-Jews: that is, Ashkenazi like Mayer Amschel Rothschild but also like his descendant Walter Rothschild, eldest son and heir of the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the first Jewish baron of England.

    Walter Rothschild was among the promoters of the declaration for the formation of the Jewish state in Palestine, later earning the merit of becoming president of the Council of Deputies of British Jews from 1925 to 1926.

    From these seeds we arrived at 1917 when a letter from the British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, addressed to the “Dear Lord Rothschild”, sanctioned Balfour’s declaration which committed the British government to supporting the creation in Palestine of a home for the Jews in respect for the rights of other resident minorities.

    How did Albert Pike know all these things before they happened?

    Very simple because he was among those who concerted them in 1860 when the Southern general through Young America planned the American Civil War to defend the right to slavery, Mazzini with Young Italy committed himself to the Expedition of the Thousand and Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount of Palmerston, British Secretary of State and exponent of the Grand Lodge of England guaranteed all financial and political support.

    The first expressions of proto-Zionism took shape, for example, in the foundation of the Universal Israelite Alliance in 1860, an organization aimed at the emancipation of the Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the publication of various works, including Rome and Jerusalem, written in 1862 by the German Jewish philosopher Moses Hess, Derishat Zion by the Polish-Prussian rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, and the hymn Hatikvah, whose lyrics were written by Naftali Herz Imber and which later became the anthem of the State of Israel.

    Zionism draws its roots from the new cultural environment generated in the context of the emancipation of European Jews starting from the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century and from the Haskalah.

    The haskalah, with a small delay compared to other Enlightenment movements, arose in Germany and then spread throughout much of Europe and to a small extent also across the Atlantic. The father and inspirer of the movement was Moses Mendelssohn, close to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a free thinker of Protestant extraction and an energetic defender of the Jews in Germany. The latter introduced Mendelssohn into the world of Berlin intellectuals where he dedicated himself to the composition of philosophical essays and dissertations.

    A varied and open movement, the haskalah probably did not close its doors even to exponents of the Frankist heresy, a sort of tail of the messianic movement of Shabatai Zevi which had long been in opposition to official Judaism, perhaps linked to lodges of freemasonry, another force of the times, definitely in relation to the Enlightenment philosophy.

    Many Jews influenced by the haskalah and the closeness it brought with European culture were seduced by the possibility of assimilation by embracing Christianity. Just think of the family of Karl Marx, descended from rabbis who converted to Protestantism, as did Mendelssohn’s own daughters. Others, however, laid the foundations of the new science of Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums.

    THE LODGES INSPIRED BY THE SON OF THE BIBLICAL MURDERER CAIN

    In the previous investigation we highlighted how Marx received the task of writing Capital from British Freemasonry. In other reports we have highlighted the fundamental role played by the Protestants in the birth of the Grand Lodge of London on 24 June 1717.

    Today we add another detail by recalling the figure of John Theophilus Desaguliers (La Rochelle, 12 March 1683 – Covent Garden, 29 February 1744) who was an English scientist, religious and Freemason of French origins.

    Desaguliers emigrated to England in 1694, due to the Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the freedom of worship of Protestants. He approached Freemasonry, becoming Grand Master of the First Grand Lodge of England in 1718, and Deputy Grand Master in 1723 and 1725. Under his leadership, the Grand Lodge of London and Freemasonry developed in an “astonishing” way in the islands British, to the point that «in 1740 there were already more than 180 lodges».

    Each of the earliest Masonic texts contains some sort of history of the craft, or guild, of Freemasonry. The oldest work of this type, the Royal Manuscript, dating from 1390 to 1425, has a brief history in the introduction, which states that the “craft of Freemasonry” began with Euclid in Egypt, and arrived in England during the reign of ruler Æðelstan.

    A little later, the Cooke Manuscript traces Freemasonry to Jabal, son of Lamech (Genesis 4, 20-22), and tells how this knowledge reached Euclid, from him to the children of Israel when they were in Egypt, and so on for an elaborate route to Æðelstan. This myth formed the basis for later manuscript foundations, all of which claim that Freemasonry dates back to Biblical times, and pegs its institutional consolidation in England during the reign of Æðelstan (927-939).

    Shortly after the formation of the first Grand Lodge of England, James Anderson was commissioned to summarize these “Gothic constitutions” into a pleasing modern form. The constitutions produced by his work have a more widespread historical introduction than any previous one, and once again connect the history of what Freemasonry had become to its biblical roots, always inserting Euclid into the chain of narrative.

    The first question that a connoisseur of Judeo-Christian history should ask is almost banal.

    Why do the Freemasons, due to fabulous legendary and historical beliefs, trace Freemasonry to one of the descendants of the murderer Cain and not to the third son of Adam named Set from whom the Semitic culture was born?

    In this, the manipulation carried out over the centuries by Rabbinic Taldumist Judaism, well described by the Judaism expert Professor Paola Persichetti in the previous investigations in which she highlights the correlations of this Jewish regurgitation following the Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, seems evident.

    In France, Chevalier (Knight) Ramsay’s 1737 conference added Crusader Freemasons to the family tree claiming that they had revived the craft with secrets recovered in the Holy Land, under the patronage of the Knights Hospitaller. At this point, the “history” of the profession of continental Freemasonry separated from that of Freemasonry in England which in the meantime had published its “charter”.

    THE SCHSM ON THE GREAT ARCHITECT OF THE UNIVERSE

    The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, “for the use of the lodges” in London and Westminster, was published in 1723. It was edited by the Presbyterian clergyman James Anderson, by order of John Theophilus Desaguliers, and approved by a committee of the grand lodge under its control. The work was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin, who in that year became Grand Master of the Pennsylvania Freemasons. It was also translated into Dutch (1736), German (1741) and French (1745).

    Anderson was minister of the Presbyterian church in Swallow Street, London, which had formerly been a Huguenot church, and whose pastor in the 1690s was Desaguliers’ father. At the time of his meeting with Desaguliers, he appears to have presented himself as a Talmudic scholar.

    In various historical testimonies that we summarize for brevity, Anderson himself seems to imply the existence of an Italian Grand Lodge.

    In Naples in 1728 he saw the light of the first regular Masonic lodge established in Italy, La Perfetta Unione. Raised by the will of the Prince of San Severo, it had Egyptian symbols such as the pyramid, the Sphinx and the radiant sun in its emblem. Subsequently, the English lodge (“La Loggia degli Inglesi”) was established in Florence, founded in 1731 and Freemasonry spread rapidly, despite a series of papal prohibitions.

    But already ahead the so-called Great Schism occurred. According to a widespread opinion, the schism between French and English Freemasonry originates from the general assembly of the Grand Orient of France in September 1877. Accepting the recommendation contained in a report by the Protestant pastor (and Freemason) Frédéric Desmons, the assembly decided by a majority of amend its constitutions by inserting the formula “its principles are absolute freedom of conscience and human solidarity”. This replaced the previous statement “its principles are the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and human solidarity”.

    The reaction of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) was the resolution of March 1878 which reiterated “That the Grand Lodge, while anxious to welcome in the most fraternal spirit the Brethren of any foreign Grand Lodge whose proceedings are conducted according to the Ancient cornerstones of the Order, among which the first and most important is the faith in T. G. A. O. T. U. [“the great Architect of the universe”, in English acronym], cannot recognize as ‘true and genuine’ Brothers all those who have been initiated in lodges that deny or ignore that faith.”

    FREEMASONRY SIMILAR TO THE BEAST OF THE APOCALYPSE

    Having concluded this long but necessary historical digression on Freemasonry implemented with various Wikipedia sources, let’s return to the beginning. To the book of the Apocalypse of Saint John and the disturbing esoteric symbolisms.

    If we summarize the historical notes above we can easily conclude that the first promoters of Zionism in the USA were the founders of the B’nai B’rith Lodge composed of Ashkenazi Jews (as Adolph Hitler is also believed to be) that the historians of Jewish culture they define the “13th Tribe of Israel” as they derive from the diaspora of the Khazars who had converted to Judaism for purely political reasons.

    While in Europe it spread thanks to the Rothschild Dynasty (Red Shield) which was the first to weave subversive plots with an anti-Catholic vocation from the birth of the Bavarian Illuminati up to the pact of terror for the French Revolution from which the liberation of the proto- Zionism together with that Masonic concept of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” imposed by guillotining even the elderly nobles of the Catholic Vendée French region.

    In light of all this, the words of the Satanist Albert Pike, Pope of American Freemasonry, take on an iconic relevance in the common project between Masonic and Zionist Lodges for the New World Order:

    «Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time».

    But following this hermeneutical path to the Book of the Apocalypse, one of the most important allegories comes to mind with disconcerting and terrifying impetus:

    «The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?» (Rev. 13, 1-4)

    The prophet Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist delves into the concept with an aura vision

    «Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon. It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed» (Rev. 13, 11-12)

    It is not really scary to note how traditional esoteric Freemasonry became manifest thanks to the Anglican political schism of the Protestants and allowed Pharisaic Judaism, defeated by the Diaspora after the Crucifixion of the Messiah awaited by the Jews, to be reborn in its Talmudic form with Judaism then became with Zionism the most powerful component of the New World Order?

    We have historical clues that help identify Freemasonry as one of the two apocalyptic Beasts. But this theme will be explored in greater depth if and when we receive from the Holy Spirit the gift of the wisdom necessary to interpret it. Therefore today we cannot help but insinuate doubt…

    POWER OF CHRIST IN THE PROPHECY OF SAINT JOHN THE APOSTLE

    But it is precisely Chapter 12 of the Book of the Apocalypse (Rev. 12, 7-12) which comes to illuminate with a radiant dawn of hope the dangers of all of us Christians who strive to be among those “who listen to the words of this prophecy and put into practice the things that are written in it”:

    «Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him».

    Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

    “Now have come the salvation and the power
    and the kingdom of our God,
    and the authority of his Messiah.
    For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
    who accuses them before our God day and night,
    has been hurled down.
    They triumphed over him
    by the blood of the Lamb
    and by the word of their testimony;
    they did not love their lives so much
    as to shrink from death.
    Therefore rejoice, you heavens
    and you who dwell in them!
    But woe to the earth and the sea,
    because the devil has gone down to you!
    He is filled with fury,
    because he knows that his time is short.”

    Since Saint John was the only Apostle who died without martyrdom for his loyalty to Jesus Christ under the cross and also survived the hell of imprisonment on Patmos (where he received the visions and locutions collected in the Apocalypse), it is probably very useful to start believing him…

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    BOOK OF REVELATION (APOCALYPSE) – HOLY BIBLE

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    Fabio G. C. Carisio
    Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal.

    His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more…

    Most popolar investigation on VT is:

    Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon

    Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.

    For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.

    With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.

    In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.

    In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates

    His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others

    He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.

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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/freemasonry-zionism-1-apocalyptic-cataclysms-by-synagogue-of-satan/
    FREEMASONRY & ZIONISM – 1. Apocalyptic “Cataclysms” by Synagogue of Satan | VT Foreign Policy February 24, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. “To the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan”. Saint John Apostle and Evangelist – Book of the Revelation (Rev. 2, 8-10) In the cover image the prime minister of the Israeli Zionist Regime Benjamin Nethanyau and the “Pope of Freemasonry” Albert Pike NB – some quotes of American persons have been translated from sources in Italian so forgive any stylistic errors or differences with the original ones By Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio VERSIONE IN ITAIANO «The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near». This Prologue to the Book of the Revelation (Apocalypse) of Saint John the Evangelist, the only Apostle who died without martyrdom as a reward for his loyalty to Jesus under the cross of Golgotha, reread in recent days, after almost a million deaths caused in recent years by the wars in Ukraine, Syria. Iraq and Libya (to name the best known) and after the genocide of the Israeli army in Palestine in which over 8 thousand children were massacred by bombs in a few weeks together with around 22 thousand adults, we should be inspired by a profound spiritual reflection also by virtue of the prophecy on Armageddon, the final battle of the armies foretold in the Holy Land in the same text on the Apocalypse which in Greek, it is good to remember it only means “revelation”, “prophecy” and not “catastrophe”. They take on an equally tragic meaning if we think of the holocaust of millions of victims caused both by the pandemic triggered by a SARS-Cov-2 built in the laboratory and by the killer vaccines with which unscrupulous Big Pharma is testing the world population like a massive human guinea-pig to reach the transhumanist goal of eugenic health culture: denial of Nature and the Almighty God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has survived 7 thousand years of attempts at annihilation. THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS AND THE HOLOCAUST OF THE VACCINATED Faced with this extraordinary “pande-medic holocaust” made invisible by the denialism of those who govern politics and science in obedience to the powers of the New World Order clearly theorized as an evolution of NATO by the Hungarian-American plutarch George Soros in 1993, the Palestinian victims , Ukrainian, Syrian conflicts caused precisely by military conflicts plotted by the Atlantic Alliance and by Anglo-Saxon intelligence appear as the ordinary, inevitable consequence of the hatred and ferocity that has plagued human history since the time of Cain. This name will come back later… Therefore, the biblical reference in the Book of Revelation to “those who proclaim themselves Jews and are not, but belong to the synagogue of Satan” does not appear in vain in the case of the Zionist leader Netanyahu who is carrying out a genocide of Palestinians after having mass vaccinated his fellow Israelis for a gigantic transversal business between the Weapons Lobby and Big Pharma with American President Joesph Biden. Modern telecommunications means – where not blocked as in Gaza to prevent reckless reporters from documenting the war crimes ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already renamed “the Hitler of the 21st Century” by Turkish lawyers who demand his indictment – have made the bloody genocide tacitly legalized by the West and carried out in the churches and hospitals of Palestine terrifying, bringing before the eyes and ears cries that implore revenge and make the sense of forgiveness waver even in Christians, all this satanic torment appears comparable screams from the silence imploded in the hearts of children torn by lethal myocarditis or in the brains devoured by turbo-cancer of the victims of adverse reactions to the mRNA Covid vaccines. Precisely because their roar against death is silent, broken in the throat by a sudden illness of which political, health and judicial authorities too often do not want to detect and reveal traces of the FAILURE OF A SYSTEM. Precisely that of the New World Order which is seeking God’s mercy with the merciless human reason capable of killing an 8-month-old baby girl, Indi Gregory, although she had a concrete hope of being assisted. THE CATACLYSM FORECAST BY THE “POPE” OF AMERICAN FREEMASONRY If all this happening is not a coincidence but appears to be an international and historical conspiracy foreseen in very remote times by the American “Pope of Freemasonry”, a Southern general, about whom we have already written, who was among the Confederate supporters of the Civil War but also among the founders of the KuKluxKlan and among the followers of satanic rites: Albert Pike. We have already mentioned his extensive correspondence with the 33rd degree Freemason of the Supreme Council of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite Giuseppe Mazzini who, thanks to the financing of the hooded friends of the London lodges ready to host him even though he was a fugitive terrorist in Europe, planned the Expedition of the Thousand of Masonic guerrilla Giuseppe Garibaldi with whom the Kingdom of Italy wrested a part of Rome from the Papal State in the gigantic and crude plot against Christianity and the Catholic Church, partly attenuated only by the faith of the Ruling Savoy Dynasty. But we had missed some passages which in the light of today’s events take on monstrous relevance, furthermore proving the imprint of Freemasonry, like a Mark of the Beast, in every religious and political conflictual drift, prodigiously foreseen in detail by General Pike. In these first episodes we will analyze the conspiratorial complicity of Freemasonry with Zionism. In the next one with Nazism and Jihadist Islamism, where in a previous investigation we have analyzed the role of hooded men between Capitalism and Communism. «The Third World War will have to be fomented by taking advantage of the differences stirred up by the agents of the Illuminati between political Zionism and the leaders of the Islamic world. The war will have to be oriented so that Islam (including the State of Israel) destroy each other, while at the same time the remaining nations, once again divided and opposed to each other, will then be forced to fight each other until to complete physical, mental, spiritual and economic exhaustion». This is what Pike wrote to Mazzini on 15 August 1871 in a letter according to the revelations made by the commodore of the Canadian navy William Guy Carr which he later reported in his famous 1954 book Pawns in the Game. He stated that he learned about the letter from the anti-Mason, Cardinal José María Caro Rodríguez of Santiago, Chile, the author of The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled (Hawthorne, California, Christian Book Club of America, 1971). The Navy official can be considered very reliable as worked also for the Canadian Intelligence Service during World War II, and in 1944 he published Checkmate in the North, a book about an invasion by the Axis forces to take place in the area of the CFB Goose Bay (Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay). Carr’s books often discuss a Luciferian conspiracy by what he called the “World Revolutionary Movement,” but he later attributed the conspiracy more specifically to the “Synagogue of Satan.” The term was not a reference to Judaism as he wrote: “I wish to make it clearly and emphatically known that I do not believe the Synagogue of Satan (S.O.S.) is Jewish, but, as Christ told us for a definite purpose, it is comprised of ‘I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.’ (Rev. 2:9 and 3:9) Albert Pike, the Pope of American Freemasonry The Canadian commodore reported what we had already mentioned in the previous investigation on Pike and which we will try to contextualize both in the biblical, esoteric and historical context in the following lines. «The First World War had to be fought to allow the “Illuminati” to overthrow the power of the czars in Russia and transform this country into the fortress of atheist communism. The differences stirred up by “Illuminati” agents between the British and German Empires were used to foment this war. After the war was over, communism had to be built and used to destroy other governments and weaken religions». Citing Confederate General Pike who was Grand Master of the Mother Lodge of Charleston (but also, in all probability, the only Southerner to have had, until recently, a statue in his memory in the USA sculpted by an Italian but recently destroyed by vandals), the commodore added: «The Second World War had to be fomented by taking advantage of the difference between fascists and political Zionists. The war had to be fought in order to destroy Nazism and increase the power of political Zionism, in order to allow the establishment of the sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, a Communist International had to be established as strong as the whole of Christianity. At this point the latter had to be contained and kept under control until required for the final social cataclysm». Rereading these sentences after having published an investigation into the recent Israeli military plan for the genocide and forced exodus of Palestinians in Egypt and Europe represents a disturbing and burning confirmation but is not enough to understand the deepest motivations of the diabolical NWO conspiracy. On 15 August 1871, as revealed by Carr, the Pope of American Freemasonry Pike revealed to Mazzini that at the end of the Third World War those who aspire to World Government would cause the greatest social cataclysm ever seen. «We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion». And then again: «Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time». GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE THIRD WORLD WAR IN FRAGMENTS If we carefully analyze what has happened in the last twenty years, rereading them with the lens of a geopolitical intelligence analysis, we can put together these dramatic events that prove the gradual increase of the Third World War “in a patchy pattern, in fragments, or in small pieces” as defined several times by Pope Francis. September 11, 2001 – From the World Trade Center to the War in Afghanistan Avoidable massacre of the attacks on the Twin Towers facilitated by the obstacles posed by the American counter-espionage of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the investigations of the director of anti-terrorism of the FBI John O’Neill (who died in the World Trade Center where he was hired after being fired following sabotage of his professional activity). The hidden role of the Israeli counter-intelligence Mossad came to light immediately, recently with the disconcerting confirmation that two of the hijackers were collaborating with the CIA. Thanks to that event, the USA, led by the Weapons Lobby controlled by investment funds of Zionist financiers such as Larry Fink, began the terrible and unsuccessful war in Afghanistan July 18, 2007 – Hamas conquers Gaza Palestinian President Abbas issued a decree outlawing the Hamas militias who defeated Fatah (a Palestinian political and paramilitary organization, part of the PLO, of which Yasser Arafat was leader) and therefore removed the Gaza Strip from the control of the Authority Palestinian national authority. According to various intelligence experts including a former CIA director, Hamas, linked to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood (sons of another Masonic history…), was financed by the USA and Israel precisely to lead to the Palestinian exodus plan that was configured in recent days after the attacks of 7 October which took the highly expert Israeli secret services (Shin Bet, Mossad and the military Aman) by surprise. March 15, 2011 – Civil War in Syria The Syrian Civil War begins thanks to the Color Revolution financed by Soros and armed by the CIA’s MOM operation with the supply of TOW anti-tank missiles to extremist jihadist factions related to Al Qaeda. In 2014, ISIS founded by Caliph Al Baghdadi entered the war shortly after his liberation from Camp Bucca where he was detained by the US Army for terrorist activity in Iraq. He was believed to be a Mossad and CIA agent February 20, 2014 – Start of the War in Ukraine The second Orange Revolution financed by the Zionist Soros in Kiev explodes in all its violence due to the shooting of mysterious mercenary snipers on Ukrainian policemen and the crowd. It seems like a repeat of what the CIA hatched in 2002 in Caracas. The coup financed by NATO countries materializes with the escape of the legitimately elected president Viktor Fedorovyč Yanukovych to friendly Russia. From there begins the Donbass Civil War which became a Global Conflict after the start of Moscow’s military operation to protect the pro-Russian victims of genocide by the neo-Nazi guerrillas of the Azov Battalion led by the Kiev Regime and also armed by Israel in an apparent, crazy paradox … April 2014 – “Sabotaged” elections in Palestine Fatah and Hamas sign agreements in Gaza for the return to voting in all PNA territories, foreseeing elections for the following October. In July, however, the Israelis launched Operation Protective Edge to destroy clandestine tunnels into their country, triggering a resurgence of military clashes. Only on 28 August was a ceasefire declared by both sides but the electoral consultations were postponed and never agreed upon again. October 2023 – Genocide Planned and Legalized in Gaza Hamas captures hostages from an Israeli Rave Party and several kibbutz settlers in the illegally occupied territories. Israel responds disproportionately by bombing everyone, women, children, hospitals, churches, UN officials. Few Western politicians denounce a GENOCIDE which instead appears LEGALIZED by almost all NATO countries. If we correlate the recurring subjects of these events it is easy to deduce that the Third World War in fragments has already been implemented for at least two decades with an enormous occult direction of that NATO evoked by Soros to embody the New World Order. ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL CATALYSM: MANMADE VIRUS PANDEMIC Let’s go back to the tired “forecasts” of the Freemason Albert Pike and reread a significant phrase: «We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion». Since 2001, the American virologist Anthony Fauci began playing with dangerous viruses manipulated in the laboratory as biological weapons thanks to enormous funding provided by both the Department of Health and Defense, including through Pentagon agencies such as DARPA. https://www.gospanews.net/en/2024/01/09/faucis-testimony-before-us-congress-uncovered-drastic-failures-in-public-health-systems-and-pandemic-origin/ In 2004 the European Commission chaired by Romano Prodi, a Soros associate, financed the Wuhan Institute of Virology strengthened by the son of President Jiang Zemin, the Executioner of Tiananmen, also in light of an agreement on collaborations for research in the bacteriological field signed with the American president Bill Clinton in 1999. In December 2019 the first outbreak of SARS-Cov-2 was discovered in Wuhan and for over 2 years the USA blamed the Chinese while the scientific community of Fauci & Co. tried to cover up the artificial orgone ascertained by the Senate Health Commission and the House Investigation Committee of the US Congress only in 2023. Now even many US politicians admit their nation’s role in building the laboratory virus. This is denied by the National Intelligence Directorate led by Avril Haines who was deputy CIA director expert in bio-weapons when Fauci was carrying out experiments on Coronaviruses on behalf of the Obama-Biden administration together in Wuhan. European Union politicians continue to ignore or deny the artificial origin of the virus. While almost everyone has welcomed, so much so as to impose them as mandatory even for many professional categories, the experimental mRNA genetic serums based on the toxic Spike protein and promoted by a swirl of billionaire interests of Big Pharma with governments and the usual Zionist lobbies who also invest in Warlord corporations. Even the Catholic Church genuflects to the Vaccine GOD. Let’s reread Pike’s prophecy again, a truly disturbing name when associated with the almost homonymous Covid-19 protein. «Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same Time» HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FREEMASONRY AND ZIONISM The detractors of the military geopolitical analyst and writer William Guy Carr who refers to the diabolical plan of the Pope of American Freemasonry are based on the fact that Albert Pike in 1871 could not have known about the birth of Communism, nor of Nazism, nor of Zionism. Nor even knowing about the two world wars. Unless you were among those who designed them. This observation can easily be refuted by citing some historical references already mentioned and which we will highlight. «In July 1782 the Order of the Illuminati allied itself with Freemasonry during the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, which the historian Freemason Albert Mackey defined as ‘the most important Masonic Congress of the eighteenth century’ – we read on the website Freemasonry Unmasked, full of anecdotes and authoritative historical sources – The participants in that Congress had to swear not to reveal the decisions they had made to anyone (see Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution, 1921, page 31)». Wilhelmsbad Castle was owned by the Ashkenazi Jewish banker (of Khazar-European origins) Mayer Amschel Rothschild who, according to various historians, in 1777 brought together twelve of his most influential friends and convinced them that if they pooled their resources they could dominate the world: this is how the Bavarian Illuminati was born. The French Revolution confirms their success with the annihilation of the first important Catholic Monarchy. It will be the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, the regurgitation of the regime of terror, that will inspire Lenin in his plan for the subsequent Bolshevik and Communist revolution. So Pike was not only still alive at the time but knew the details. The Independent Order B’nai B’rith or Bené Berith (Hebrew: בני ברית, “sons of the covenant”) is a Jewish lodge founded in 1843 during the presidency of John Tyler and still existing and active. It was founded at the Sinsheimer Café, in the Wall Street neighborhood of New York, by Henry Jones and eleven other people on October 13, 1843. The original name was in German “Bundes-Brueder” (which means “League of Brothers”), in the current one which retains the initials (“BB”). Most of the founders were German-Jews: that is, Ashkenazi like Mayer Amschel Rothschild but also like his descendant Walter Rothschild, eldest son and heir of the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the first Jewish baron of England. Walter Rothschild was among the promoters of the declaration for the formation of the Jewish state in Palestine, later earning the merit of becoming president of the Council of Deputies of British Jews from 1925 to 1926. From these seeds we arrived at 1917 when a letter from the British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, addressed to the “Dear Lord Rothschild”, sanctioned Balfour’s declaration which committed the British government to supporting the creation in Palestine of a home for the Jews in respect for the rights of other resident minorities. How did Albert Pike know all these things before they happened? Very simple because he was among those who concerted them in 1860 when the Southern general through Young America planned the American Civil War to defend the right to slavery, Mazzini with Young Italy committed himself to the Expedition of the Thousand and Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount of Palmerston, British Secretary of State and exponent of the Grand Lodge of England guaranteed all financial and political support. The first expressions of proto-Zionism took shape, for example, in the foundation of the Universal Israelite Alliance in 1860, an organization aimed at the emancipation of the Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the publication of various works, including Rome and Jerusalem, written in 1862 by the German Jewish philosopher Moses Hess, Derishat Zion by the Polish-Prussian rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, and the hymn Hatikvah, whose lyrics were written by Naftali Herz Imber and which later became the anthem of the State of Israel. Zionism draws its roots from the new cultural environment generated in the context of the emancipation of European Jews starting from the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century and from the Haskalah. The haskalah, with a small delay compared to other Enlightenment movements, arose in Germany and then spread throughout much of Europe and to a small extent also across the Atlantic. The father and inspirer of the movement was Moses Mendelssohn, close to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a free thinker of Protestant extraction and an energetic defender of the Jews in Germany. The latter introduced Mendelssohn into the world of Berlin intellectuals where he dedicated himself to the composition of philosophical essays and dissertations. A varied and open movement, the haskalah probably did not close its doors even to exponents of the Frankist heresy, a sort of tail of the messianic movement of Shabatai Zevi which had long been in opposition to official Judaism, perhaps linked to lodges of freemasonry, another force of the times, definitely in relation to the Enlightenment philosophy. Many Jews influenced by the haskalah and the closeness it brought with European culture were seduced by the possibility of assimilation by embracing Christianity. Just think of the family of Karl Marx, descended from rabbis who converted to Protestantism, as did Mendelssohn’s own daughters. Others, however, laid the foundations of the new science of Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums. THE LODGES INSPIRED BY THE SON OF THE BIBLICAL MURDERER CAIN In the previous investigation we highlighted how Marx received the task of writing Capital from British Freemasonry. In other reports we have highlighted the fundamental role played by the Protestants in the birth of the Grand Lodge of London on 24 June 1717. Today we add another detail by recalling the figure of John Theophilus Desaguliers (La Rochelle, 12 March 1683 – Covent Garden, 29 February 1744) who was an English scientist, religious and Freemason of French origins. Desaguliers emigrated to England in 1694, due to the Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the freedom of worship of Protestants. He approached Freemasonry, becoming Grand Master of the First Grand Lodge of England in 1718, and Deputy Grand Master in 1723 and 1725. Under his leadership, the Grand Lodge of London and Freemasonry developed in an “astonishing” way in the islands British, to the point that «in 1740 there were already more than 180 lodges». Each of the earliest Masonic texts contains some sort of history of the craft, or guild, of Freemasonry. The oldest work of this type, the Royal Manuscript, dating from 1390 to 1425, has a brief history in the introduction, which states that the “craft of Freemasonry” began with Euclid in Egypt, and arrived in England during the reign of ruler Æðelstan. A little later, the Cooke Manuscript traces Freemasonry to Jabal, son of Lamech (Genesis 4, 20-22), and tells how this knowledge reached Euclid, from him to the children of Israel when they were in Egypt, and so on for an elaborate route to Æðelstan. This myth formed the basis for later manuscript foundations, all of which claim that Freemasonry dates back to Biblical times, and pegs its institutional consolidation in England during the reign of Æðelstan (927-939). Shortly after the formation of the first Grand Lodge of England, James Anderson was commissioned to summarize these “Gothic constitutions” into a pleasing modern form. The constitutions produced by his work have a more widespread historical introduction than any previous one, and once again connect the history of what Freemasonry had become to its biblical roots, always inserting Euclid into the chain of narrative. The first question that a connoisseur of Judeo-Christian history should ask is almost banal. Why do the Freemasons, due to fabulous legendary and historical beliefs, trace Freemasonry to one of the descendants of the murderer Cain and not to the third son of Adam named Set from whom the Semitic culture was born? In this, the manipulation carried out over the centuries by Rabbinic Taldumist Judaism, well described by the Judaism expert Professor Paola Persichetti in the previous investigations in which she highlights the correlations of this Jewish regurgitation following the Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, seems evident. In France, Chevalier (Knight) Ramsay’s 1737 conference added Crusader Freemasons to the family tree claiming that they had revived the craft with secrets recovered in the Holy Land, under the patronage of the Knights Hospitaller. At this point, the “history” of the profession of continental Freemasonry separated from that of Freemasonry in England which in the meantime had published its “charter”. THE SCHSM ON THE GREAT ARCHITECT OF THE UNIVERSE The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, “for the use of the lodges” in London and Westminster, was published in 1723. It was edited by the Presbyterian clergyman James Anderson, by order of John Theophilus Desaguliers, and approved by a committee of the grand lodge under its control. The work was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin, who in that year became Grand Master of the Pennsylvania Freemasons. It was also translated into Dutch (1736), German (1741) and French (1745). Anderson was minister of the Presbyterian church in Swallow Street, London, which had formerly been a Huguenot church, and whose pastor in the 1690s was Desaguliers’ father. At the time of his meeting with Desaguliers, he appears to have presented himself as a Talmudic scholar. In various historical testimonies that we summarize for brevity, Anderson himself seems to imply the existence of an Italian Grand Lodge. In Naples in 1728 he saw the light of the first regular Masonic lodge established in Italy, La Perfetta Unione. Raised by the will of the Prince of San Severo, it had Egyptian symbols such as the pyramid, the Sphinx and the radiant sun in its emblem. Subsequently, the English lodge (“La Loggia degli Inglesi”) was established in Florence, founded in 1731 and Freemasonry spread rapidly, despite a series of papal prohibitions. But already ahead the so-called Great Schism occurred. According to a widespread opinion, the schism between French and English Freemasonry originates from the general assembly of the Grand Orient of France in September 1877. Accepting the recommendation contained in a report by the Protestant pastor (and Freemason) Frédéric Desmons, the assembly decided by a majority of amend its constitutions by inserting the formula “its principles are absolute freedom of conscience and human solidarity”. This replaced the previous statement “its principles are the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and human solidarity”. The reaction of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) was the resolution of March 1878 which reiterated “That the Grand Lodge, while anxious to welcome in the most fraternal spirit the Brethren of any foreign Grand Lodge whose proceedings are conducted according to the Ancient cornerstones of the Order, among which the first and most important is the faith in T. G. A. O. T. U. [“the great Architect of the universe”, in English acronym], cannot recognize as ‘true and genuine’ Brothers all those who have been initiated in lodges that deny or ignore that faith.” FREEMASONRY SIMILAR TO THE BEAST OF THE APOCALYPSE Having concluded this long but necessary historical digression on Freemasonry implemented with various Wikipedia sources, let’s return to the beginning. To the book of the Apocalypse of Saint John and the disturbing esoteric symbolisms. If we summarize the historical notes above we can easily conclude that the first promoters of Zionism in the USA were the founders of the B’nai B’rith Lodge composed of Ashkenazi Jews (as Adolph Hitler is also believed to be) that the historians of Jewish culture they define the “13th Tribe of Israel” as they derive from the diaspora of the Khazars who had converted to Judaism for purely political reasons. While in Europe it spread thanks to the Rothschild Dynasty (Red Shield) which was the first to weave subversive plots with an anti-Catholic vocation from the birth of the Bavarian Illuminati up to the pact of terror for the French Revolution from which the liberation of the proto- Zionism together with that Masonic concept of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” imposed by guillotining even the elderly nobles of the Catholic Vendée French region. In light of all this, the words of the Satanist Albert Pike, Pope of American Freemasonry, take on an iconic relevance in the common project between Masonic and Zionist Lodges for the New World Order: «Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time». But following this hermeneutical path to the Book of the Apocalypse, one of the most important allegories comes to mind with disconcerting and terrifying impetus: «The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?» (Rev. 13, 1-4) The prophet Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist delves into the concept with an aura vision «Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon. It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed» (Rev. 13, 11-12) It is not really scary to note how traditional esoteric Freemasonry became manifest thanks to the Anglican political schism of the Protestants and allowed Pharisaic Judaism, defeated by the Diaspora after the Crucifixion of the Messiah awaited by the Jews, to be reborn in its Talmudic form with Judaism then became with Zionism the most powerful component of the New World Order? We have historical clues that help identify Freemasonry as one of the two apocalyptic Beasts. But this theme will be explored in greater depth if and when we receive from the Holy Spirit the gift of the wisdom necessary to interpret it. Therefore today we cannot help but insinuate doubt… POWER OF CHRIST IN THE PROPHECY OF SAINT JOHN THE APOSTLE But it is precisely Chapter 12 of the Book of the Apocalypse (Rev. 12, 7-12) which comes to illuminate with a radiant dawn of hope the dangers of all of us Christians who strive to be among those “who listen to the words of this prophecy and put into practice the things that are written in it”: «Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him». Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.” Since Saint John was the only Apostle who died without martyrdom for his loyalty to Jesus Christ under the cross and also survived the hell of imprisonment on Patmos (where he received the visions and locutions collected in the Apocalypse), it is probably very useful to start believing him… Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio © COPYRIGHT GOSPA NEWS prohibition of reproduction without authorization follow Fabio Carisio Gospa News director on Twitter follow Gospa News on Telegram MAIN SOURCES BOOK OF REVELATION (APOCALYPSE) – HOLY BIBLE Epiphanius – Massoneria e sette segrete, Controcorrente Edizioni, pag. 163, 164, 165, 166. – Citazioni da I Nuovi Vespri STORIA DELLA MASSONERIA – WIKIPEDIA GOSPA NEWS – CONSPIRACY – FREEMASONRY – NWO GOSPA NEWS – CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED GOSPA NEWS – WUHAN-GATES DOSSIER GOSPA NEWS – PALESTINE GOSPA NEWS – WAR ZONE GOSPA NEWS – WEAPONS LOBBY DOSSIER GOSPA NEWS – COVID-19, VACCINES & BIG PHARMA DOSSIER Fabio G. C. Carisio Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal. His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more… Most popolar investigation on VT is: Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting. For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime. With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians. In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence. In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator. VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS www.gospanews.net/ ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/freemasonry-zionism-1-apocalyptic-cataclysms-by-synagogue-of-satan/
    WWW.VTFOREIGNPOLICY.COM
    FREEMASONRY & ZIONISM – 1. Apocalyptic “Cataclysms” by Synagogue of Satan
    “To the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a...
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  • America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
    UPDATE: On the morning of September 21st Phil Giraldi was fired over the phone by The American Conservative, where he had been a regular contributor for fourteen years. He was told that “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” was unacceptable. The TAC management and board appear to have forgotten that the magazine was launched with an article by founder Pat Buchanan entitled “Whose War?” which largely made the same claims that Giraldi made about the Jewish push for another war, in that case with Iraq. Buchanan was vilified and denounced as an anti-Semite by many of the same people who are now similarly attacking Giraldi.

    I spoke recently at a conference on America’s war party where afterwards an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked, “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”

    It was a question combined with a comment that I have heard many times before and my answer is always the same: any organization that aspires to be heard on foreign policy knows that to touch the live wire of Israel and American Jews guarantees a quick trip to obscurity. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again. They are particularly sensitive on the issue of so-called “dual loyalty,” particularly as the expression itself is a bit of a sham since it is pretty clear that some of them only have real loyalty to Israel.

    Most recently, some pundits, including myself, have been warning of an impending war with Iran. To be sure, the urging to strike Iran comes from many quarters, to include generals in the Administration who always think first in terms of settling problems through force, from a Saudi government obsessed with fear over Iranian hegemony, and, of course, from Israel itself. But what makes the war engine run is provided by American Jews who have taken upon themselves the onerous task of starting a war with a country that does not conceivably threaten the United States. They have been very successful at faking the Iranian threat, so much so that nearly all Republican and most Democratic congressmen as well as much of the media seem to be convinced that Iran needs to be dealt with firmly, most definitely by using the U.S. military, and the sooner the better.

    And while they are doing it, the issue that nearly all the Iran haters are Jewish has somehow fallen out of sight, as if it does not matter. But it should matter. A recent article in the New Yorker on stopping the impending war with Iran strangely suggests that the current generation “Iran hawks” might be a force of moderation regarding policy options given the lessons learned from Iraq. The article cites as hardliners on Iran David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens.

    Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative has a good review of the New Yorker piece entitled “Yes, Iran Hawks Want Conflict with Iran,” which identifies the four above cited hawks by name before describing them as “…a Who’s Who of consistently lousy foreign policy thinking. If they have been right about any major foreign policy issue in the last twenty years, it would be news to the entire world. Every single one of them hates the nuclear deal with Iran with a passion, and they have argued in favor of military action against Iran at one point or another. There is zero evidence that any of them would oppose attacking Iran.”

    And I would add a few more names, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine; Elliot Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations; Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute; Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; and Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka and David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute. And you can also throw into the hopper entire organizations like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Hudson Institute. And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives. And I might add that only one of the named individuals has ever served in any branch of the American military – David Wurmser was once in the Navy reserve. These individuals largely constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying.

    So it is safe to say that much of the agitation to do something about Iran comes from Israel and from American Jews. Indeed, I would opine that most of the fury from Congress re Iran comes from the same source, with AIPAC showering our Solons on the Potomac with “fact sheets” explaining how Iran is worthy of annihilation because it has pledged to “destroy Israel,” which is both a lie and an impossibility as Tehran does not have the resources to carry out such a task. The AIPAC lies are then picked up and replayed by an obliging media, where nearly every “expert” who speaks about the Middle East on television and radio or who is interviewed for newspaper stories is Jewish.

    One might also add that neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush. Recall for a moment Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. Yes, all Jewish and all conduits for the false information that led to a war that has spread and effectively destroyed much of the Middle East. Except for Israel, of course. Philip Zelikow, also Jewish, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel.

    Add to the folly a Jewish U.S. Ambassador to Israel who identifies with the most right-wing Israeli settler elements, a White House appointed chief negotiator who is Jewish and a Jewish son-in-law who is also involved in formulating Middle East policy. Is anyone providing an alternative viewpoint to eternal and uncritical support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his kleptocratic regime of racist thugs? I think not.

    There are a couple of simple fixes for the dominant involvement of American Jews in foreign policy issues where they have a personal interest due to their ethnicity or family ties. First of all, don’t put them into national security positions involving the Middle East, where they will potentially be conflicted. Let them worry instead about North Korea, which does not have a Jewish minority and which was not involved in the holocaust. This type of solution was, in fact, somewhat of a policy regarding the U.S. Ambassador position in Israel. No Jew was appointed to avoid any conflict of interest prior to 1995, an understanding that was violated by Bill Clinton (wouldn’t you know it!) who named Martin Indyk to the post. Indyk was not even an American citizen at the time and had to be naturalized quickly prior to being approved by congress.

    Those American Jews who are strongly attached to Israel and somehow find themselves in senior policy making positions involving the Middle East and who actually possess any integrity on the issue should recuse themselves, just as any judge would do if he were presiding over a case in which he had a personal interest. Any American should be free to exercise first amendment rights to debate possible options regarding policy, up to and including embracing positions that damage the United States and benefit a foreign nation. But if he or she is in a position to actually create those policies, he or she should butt out and leave the policy generation to those who have no personal baggage.

    For those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity, the media should be required to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.”

    As none of the above is likely to happen, the only alternative is for American citizens who are tired of having their country’s national security interests hijacked by a group that is in thrall to a foreign government to become more assertive about what is happening. Shine a little light into the darkness and recognize who is being diddled and by whom. Call it like it is. And if someone’s feelings are hurt, too bad. We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver. Seriously, we don’t need it.

    https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars/

    https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars.html
    America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review UPDATE: On the morning of September 21st Phil Giraldi was fired over the phone by The American Conservative, where he had been a regular contributor for fourteen years. He was told that “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” was unacceptable. The TAC management and board appear to have forgotten that the magazine was launched with an article by founder Pat Buchanan entitled “Whose War?” which largely made the same claims that Giraldi made about the Jewish push for another war, in that case with Iraq. Buchanan was vilified and denounced as an anti-Semite by many of the same people who are now similarly attacking Giraldi. I spoke recently at a conference on America’s war party where afterwards an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked, “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?” It was a question combined with a comment that I have heard many times before and my answer is always the same: any organization that aspires to be heard on foreign policy knows that to touch the live wire of Israel and American Jews guarantees a quick trip to obscurity. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again. They are particularly sensitive on the issue of so-called “dual loyalty,” particularly as the expression itself is a bit of a sham since it is pretty clear that some of them only have real loyalty to Israel. Most recently, some pundits, including myself, have been warning of an impending war with Iran. To be sure, the urging to strike Iran comes from many quarters, to include generals in the Administration who always think first in terms of settling problems through force, from a Saudi government obsessed with fear over Iranian hegemony, and, of course, from Israel itself. But what makes the war engine run is provided by American Jews who have taken upon themselves the onerous task of starting a war with a country that does not conceivably threaten the United States. They have been very successful at faking the Iranian threat, so much so that nearly all Republican and most Democratic congressmen as well as much of the media seem to be convinced that Iran needs to be dealt with firmly, most definitely by using the U.S. military, and the sooner the better. And while they are doing it, the issue that nearly all the Iran haters are Jewish has somehow fallen out of sight, as if it does not matter. But it should matter. A recent article in the New Yorker on stopping the impending war with Iran strangely suggests that the current generation “Iran hawks” might be a force of moderation regarding policy options given the lessons learned from Iraq. The article cites as hardliners on Iran David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens. Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative has a good review of the New Yorker piece entitled “Yes, Iran Hawks Want Conflict with Iran,” which identifies the four above cited hawks by name before describing them as “…a Who’s Who of consistently lousy foreign policy thinking. If they have been right about any major foreign policy issue in the last twenty years, it would be news to the entire world. Every single one of them hates the nuclear deal with Iran with a passion, and they have argued in favor of military action against Iran at one point or another. There is zero evidence that any of them would oppose attacking Iran.” And I would add a few more names, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine; Elliot Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations; Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute; Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; and Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka and David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute. And you can also throw into the hopper entire organizations like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Hudson Institute. And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives. And I might add that only one of the named individuals has ever served in any branch of the American military – David Wurmser was once in the Navy reserve. These individuals largely constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying. So it is safe to say that much of the agitation to do something about Iran comes from Israel and from American Jews. Indeed, I would opine that most of the fury from Congress re Iran comes from the same source, with AIPAC showering our Solons on the Potomac with “fact sheets” explaining how Iran is worthy of annihilation because it has pledged to “destroy Israel,” which is both a lie and an impossibility as Tehran does not have the resources to carry out such a task. The AIPAC lies are then picked up and replayed by an obliging media, where nearly every “expert” who speaks about the Middle East on television and radio or who is interviewed for newspaper stories is Jewish. One might also add that neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush. Recall for a moment Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. Yes, all Jewish and all conduits for the false information that led to a war that has spread and effectively destroyed much of the Middle East. Except for Israel, of course. Philip Zelikow, also Jewish, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel. Add to the folly a Jewish U.S. Ambassador to Israel who identifies with the most right-wing Israeli settler elements, a White House appointed chief negotiator who is Jewish and a Jewish son-in-law who is also involved in formulating Middle East policy. Is anyone providing an alternative viewpoint to eternal and uncritical support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his kleptocratic regime of racist thugs? I think not. There are a couple of simple fixes for the dominant involvement of American Jews in foreign policy issues where they have a personal interest due to their ethnicity or family ties. First of all, don’t put them into national security positions involving the Middle East, where they will potentially be conflicted. Let them worry instead about North Korea, which does not have a Jewish minority and which was not involved in the holocaust. This type of solution was, in fact, somewhat of a policy regarding the U.S. Ambassador position in Israel. No Jew was appointed to avoid any conflict of interest prior to 1995, an understanding that was violated by Bill Clinton (wouldn’t you know it!) who named Martin Indyk to the post. Indyk was not even an American citizen at the time and had to be naturalized quickly prior to being approved by congress. Those American Jews who are strongly attached to Israel and somehow find themselves in senior policy making positions involving the Middle East and who actually possess any integrity on the issue should recuse themselves, just as any judge would do if he were presiding over a case in which he had a personal interest. Any American should be free to exercise first amendment rights to debate possible options regarding policy, up to and including embracing positions that damage the United States and benefit a foreign nation. But if he or she is in a position to actually create those policies, he or she should butt out and leave the policy generation to those who have no personal baggage. For those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity, the media should be required to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.” As none of the above is likely to happen, the only alternative is for American citizens who are tired of having their country’s national security interests hijacked by a group that is in thrall to a foreign government to become more assertive about what is happening. Shine a little light into the darkness and recognize who is being diddled and by whom. Call it like it is. And if someone’s feelings are hurt, too bad. We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver. Seriously, we don’t need it. https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars.html
    WWW.UNZ.COM
    America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars
    Shouldn't they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?
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  • The Pulitzer Winner Hersh Unveils Mystery on Death of Navy SEALS in Gulf of Aden | VT Foreign Policy
    February 16, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    In the cover image the USS Lewis B. Puller departs Naval Station Norfolk in July 2017. / US Navy photo by Bill Mesta.

    The Seals and the Dhow

    Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

    All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted

    Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published

    This is a painful story for the families of three Navy SEALs. Two of the SEALs were lost at sea and a third was critically injured on a mission on January 11 in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia. It was a mission that never should have been ordered, and when everything went wrong, it was covered up with a series of lies.

    Why report a story about two deaths and an injury when there is a president who has put America indirectly into wars in Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East? I have learned in six decades of chasing down hidden stories that it is delving into the little lies that reveals much about the bigger lies. So it has been in the past month with the story of the dead and injured SEALs.

    Middle East Dashing to WWIII! Kremlin Condemns Illegal US, UK Strikes on Houthis in Yemen. Germany to Join Mission

    Their target was a wooden smuggling vessel, operated by Somalis, that was suspected of delivering modern ballistic missiles or missile parts to America’s new enemy: the Houthis of Yemen. Somalis have been smuggling goods through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in their wooden sailing vessels, known as dhows, since biblical times. Few have motors or any means of electronic communication, and the larger dhows, like the one targeted by the SEALs, often serve as living quarters for the smugglers’ families. (dhow is a a sailing boat with a long, thin hull – ed).

    The SEALs were assigned to a ship named the Lewis B. Puller, after a fabled combat general, the most decorated marine of all time, who fought in World War II against the Japanese, as well as in Haiti, in Central America, and in the Korean War. The ship, modeled on an oil tanker, is what the Navy calls an Expeditionary Mobile Base, which means that it is capable, with its landing decks, of supporting a vast number of air and sea military activities from all the services, including those of the Navy SEALs. The Puller was commissioned in 2017 in a port in Bahrain and was not much in the news until it became known that the failed SEAL mission took place.

    IRGC Missiles hit anti-Iran terrorists’ and Mossad Espionage Base (video). Houthis Struck US Ship

    On January 13, the New York Times, citing two current and two former Pentagon officials, published the first account of the two deaths, which were said to have taken place while the SEALs were attempting to board a dhow at night.

    The Quoting of a Former SEAL Senior Chief

    The sea was rough, and one SEAL slipped off the boarding ladder. The initial report claimed that a second SEAL jumped into the water in an effort to save his colleague and both drowned. It was not clear whether he was also on the ladder or jumped from the inflatable speedboat known as a RHIB, for rigid hulled inflatable boat, that the SEALs used to approach the ship. A January 22 Times article about the incident, by Dave Philipps, known for his excellent sources in the special operations community, revealed that a third SEAL attempted to climb the ladder to board the dhow. He fell during the attempted boarding and struck the speedboat. He was rescued and today remains in critical condition.

    Philipps quoted a former SEAL senior chief explaining that he and his retired colleagues were convinced the story, as told by administration officials, “doesn’t make sense. Something else must have gone wrong.”

    Navy Seal Who Went AWOL Killed While Fighting Russians In Bakhmut

    There were questions at the time about President’s Biden decision in early January to expand the American war portfolio. He has taken on the Houthis, who had survived a seven-year war with the Saudi air force, supported by American bombs and targeting intelligence. That war ended with what amounted to a Saudi surrender. The American attacks, still being supported by British air power, are in their second month, and the world’s major shipping companies are still choosing not to chance a ten-day shortcut by sailing from Europe via the Suez Canal into the Red Sea. The Houthi threat is still there, pending an Israeli decision to cease its onslaught in the Gaza Strip. Ironically, or tragically, Biden is now said to be telling the Israelis that a ceasefire is needed. The world is coming to its own judgment about Biden, who is now seeking a second term.

    Refer a friend

    The Somali dhow offered the White House a chance to justify its new offensive. It had been tracked by American intelligence since leaving Somalia because it was believed to be carrying ballistic missile parts needed by the Houthis in their ongoing campaign against Western shipping; The basis for that intelligence, which proved to be wrong, has not been made known.

    Worse than Ukraine! In Yemen “Catastrophic” Hunger due to Saudi War: 400,000 Toddlers at “Risk of Death”

    Back to the Lewis B. Puller. The more than a dozen senior officers from all services assigned to the ship’s command center were gung-ho to send the hot-shot SEAL team to intercept the dhow, compel the boat to stand to, and board it to find ballistic missiles or parts of weapons that were coming to the Houthis from Iran, known to American intelligence as a longtime supporter and supplier of weaponry to Yemen. But there was a serious problem. The issue is what is known in the Navy as the Sea State Code, which is based on terminology used in oceanography to describe the general conditions of the ocean’s surface, as determined by three key factors: wind, waves, and swell.

    The Serious Problem of Sea State

    There are ten categories of sea state, and SEALs can operate with ease and safety up to sea state 3. One experienced retired senior American Navy officer told me that even four- and five-foot waves can sometimes create difficulties for a Navy tanker attempting to refuel an aircraft carrier, but it can be done with skilled maneuvering. No ship loaded with high-octane fighter fuel wants to crash into the side of a carrier.

    When the seas get higher, to level 4 or 5, the waves and stronger current make boarding a targeted vessel, even a wooden dhow, an extremely dangerous prospect, in part because of the difficulty in handling steel ladders, known as caving ladders, that are standard SEAL boarding gear. The steps are lightweight aluminum tubes linked by equally lightweight steel cables.

    US judge rules in favor of Navy SEALs Refusing Vaccination on Religious Grounds

    What is hard to do at sea state 3 is deadly dangerous at sea state 4 or 5, a retired Navy officer, with years of experience in special operations, told me. “The waves are going up and down eight feet and more and you do not board a ship in heavy sea,” he said. He added that Navy captains of combat ships finishing a long deployment understand that crews due for shore leave are not permitted to leave the ship in such churning waters.

    The retired officer said that when the officer on the Puller who was in charge of all special operation missions, an Army colonel, told “the SEAL team leader to ‘saddle up,’ the team leader told him to look outside the window.” His message was that “it was dark, and the sea was too rough. And it was beyond the capabilities of his team.” The retired officer added: “It was an argument between the on the scene commander and a guy in charge of the SEALs.”

    The SEAL team leader said no. But he was ordered to carry out the mission, despite the obvious weather issues, and he did so.

    The Mystery on a Ballistic Missile

    The questions that were not asked, the retired officer said, were these: “Do we know if the dhow is carrying a ballistic missile or a box full of missile parts?” No. “Can you get a key to a launch site?” No. “Or a map of all the Houthi launch sites?” No. “Do Somali smugglers know the difference between a case of Johnny Walker Red and one of Johnny Walter Black?” Yes.

    CIA-GATE – 1. Bulgarian Network to Weaponize Ukraine Intelligence and Middle-East’s Terrorists

    The decision to ignore the concerns of the SEAL commander has been seen by the angered SEAL community in America as “beyond rational planning” and “a disaster waiting to happen.” I learned that one high-ranking member of the community, now retired, wrote a private letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, asking that the officer who overruled the SEAL commander be court-martialed for dereliction of duty as the buck-stops-here boss of the operation. “It will never happen,” the former officer told me. “Dead SEALs will go down in Navy annals as heroes, not victims.” His point was that the Navy would never acknowledge that the SEAL team had no business being sent on a search-and-destroy mission in such weather.

    US launches ‘Retaliatory AirStrikes’ in the Middle East. Targeted 85 sites in Iraq and Syria. At least 18 People Died

    As many as nine SEALs may have been aboard the SEALs’ inflatable speedboat—there was a second boat with no SEALs aboard as backup—as it dashed to the dhow that, as ordered, came to a stop and acknowledged that it was to be boarded. Three SEALs began the treacherous climb aboard the vessel. It is not known just what happened—did one fall off the special ladder, made up of steel tubes and chain links? Or did the ladder, swaying to and from in the heavy sea with two SEALs making the climb and a third waiting to do so, suddenly get rocked by a huge wave that flung the men against the side of the dhow, leaving both unconscious or worse, with only to drop into the sea? The badly injured third SEAL survived only because he fell into one of the speedboats.

    Only Obsolete Rocket Motors and Pieces of Old Missiles on the Dhow

    The SEALs who made the climb into the dhow “did find the treasure,” the retired officer sardonically told me. “There were some obsolete rocket motors, all Iran-made, and some pieces of Styx missiles from the 1950s and ’60s, but no significant missile components among the cargo, other than ancient engines and some random tubes that had been used in missile attacks. There was the usual cargo of liquor, cigarettes, random knock-off clothing, porn cassettes.”

    The Somali smugglers were taken prisoner and placed on Navy vessels that came to the scene, and the dhow sent to the bottom.

    The two deaths were reported, but over the next few days, the retired officer said, all involved “were playing the game,” keeping as many details as possible under wraps. The Lewis B. Puller was locked down in extreme secrecy. The names of the dead were made public, but not that of the survivor, if he does survive. His is a story that no one in the Navy wants told. I learned that the commanding officer of the Lewis B. Puller, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 2000 and spent his career in Navy aviation—not as a pilot but as a backseat radar intercept officer—may be quietly retired, if the system works as it usually does.

    Gaza, Donbass, Syria: GENOCIDES of the Zionist, Nazi, Jihadist Regimes is US-NATO’s “New” Geopolitical WEAPON

    There is a Navy history for such arrogance and deception that dates to the end of the Second World War. The chief of Naval Operations was crusty Admiral Ernest King, a brilliant officer who played a key role in advising President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on military matters. When asked at one point by an aide what to tell the press about the progress of the war against the Japanese fleet, King famously said: “Don’t tell them anything. When it’s over, tell them who won.”

    Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

    All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted

    Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published

    Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandalfor The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military’s torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    “Soros” French Judges want to Arrest Assad for Douma Chemical Attack despite it was White Helmets False-Flag

    In 2013, Hersh’s reporting alleged that Syrian rebel forces, rather than the government, had attacked civilians with sarin gas at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he presented an alternative account of the U.S. special forces raid in Pakistan which killed Osama bin Laden. In 2023, Hersh highlighted that the U.S. and Norway had sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.

    Nord Stream Sabotage: UN Security Council Rejected Investigation on Terroristic Act. Russia: “Dangerous Precedent”

    GOSPA NEWS – WARZONE

    GOSPA NEWS – WEAPONS LOBBY DOSSIER

    Thanks to Ukrainian Weapons Hamas resists vs Israel’s Massacre in Gaza which goes on due to US Veto at UN

    Western Weapons sent to Kiev found in Possession of Mexican Drug Cartels

    Pentagon’s Weaponry Shady Traffic. Missiles for Ukraine Disappeared. New US Supplies to Kosovo Separatists

    Fabio G. C. Carisio
    Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal.

    His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more…

    Most popolar investigation on VT is:

    Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon

    Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.

    For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.

    With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.

    In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.

    In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates

    His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others

    He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.

    VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS

    www.gospanews.net/

    ATTENTION READERS

    We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
    In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

    About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
    Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.

    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/the-pulitzer-winner-hersh-unveils-mystery-on-death-of-navy-seals-in-gulf-of-aden/

    https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-pulitzer-winner-hersh-unveils.html
    The Pulitzer Winner Hersh Unveils Mystery on Death of Navy SEALS in Gulf of Aden | VT Foreign Policy February 16, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. In the cover image the USS Lewis B. Puller departs Naval Station Norfolk in July 2017. / US Navy photo by Bill Mesta. The Seals and the Dhow Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published This is a painful story for the families of three Navy SEALs. Two of the SEALs were lost at sea and a third was critically injured on a mission on January 11 in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia. It was a mission that never should have been ordered, and when everything went wrong, it was covered up with a series of lies. Why report a story about two deaths and an injury when there is a president who has put America indirectly into wars in Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East? I have learned in six decades of chasing down hidden stories that it is delving into the little lies that reveals much about the bigger lies. So it has been in the past month with the story of the dead and injured SEALs. Middle East Dashing to WWIII! Kremlin Condemns Illegal US, UK Strikes on Houthis in Yemen. Germany to Join Mission Their target was a wooden smuggling vessel, operated by Somalis, that was suspected of delivering modern ballistic missiles or missile parts to America’s new enemy: the Houthis of Yemen. Somalis have been smuggling goods through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in their wooden sailing vessels, known as dhows, since biblical times. Few have motors or any means of electronic communication, and the larger dhows, like the one targeted by the SEALs, often serve as living quarters for the smugglers’ families. (dhow is a a sailing boat with a long, thin hull – ed). The SEALs were assigned to a ship named the Lewis B. Puller, after a fabled combat general, the most decorated marine of all time, who fought in World War II against the Japanese, as well as in Haiti, in Central America, and in the Korean War. The ship, modeled on an oil tanker, is what the Navy calls an Expeditionary Mobile Base, which means that it is capable, with its landing decks, of supporting a vast number of air and sea military activities from all the services, including those of the Navy SEALs. The Puller was commissioned in 2017 in a port in Bahrain and was not much in the news until it became known that the failed SEAL mission took place. IRGC Missiles hit anti-Iran terrorists’ and Mossad Espionage Base (video). Houthis Struck US Ship On January 13, the New York Times, citing two current and two former Pentagon officials, published the first account of the two deaths, which were said to have taken place while the SEALs were attempting to board a dhow at night. The Quoting of a Former SEAL Senior Chief The sea was rough, and one SEAL slipped off the boarding ladder. The initial report claimed that a second SEAL jumped into the water in an effort to save his colleague and both drowned. It was not clear whether he was also on the ladder or jumped from the inflatable speedboat known as a RHIB, for rigid hulled inflatable boat, that the SEALs used to approach the ship. A January 22 Times article about the incident, by Dave Philipps, known for his excellent sources in the special operations community, revealed that a third SEAL attempted to climb the ladder to board the dhow. He fell during the attempted boarding and struck the speedboat. He was rescued and today remains in critical condition. Philipps quoted a former SEAL senior chief explaining that he and his retired colleagues were convinced the story, as told by administration officials, “doesn’t make sense. Something else must have gone wrong.” Navy Seal Who Went AWOL Killed While Fighting Russians In Bakhmut There were questions at the time about President’s Biden decision in early January to expand the American war portfolio. He has taken on the Houthis, who had survived a seven-year war with the Saudi air force, supported by American bombs and targeting intelligence. That war ended with what amounted to a Saudi surrender. The American attacks, still being supported by British air power, are in their second month, and the world’s major shipping companies are still choosing not to chance a ten-day shortcut by sailing from Europe via the Suez Canal into the Red Sea. The Houthi threat is still there, pending an Israeli decision to cease its onslaught in the Gaza Strip. Ironically, or tragically, Biden is now said to be telling the Israelis that a ceasefire is needed. The world is coming to its own judgment about Biden, who is now seeking a second term. Refer a friend The Somali dhow offered the White House a chance to justify its new offensive. It had been tracked by American intelligence since leaving Somalia because it was believed to be carrying ballistic missile parts needed by the Houthis in their ongoing campaign against Western shipping; The basis for that intelligence, which proved to be wrong, has not been made known. Worse than Ukraine! In Yemen “Catastrophic” Hunger due to Saudi War: 400,000 Toddlers at “Risk of Death” Back to the Lewis B. Puller. The more than a dozen senior officers from all services assigned to the ship’s command center were gung-ho to send the hot-shot SEAL team to intercept the dhow, compel the boat to stand to, and board it to find ballistic missiles or parts of weapons that were coming to the Houthis from Iran, known to American intelligence as a longtime supporter and supplier of weaponry to Yemen. But there was a serious problem. The issue is what is known in the Navy as the Sea State Code, which is based on terminology used in oceanography to describe the general conditions of the ocean’s surface, as determined by three key factors: wind, waves, and swell. The Serious Problem of Sea State There are ten categories of sea state, and SEALs can operate with ease and safety up to sea state 3. One experienced retired senior American Navy officer told me that even four- and five-foot waves can sometimes create difficulties for a Navy tanker attempting to refuel an aircraft carrier, but it can be done with skilled maneuvering. No ship loaded with high-octane fighter fuel wants to crash into the side of a carrier. When the seas get higher, to level 4 or 5, the waves and stronger current make boarding a targeted vessel, even a wooden dhow, an extremely dangerous prospect, in part because of the difficulty in handling steel ladders, known as caving ladders, that are standard SEAL boarding gear. The steps are lightweight aluminum tubes linked by equally lightweight steel cables. US judge rules in favor of Navy SEALs Refusing Vaccination on Religious Grounds What is hard to do at sea state 3 is deadly dangerous at sea state 4 or 5, a retired Navy officer, with years of experience in special operations, told me. “The waves are going up and down eight feet and more and you do not board a ship in heavy sea,” he said. He added that Navy captains of combat ships finishing a long deployment understand that crews due for shore leave are not permitted to leave the ship in such churning waters. The retired officer said that when the officer on the Puller who was in charge of all special operation missions, an Army colonel, told “the SEAL team leader to ‘saddle up,’ the team leader told him to look outside the window.” His message was that “it was dark, and the sea was too rough. And it was beyond the capabilities of his team.” The retired officer added: “It was an argument between the on the scene commander and a guy in charge of the SEALs.” The SEAL team leader said no. But he was ordered to carry out the mission, despite the obvious weather issues, and he did so. The Mystery on a Ballistic Missile The questions that were not asked, the retired officer said, were these: “Do we know if the dhow is carrying a ballistic missile or a box full of missile parts?” No. “Can you get a key to a launch site?” No. “Or a map of all the Houthi launch sites?” No. “Do Somali smugglers know the difference between a case of Johnny Walker Red and one of Johnny Walter Black?” Yes. CIA-GATE – 1. Bulgarian Network to Weaponize Ukraine Intelligence and Middle-East’s Terrorists The decision to ignore the concerns of the SEAL commander has been seen by the angered SEAL community in America as “beyond rational planning” and “a disaster waiting to happen.” I learned that one high-ranking member of the community, now retired, wrote a private letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, asking that the officer who overruled the SEAL commander be court-martialed for dereliction of duty as the buck-stops-here boss of the operation. “It will never happen,” the former officer told me. “Dead SEALs will go down in Navy annals as heroes, not victims.” His point was that the Navy would never acknowledge that the SEAL team had no business being sent on a search-and-destroy mission in such weather. US launches ‘Retaliatory AirStrikes’ in the Middle East. Targeted 85 sites in Iraq and Syria. At least 18 People Died As many as nine SEALs may have been aboard the SEALs’ inflatable speedboat—there was a second boat with no SEALs aboard as backup—as it dashed to the dhow that, as ordered, came to a stop and acknowledged that it was to be boarded. Three SEALs began the treacherous climb aboard the vessel. It is not known just what happened—did one fall off the special ladder, made up of steel tubes and chain links? Or did the ladder, swaying to and from in the heavy sea with two SEALs making the climb and a third waiting to do so, suddenly get rocked by a huge wave that flung the men against the side of the dhow, leaving both unconscious or worse, with only to drop into the sea? The badly injured third SEAL survived only because he fell into one of the speedboats. Only Obsolete Rocket Motors and Pieces of Old Missiles on the Dhow The SEALs who made the climb into the dhow “did find the treasure,” the retired officer sardonically told me. “There were some obsolete rocket motors, all Iran-made, and some pieces of Styx missiles from the 1950s and ’60s, but no significant missile components among the cargo, other than ancient engines and some random tubes that had been used in missile attacks. There was the usual cargo of liquor, cigarettes, random knock-off clothing, porn cassettes.” The Somali smugglers were taken prisoner and placed on Navy vessels that came to the scene, and the dhow sent to the bottom. The two deaths were reported, but over the next few days, the retired officer said, all involved “were playing the game,” keeping as many details as possible under wraps. The Lewis B. Puller was locked down in extreme secrecy. The names of the dead were made public, but not that of the survivor, if he does survive. His is a story that no one in the Navy wants told. I learned that the commanding officer of the Lewis B. Puller, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 2000 and spent his career in Navy aviation—not as a pilot but as a backseat radar intercept officer—may be quietly retired, if the system works as it usually does. Gaza, Donbass, Syria: GENOCIDES of the Zionist, Nazi, Jihadist Regimes is US-NATO’s “New” Geopolitical WEAPON There is a Navy history for such arrogance and deception that dates to the end of the Second World War. The chief of Naval Operations was crusty Admiral Ernest King, a brilliant officer who played a key role in advising President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on military matters. When asked at one point by an aide what to tell the press about the progress of the war against the Japanese fleet, King famously said: “Don’t tell them anything. When it’s over, tell them who won.” Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandalfor The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military’s torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Soros” French Judges want to Arrest Assad for Douma Chemical Attack despite it was White Helmets False-Flag In 2013, Hersh’s reporting alleged that Syrian rebel forces, rather than the government, had attacked civilians with sarin gas at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he presented an alternative account of the U.S. special forces raid in Pakistan which killed Osama bin Laden. In 2023, Hersh highlighted that the U.S. and Norway had sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. Nord Stream Sabotage: UN Security Council Rejected Investigation on Terroristic Act. Russia: “Dangerous Precedent” GOSPA NEWS – WARZONE GOSPA NEWS – WEAPONS LOBBY DOSSIER Thanks to Ukrainian Weapons Hamas resists vs Israel’s Massacre in Gaza which goes on due to US Veto at UN Western Weapons sent to Kiev found in Possession of Mexican Drug Cartels Pentagon’s Weaponry Shady Traffic. Missiles for Ukraine Disappeared. New US Supplies to Kosovo Separatists Fabio G. C. Carisio Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal. His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more… Most popolar investigation on VT is: Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting. For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime. With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians. In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence. In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator. VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS www.gospanews.net/ ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/the-pulitzer-winner-hersh-unveils-mystery-on-death-of-navy-seals-in-gulf-of-aden/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-pulitzer-winner-hersh-unveils.html
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    The Pulitzer Winner Hersh Unveils Mystery on Death of Navy SEALS in Gulf of Aden
    In the cover image the USS Lewis B. Puller departs Naval Station Norfolk in July 2017. / US Navy photo by Bill Mesta. The Seals and the Dhow Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted Subscribe to...
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  • More severe war crimes of the Zionist state...

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been brutally tortured in Belmarsh Prison (UK) and persecuted for publishing equal war crimes of the U.S. Government in Iraq! And the U.S. Government IS funding the Gaza democide!

    https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1757358867132948930?s=20
    More severe war crimes of the Zionist state... WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been brutally tortured in Belmarsh Prison (UK) and persecuted for publishing equal war crimes of the U.S. Government in Iraq! And the U.S. Government IS funding the Gaza democide! https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1757358867132948930?s=20
    Like
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  • China tells UN Security Council that the recent US airstrikes “constitute a grave violation of the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of Syria and Iraq.”

    “The situation in the Middle East is on the verge of extreme peril...”

    WATCH the Video:
    📰 WW3 INFO BLOG...
    Meanwhile, keep updated
    Subscribe to @WW3INFO ✅
    China tells UN Security Council that the recent US airstrikes “constitute a grave violation of the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of Syria and Iraq.” “The situation in the Middle East is on the verge of extreme peril...” WATCH the Video: 📰 WW3 INFO BLOG... Meanwhile, keep updated Subscribe to @WW3INFO ✅
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  • 🆘 For those who say “Nothing’s Happening”

    1. President Clinton confirmed on Epstein list.
    2. Iraq says “No More USD exchange” inside the country.
    3. NATO full panic mode — planning to false_flag themselves and blame Russia.
    4. SCOTUS accepts filing alleging Jack Smith is an illegal special counsel.
    5. Public confirmation that DJT never went to Epstein Island.
    6. Genocide in Gaza confirmed by multiple alt-media/citizen journalists worldwide. Official case accepted by ICJ.
    7. Tucker Carlson/Russell Brand say the words “spiritual warfare”, and “C19 was a bioweapon” on Tucker’s show, 3 weeks after Tucker basically proved Epstein didn’t kill himself.
    8. Former Counsel in US FDIC office overseeing commercial banking sector, sentenced to prison for child pornography/assault.
    9. WeThePeople protests now choking off transit in multiple Western nations.
    10. “Alien” seed firmly planted in the consciousness in Miami, FL.

    And we’re just 1 month in …
    #MAGA2024

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  • ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 121: Israel kills more than 1,000 Palestinians since ICJ ruling; U.S. bombs Yemen
    Israeli forces bomb Rafah, where thousands of Palestinians are displaced in shelters near the Egyptian border, as an Israeli minister wishes to “encourage voluntary emigration” from Gaza. In West Bank, settlers attack Palestinian villages.

    Mustafa Abu SneinehFebruary 4, 2024
    An injured child gets treatment at Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip
    Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for treatment following the Israeli attacks in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza on February 04, 2024. (Omar Ashtawy/apaimages)
    Casualties

    27,365+ killed* and at least 66,630 wounded in the Gaza Strip.
    380+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem
    Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147.
    562 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.**
    *This figure was confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Telegram channel. Some rights groups put the death toll number at more than 35,000 when accounting for those presumed dead.

    ** This figure is released by the Israeli military.

    Key Developments

    Israeli far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, says his plan is to “encourage Gazans to voluntarily emigrate to places around the world” by offering them cash incentives.
    Ben-Gvir says he looks forward to Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office; believes that Tump will give Israel free hand in Gaza, while President Joe Biden is “hampering Israel’s war effort”.
    Israeli forces bomb kindergarten housing hundreds of displaced Palestinian in Al-Salam neighborhood, east of Rafah, which borders Egypt.
    Israeli forces lay siege for day six over Al-Shifa Hospital in north Gaza, preventing people from accessing the facility.
    Israeli airstrikes bomb two inhabited houses in Rafah and kill at least 26 Palestinians.
    Hamas military wing, Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, releases video of attack in Al-Maghazi that killed 21 Israeli soldiers last month.
    Hamas also releases video of its fighters shooting an Israeli command officer in Gaza City; fighters firing direct and close hit on D9 Bulldozer in Khan Yunis.
    US and UK bomb 48 targets of Yemeni Armed Forces, led by the Ansar Allah group (unofficially known also as “Houthis”).
    Yemeni Armed Forces spokesperson says: “These attacks will not deter us from our moral, religious, and humanitarian stance in support of the steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and will not pass without response and punishment.”
    Israeli authorities and forces kill five Palestinians, demolish 22 properties, detain 163 people, and put 13 under house arrest in occupied Jerusalem in January, according to the Al-Quds Governate report.
    Israeli minister wants to ‘encourage Gazans to voluntarily emigrate’

    Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling last week, ordering Tel Aviv to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.

    Advertisement

    Watch now: SUSAN ABULHAWA and FRANCESCA ALBANESE on Witnessing Palestine with Frank Barat
    The Israeli forces have not ceased to bomb the Gaza Strip since October, except for a temporary pause in November to allow for the exchange of captives.

    Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Sunday morning that Israel killed 127 Palestinians and injured 178 others, committing 14 massacres in the past 24 hours.

    The number of Palestinians killed in the Israeli aggression on Gaza now stands at 27,365 martyrs, and 66,630 were injured since October.

    Meanwhile, some Israeli government ministers and Knesset members are making it clear that their wish is to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza.

    The far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the Wall Street Journal that his plan is to “encourage Gazans to voluntarily emigrate to places around the world” by offering them cash incentives.

    Ben-Gvir’s position aligns with the Religious Zionism political alliance, one of the core blocs that makes up Netanyahu’s government. Last week, members of Religious Zionism held a conference in occupied Jerusalem, dubbed “Return to Gaza Conference”, in which they called for building 21 Israeli settlements on top of recently destroyed Palestinian neighbourhoods.

    Ben-Gvir is also looking forward to the day Donald Trump would sit in the Oval Office, believing that he will give Israel a free hand in Gaza, while President Joe Biden is “hampering Israel’s war effort”.

    Ben-Gvir made these statements despite the fact that the Biden administration has stood firmly behind Israel since October 7, authorizing the sale of thousands of munition rounds, rejecting calls for a ceasefire, and supporting Tel Aviv diplomatically and in the UN Security Council.

    The U.S. also called Hamas to free all the Israelis captured during the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood cross-fence attack on October 7. However, Hamas had refused these calls before an agreement on a permanent ceasefire is reached.

    Currently, Hamas is still deliberating over a proposed truce for 45 days and the release of 35 Israeli captives in return for the freeing of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails. The deal is yet to be confirmed.

    But releasing Israeli captives is not a top agenda item for some Israeli politicians. Amichai Elhaho, the Israeli Minister of Heritage, who called for nuking Gaza, pleaded to Israelis who protested against Netanyahu to release hostages, to think outside the box.

    “We must get out of mental stagnation that the deal is the only way to free the hostages,” Elhaho told army radio on Sunday. “The Jewish morality does not hold us fully responsible for the release of the captives,” he added.

    Israeli forces bomb kindergarten sheltering Palestinians in Rafah

    Overnight, Israeli forces bombed a kindergarten housing hundreds of displaced Palestinian in Al-Salam neighborhood, east of Rafah, the southern city which borders Egypt.

    Wafa news agency reported that two girls were killed in the Israeli airstrike and dozens injured. Another Israeli airstrike on an apartment in Hassan Salama Tower in Al-Geneina neighbourhood, east of Rafah, killed a child and wounded two others.

    An Israeli airstrike on the house of the Abu Safar family killed seven Palestinians, including children, in the Al-Hakar area in Deir Al-Balah city, in central Gaza. Wafa also reported that several Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling were launched on Khan Yunis overnight.

    An airstrike on the house of Masran family in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza injured several Palestinians as Israeli forces continued to bomb north Gaza neighbourhoods, killing at least eight Palestinians in an airstrike on the Al-Rimal area.

    Wafa reported that in north Gaza, medical teams transferred the bodies and the injured to the Kamal Adwan Hospital, while for the sixth day in a row, Israeli forces are laying siege over the Al-Shifa Hospital, preventing people from accessing the facility.

    Last week, Israeli tanks approaching the Al-Shifa Hospital and Al-Rimal neighborhood, forced thousands of Palestinians to flee in panic and fear to the eastern areas of Gaza City. Despite being one of the first hospitals attacked by the Israeli military in its ground offensive campaign, Al-Shifa is one of the few remaining hospitals that are still partially operating in Gaza.

    In Rafah, Israeli airstrikes on two inhabited houses killed at least 26 Palestinians, according to Wafa, and injured dozens. Rafah, the southernmost district of the Gaza Strip, has seen the influx of nearly half of Gaza’s 2 million residents, who were forcibly displaced by Israeli forces. Thousands of Palestinian families are living in tents in Rafah and lack sufficient food, fresh water and heating sources.

    In the past weeks, Israel has been mulling a plan to invade the Philadelphia Axis, a zone which separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt.

    Palestinians are concerned that Israel will use the military operation in the area to push thousands of people out to the Sinai Peninsula under the threat of bombardment and airstrikes. Israel claims that the border area is still a breathing lung for Hamas fighters and has tunnels running underneath it.

    Hamas releases video of attack that killed 21 Israeli soldiers

    Hamas’ military wing, Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, released a video of the attack that killed 21 Israeli soldiers last month.

    The attack was the heaviest combat loss the Israeli military has suffered since December, when eight soldiers from the Golani Brigade were killed in Al-Shuja’iya refugee camp, east of Gaza City.

    Since October, at least 562 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the Gaza Strip or during armed clashes with Palestinian fighters, according to the Israeli military. The 562 identified soldiers are, according to the military’s website, the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”

    In the video released by Hamas, fighters fired a 105mm Al-Yaseen anti-tank shell on a two-story building in Al-Maghazi in central Gaza, while another one fired another Al-Yaseen on an Israeli tank, followed by detonating a minefield.

    The Israeli force were preparing mines and explosives to demolish a building 600 meters away from Kissufim, an Israel kibbutz to the east of the Gaza Strip’s fence.

    The Israeli military said one of Hamas’s anti-tank grenades hit the explosives and mines being set up by the Israeli unit inside the building, which led to a massive explosion, killing the 21 soldiers and the collapse of the building, Haaretz reported.

    Since December, the Israeli military demolished several houses and residential buildings along the Gaza fence in a bid to create a “buffer zone” and further push Palestinian neighborhoods to the west away from Israeli towns.

    Hamas also released a video of shooting an Israeli command officer west of Gaza City, with a sniper fire, while in Khan Yunis, it attacked several Israeli tanks and military vehicles, including the D9 Bulldozer with a direct and close hit, while it was destroying Palestinian homes.

    U.S. and U.K. bomb dozens of targets in Yemen

    Overnight, the U.S. and U.K. said that they bombed 48 targets of the Yemeni Armed Forces, led by Ansar Allah group (unofficially known also as “Houthis”).

    These strikes are the second to be carried out by the US in the region in less than 24 hours, following more than 80 strikes in Iraq and Syria.

    Ansar Allah spokesperson said that the US and UK launched 13 airstrikes on Sana’a, nine on Hodeidah on the Red Sea, 11 raids on Taiz, seven on Al-Bayda town, while it struck one target in Saada and seven in Hajjah.

    “These attacks will not deter us from our moral, religious, and humanitarian stance in support of the steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and will not pass without response and punishment,” he added.

    Yemen’s Ansar Allah vowed to target any Israel-bound or Israeli-owned ships in Bab Al-Mandab Strait as long as Israeli aggression continues on the Gaza Strip. It added the U.S. and U.K. to the list of targeted ships following a joint U.S.-U.K. airstrikes on Yemen early in January.

    The U.S. Central Command (Centcom) wrote on X platform that it targeted Ansar Allah’s “multiple underground storage facilities, command and control, missile systems, UAV storage and operations sites, radars, and helicopters.”

    On Sunday morning, Centcom said that it shot down an anti-ship cruise missile launched from Yemen against its forces in the Red Sea.

    The U.S. strikes in Yemen, Iraq and Syria are endangering a full-blown war in the region.

    Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said on Sunday that U.S. attacks are “in clear contradiction with the repeated claims of Washington and London that they do not want the expansion of war and conflict in the region.”

    Kanaani accused the U.S. and U.K. of “fuelling chaos, disorder, insecurity and instability” by supporting the Israeli war on Gaza.

    Israeli settlers rampage Palestinian villages in West Bank

    Israeli forces arrested a total of 6,512 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem since October, some of them were released later, according to the Commission for Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs and the Prisoners’ Club.

    In occupied Jerusalem, Israel killed five Palestinians since January, demolished 22 properties, detained 163 people, and put 13 under house arrest, according to a comprehensive report by Al-Quds Governate affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA).

    A total of 3,405 Israeli settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque in the old city of Jerusalem in January.

    In the past 24 hours, Israeli forces raided several Palestinian towns, including Husan, Anabta, Khirbet Tuba, Jericho and Ein Al-Sultan refugee camp, Nablus and Balata refugee camp, Deir Jreer and the Jalazon refugee camp.

    In Ain al-Auja, north of Jericho, Israeli settlers stole ten sheep from a Palestinian Bedouin community, according to Wafa.

    Wafa also reported that Israeli settlers stormed Farasin village, south of Jenin, and vandalized security cameras of shops a poultry farm in the village, and tore down greenhouses.

    The Wall and Settlement Resistance Committee said in January, Israeli settlers, protected by soldiers on most occasions, launched 1,593 attacks against Palestinian towns and properties.

    BEFORE YOU GO – At Mondoweiss, we understand the power of telling Palestinian stories. For 17 years, we have pushed back when the mainstream media published lies or echoed politicians’ hateful rhetoric. Now, Palestinian voices are more important than ever.

    Our traffic has increased ten times since October 7, and we need your help to cover our increased expenses.

    Support our journalists with a donation today.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-121-israel-kills-more-than-1000-palestinians-since-icj-ruling-u-s-bombs-yemen/

    https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-121-israel.html
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 121: Israel kills more than 1,000 Palestinians since ICJ ruling; U.S. bombs Yemen Israeli forces bomb Rafah, where thousands of Palestinians are displaced in shelters near the Egyptian border, as an Israeli minister wishes to “encourage voluntary emigration” from Gaza. In West Bank, settlers attack Palestinian villages. Mustafa Abu SneinehFebruary 4, 2024 An injured child gets treatment at Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for treatment following the Israeli attacks in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza on February 04, 2024. (Omar Ashtawy/apaimages) Casualties 27,365+ killed* and at least 66,630 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 380+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147. 562 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.** *This figure was confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Telegram channel. Some rights groups put the death toll number at more than 35,000 when accounting for those presumed dead. ** This figure is released by the Israeli military. Key Developments Israeli far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, says his plan is to “encourage Gazans to voluntarily emigrate to places around the world” by offering them cash incentives. Ben-Gvir says he looks forward to Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office; believes that Tump will give Israel free hand in Gaza, while President Joe Biden is “hampering Israel’s war effort”. Israeli forces bomb kindergarten housing hundreds of displaced Palestinian in Al-Salam neighborhood, east of Rafah, which borders Egypt. Israeli forces lay siege for day six over Al-Shifa Hospital in north Gaza, preventing people from accessing the facility. Israeli airstrikes bomb two inhabited houses in Rafah and kill at least 26 Palestinians. Hamas military wing, Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, releases video of attack in Al-Maghazi that killed 21 Israeli soldiers last month. Hamas also releases video of its fighters shooting an Israeli command officer in Gaza City; fighters firing direct and close hit on D9 Bulldozer in Khan Yunis. US and UK bomb 48 targets of Yemeni Armed Forces, led by the Ansar Allah group (unofficially known also as “Houthis”). Yemeni Armed Forces spokesperson says: “These attacks will not deter us from our moral, religious, and humanitarian stance in support of the steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and will not pass without response and punishment.” Israeli authorities and forces kill five Palestinians, demolish 22 properties, detain 163 people, and put 13 under house arrest in occupied Jerusalem in January, according to the Al-Quds Governate report. Israeli minister wants to ‘encourage Gazans to voluntarily emigrate’ Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling last week, ordering Tel Aviv to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza. Advertisement Watch now: SUSAN ABULHAWA and FRANCESCA ALBANESE on Witnessing Palestine with Frank Barat The Israeli forces have not ceased to bomb the Gaza Strip since October, except for a temporary pause in November to allow for the exchange of captives. Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Sunday morning that Israel killed 127 Palestinians and injured 178 others, committing 14 massacres in the past 24 hours. The number of Palestinians killed in the Israeli aggression on Gaza now stands at 27,365 martyrs, and 66,630 were injured since October. Meanwhile, some Israeli government ministers and Knesset members are making it clear that their wish is to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza. The far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the Wall Street Journal that his plan is to “encourage Gazans to voluntarily emigrate to places around the world” by offering them cash incentives. Ben-Gvir’s position aligns with the Religious Zionism political alliance, one of the core blocs that makes up Netanyahu’s government. Last week, members of Religious Zionism held a conference in occupied Jerusalem, dubbed “Return to Gaza Conference”, in which they called for building 21 Israeli settlements on top of recently destroyed Palestinian neighbourhoods. Ben-Gvir is also looking forward to the day Donald Trump would sit in the Oval Office, believing that he will give Israel a free hand in Gaza, while President Joe Biden is “hampering Israel’s war effort”. Ben-Gvir made these statements despite the fact that the Biden administration has stood firmly behind Israel since October 7, authorizing the sale of thousands of munition rounds, rejecting calls for a ceasefire, and supporting Tel Aviv diplomatically and in the UN Security Council. The U.S. also called Hamas to free all the Israelis captured during the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood cross-fence attack on October 7. However, Hamas had refused these calls before an agreement on a permanent ceasefire is reached. Currently, Hamas is still deliberating over a proposed truce for 45 days and the release of 35 Israeli captives in return for the freeing of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails. The deal is yet to be confirmed. But releasing Israeli captives is not a top agenda item for some Israeli politicians. Amichai Elhaho, the Israeli Minister of Heritage, who called for nuking Gaza, pleaded to Israelis who protested against Netanyahu to release hostages, to think outside the box. “We must get out of mental stagnation that the deal is the only way to free the hostages,” Elhaho told army radio on Sunday. “The Jewish morality does not hold us fully responsible for the release of the captives,” he added. Israeli forces bomb kindergarten sheltering Palestinians in Rafah Overnight, Israeli forces bombed a kindergarten housing hundreds of displaced Palestinian in Al-Salam neighborhood, east of Rafah, the southern city which borders Egypt. Wafa news agency reported that two girls were killed in the Israeli airstrike and dozens injured. Another Israeli airstrike on an apartment in Hassan Salama Tower in Al-Geneina neighbourhood, east of Rafah, killed a child and wounded two others. An Israeli airstrike on the house of the Abu Safar family killed seven Palestinians, including children, in the Al-Hakar area in Deir Al-Balah city, in central Gaza. Wafa also reported that several Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling were launched on Khan Yunis overnight. An airstrike on the house of Masran family in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza injured several Palestinians as Israeli forces continued to bomb north Gaza neighbourhoods, killing at least eight Palestinians in an airstrike on the Al-Rimal area. Wafa reported that in north Gaza, medical teams transferred the bodies and the injured to the Kamal Adwan Hospital, while for the sixth day in a row, Israeli forces are laying siege over the Al-Shifa Hospital, preventing people from accessing the facility. Last week, Israeli tanks approaching the Al-Shifa Hospital and Al-Rimal neighborhood, forced thousands of Palestinians to flee in panic and fear to the eastern areas of Gaza City. Despite being one of the first hospitals attacked by the Israeli military in its ground offensive campaign, Al-Shifa is one of the few remaining hospitals that are still partially operating in Gaza. In Rafah, Israeli airstrikes on two inhabited houses killed at least 26 Palestinians, according to Wafa, and injured dozens. Rafah, the southernmost district of the Gaza Strip, has seen the influx of nearly half of Gaza’s 2 million residents, who were forcibly displaced by Israeli forces. Thousands of Palestinian families are living in tents in Rafah and lack sufficient food, fresh water and heating sources. In the past weeks, Israel has been mulling a plan to invade the Philadelphia Axis, a zone which separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt. Palestinians are concerned that Israel will use the military operation in the area to push thousands of people out to the Sinai Peninsula under the threat of bombardment and airstrikes. Israel claims that the border area is still a breathing lung for Hamas fighters and has tunnels running underneath it. Hamas releases video of attack that killed 21 Israeli soldiers Hamas’ military wing, Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, released a video of the attack that killed 21 Israeli soldiers last month. The attack was the heaviest combat loss the Israeli military has suffered since December, when eight soldiers from the Golani Brigade were killed in Al-Shuja’iya refugee camp, east of Gaza City. Since October, at least 562 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the Gaza Strip or during armed clashes with Palestinian fighters, according to the Israeli military. The 562 identified soldiers are, according to the military’s website, the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” In the video released by Hamas, fighters fired a 105mm Al-Yaseen anti-tank shell on a two-story building in Al-Maghazi in central Gaza, while another one fired another Al-Yaseen on an Israeli tank, followed by detonating a minefield. The Israeli force were preparing mines and explosives to demolish a building 600 meters away from Kissufim, an Israel kibbutz to the east of the Gaza Strip’s fence. The Israeli military said one of Hamas’s anti-tank grenades hit the explosives and mines being set up by the Israeli unit inside the building, which led to a massive explosion, killing the 21 soldiers and the collapse of the building, Haaretz reported. Since December, the Israeli military demolished several houses and residential buildings along the Gaza fence in a bid to create a “buffer zone” and further push Palestinian neighborhoods to the west away from Israeli towns. Hamas also released a video of shooting an Israeli command officer west of Gaza City, with a sniper fire, while in Khan Yunis, it attacked several Israeli tanks and military vehicles, including the D9 Bulldozer with a direct and close hit, while it was destroying Palestinian homes. U.S. and U.K. bomb dozens of targets in Yemen Overnight, the U.S. and U.K. said that they bombed 48 targets of the Yemeni Armed Forces, led by Ansar Allah group (unofficially known also as “Houthis”). These strikes are the second to be carried out by the US in the region in less than 24 hours, following more than 80 strikes in Iraq and Syria. Ansar Allah spokesperson said that the US and UK launched 13 airstrikes on Sana’a, nine on Hodeidah on the Red Sea, 11 raids on Taiz, seven on Al-Bayda town, while it struck one target in Saada and seven in Hajjah. “These attacks will not deter us from our moral, religious, and humanitarian stance in support of the steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and will not pass without response and punishment,” he added. Yemen’s Ansar Allah vowed to target any Israel-bound or Israeli-owned ships in Bab Al-Mandab Strait as long as Israeli aggression continues on the Gaza Strip. It added the U.S. and U.K. to the list of targeted ships following a joint U.S.-U.K. airstrikes on Yemen early in January. The U.S. Central Command (Centcom) wrote on X platform that it targeted Ansar Allah’s “multiple underground storage facilities, command and control, missile systems, UAV storage and operations sites, radars, and helicopters.” On Sunday morning, Centcom said that it shot down an anti-ship cruise missile launched from Yemen against its forces in the Red Sea. The U.S. strikes in Yemen, Iraq and Syria are endangering a full-blown war in the region. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said on Sunday that U.S. attacks are “in clear contradiction with the repeated claims of Washington and London that they do not want the expansion of war and conflict in the region.” Kanaani accused the U.S. and U.K. of “fuelling chaos, disorder, insecurity and instability” by supporting the Israeli war on Gaza. Israeli settlers rampage Palestinian villages in West Bank Israeli forces arrested a total of 6,512 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem since October, some of them were released later, according to the Commission for Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs and the Prisoners’ Club. In occupied Jerusalem, Israel killed five Palestinians since January, demolished 22 properties, detained 163 people, and put 13 under house arrest, according to a comprehensive report by Al-Quds Governate affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA). A total of 3,405 Israeli settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque in the old city of Jerusalem in January. In the past 24 hours, Israeli forces raided several Palestinian towns, including Husan, Anabta, Khirbet Tuba, Jericho and Ein Al-Sultan refugee camp, Nablus and Balata refugee camp, Deir Jreer and the Jalazon refugee camp. In Ain al-Auja, north of Jericho, Israeli settlers stole ten sheep from a Palestinian Bedouin community, according to Wafa. Wafa also reported that Israeli settlers stormed Farasin village, south of Jenin, and vandalized security cameras of shops a poultry farm in the village, and tore down greenhouses. The Wall and Settlement Resistance Committee said in January, Israeli settlers, protected by soldiers on most occasions, launched 1,593 attacks against Palestinian towns and properties. BEFORE YOU GO – At Mondoweiss, we understand the power of telling Palestinian stories. For 17 years, we have pushed back when the mainstream media published lies or echoed politicians’ hateful rhetoric. Now, Palestinian voices are more important than ever. Our traffic has increased ten times since October 7, and we need your help to cover our increased expenses. Support our journalists with a donation today. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-121-israel-kills-more-than-1000-palestinians-since-icj-ruling-u-s-bombs-yemen/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-121-israel.html
    MONDOWEISS.NET
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 121: Israel kills more than 1,000 Palestinians since ICJ ruling; U.S. bombs Yemen
    Israeli forces bomb Rafah, where thousands of Palestinians are displaced in shelters near the Egyptian border, as an Israeli minister wishes to “encourage voluntary emigration” from Gaza. In West Bank, settlers attack Palestinian villages.
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