"An Intricate Fabric of Bad Actors Working Hand-in-Hand" – So is War Inevitable?, by Alastair Crooke - The Unz Review
Netanyahu did not appreciate Iran’s moderation. He doubled-down on war, making it inevitable, sooner or later.

Walter Kirn, an American novelist and cultural critic, in his 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, described how, after a sojourn at Oxford, he came to be a member of ‘the class that runs things’ – the one that “writes the headlines, and the stories under them”. It was the account of a middle-class kid from Minnesota trying desperately to fit into the élite world, and then to his surprise, realising that he didn’t want to fit in at all.

Now 61, Kirn has a newsletter on Substack and co-hosts a lively podcast devoted in large part to critiquing ‘establishment liberalism’. His contrarian drift has made him more vocal about his distrust of élite institutions – as he wrote in 2022:

“For years now, the answer, in every situation—‘Russiagate,’ COVID, Ukraine—has been more censorship, more silencing, more division, more scapegoating. It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way,”

Kirn’s politics, a friend of his suggested, was “old-school liberal,” underscoring that it was the other ‘so-called liberals’ who had changed: “I’ve been told repeatedly in the last year that free speech is a right-wing issue; I wouldn’t call [Kirn] Conservative. I would just say he’s a free-thinker, nonconformist, iconoclastic”, the friend said.

To understand Kirn’s contrarian turn – and to make sense of today’s form of American politics – it is necessary to understand one key term. It is not found in standard textbooks, but is central to the new playbook of power: the “whole of society”.

“The term was popularised roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for a governance ‘whole-of-society’ approach” – one that asserts that as actors – media, NGOs,corporations and philanthropist institutions – interact with public officials to play a critical role not just in setting the public agenda, but in enforcing public decisions.

Jacob Siegel has explained the historical development of the ‘whole of society’ approach during the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot in the ‘war on terror’ to what it called ‘CVE’ – countering violent extremism. The idea was to surveil the American people’s online behaviour in order to identify those who may, at some unspecified time in the future, ‘commit a crime’.

Inherent to the concept of the potential ‘violent extremist’ who has, as yet, committed no crime, is a weaponised vagueness: “A cloud of suspicion that hangs over anyone who challenges the prevailing ideological narratives”.

“What the various iterations of this whole-of-society approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and the right to free association – their embrace of social media surveillance, and their repeated failure to deliver results …”.

Aaron Kheriaty writes:

“More recently, the whole of society political machinery facilitated the overnight flip from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, with news media and party supporters turning on a dime when instructed to do so—democratic primary voters ‘be damned’. This happened not because of the personalities of the candidates involved, but on the orders of party leadership. The actual nominees are fungible, and entirely replaceable, functionaries, serving the interests of the ruling party … The party was delivered to her because she was selected by its leaders to act as its figurehead. That real achievement belongs not to Harris, but to the party-state”.

What has this to do with Geo-politics – and whether there will be war between Iran and Israel?

Well, quite a lot. It is not just western domestic politics that has been shaped by the Obama CVE totalising mechanics. The “party-state” machinery (Kheriaty’s term) for geo-politics has also been co-opted:

“To avoid the appearance of totalitarian overreach in such efforts”, Kheriaty argues,“the party requires an endless supply of causes … that party officers use as pretexts to demand ideological alignment across public and private sector institutions. These causes come in roughly two forms: the urgent existential crisis (examples include COVID and the much-hyped threat of Russian disinformation) – and victim groups supposedly in need of the party’s protection”.

“It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way”, Kirn underlines.

Just to be clear, the implication is that all geo-strategic critics of the party-state’s ideological alignment must be jointly and collectively treated as potentially dangerous extremists. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea therefore are bound together as presenting a single obnoxious extremism that stands in opposition to ‘Our Democracy’; versus ‘Our Free Speech’ and versus ‘Our Expert Consensus’.

So, if the move to war against one extremist (i.e. versus Iran) is ‘acclaimed’ by 58 standing ovations in the joint session of Congress last month, then further debate is unnecessary – any more than Kamala Harris’ nomination as Presidential candidate needs to be endorsed through primary voting:

Candidate Harris told hecklers on Wednesday, chanting about genocide in Gaza, ‘to pipe down’ – unless they “want Trump to win”. Tribal norms must not be challenged (even for genocide).

Sandra Parker, Chairwoman of the political advocacy arm for the three thousand members of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) was advising on correct talking points, the Times of Israel reports:

“The rise of Republican far right-wingers who spurn decades of (bi-partisan) pro-Israel orthodoxies, favouring isolationism and resurrecting anti-Jewish tropes is alarming pro-Israel evangelicals and their Jewish allies… The break with decades of assertive foreign policy was evident last year when Sen. Josh Hawley derided the “liberal empire” that he dismissively characterised as bipartisan “Neoconservatives on the right, and liberal globalists on the left: Together they make up what you might call the uniparty, the DC establishment that transcends all changing administrations””.

At the CUFI talking points conference, the fear of increased isolation on the Right was the issue:

“You’re going to see that adversaries will see the U.S. as in retreat” – should isolationists get the upper hand: Activists were advised to push back: Should lawmakers claim that NATO expansion is what triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Should anybody begin to make the argument that the reason the Russians have moved in on Ukraine – is because of NATO enlargement – can I just say that this is the age-old ‘blame America trope,’” the Chair advised the assembled delegates.

“They have the strain of isolationism that’s – ‘Let’s just do China and forget about Iran, forget about Russia, let’s just do one thing’ – but it doesn’t work that way,” said Boris Zilberman, director of policy and strategy for the CUFI Action Fund. Instead , he described “an intricate fabric of bad actors working hand in hand”.

So, to get to the bottom of this western mind-management in which appearance and reality are cut from the same cloth of hostile extremism: Iran, Russia and China are ‘cut from it’ likewise.

Plainly put, the import of this “behavioural-engineering enterprise (it no longer having much to do with the truth, no longer having much to do with your right to desire what you wish – or not desire what you don’t wish)” – is, as Kirn says: “everyone is in on the game”. “The corporate and state interests don’t believe you are wanting the right things—you might want Donald Trump— or, that you aren’t wanting the things you should want more” (such as seeing Putin removed).

If this ‘whole of society’ machinery is understood correctly in the wider world, then the likes of Iran or Hizbullah are forced to take note that war in the Middle East inevitably may bleed across into wider war against Russia – and have adverse ramifications for China, too.

That is not because it makes sense. It doesn’t. But it is because the ideological needs of ‘whole of society’ foreign-policy hinge on simplistic ‘moral’ narratives: Ones that express emotional attitudes, rather than argued propositions.

Netanyahu went to Washington to lay out the case for all-out war on Iran – a moral war of civilisation versus the Barbarians, he said. He was applauded for his stance. He returned to Israel and immediately provoked Hizbullah, Iran and Hamas in a way that dishonoured and humiliated both – knowing well that it would draw a riposte that would most likely lead to wider war.

Clearly Netanyahu, backed by a plurality of Israelis, wants an Armageddon (with full U.S. support, of course). He has the U.S., he thinks, exactly where he wants it. Netanyahu has only to escalate in one way or another – and Washington, he calculates (rightly or wrongly), will be compelled to follow.

Is this why Iran is taking its time? The calculus on an initial riposte to Israel is ‘one thing’, but how then might Netanyahu retaliate in Iran and Lebanon? That can be altogether an ‘other thing’. There have been hints of nuclear weapons being deployed (in both instances). There is however nothing solid, to this latter rumour.

Further, how might Israel respond towards Russia in Syria, or might the U.S. react through escalation in Ukraine? After all, Moscow has assisted Iran with its air defences (just as the West is assisting Ukraine against Russia).

Many imponderables. Yet, one thing is clear (as former Russian President Medvedev noted recently): “the knot is tightening” in the Middle East. Escalation is across all the fronts. War, Medvedev suggested, may be ‘the only way this knot will be cut’.

Iran must think that appeasing western pleas in the wake of the Israeli assassination of Iranian officials at their Damascus Consulate was a mistake. Netanyahu did not appreciate Iran’s moderation. He doubled-down on war, making it inevitable, sooner or later.



Video Link

https://www.unz.com/article/an-intricate-fabric-of-bad-actors-working-hand-in-hand-so-is-war-inevitable/

Alastair Crooke - Netanyahu went to Washington to lay out the case for all-out war on Iran – a moral war of civilisation versus the Barbarians, he said. He was applauded for his stance. He returned to Israel and immediately provoked Hizbullah, Iran and Hamas in a way that dishonoured and humiliated both – knowing well that it would draw a riposte that would most likely lead to wider war.

Clearly Netanyahu, backed by a plurality of Israelis, wants an Armageddon (with full U.S. support, of course). He has the U.S., he thinks, exactly where he wants it. Netanyahu has only to escalate in one way or another – and Washington, he calculates (rightly or wrongly), will be compelled to follow.

Is this why Iran is taking its time? The calculus on an initial riposte to Israel is ‘one thing’, but how then might Netanyahu retaliate in Iran and Lebanon? That can be altogether an ‘other thing’. There have been hints of nuclear weapons being deployed (in both instances). There is however nothing solid, to this latter rumour.

Further, how might Israel respond towards Russia in Syria, or might the U.S. react through escalation in Ukraine? After all, Moscow has assisted Iran with its air defences (just as the West is assisting Ukraine against Russia).

Many imponderables. Yet, one thing is clear (as former Russian President Medvedev noted recently): “the knot is tightening” in the Middle East. Escalation is across all the fronts. War, Medvedev suggested, may be ‘the only way this knot will be cut’.

Iran must think that appeasing western pleas in the wake of the Israeli assassination of Iranian officials at their Damascus Consulate was a mistake. Netanyahu did not appreciate Iran’s moderation. He doubled-down on war, making it inevitable, sooner or later.

https://www.unz.com/article/an-intricate-fabric-of-bad-actors-working-hand-in-hand-so-is-war-inevitable/


"An Intricate Fabric of Bad Actors Working Hand-in-Hand" – So is War Inevitable?, by Alastair Crooke - The Unz Review
Netanyahu did not appreciate Iran’s moderation. He doubled-down on war, making it inevitable, sooner or later.

Walter Kirn, an American novelist and cultural critic, in his 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, described how, after a sojourn at Oxford, he came to be a member of ‘the class that runs things’ – the one that “writes the headlines, and the stories under them”. It was the account of a middle-class kid from Minnesota trying desperately to fit into the élite world, and then to his surprise, realising that he didn’t want to fit in at all.

Now 61, Kirn has a newsletter on Substack and co-hosts a lively podcast devoted in large part to critiquing ‘establishment liberalism’. His contrarian drift has made him more vocal about his distrust of élite institutions – as he wrote in 2022:

“For years now, the answer, in every situation—‘Russiagate,’ COVID, Ukraine—has been more censorship, more silencing, more division, more scapegoating. It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way,”

Kirn’s politics, a friend of his suggested, was “old-school liberal,” underscoring that it was the other ‘so-called liberals’ who had changed: “I’ve been told repeatedly in the last year that free speech is a right-wing issue; I wouldn’t call [Kirn] Conservative. I would just say he’s a free-thinker, nonconformist, iconoclastic”, the friend said.

To understand Kirn’s contrarian turn – and to make sense of today’s form of American politics – it is necessary to understand one key term. It is not found in standard textbooks, but is central to the new playbook of power: the “whole of society”.

“The term was popularised roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for a governance ‘whole-of-society’ approach” – one that asserts that as actors – media, NGOs,corporations and philanthropist institutions – interact with public officials to play a critical role not just in setting the public agenda, but in enforcing public decisions.

Jacob Siegel has explained the historical development of the ‘whole of society’ approach during the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot in the ‘war on terror’ to what it called ‘CVE’ – countering violent extremism. The idea was to surveil the American people’s online behaviour in order to identify those who may, at some unspecified time in the future, ‘commit a crime’.

Inherent to the concept of the potential ‘violent extremist’ who has, as yet, committed no crime, is a weaponised vagueness: “A cloud of suspicion that hangs over anyone who challenges the prevailing ideological narratives”.

“What the various iterations of this whole-of-society approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and the right to free association – their embrace of social media surveillance, and their repeated failure to deliver results …”.

Aaron Kheriaty writes:

“More recently, the whole of society political machinery facilitated the overnight flip from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, with news media and party supporters turning on a dime when instructed to do so—democratic primary voters ‘be damned’. This happened not because of the personalities of the candidates involved, but on the orders of party leadership. The actual nominees are fungible, and entirely replaceable, functionaries, serving the interests of the ruling party … The party was delivered to her because she was selected by its leaders to act as its figurehead. That real achievement belongs not to Harris, but to the party-state”.

What has this to do with Geo-politics – and whether there will be war between Iran and Israel?

Well, quite a lot. It is not just western domestic politics that has been shaped by the Obama CVE totalising mechanics. The “party-state” machinery (Kheriaty’s term) for geo-politics has also been co-opted:

“To avoid the appearance of totalitarian overreach in such efforts”, Kheriaty argues,“the party requires an endless supply of causes … that party officers use as pretexts to demand ideological alignment across public and private sector institutions. These causes come in roughly two forms: the urgent existential crisis (examples include COVID and the much-hyped threat of Russian disinformation) – and victim groups supposedly in need of the party’s protection”.

“It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way”, Kirn underlines.

Just to be clear, the implication is that all geo-strategic critics of the party-state’s ideological alignment must be jointly and collectively treated as potentially dangerous extremists. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea therefore are bound together as presenting a single obnoxious extremism that stands in opposition to ‘Our Democracy’; versus ‘Our Free Speech’ and versus ‘Our Expert Consensus’.

So, if the move to war against one extremist (i.e. versus Iran) is ‘acclaimed’ by 58 standing ovations in the joint session of Congress last month, then further debate is unnecessary – any more than Kamala Harris’ nomination as Presidential candidate needs to be endorsed through primary voting:

Candidate Harris told hecklers on Wednesday, chanting about genocide in Gaza, ‘to pipe down’ – unless they “want Trump to win”. Tribal norms must not be challenged (even for genocide).

Sandra Parker, Chairwoman of the political advocacy arm for the three thousand members of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) was advising on correct talking points, the Times of Israel reports:

“The rise of Republican far right-wingers who spurn decades of (bi-partisan) pro-Israel orthodoxies, favouring isolationism and resurrecting anti-Jewish tropes is alarming pro-Israel evangelicals and their Jewish allies… The break with decades of assertive foreign policy was evident last year when Sen. Josh Hawley derided the “liberal empire” that he dismissively characterised as bipartisan “Neoconservatives on the right, and liberal globalists on the left: Together they make up what you might call the uniparty, the DC establishment that transcends all changing administrations””.

At the CUFI talking points conference, the fear of increased isolation on the Right was the issue:

“You’re going to see that adversaries will see the U.S. as in retreat” – should isolationists get the upper hand: Activists were advised to push back: Should lawmakers claim that NATO expansion is what triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Should anybody begin to make the argument that the reason the Russians have moved in on Ukraine – is because of NATO enlargement – can I just say that this is the age-old ‘blame America trope,’” the Chair advised the assembled delegates.

“They have the strain of isolationism that’s – ‘Let’s just do China and forget about Iran, forget about Russia, let’s just do one thing’ – but it doesn’t work that way,” said Boris Zilberman, director of policy and strategy for the CUFI Action Fund. Instead , he described “an intricate fabric of bad actors working hand in hand”.

So, to get to the bottom of this western mind-management in which appearance and reality are cut from the same cloth of hostile extremism: Iran, Russia and China are ‘cut from it’ likewise.

Plainly put, the import of this “behavioural-engineering enterprise (it no longer having much to do with the truth, no longer having much to do with your right to desire what you wish – or not desire what you don’t wish)” – is, as Kirn says: “everyone is in on the game”. “The corporate and state interests don’t believe you are wanting the right things—you might want Donald Trump— or, that you aren’t wanting the things you should want more” (such as seeing Putin removed).

If this ‘whole of society’ machinery is understood correctly in the wider world, then the likes of Iran or Hizbullah are forced to take note that war in the Middle East inevitably may bleed across into wider war against Russia – and have adverse ramifications for China, too.

That is not because it makes sense. It doesn’t. But it is because the ideological needs of ‘whole of society’ foreign-policy hinge on simplistic ‘moral’ narratives: Ones that express emotional attitudes, rather than argued propositions.

Netanyahu went to Washington to lay out the case for all-out war on Iran – a moral war of civilisation versus the Barbarians, he said. He was applauded for his stance. He returned to Israel and immediately provoked Hizbullah, Iran and Hamas in a way that dishonoured and humiliated both – knowing well that it would draw a riposte that would most likely lead to wider war.

Clearly Netanyahu, backed by a plurality of Israelis, wants an Armageddon (with full U.S. support, of course). He has the U.S., he thinks, exactly where he wants it. Netanyahu has only to escalate in one way or another – and Washington, he calculates (rightly or wrongly), will be compelled to follow.

Is this why Iran is taking its time? The calculus on an initial riposte to Israel is ‘one thing’, but how then might Netanyahu retaliate in Iran and Lebanon? That can be altogether an ‘other thing’. There have been hints of nuclear weapons being deployed (in both instances). There is however nothing solid, to this latter rumour.

Further, how might Israel respond towards Russia in Syria, or might the U.S. react through escalation in Ukraine? After all, Moscow has assisted Iran with its air defences (just as the West is assisting Ukraine against Russia).

Many imponderables. Yet, one thing is clear (as former Russian President Medvedev noted recently): “the knot is tightening” in the Middle East. Escalation is across all the fronts. War, Medvedev suggested, may be ‘the only way this knot will be cut’.

Iran must think that appeasing western pleas in the wake of the Israeli assassination of Iranian officials at their Damascus Consulate was a mistake. Netanyahu did not appreciate Iran’s moderation. He doubled-down on war, making it inevitable, sooner or later.



Video Link

US approves “historic” $20B arms sale to Israel, as Gazans die – Day 311
[email protected] August 14, 2024 ben gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, ceasefire, free speech on campus, Iran, israeli gang rape, Josep Borrell, palestine olympics head, twins in gaza, weapons to israel
Destroyed buildings last month in Beit Lahia, one of the northernmost cities in the Gaza Strip.Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (photo)
More weapons for Israel; newborn twins killed in Gaza; Israel shoots American activist; two Palestinians killed in West Bank; Israel detains Palestine Olympic head; California mulls anti-free speech on campus bill; Ben Gvir leads provocative march on Temple Mount; EU leader calls for sanctions against Israeli Smotrich for calls to starve Gazans; house arrest for gang-rape suspects; yes, Netanyahu has been messing with ceasefire details;

Iran says Europe’s silence on “inhumane crimes” in Gaza encouraged Israel to continue atrocities while threatening global peace; more.

By IAK staff, from reports.

US State Department Approves Over $20 Billion Arms Package for Israel

AntiWar reports: On Tuesday, the State Department approved a series of potential weapons sales to Israel worth over $20 billion that includes F-15 fighter jets and tank munitions. The approval comes as Israeli airstrikes continue to slaughter civilians in Gaza, including newborn twins who were killed hours before the State Department announced the new support for Israel.

Ha’aretz reports the transaction as “among the most significant arms sales to Israel in American history.”

In total, the US announced five new arms deals for Israel. The biggest is for 50 F-15 fighter jets and related equipment, worth $18.8 billion. Israel will also receive $102.5 million in advanced air-to-air missiles, about 33,000 120mm tank cartridges worth $774 million, 50,000 high-explosive 120mm mortar rounds worth $61.1 million, and $583.1 million worth of medium tactical vehicles.

It’s unclear how much of the massive weapons sale will be funded by US military aid. The announcement came a few days after the State Department said it was releasing $3.5 billion in military assistance for Israel in the form of Foreign Military Financing, a program that gives foreign governments money to buy US weapons.

It will take years before the F-15s and other weapons will be delivered to Israel, although, according to Reuters, the tank rounds would be almost immediately available for delivery. The notification begins a period where Congress could potentially block the sales, but it’s expected to breeze through since only a few dozen progressive Democrats are opposed to arming Israel.

The U.S. has sent Israel more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles since the start of the Gaza war in October, U.S. officials told Reuters in June.

RECOMMENDED READING: Rafah attack: Netanyahu’s lies expose the truth about Israel

An Israeli soldier carries a 155mm artillery shell near a self-propelled howitzer deployed at a position near the border with Lebanon in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)
An Israeli soldier carries a 155mm artillery shell near a self-propelled howitzer deployed at a position near the border with Lebanon in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images) (photo)
Newborn twins killed in Israeli strike in Gaza as father collects their birth certificates

Andalou Agency reports: Newborn twins were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip on Tuesday as their father went to collect their birth certificates.

The two babies were born on Saturday in the city of Deir al-Balah, but an Israeli strike on their apartment shattered the family’s joy of their newborns.

“I have just obtained the birth certificates for my newborn babies Aysel and Asser,” their father Mohammad Abu al-Qumsan told Anadolu as tears rolled down his cheeks.

“They were born on August 10. I was outside the house, finalizing the paperwork, and then I got the call… I didn’t expect to find them all gone.”



Israeli hardliner Ben-Gvir “put lives at risk” with Jerusalem prayer call

Reuters reports: Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Tuesday visited the Al-Aqsa mosque compound known to Jews as Temple Mount, and said Jews should be allowed to pray there, freshly challenging rules covering one of the most sensitive sites in the Middle East.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly denied there would be any change to rules prohibiting Jews from praying at the site, which is holy to Muslims as well.

The Al-Aqsa compound, revered by Jews as a vestige of their two ancient temples, is administered by a Jordanian religious foundation and under rules dating back decades, Jews are allowed to visit, but may not pray there.

“Our policy is to allow prayer,” Ben-Gvir said as he passed a line of Jewish visitors who prostrated themselves on the ground, while others sang and clapped their hands in celebration. The Waqf, the foundation that administers the site, said around 2,250 Jews entered the site on Tuesday.

The spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced Ben-Gvir’s visit as a “provocation” and called on the U.S. to intervene “if it wants to prevent the region from exploding in an uncontrollable manner”.

HA’ARETZ ADDS: What happened on the Temple Mount Tuesday categorically puts lives at risk, and is further evidence of the chaos being caused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and his irresponsible leadership.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and another minister ascended the Temple Mount (known as Al-Aqsa to Muslims), and dozens of Jewish visitors prayed on the compound in violation of the status quo. All this happened in front of the police who were stationed there, but they refrained from enforcing the ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.

The fact that Ben-Gvir oversees the police doubles the threat he poses, because the police exist in part to deal with criminals like him. But when the criminal is the very minister in charge of the police, who can you turn to? When the person endangering national security is the minister in charge of preserving it, what do you do?

And the helplessness becomes absolute when you realize the prime minister can’t be relied upon in this situation, since Netanyahu is the one who appointed Ben-Gvir despite very well knowing that he is dangerous.


An American was just shot in the West Bank. The American press can’t be bothered.

DropSite News reports: Last Friday, Amado Sison, an activist from New Jersey with the solidarity group Faz3a, joined fellow demonstrators near the West Bank village of Beita. In an interview with Drop Site after being discharged from the hospital, Sison said he was taking part in a “protective presence” exercise aimed at defending Palestinian citizens living in the West Bank from settler and military violence.

“The Palestinians were holding a rally and doing chants, when Israeli soldiers at a nearby outpost started shooting tear gas and aiming weapons at us,” said Sison. “

This was only my second demonstration, but some of the more experienced demonstrators shouted that live rounds were being fired and everyone began to run.”

Sison and others ran from the gunfire into a nearby olive grove. It was then that he felt a “blunt impact” in the back of his leg. He initially thought he had been hit by a tear gas canister.

It turned out to have been a live bullet, which entered his thigh and exited from the front of his leg.

In video of the incident taken by Anthony C., an activist with Faz3a, and provided to Drop Site, a group of protesters and local Palestinians can be seen screaming as they attempt to carry a wounded Sison to safety after the shooting.

(Read the full article here.)

West Bank: Two Palestinian young men killed by Israeli forces

WAFA reports: A Palestinian teenager succumbed to serious wounds he sustained earlier Tuesday after being shot by Israeli occupation forces in the town of Anata, east of occupied Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Governorate Media Department said in a statement that Shadi Wisam Shehada, 17, was shot by the Israeli occupation in the town of Anata while he was working at his privately-owned car wash shop in the area, for allegedly throwing stones at the occupation soldiers.

Another Palestinian young man, Moataz Sarsour, was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces during a raid on the cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh at Tuesday dawn.

Shadi Wisam Shehada and Moataz Sarsour, killed by Israeli forces
Shadi Wisam Shehada and Moataz Sarsour, killed by Israeli forces (photo)
Israeli authorities detain head of the Palestine Olympic Committee

Middle East Eye reports: Jibril Rajoub, who is also a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, was reportedly detained by Israeli authorities upon his return from the Paris Olympics while en route to the occupied West Bank.

The 71-year-old was searched, had his passport confiscated, and was summoned for questioning at the Ofer military compound near Ramallah on Tuesday.

Rajoub has previously faced threats of imprisonment from some members of the Israeli government due to his efforts to have Israel barred from the Olympics and the football World Cup, citing violations of the Olympic Charter and FIFA regulations against apartheid in sports.

In May, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz threatened to revoke Rajoub’s travel pass.

“We will work to thwart his plans, and if he doesn’t stop, we will imprison him in the Muqataa [presidential compound in Ramallah], where he will be left to play stanga by himself between the walls,” Katz said, referring to a popular Israeli street game involving a football.

Anti-free speech California bill inspired by opposition to pro-Palestine campus protest

The Intercept reports: A bill making its way through the California legislature would stifle free speech on public university and college campuses, specifically around protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and its occupation of Palestine, according to civil rights advocates.

The American Civil Liberties Union in California is ringing the alarm bell on Senate Bill 1287, saying that it will “set a dangerous precedent of chilling speech on campuses across the state.”

The bill, introduced in February by Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer, would require schools to adopt and enforce rules against harassment, discrimination, or any behavior that “creates a hostile environment on campus.”

The bill’s supporters include a host of pro-Israel advocacy groups. [Glazer has made many trips to Israel and lived in Israel for six months working on a kibbutz.]

Among the bill’s most vocal detractors has been ACLU California Action, which said in a letter sent last week to Glazer’s office that the bill would suppress free speech. In the letter, obtained by The Intercept, the ACLU highlighted areas of the bill that are “overly broad” and vague, such as leaving terms like “harassment,” “discrimination,” and “hostile environment” with no clear definitions that may allow institutions to apply them in ways that prohibit students’ free speech.

Across the U.S., lawmakers on the state and federal level have introduced bills cracking down on campus protests. In Congress, Republican lawmakers proposed a slate of bills, including measures that would revoke visas and deport any international student convicted of a crime related to protests on campus; bar students convicted of a protest-related crime from receiving financial aid; make federal accreditation and funding for schools contingent on their policies toward protests; barring a student of faculty member from student loan forgiveness if they are expelled or fired due to protests; and withholding federal funds from schools that don’t clear encampments.

Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee who is behind several of the bills, also introduced one that would require a student convicted of a protest-related offense to do community service in Gaza for six months.

(Read the full article here.)

RECOMMENDED READING: Unmasking counterprotesters who attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment

In early May, police arrested around 200 protesters from the anti-war encampment at UCLA, with the campus police restricting access to the area, and police helicopters hovering overhead.
In early May, police arrested around 200 protesters from the anti-war encampment at UCLA, with the campus police restricting access to the area, and police helicopters hovering overhead. (photo)
Iran says silence of UK, France, Germany on “inhumane crimes” in Gaza encouraged Israel to continue atrocities while threatening global peace

The Cradle reports: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a phone call that the silence of the international community in the face of Israel’s “unprecedented and inhumane crimes” in Gaza encouraged it to continue committing atrocities while threatening regional and global peace and security, IRNA reported on 13 August.

Pezeshkian added that war in any part of the world is not in the interest of any country while emphasizing that a “punitive response to an aggressor is a legal right of states and a way to stop crime and aggression.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani issued a similar message Tuesday, saying the Islamic Republic will defend its national security and sovereignty and does not ask for permission to exercise its rights.

Kanaani made the statement in response to a letter published by the UK, France, and Germany, urging Iran not to retaliate for the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 1 August.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman added that the three European countries have been indifferent to Israel’s continued “genocidal acts and war crimes against defenseless Palestinians.”

He stated that the European nations’ request that Iran not respond to the Hamas leader’s assassination would “encourage the criminals to continue massacre, genocide, and crime against humanity.”

The spokesman said if those mentioned countries were really after peace and stability in the region, they should stand against Israel and seek to end the war on Gaza and the killing of children and women.

Israeli troops accused of gang raping Palestinian detainee released on house arrest

The Cradle reports: The Israeli military attorney’s office and defense lawyers agreed on the release to house arrest of the five soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian man in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp, Haaretz reported in Hebrew on 13 August.

The Israeli army spokesman said the five soldiers will be released to house arrest for 10 days during the investigation.

On 8 August, a leaked surveillance video from Sde Teiman was broadcast on Israeli news network Channel 12, showing the Israeli soldiers gang-raping the Palestinian man.

Members of the Knesset and Hebrew media have strongly criticized the military for detaining the soldiers, arguing that it is morally acceptable to do anything to Hamas fighters, including rape.

Military police officers who arrested the soldiers have faced death threats.

Israel’s military advocate general, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi responded to criticism over the arrests by saying they were crucial for shielding Israel from war crimes charges in international courts and ensuring continued weapons deliveries from the US and European nations.

RECOMMENDED READING: Hostages of Israeli revenge in the Gaza Strip: Testimonies of 100 released Palestinian detainees reveal crimes of torture, cruel treatment.



Documents confirm Netanyahu responsible for obstructing Gaza ceasefire

New York Times reports: For weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has denied that he is trying to block a cease-fire deal in Gaza by hardening Israel’s negotiating position.

Mr. Netanyahu has consistently placed all blame for the deadlocked negotiations on Hamas, even as senior members of the Israeli security establishment accused him of slowing the process himself.

But in private, Mr. Netanyahu has, in fact, added new conditions to Israel’s demands, additions that his own negotiators fear have created extra obstacles to a deal.

According to unpublished documents reviewed by The New York Times that detail Israel’s negotiating positions, Israel relayed a list of new stipulations in late July to American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators that added less flexible conditions to a set of principles it had made in late May.

The documents reviewed by The Times make clear that the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Netanyahu government has been extensive — and suggest that agreement may be elusive at the talks set to begin this week.

(Read more here.)

Israel defense ministry expects 100,000 disabled veterans by 2030, half to be related to mental health

Ha’aretz reports: A recent forecast by the rehabilitation division of Israel’s Defense Ministry expects there to be 100,000 disabled IDF veterans by the year 2030, with half being related to mental health.

According to the data, since October 7 the rehabilitation division has seen 10,056 wounded individuals. The Defense Ministry is now discussing a strategy to absorb and treat those wounded in the war, on top of approximately 62,000 disabled IDF veterans already being treated by the division before the war.

NOTE: Over 92,000 Gazans have been injured in just ten months – at least 3,000 children have had a limb amputated. Mental health issues are widespread, including nearly every child in Gaza.

Josep Borrell calls for sanctions against Israeli ministers for ‘incitement to war crimes’

The Cradle reports: EU Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell [from Spain] said on 11 August that the bloc must consider imposing sanctions against Israeli far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for “incitement to war crimes.”

Borrell urged the Israeli government to clearly dissociate itself from individuals who incite war crimes and to work seriously towards a ceasefire deal.

The high-ranking EU official also denounced Ben Gvir for urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt all humanitarian aid and fuel to the Gaza Strip amidst the ongoing genocide.

Finance Minister Smotrich’s comments about starving two million Gazans by withholding aid in exchange for Israeli captives as “sinister,” in stark contrast to the Israeli minister’s assertion that the approach is “justified and moral.”

MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

The Guardian: Why should US troops pay the price for Biden’s failure to rein in Netanyahu?

Mondoweiss: The ICJ finds that BDS is not merely a right, but an obligation

+972 Magazine: In Jenin and Tulkarem, Israel’s war on Palestinian armed resistance is failing

CNN: Rep. Ilhan Omar will win primary in Minnesota, CNN projects, breaking ‘squad’ losing streak

STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – AUGUST 13:

Palestinian death toll from October 7 – August 13: at least 40,590* (39,965 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,251 children as of July 22. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 625 in the West Bank (~145 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 46,848 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 18 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**.
About 1.7 million, or 75% of Gaza’s population are currently displaced.
2.15 million (out of total population of 2.3 million) are projected to face Crisis or worse levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – August 13: at least 97,714 (including at least 92,294 in Gaza and 5,420 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7 – August 13: ~1,486 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 331 military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 16 in the West Bank) and~8,730 injured.

Times of Israel reports: The IDF listed 41 soldiers killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents – nearly 16%.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries in Israel on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.**

Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org
Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
Palestinians’ harrowing stories of rape by Israeli soldiers (including female soldiers)
A Palestinian journalist visited Ismail Haniyeh’s home in Gaza to report on his death. Israel assassinated him too.
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn’t care.
How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza
Why the West Bank is on the verge of economic collapse
Netanyahu’s plan to involve US in regional war on its behalf
Western media continue to withhold the truth about Israel and Gaza – 4 stories
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children
What Would You Do With An Extra $320 Million?
Assassination of Haniyeh an intentional, dangerous escalation – Parsi, Macgregor
When Israel Burned Refugees Alive, Establishment Media Called It a ‘Tragic Accident’
Israel has turbocharged West Bank housing demolitions under the cover of war
Western media ignores Israeli confirmation of Hannibal Directive on 7 Oct
US Should Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu When He’s in Washington
Airwars investigation: Israeli airstrikes uniquely lethal (video)
Hesen Jabr paid the price of conscience
Gaza genocide denial
Why the news media’s job is to groom us
‘Disappeared, buried, detained’: The horrors of Gaza’s missing children

https://israelpalestinenews.org/us-approves-historic-20b-arms-sale-to-israel-as-gazans-die-day-311/

Why Did Washington Memory-hole Gaza?
Suddenly a White House “priority”—getting aid to starving civilians—has vanished from the news cycle.

Foreign Affairs

US Military Constructs Temporary Pier To Deliver Humanitarian Aid To Gaza
Some are calling it Kamala Harris’s “Sister Souljah moment,” referring to when, in June 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly rebuked racist comments made by a popular female hip-hop artist as a way of distancing himself from extreme elements of the Democratic base.

For her part, Harris appeared to be drawing her own line Wednesday, shutting down chants from pro-Palestinian protesters at a Detroit rally on Wednesday, with a firm, “I’m speaking now.” The chants— “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide”—received this stern rebuke from the vice president: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

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Harris’s team said the Democratic nominee for president had already met with the protesters earlier so any suggestion she was ignoring this important segment of her constituency was wrong. Her defenders on social media applauded her willingness to call out disruptive tactics that feed into the notion that the party is divided. “At a moment when former President Donald J. Trump is attacking her as ‘radical’ her confrontation with protesters on the left offered a visual rebuttal,” wrote the New York Times’s Rebecca Davis O’Brien.

Heckling protesters and Sista Souljah moments aside, the incident raises another question, just as important—is Kamala hiding from the Israel–Gaza issue? And are the mainstream media and the Biden administration helping her do it?

Consider that just four months ago, her boss had stood up at the State of the Union and pledged a military “surge” of humanitarian aid into Gaza to save starving Palestinians on the ground. “To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip,” Biden said. “Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.”

By July—just four months later—the humanitarian pier project was built and then dismantled amid stunning failure. A major reason: The Israelis never provided safe passage for the aid delivery. The entire spectacle has been memory-holed. But the population in Gaza is getting less aid than it was in March, and is now at risk of suffering from diseases not seen since the 1950s—like polio—and somehow the “priority” has just vanished as a topic at White House and State Department briefings.

Calls for Israel to allow more trucks into Gaza? Silence. Questions about what aid organizations are equipped to deliver global donations waiting at the border? Crickets. Updates on the maritime corridor which in May was hailed as a “multinational and combined effort” between the U.S., Cyprus, Israel, the UN, and international donors, including the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the European Union? None.

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“For the White House, no news on Gaza is good news, for food aid or otherwise,” charged Steve Semler, journalist and co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI). He diligently tracked the rise and fall of the military “pier” that was supposed to bring salvation to the 2 million population, but ended up floating away with millions of U.S. tax dollars instead.

“The Biden-Harris administration realizes its Israel policy is a massive political liability, but refuses to compromise with its base on that policy. Instead, the administration tries all sorts of things to make the issue go away,” he told TAC. “It stops talking about food aid in press conferences, it omits details about taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel, it pretends Biden has no leverage over Israel to open humanitarian corridors despite those billions in military aid.”

The focus instead is on the looming conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and the potential for the U.S. to get dragged into the fight, which could include a direct confrontation with Iran. The U.S. is moving more military assets into the region, including giving F-22 Raptors to Israel. CENTCOM chief Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla, has met twice with Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) leaders in the last week.

Appearing only to buy time for Israel to continue laying waste to Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken shuttles back and forth to say the same things over and over about urging Israel and Hamas to sign a ceasefire agreement. After Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, the prospects for a deal have dimmed significantly. The administration puts no obvious pressure on the Israeli government to stop the ongoing bombing of civilian structures, including schools used as shelters (more than 100 were killed in such an attack Saturday), tent cities, water facilities, and private homes, not to mention its complete refusal to ensure aid to the starving and diseased population inside.

According to a Reuters report a month ago, humanitarian aid is barely getting into northern Gaza. While some commercial food supplies are making it into the southern crossings, deliveries are erratic—trucks have to be manned by armed guards paid for by the companies and that means prices, when they actually get to market, are far too high for regular Palestinians to afford. There are now fewer than 80 trucks of any stripe getting into Gaza a day, far below the 600 trucks needed to feed the population.

“Food aid is getting in as a trickle, just a trickle, a few dozen trucks a day,” Chris Gunness, Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project, and former spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), told TAC. “That is why people are literally starving to death.”

Trucks coming from Israel and the West Bank have been attacked by Israeli settlers. If they do make it to the crossings, food piles up and rots while waiting for delivery. Even when trucks make it through the laborious Israeli inspection process, they run into a buzzsaw of security issues inside: Israeli military attacks, armed gangs. Some 70 percent of humanitarian aid trucks, which typically do not have guards (too expensive) are looted. There are few or no police on the streets anymore, the Israeli military have killed or sent them all fleeing, according to this Wall Street Journal report.

Interestingly, USAID Director Samantha Power, probably the administration’s most prominent humanitarian, plays only a bit part these days. The last time she spoke candidly out about Gaza was to say that Israel was the chief impediment to food deliveries. That was back in May. She has since announced $100 million in U.S. aid, but we know it is not going anywhere. The administration apparently won’t talk about it openly, just to reporters on background.

And yet the administration is actively continuing to fuel the Israeli military with weapons used in Gaza to make the situation worse, releasing a fresh $3.5 billion tranche on Friday and deciding not to withhold aid from an IDF unit accused of human rights abuses in the West Bank. It turns a blind eye to comments made by Likud party members and ministers who have defended the use of rape against Palestinian prisoners and the starving of the entire population as “morally justified.”

Speaking on the Judge Andrew Napolitano podcast this week, Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor, a TAC contributing editor, pointed out how high-level Israelis have talked about how “they're dealing with the Amalek—animals—that deserve the worst, and that anything you do to the animals that are In front of you is justified, so the notion of any sort of moral restraint is completely absent.”

“The only way to deal with that is to confront it directly but we're not going to do that. Our government will not confront it. They may say something in private, but from the standpoint of the current leadership in Israel, they know they exert infinitely more influence and control over the Senate and the House in the United States than President Biden, or, for that matter, President Harris, does,” he added.

Harris did raise hopes when she said the following after her visit last month with Benjamin Netanyahu: “The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”

But is this more rhetoric than substance? Her office’s response to the heckling protester story Wednesday smacked of trying to have it both ways, the default administration tone. It came in a X post by her top advisor, Phil Gordon:

.@VP has been clear: she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel. She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.

Harris is obviously engaged in a delicate dance. Her progressive base is in no mood for triangulation on this issue, yet she is running a national campaign in which many Democratic top donors are especially pro-Israel, as is the leadership and party establishment.

Semler sees a glass half full and doesn’t think, given the political dynamics, the Harris team can ignore the issue for much longer: “In Minnesota, for example, one in five Democrats voted ‘uncommitted’ in the presidential primary. Current Minnesota Governor and [vice-presidential nominee] Tim Walz has no choice but to talk about Gaza, and so the media has no choice but to cover it. So while the food aid issue is for the time being in retreat, I think the broader Gaza issue is here to stay.”

Perhaps especially if a candidate only gets only one “Sista Souljah moment” per campaign.

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-did-washington-memory-hole-gaza/

Report: VACCINES and LOCKDOWNS are responsible for excess all-cause mortality, not COVID-19 infection

Vaccines and lockdowns to address the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) are to blame for the excess all-cause mortality during the pandemic, according to a new report.

The said report was published by not-for-profit corporation Correlation Canada and was authored by the group's associate researchers Denis Rancourt, Joseph Hickey and Christian Linard. It examined all-cause mortality data in 125 nations between the years 2020 and 2023.

The three researchers found that deaths commonly attributed to COVID-19 were actually due to other factors – including lockdowns and, in bitter irony, the injections touted as a solution for the pathogen. According to them, this excess all-cause mortality worldwide is incompatible with a viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death.

"We describe plausible mechanisms and argue that the three primary causes of death associated with the excess all-cause mortality during (and after) the COVID-19 period are: biological (including psychological) stress from mandates, such as lockdowns and associated socio-economic structural changes; non-COVID-19-vaccine medical interventions, such as mechanical ventilators and drugs; and COVID-19 vaccine injection rollouts, including repeated rollouts on the same populations," they wrote.

Writing for Armageddon Prose, Ben Bartee commented on the second cause of death. He pointed out that "based on reports from countless nurses and other frontline healthcare providers," the scheme involved putting COVID-19 patients on ventilators knowing fully aware that they won't make it. Another scheme, Bartee noted, was the administration of the dangerous drug midazolam on COVID-19 patients and listing the cause of death as COVID-19 infection.

Hospitals incentivized to hook COVID-19 patients to ventilators

"Let's not be naive enough to delude ourselves into believing it was a coincidence that the hospitals were given a financial incentive to throw maximum numbers of grannies on ventilators," Bartee continued. According to the Thailand-based commentator, hospitals' payout from Medicare tripled when they did so. This was on top of the special 20 percent bonus for COVID-19 patients courtesy of the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

According to WRAL News, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimated that the average Medicare payment for a less severe hospitalizations is at $13,297. A hospitalization where a patient is hooked to a ventilator for at least 96 hours is at $40,218.

KFF's estimate is roughly the same as numbers given by former Minnesota State Sen. Scott Jensen, a Republican, during an interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News. According to him, a hospital gets paid $13,000 if a COVID-19 patient on Medicare is admitted and $39,000 if the patient goes on a ventilator. Jensen, a physician by profession, remarked that doctors are being encouraged to cite COVID-19 as a cause of death on death certificates – suggesting money as a motivation.

"A COVID-19 patient on a ventilator will need more services and more complicated services, not just the ventilator," said Joseph Antos, scholar in health care at the American Enterprise Institute. "It is reasonable that a patient who is on a ventilator would cost three times one who isn’t that sick."

Medicare will pay hospitals a 20 percent "add-on" to the regular DRG payment for (COVID-19) patients. That’s a result of the CARES Act, the largest of the three federal stimulus laws enacted in response to the coronavirus, which was signed into law March 27.

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A Khazarian terrorist who deserved to be hanged before he died (Part VI) | VT Foreign Policy
July 8, 2022
…by Jonas E. Alexis

In the 1960s, it was widely reported that “heroin began flowing into the United States from Southeast Asia in body bags returning from the war, courtesy of the CIA.”[1] During the same time, John Lennon declared that “We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD…They invented the LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom.”[2] Virtually all the intellectuals, gurus, drug addicts, and even musicians of the counterrevolution agreed with Lennon.

Timothy Leary, who believed that he was Aleister Crowley reborn, said: “The LSD movement was started by the CIA. I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists.”[3] Allen Ginsberg acknowledged: “Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of the CIA’s lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control? Had they, by conscious plan or inadvertent Pandora’s Box, let loose the whole LSD fad on the US and the world?”[4] Ginsberg, like Ken Kesey, was part of the “successful experiment” the CIA was conducting in the 1950s and 60s.

Kesey was studying creative writing at Stanford when he first took LSD in 1959. When Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital offered to give mind-altering drugs to volunteers, Kesey couldn’t be more excited: he quickly put his name on the dotted line. His drug trip at the hospital was an epiphany. In order to test his experiment further, he took a job at the same hospital and spread the gospel of LSD to his comrades. Stephen Kinzer writes that Kesey’s home “turned into a twenty-four-hour psychedelic party as friends and neighbors got high and danced to loud music, electric rock music.”[5]

Under the influence of LSD, Kesey got enough material for his new novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book which ultimately became a bestseller. “With the money he earned from royalties, Kesey bought a new home and began throwing ‘acid tests’ at which he served LSD to a wild roster of guests including poets, musicians, and bikers from the Hells Angels gang…Kesey gave LSD a new role in American society.”[6]

MK-Ultra

Leary, Kesey, Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, among others, were all the product of MK-Ultra, a secret program which the CIA brought about through one man, Sidney Gottlieb, who actually was “the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the name of national security.”[7] Under the director of Allen Dulles, both the CIA and Gottlieb deliberately spread LSD virtually everywhere during the 1950s and 60s in order to control people.

In fact, Dulles explicitly declared that one of the main purposes for developing MK-Ultra was to control people,[8] particularly mental patients, prisoners (from Japan, Korea, Germany), and drug addicts, prostitutes, and even children.[9] As they put it, these people “could not fight back.”[10] What was the false pretense that the CIA and Gottlieb used to dose these people? In the name of “science” and “patriotism,” they were trying to find a cure for schizophrenia. One patient in particular “was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days” in Kentucky. Other patients went mad, others had to suffer psychological damage for the rest of their lives, and others ended up dead because of the diabolical experiment.[11] And between 1953 and 1963 oligarchic institutions like Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Columbia University, Cornell, etc., all supported MK-Ultra—directly or indirectly.[12] Other institutions such as “Massachusetts General Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital, the Universities of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Denver, Illinois, Oklahoma, Rochester, Texas and Indiana as well as Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Baylor, Emory, George Washington, Vanderbilt, Cornell, John Hopkins New York University” were all involved in MK-Ultra.[13]

Kinzer calls Gottlieb “the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century—unless there was someone else who conducted brutal experiments across three continents and had a license to kill issued by the U.S. government.”[14] Hunter, who himself experimented with the drug at Stanford under the auspices of the CIA[15] and who got hypnotized by the drug, eventually came to the conclusion that “the United States government was in a way responsible for creating the ‘acid tests’ and the Grateful Dead, and thereby the whole psychedelic counterculture.”[16]

Like Agave in Euripides’ The Bacchae, Hunter eventually realized that he was duped. His moral integrity had awakened, and he eventually realized that he was a guinea pig in a social experiment. But for him and others, it was already too late. An entire culture and indeed a nation were hooked on a drug that was hatched by a man whose diabolical plan was to control much of humanity. That man again was none other than Jewish revolutionary Sidney Gottlieb. John Marks, a sympathizer, declared that if one used the Nuremberg standards, Gottlieb would have been executed on the spot precisely because he did the same thing that the Nazis were allegedly doing.[17]

Gottlieb was aptly called “the Black Sorcerer.”[18] He was a scientist at the US Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and was specifically assigned by the CIA to create a lethal toxin that would allow the CIA to not only manipulate people at will but to assassinate perceived enemies and dissidents.

Gottlieb also had a plan to upgrade the social engineering that was part of the CIA’s program in the United States. He wanted to see how individual behavior could be altered via drugs, most specifically through LSD and other powerful psychoactive drugs. According to Kinzer, the CIA and the psychological warfare program called this “a new era of humane warfare.”[19]

Gottlieb joined the CIA in 1951, and he quickly created the poison that they wanted. No, he did not invent LSD; the man responsible for concocting the drug was Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist and author who synthesized the drug with ergot and other supplements in November of 1938. Hoffman also wrote the book LSD: My Problem Child. It was indeed his problem child, for Hoffman tried the drug on himself and, like Aleister Crowley, discovered something powerful. After absorbing the drug, he said that he felt

“a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away…. I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.”[20]

This “mystical experience” was again felt by Crowley and a host of black magicians over the centuries.

How does the drug work? Simple: “After receiving the toxin orally or by pinprick, a victim first feels a tingling sensation in the fingers and lips and dies ten seconds later from a painless paralysis.”[21]

Gottlieb, throughout his life, was never prosecuted for his crime. He was protected by the CIA, oligarchic institutions, and the elite. If there was one person who deserved to be hanged before he died, then that person should have been Sidney Gottlieb.

First published on July 19, 2020.

[1] Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 341.

[2] Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2019), 190.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 188.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Tim Weiner, “Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A.,” NY Times, March 10, 1999.
[8] Cited in Michael Otterman, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 24.
[9] Laura Collins, “How CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb – the ‘most prolific torturer of his generation’ – used potent drugs, extreme temperatures, food and sleep deprivation and electroshock for his mind control experiments on human ‘expendables,’” Daily Mail, December 4, 2019.
[10] Weiner, “Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A.,” NY Times, March 10, 1999.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Otterman, American Torture, 24.
[13] Collins, “How CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb – the ‘most prolific torturer of his generation’ – used potent drugs, extreme temperatures, food and sleep deprivation and electroshock for his mind control experiments on human ‘expendables,’” Daily Mail, December 4, 2019.
[14] Stephen Kinzer, “The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments,” Politico, September 15, 2019.
[15] See also McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 42.
[16] Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief, 189.
[17] Weiner, “Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies; Took LSD to C.I.A.,” NY Times, March 10, 1999.
[18] Kris Hollington, Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed History (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008), 34.
[19] Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief, 36.
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann#cite_note-10.
[21] Hollington, Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes, 34.
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As Gazans starve, Israeli rhetoric grows more and more radically anti-Palestinian – Day 306
[email protected] August 9, 2024 AIPAC, ceasefire, Cori Bush, ethnic cleansing, humanitarian aid gaza, kamala harris on palestine, polio in gaza, rape of palestinian prisoners, sanctions, tim walz on palestine, torture of Palestinian prisoners
A Palestinian girl clings to her mother in Gaza City, June 2 [Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu] (photo)
In Gaza, airstrikes continue, food rations drop, polio threat grows; in Israel, calls to punish not the rapists, but the one who filmed them, to make rape of Palestinian prisoners official policy, to make Nablus in West Bank “look like Rafah,” to legalize Israeli settlement in Gaza, to end US sanctions on violent settlers; Biden administration ok’s more war after prisoner swap (risking ceasefire deal), condemns not AIPAC’s purchase of congressional candidates, but Cori Bush’s warnings against AIPAC; Kamala Harris indicates no tolerance for pro-Palestinian protesters or their message; Tim Walz’s track record on Palestine is not nearly as moral as Dems painted it; more.

By IAK staff, from reports.

At least 15 killed in Israeli bombing of two Gaza schools

The New Arab reports: An Israeli attack on two schools in Gaza City left at least 15 people killed and dozens injured in the Tuffah district of the besieged enclave.

The schools targeted, Abdel Fattah Hamoud and al-Zahraa, were destroyed with many Palestinians still missing and trapped under the rubble, according to local civil defence teams who were still working to pull people out.

Displaced Palestinians were sheltering in the schools, which were reportedly targeted without any prior warning.

Earlier on Thursday, Israeli forces stepped up airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, killing at least five Palestinians in a house in the heart of Gaza City.

Another airstrike in the southern city of Khan Younis killed one person and wounded others, according to medics.

NOTE: Every single day, Gaza’s population endures many airstrikes, tank shells, and snipers’ bullets – too many to report on here. And every day, more Palestinians are lost under the rubble of bombed-out buildings. We acknowledge that these are important stories, even if we are unable to cover them all.

A view of the destruction after an Israeli attack on Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on Tuesday [Ashraf Amra/Anadolu]
A view of the destruction after an Israeli attack on Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on Tuesday [Ashraf Amra/Anadolu] (photo)
World Food Program forced to reduce rations in Gaza

Al Jazeera reports: The deputy spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, Farhan Haq, explained that the World Food Program has been forced to reduce rations for Palestinians in Gaza because of the continuing war on the enclave.

“WFP urgently needs fuel deliveries, increased flow of blood supplies and greater capacity to deliver hot meals, particularly in Gaza City and north Gaza,” Haq said.

“WFP warns that it will be unable to bring in the quantity of food required this month unless more border crossing points into Gaza open and aid workers are able to bring in half the quantity of food needed in July and in the West Bank.”


Without ceasefire for vaccines, polio could spread throughout region: WHO specialist

Al Jazeera reports: The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) has called for a ceasefire in Gaza to administer a mass polio vaccination campaign, including to 600,000 children under the age of eight, after samples of the disease were detected in the enclave’s wastewater.

Hamid Jafari, a polio specialist with the WHO, says that if such a ceasefire is not implemented and if healthcare workers are not granted enough freedom of movement to distribute all the vaccines, the risk of a polio outbreak both within Gaza and regionally is “very high”.

“This can spread very fast internationally and most importantly, it is a direct threat to the children of Gaza,” Jafari told Al Jazeera. “This can start paralysing children very very rapidly.”

He added: “If it [polio] spreads into Israel or the West Bank, it becomes a public health emergency there. Lebanon is at risk. Egypt is at risk. Jordan is at risk. And other countries of the region are at risk.

After Israel destroyed Gaza's water and sewage systems, filthy water runs or stands stagnant all over the enclave, carrying polio and other diseases.
After Israel destroyed Gaza’s water and sewage systems, filthy water runs or stands stagnant all over the enclave, carrying polio and other diseases. (collage)
Friendly Fire: Israeli Man Dies After Being Wounded by Malfunctioning Iron Dome Interceptor

Ha’aretz reports: The Israeli military said a preliminary investigation showed Samara was mistakenly struck by a malfunctioning interceptor rocket that was launched at a drone launched from Lebanon. The investigation showed that the rocket had fallen after failing to explode in the air as designed, it added.

Two others were wounded besides Samara: a woman who was hit by shrapnel from the explosion and a cyclist who was hit by a car during the alarm.

The hospital in the area said 19 people were admitted for treatment, including six soldiers – most of them requesting help for headaches, ringing in the ears and anxiety.

Israel bans imam Ekrima Sabri from Al-Aqsa Mosque for 6 more months

Al Jazeera reports: Israel has extended its ban on Al-Aqsa Mosque’s speaker Ekrima Sabri, restricting his access to the mosque and its courtyards for six more months, his lawyer tells Al Jazeera.

Sabri was detained on August 2 on suspicion of inciting “terrorism” after he mourned assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at the mosque.

Sabri, 85, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem and current head of its Supreme Islamic Council, called Haniyeh a “martyr” at the mosque in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, his lawyer Hamzeh Qutteineh said at the time.

At the time, he was also banned from entering the mosque until August 8.

Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories walks outside an Israeli police station after being summoned for interrogation, in Jerusalem on January 2, 2023. [Saeed Qaq/NurPhoto via Getty Images]
Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories walks outside an Israeli police station after being summoned for interrogation, in Jerusalem on January 2, 2023. [Saeed Qaq/NurPhoto via Getty Images] (photo)
Smotrich demands punishment for person who filmed Sde Teiman rape video

Middle East Eye reports: Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for an investigation to find out who took the video that shows Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian in the Sde Teiman detention centre.

In a post on X, he demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them”.

NOTE: On Monday, Smotrich said that letting two million people in Gaza die from hunger is “justified and moral”.

Israeli journalist urges rape to become state policy for Palestinian prisoners

Andalou Agency reports: An Israeli journalist advocated rape Thursday as an official policy by the state for Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails.

“The only thing that is a problem for me here is that it is not a regulated policy of the state to abuse the (Palestinian) detainees,” journalist Yehuda Schlesinger said on a television program on Channel 12 when asked if raping prisoners is acceptable.

He justified his comments by claiming, “Because first of all, they deserve it, and it is great revenge that we need to give them.”

“And secondly, maybe it will also serve us a little more as a deterrent,” he said. “It is just a shame that we don’t do it in an institutionalized way as a part of regulations for torture of prisoners.”

The comments follow reports by media outlets that showed a video of Israeli soldier raping a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman Prison in the Negev desert in southern Israel.

A leaked video showing Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee from Gaza has emerged. (Photo: video grab)
A leaked video showing Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee from Gaza has emerged. (Photo: video grab) (photo)
Israeli lawmaker says ‘Nablus should look like Rafah’

Middle East Eye reports: Israeli member of parliament Zvi Sukkot, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, said Israel should act in the occupied West Bank the same way it is acting in the Gaza Strip.

“We still see processions of armed men,” he said. “Maybe we are waiting for them to try to shoot someone? This is a disturbing event, an unacceptable reality. Nablus should look like Rafah as long as it exports terror, Tulkarm like Khan Younis, Jenin like Jabalia.”

Israeli forces have killed at least 620 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the war on Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry.




Israeli lawmakers, settler leaders unite to legalize Gaza settlements: Report

The Cradle reports: Israel’s Channel 12 reported on 8 August that lawmakers from the Likud and Religious Zionism parties have formed a “civilian parliamentary working group” alongside settler leaders that seeks to legitimize the resettlement of Gaza by repealing the 2005 disengagement law.

The working group reportedly expects to present the draft bill at the opening of the next Knesset session.

Approved in 2005, the Gaza Disengagement Law led to the dismantling of the Gush Katif settlement bloc in the strip and four Jewish settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank. For several years preceding the current war, religious Zionist settlers in Israel called for a war to conquer Gaza, reverse the disengagement, and rebuild Gush Katif.


Israeli army responds to announcement of World Central Kitchen of Israel’s killing of staff

The US-based World Central Kitchen aid group had announced the killing of a Palestinian staff member, Nadi Sallout, near Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.

The Times of Israel newspaper reports that the Israeli military said it conducted a preliminary examination and held a conversation with the WCK about the reported killing.

It claimed that “there is no known incident of harm to an employee of the organization while working in the last few days,” adding, “The [army] examines each unusual incident individually.”

In early April, Israel killed seven people working with the United States-based NGO in an attack on the Gaza Strip.

NOTE: Israel’s self-investigations consistently whitewash its crimes and fail to appropriately punish the perpetrators. Israeli sources, including the government itself, have a long track record of lying (for example, this and this and this.)


US To Let Israel Restart Military Operations in Gaza After First Phase of Ceasefire Deal

As Ha’aretz reports ceasefire negotiations are nearly completed, AntiWar reports: The US is ready to guarantee that it would allow Israel to restart the genocidal war in Gaza after the first phase of any hostage and ceasefire deal that might be reached with Hamas, according to Israeli media reports.

The Israeli condition could make Hamas less likely to agree to a deal since one of its main demands has been a permanent ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

According to The Times of Israel, a proposal that’s been discussed would involve three phases where Israel would halt its military operations and Hamas would release hostages. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants a guarantee that he’ll be able to restart military operations after the first phase, which is when negotiations will be held on implementing the next two phases.

The US has not yet provided a written agreement that it would allow Israel to restart operations but has expressed its approval of the idea. Yedioth Ahronoth reported that the US wouldn’t give the guarantee in writing until an agreement is reached with Hamas.


Israel ‘working to block’ sanctions on violent settlers: Netanyahu

Israeli government press release: The Israeli prime minister held a meeting Thursday in Tel Aviv with council heads from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank to discuss their concerns about the effects of the Western sanctions imposed on a limited number of violent settlers and organizations.

Regarding the sanctions against the settlers and the organizations, Prime Minister Netanyahu noted that he views this with utmost gravity and said: “We are working to block this. It is an issue for the entire State of Israel, not just Judea and Samaria.”

RECOMMENDED READING: Israel revokes diplomatic status of Norwegian envoys

Netanyahu: Israel should have waged war against Hamas sooner

In an exclusive interview given to the US’s Time Magazine, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he made a mistake not launching a full-scale war against the Palestinian group in the years leading up to its October 7 attacks on Israel.

He blamed the Israeli security establishment for its hesitation, and himself for acceding to their reluctance.

“October 7 showed that those who said that Hamas was deterred were wrong,” he said to Time during his interview. “If anything, I didn’t challenge enough the assumption that was common to all the security agencies.”

[In reality, Israel had frequently waged war on Gaza.]




White House denounces Cori Bush’s ‘inflammatory’ words to AIPAC after primary loss

The Hill reports: Asked for President Biden’s thoughts on Bush’s vow to challenge AIPAC, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president condemns that kind of “divisive” and “inflammatory” rhetoric.

Earlier this week, Cori Bush told supporters, “They’re about to see this other Cori, this other side…All they did was radicalize me, so now they need to be afraid,” and, “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

The White House press secretary said of this comment, “Look, the president has always been very clear — and very recently, after the assassination attempt of the last president — about lowering rhetoric, right? Lowering political rhetoric and the importance of doing that,” Jean-Pierre said Wednesday at the daily press briefing.

“It is important — important that we be very mindful of what we say. This kind of rhetoric is inflammatory and divisive and incredibly unhelpful.”

“We’re going to continue to condemn any type of political rhetoric in that way, in that vein,” she continued. “And so, it is important to be mindful in what we say and how we say it. But we cannot have this type of inflammatory, divisive language in our political discourse.”

NOTE: In what some analysts have called an attack on the democratic process, AIPAC spent over $17 million to topple Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., in June, and around $26 million to defeat Cori Bush. The administration’s position toward Bush’s comment indicates it is more worried about challenges to Israel’s primacy in US politics than the fact that Congressional seats are for sale.



Kamala’s husband, the US Second Gentleman, claims ‘We’re witnessing the worst wave of Jew-hatred since World War II’

Ha’aretz reports: Talking to the media while visiting Paris, U.S. Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff said that “There is a ferocious surge of antisemitism occurring around the world, including here in France. It is a crisis.”

We are witnessing the worst wave of Jew-hatred the globe has experienced since World War II,” he added.

According to the second gentleman, “When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or identity, and when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.”

NOTE: A large portion of alleged antisemitism is opposition to Zionism, a racist ideology under which Israel dispossessed 750,000 Palestinian people and exiled them to Gaza and other locations. The so-called “demonization” of Israel is in most cases a legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, and other illegal practices.

Activists in Minnesota: ‘Governor Walz has refused to meet Palestinian families’

Middle East Eye reports: It’s been 10 months since Israel’s war on Gaza began, and Governor Tim Walz, the newly appointed vice-presidential nominee on Kamala Harris’ ticket, has yet to meet with Palestinian families from his home state of Minnesota, anti-war activists have told Middle East Eye.

The accusations are in stark contrast to the public image being conjured up by the Democratic Party establishment to present Walz, along with presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, as more sympathetic and empathetic towards the carnage suffered by Palestinians over the past 10 months.

But according to several activists in Minnesota, not only has the governor refused to meet with Palestinian families who have lost relatives in Israel’s war on Gaza, he has barely acknowledged their concerns and and demands.

Sana Wazwaz, spokesperson for the group, said the Palestinian community had been trying for months to arrange a meeting with the governor to talk about the devastating losses in Gaza and their demands for an arms embargo on Israel.

When they did manage to arrange a meeting with the governor for early July, it was abruptly cancelled when they explained to the governor’s staff that they had come to discuss “material solutions” with the governor and not merely to narrate “sob stories” about the loss of their loved ones.

When asked why the meeting had been cancelled, they were told that the governor “was prepared to listen to you tell your stories, but we weren’t prepared to talk about divestment”.

“Walz wanted us for the PR stunt and not for actual, genuine conversation about political change. He just wanted to check it off the list that he met with another marginalized group that he’s been ignoring for months upon months,” Wazwaz explained.

“We have been trying for months to arrange a meeting. Phone calls have been made, but Governor Walz has refused to show up for any of the Palestinian families; has refused to sit down and meet with them, has refused to, you know, visit a single mosque or a single Palestinian institution to check in on our families,” Wazwaz said.

Activists also point out that Walz’s nomination has also garnered praise from liberal pro-Israel lobbying groups in the US. J Street described the Harris-Walz team as “pro-Israel”; Mark Mellman, chair of Democratic Majority for Israel described Walz as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat with a strong record of supporting the US-Israel relationship”.

COUNTERPUNCH ADDS: Harris has offered sympathetic words on Gaza: “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety – sometimes displaced for a second, third, or fourth time – we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

Eman Abdelhadi of the University of Chicago finds such sentiments from Harris parch dry, arguing that a lack of “an actual commitment to stop killing the children of Gaza” invalidates any claims to empathy. “To be empathetic to someone that you’re shooting in the head is not exactly laudable. We don’t need empathy from these people. We need to stop providing the weapons and the money that is actively killing the people that they’re supposedly empathising with.”

[Also see Glenn Greenwald’s commentary.]


MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

The Intercept: The Outrageous Case of an NY Journalist Charged With a Hate Crime for Recording a Gaza Protest Action

Caitlin Johnson: US Policy: Let Israel Escalate Against Iran, Then Tell Iran Not To Escalate Back

Middle East Monitor: In Gaza, keeping the internet on can cost lives but also save them


STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – AUGUST 8:

Palestinian death toll from October 7 – August 8: at least 40,315* (39,699 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,251 children as of July 22. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 616 in the West Bank (~140 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 46,848 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 18 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**.
About 1.7 million, or 75% of Gaza’s population are currently displaced.
2.15 million (out of total population of 2.3 million) are projected to face Crisis or worse levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – August 8: at least 97,142 (including at least 91,722 in Gaza and 5,420 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7 – August 8: ~1,486 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 331 military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 16 in the West Bank) and~8,730 injured.

Times of Israel reports: The IDF listed 41 soldiers killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents – nearly 16%.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries in Israel on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.**

Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
Western media continue to withhold the truth about Israel and Gaza – 4 stories
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children
What Would You Do With An Extra $320 Million?
Assassination of Haniyeh an intentional, dangerous escalation – Parsi, Macgregor
When Israel Burned Refugees Alive, Establishment Media Called It a ‘Tragic Accident’
Israel has turbocharged West Bank housing demolitions under the cover of war
Western media ignores Israeli confirmation of Hannibal Directive on 7 Oct
US Should Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu When He’s in Washington
Airwars investigation: Israeli airstrikes uniquely lethal (video)
Hesen Jabr paid the price of conscience
Gaza genocide denial
Why the news media’s job is to groom us
‘Disappeared, buried, detained’: The horrors of Gaza’s missing children
Hundreds of social media influencers attend Israel strategy summit in NYC
Supporting Israel Is Big Business in the U.S. for Israel partisans
Toys, spices, sewing machines: the items Israel banned from entering Gaza
Synopsis of ICJ’s decision on Israeli occupation, reactions, and take-aways
Russia attacks hospitals in Ukraine; Israel does the same in Gaza. The US response couldn’t be more different.
‘I have the prison inside me’: The emaciated Palestinian bodybuilder broken by Israel
Israel has manufactured an industrial-scale version of Jim Crow rape hoaxes
If Americans Knew Mobile Billboard Truck at Republican Convention
Col. Douglas MacGregor: US is under the control of Israel, likens Gaza to Warsaw Ghetto


https://israelpalestinenews.org/gazans-starve-israeli-rhetoric-more-radically-anti-palestinian-day-306/

Today's Must-Reads - 8 August 2024
Exposing the narrative with the latest news, studies, reports and articles!

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Welcome to your daily dose of curated news and insights from across the globe!

There’s a lot of information to get through every day. Cut through the noise, save yourself time and read the news that really matters.


Today this is a slimmed down version for everyone but is usually for paid subscribers only. Consider signing up as a paid subscriber and join a growing band of independent minds from around the world.

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National Guard Disputes Tim Walz's Military Biography. The Minnesota National Guard is disputing Governor Tim Walz's military biography, saying that the Democratic vice presidential candidate did not hold the rank of command sergeant major at the time of his retirement. Army Lieutenant Colonel Kristen Augé, the state public affairs officer for Minnesota National Guard, told Just the News on Wednesday that the governor did not retire as "Command Sergeant Major Walz" in 2005, as stated on Minnesota's official website, but as master sergeant "because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy." A soldier who does not complete the requisite coursework is automatically demoted, according to Army regulations.

Cambridge doubles down on freedom of speech rules. Cambridge University has implemented its new freedom of speech code, in spite of the legislation it was based on being suspended by the new Labour government. The new code was designed to bring the University’s freedom of speech protections in line with the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which was put on hold last month. But the University’s free speech code was implemented on August 1st, without the legislation underpinning it being in force.

The unfashionable truth about the riots. Our government has the same choice the Conservative and coalition governments had. It could focus on getting people into work and bringing work back to these areas. Or, like the governments before them, it could try to cover up the problem with immigration. As the Tory party could tell them, it is an easy and addictive fix. Does Keir Starmer have the guts to go cold turkey? Everything will depend on whether he does.

China’s super-secret space plane spotted above Europe. So little is known about Shenlong, China’s ultra-secret, reusable space plane that there aren’t even publicly verifiable photos of the experimental aircraft. But that doesn’t mean knowledgeable astronomy enthusiasts can’t catch glimpses of the vehicle as it orbits Earth, as was recently the case for Felix Schöfbänker in Upper Austria. China’s mysterious robotic vehicle has completed at least two confirmed missions since 2020, the second of which lasted 276 consecutive days in orbit above Earth. During that excursion, Shenlong deployed at least one free-flying object that experts believe may have been either a small satellite or external craft designed to monitor the plane itself. Its current mission began after launching from a Chinese space agency facility in the Gobi Desert on December 14, 2023. Since then it has released at least seven confirmed objects of unknown purpose into orbit.

Review as police liaison filmed telling group to ‘discard’ weapons in mosque. Staffordshire Police has launched a review after a protest liaison officer told a crowd gathered outside a mosque in Stoke-on-Trent, in Staffs, to “discard” any weapons within the place of worship. The officer was filmed in a video, which was live streamed on TikTok, addressing a crowd of men outside the Darul Falah mosque in Hanley, on Saturday as riots swept the country. In footage believed to be filmed after the counter protest, the liaison officer, wearing a blue police vest, addressed those attending and said the “EDL lot have gone home” and that they must dispose of any weapons. Speaking through a loudspeaker, the liaison officer appears to say he would be “reassured that anything that goes on now we won’t need to make any arrests”.

The British elites’ crazy rage against Elon Musk. The phoney liberals have ripped their masks to shreds and stomped them into the dirt for good measure. Their rage is linked to the riots currently rocking the UK. Musk’s own tweets, they say, not least his chatter about Britain being on the road to ‘civil war’, have helped to whip up the mayhem. Worse, his ‘free-speech absolutism’, as one ‘liberal’ magazine snottily refers to it, has meant that every tosser with a smartphone has been able to tweet their inflammatory views on the riots and even to spread misinformation. In essence, says a writer for the Guardian, Musk has been ‘leading from behind on UK thuggery and race riots’.

The Government’s sinister disinformation unit is threatening free speech again. Isn’t it curious how almost every problem this country faces seems to have a ready-made solution rooted in digital authoritarianism? Less than one month into his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer was faced with an unthinkably monstrous fatal stabbing of three little girls, followed by some of the most shameful scenes of street violence in our country’s living memory. His government’s response has notably included online censorship powers and AI facial recognition surveillance. If the history of chaos that threatens democracy teaches us anything, it is to protect our democratic rights with more vigour, not less, when they are under threat. At a time when parts of the population are in complete disharmony, to crack down on free speech would be a grave mistake.

Jeremy Clarkson warns ‘Britain is falling apart’ as he makes Brexit U-turn. Jeremy Clarkson has been a vocal Remainer since the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, repeatedly voicing his affection for Britain’s part in the EU. However, the Clarkson’s Farm star now appears to have had a change of heart, and urged Prime Minister Keir Starmer to do the same. Writing in his new column, the 64-year-old explained: “When I lived in London’s Notting Hill, I was a Remainer and so were all my friends. It literally didn’t occur to us, as we sat down there in our agreeable houses eating agreeable food that someone might vote to leave... “Today, I’m surrounded by farmers and plasterers and brickies and butchers and all I hear, all day long, is that there’s too much immigration. “But if they say this out loud, or if they go on a march, they are told by the London elite that they are far-right extremists or racist thugs. For the most part, they’re not...there was a time you’d have called them the salt of the earth. But Sir Starmer doesn’t seem to have grasped this”.

A Fed rate cut will not solve our economic problems. If our economy is ever going to heal, interest rates must be brought back in line with people’s actual time preferences. Like any true price, a pure market interest rate won’t always be stable because reality isn’t always stable. But if we want to see an end to perpetual recessions and debt-fueled mass consumption, we need to stop listening to those who benefit from the current system of centrally-planned interest rates. We need a return to accurate interest rates, which have helped encourage and coordinate the production of a better future for thousands of years.

How the health of your lungs is linked to the bacteria in your gut. The trillions of bacteria living in our gut have an extraordinary effect on our health. They’re in charge of digestion, breaking down the foods we eat and extracting their vitamins and minerals. A healthy, balanced microbiome also helps ward off infections and even lowers risk of certain diseases. Studies have revealed that people with respiratory conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer often have an imbalanced gut microbiome – a condition known as dysbiosis.

The Chain of Issuance: The People and Patents That Built The Financial Surveillance Network. The patent hoarding developers and investors associated with PayPal and Google who built the first iteration of e-commerce and digital advertising have turned to the blockchain to fulfill their vision of total financial surveillance and the circumnavigation of government-issued money.

German EV sales down 37% “The market has lost all momentum”. It’s not that people don’t want a new car, they just prefer a fossil fueled one. Sales of normal cars rose 7% in the same period. EV’s made up 20% of new car sales in Germany this time last year, but that market share has now shrunk to 13%. This is not the way a raging new lifesaving technology takes over the planet. In Sweden EV sales are down 15%, and in Switzerland they’re down by 19%. In Australia sales have fallen by about 17% in the last six months. Australians bought about 100,000 cars in July but only 6,700 of them were pure EVs, down from 8,000 earlier this year.

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https://substack.com/home/post/p-147476352

As Israel continues killing in Gaza, more torture and rape allegations surface – Day 304
[email protected] August 7, 2024 anti-masking law, ceasefire, evacuation, gaza death toll, Israeli prisons, malnutrition gaza, palestinian journalist killed, rape, tim walz, torture, turkey joins icj, turkiye, us troops to israel, west bank deaths
Israeli air strikes have targeted parts of central Gaza where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought shelter. Pictured: the aftermath of a bombing in Deir el Balah (screengrab)
166th Palestinian journalist killed; child malnutrition in Gaza; another evacuation order; Gaza’s official death toll is way too low; news of Israeli torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners keeps coming, keeps getting worse; Israel killed 12 West Bank Palestinians in 24 hours; majority of Americans don’t support sending troops to assist Israel; NY anti-masking law targets pro-Palestine protesters; VP candidate Tim Walz on Palestine; ceasefire agreement allegedly getting close; Turkey joins ICJ case against Israel; more.

By IAK staff, from reports.

Another Palestinian journalist killed in Israeli attack on Gaza

Al Jazeera reports: Gaza’s Government Media Office says the number of journalists killed in Israeli attacks has risen to 166 since the start of Israel’s war.

It said in a statement that Mohammed Issa Abu Saada, a correspondent and field photojournalist for several media outlets, is the latest to be killed.

Child malnutrition surges in Gaza: UN

OCHA reports: In the five-day period up to Monday, 143 Palestinians were reported killed and 341 injured by Israeli attacks on Gaza from air, land and sea forces, according to the UN’s latest situation report.

Detected cases of child malnutrition in Gaza have jumped almost 50 percent in July compared with June, with more than 650 Palestinian children now suffering from “acute malnutrition” in the enclave, which is a three-fold increase in cases since May.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also reports that an estimated 10,000 people remain missing or under the rubble of destroyed buildings in Gaza.

Save the Children, in a new statement, said 21,000 children are missing, some separated from their families, some buried under the rubble, their fate unknown. The advocacy group calls for a ceasefire to look for the missing children. Israel's abuses saw it added to the UN's global blacklist of countries that harm children.
Save the Children, in a new statement, said 21,000 children are missing, some separated from their families, some buried under the rubble, their fate unknown. The advocacy group calls for a ceasefire to look for the missing children. Israel’s abuses saw it added to the UN’s global blacklist of countries that harm children. (screenshot)
Israeli Military Orders Another Mass Evacuation in Northern Gaza – ‘To the Known Shelters’

Palestine Chronicle reports: The Israeli military threatened a new military operation in the northern Gaza Strip under the pretext of the firing of rockets from the area.

In a tweet published early Wednesday on the X platform, Israeli army spokesman Avichai Adraee said that all those in the Beit Hanoun area, the Manshiya and Sheikh Zayed neighborhoods should evacuate their areas immediately to “known shelters” in the center of Gaza City.

He added that Hamas and other factions were firing rockets from those areas and that the Israeli army would act “immediately and forcefully against them.”

Throughout the war, Israel has repeatedly targeted refugee encampments of displaced Gazans, resulting in the killing and wounding of thousands.

Israel’s Channel 12 said the army was preparing for what it described as large-scale ground activity in Beit Hanoun.

Meanwhile, there are reports of shelling all over Gaza.

RECOMMENDED READING: ‘The martyrs were cut up and burned’: Survivors of the latest tent massacre in Gaza recount the horror

A scene from the massive fire ignited when Israel struck Rafah
A scene from the massive fire ignited when Israel struck Rafah on May 26 (screenshot)
Gaza’s official death toll is a lie

Jonathan Cook writes: The reported death toll in Gaza is way too low by every imaginable metric. We need to be stressing this — all the more so when Israel’s apologists are vigorously engaged in a disinformation campaign to suggest that the figures are inflated.

On May 6, seven months into Israel’s slaughter, there were reported to be 34,735 dead. That was an average of 4,960 Palestinians killed each month.

Today, nearly three months on, the reported death toll stands at 39,400 — or an increase of 4,665.

It should not need a statistician to point out that, were the rise linear, the expected number of deaths would stand by this point at around 49,600.

So, even by the simplest calculation, there is a large shortfall in deaths — a shortfall that needs explaining.

Such an explanation is easy to provide: Israel destroyed Gaza’s institutions and its medical infrastructure, including its hospitals, many months ago, making it impossible for officials there to keep track of how many Palestinians are being killed by Israel.

The death toll figures started to stall in the spring, around the time Israel completed its destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and kidnapped much of the enclave’s medical personnel.

More than a month ago, Save the Children pointed out that some 21,000 children in Gaza were missing, in addition to the 16,000 known to have been killed by Israel. Many are likely to have suffered lonely, terrifying deaths under rubble — gradually suffocated to death, or dying slowly from dehydration.

But again, even those shocking figures are likely to be a severe undercount.

(Read the full article here.)




Reports of torture in Israel’s Sde Teiman ‘only represent the tip of iceberg’

UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights: Reports of alleged torture and sexual violence in Israel’s Sde Teiman prison are grossly illegal and revolting, but they only represent the tip of the iceberg, independent human rights experts* warned today.

“Israel’s widespread and systemic abuse of Palestinians in detention and arbitrary arrest practices over decades, coupled with the absence of any restraints by the Israeli State since 7 October 2023, paint a shocking picture enabled by absolute impunity,” the experts said.

Around 9,500 Palestinians, including hundreds of children and women, are currently imprisoned—around one-third without charge or trial. Another unknown number are arbitrarily being held in detention facilities and ad hoc camps following a wave of arrest and abduction campaigns across Palestinian territory that targeted men, women and children particularly following 7 October.

The experts received substantiated reports of widespread abuse, torture, sexual assault and rape, amid atrocious inhumane conditions, with at least 53 Palestinians apparently dying as a result in 10 months.

Countless testimonies by men and women speak of detainees in cage-like enclosures, tied to beds blindfolded and in diapers, stripped naked, deprived of adequate healthcare, food, water and sleep, electrocutions including on their genitals, blackmail and cigarette burns. In addition, victims spoke of loud music played until their ears bled, attacks by dogs, waterboarding, suspension from ceilings and severe sexual and gender-based violence.

“Allegations of gang-rape of a Palestinian detainee, now shockingly supported by voices in the Israeli political establishment and society, provide irrefutable evidence that the moral compass is lost,” the experts said. In February 2024, a number of experts also expressed grave concern regarding the reports of sexual and other forms of gender-based violence committed against Palestinian women and girls in Israeli detention.

(Read the full statement here.)

NOTE: The Cradle reported yesterday that US President Joe Biden has apparently agreed to guarantee that Israel will be able to resume the war against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza after the first phase of an exchange deal, according to Hebrew media. This is the “absolute impunity” to which this report referred.

A leaked photograph of the detention facility shows a blindfolded man with his arms above his head. Obtained by CNN
A leaked photograph of the detention facility shows a blindfolded man with his arms above his head. Obtained by CNN (photo)
Key takeaways from B’Tselem’s report on Israel’s ‘torture camps’

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians, including 21 from the Gaza Strip, who had been held in Israeli prisons since October 7.

The detainees spoke to B’Tselem following their release – here are some details:

The B’Tselem report reveals that more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities were converted into a network of camps “dedicated to the abuse of inmates” following October 7.
“Such spaces, in which every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering, operate in fact as torture camps,” it said.
The violations include “frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; deliberate starvation; forced unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation; prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate medical treatment”.
B’Tselem said at least 60 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 7. Some 48 of them were from Gaza.
The report said that detainee testimonies demonstrate “a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners”. This policy, it said, is implemented under the direction of Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, with the full support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
B’Tselem also noted that the number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails has doubled to 9,623 since the war on Gaza began.
Executive summary of the B’Tselem report can be found here; full report here.

Israeli soldiers stand by a truck packed with stripped, bound, and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, Friday December 8, 2023
Israeli soldiers stand by a truck packed with stripped, bound, and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, Friday December 8, 2023 (photo)
UN probe into UNRWA not given full access to Israeli evidence

UNRWA reported earlier this week that an internal UN investigation concluded that nine UNRWA staff members “may have been involved” in the 7 October attacks.

The UN has now revealed that it does not have 100% conclusive evidence, and that the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services was never given full access to Israel’s evidence that it claims it has against the UN personnel.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres ordered this internal review shortly after Israel leveled its claims against UNRWA personnel in late January. Now, because of legal and confidentiality reasons, this OIOS report will not be made public.

Meanwhile, since October 7, more than 200 UNRWA personnel have been killed due to Israel’s continued bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

In Less Than A Day, Israel Killed Twelve Palestinians In West Bank

IMEMC reports: The Israeli occupation army has killed, overnight and earlier Tuesday, twelve Palestinians in Jenin, Tubas, and Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank.

In Jenin, the army fired a missile at the eastern neighborhood of the city, killing five Palestinians whose bodies have been severely mutilated.

Wisam Bakr, the director of the Jenin Governmental Hospital, said the severely mutilated corpses of five Palestinians were transferred to the medical facility after the army fired a missile at them in the Eastern Neighborhood, and prevented Palestinian medics from entering the area for several hours.

Details on the deaths are here.

RECOMMENDED READING: Far right pulling masks off Israeli legal charade



Israelis continue to protest detention of soldiers accused of raping Palestinian prisoner

Al Jazeera reports: Israelis are demonstrating in front of the military court at the Beit Lid base in the center of the country, to protest the continued detention of five reserve soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian prisoner in Sde Teiman prison in the Negev desert.

Last week, dozens of Israeli protesters, including far-right members of the Knesset, clashed with military police after at least nine soldiers suspected of abusing a Palestinian prisoner were detained for questioning.

Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said the demonstration comes ahead of the start of a court hearing on the third extension of the detention of the five soldiers.

Demonstrators chanted slogans such as “This is the state of the Jews and it precedes democracy” and called for the release of the accused soldiers.

Israeli reservists fail polygraph probing sexual abuse allegations: Report

Al Jazeera reports: Two Israeli reservists suspected of sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner have failed a polygraph test about the allegations, reports Israel’s Channel 12.

The soldiers, among five still detained over sexual abuse allegations at Israel’s Sde Teiman facility, denied committing or covering up an act of sexual assault during the polygraph examination, but the examiner deemed their responses deceptive, said the report.

The allegations against the reservists have divided Israeli society, with a group of far-right activists storming the facility they were held at last week demanding their release.

Israeli forces blindfold and strip Palestinian prisoners who are arbitrarily detained
Israeli forces blindfold and strip Palestinian prisoners who are arbitrarily detained (photo)
Poll: Most Americans don’t want to send troops to defend Israel

Responsible Statecraft reports: According to a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, only 41% of Americans support the idea of U.S. troops defending Israel, even if its neighbors attacked it. This is a decrease from 53% in 2021 and represents the lowest level of support since the the council started tracking the question in 2010.

According to the survey, 55% of Americans overall are against the idea of sending troops to defend Israel. These numbers show a decrease in support from Republicans, typically Israel’s biggest supporters, from 72% in 2021 to 55% today. Democrats went from 42% in favor of defending Israel with U.S. troops in 2021 to 35% today.

The poll was conducted online from June 21 through July 1.

Americans still believe in a peacekeeping mission, however, with 54 percent of Americans supporting sending peacekeeping troops if a deal between Israel and the Palestinians is arranged and kept, according to the survey.

One Year in Prison and a Fine: NY Mask Ban Targets Palestine Protesters

Palestine Chronicle reports: New York’s suburban Nassau County has passed a bill to ban the wearing of masks intended to hide the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza, Reuters has reported.

The mask ban will cover any sort of public protest, but lawmakers in the Republican-controlled county say that the bill aims to prevent protesters who engage in alleged violence and anti-Semitism from hiding their identity and avoiding accountability.

Civil rights advocates view the step as an infringement on free speech rights.

The bill was approved late on Monday, with all 12 Republicans in the county legislature voting in favor. The seven Democrats abstained.

Veterans for Peace call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza
Veterans for Peace call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza (screenshot)
Tim Walz called Gaza situation “Intolerable,” sought ceasefire, praised Uncommitted; Shapiro did not

Informed Comment reports: Presumptive Democratic Party standard-bearer Kamala Harris’ pick of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate has widely been implied to have something to do with his stance on the Gaza genocide.

On March 5, Super Tuesday, Abby Phillip at CNN asked Walz about the Gaza protest vote: “We’re seeing a fairly sizable, about 40,000 votes right now, 20 percent of the vote going to uncommitted. And we’ve seen that already in this primary in Michigan. What message are voters in your state trying to send to President Biden? And what do you want to see President Biden do in response?”

Walz replied, “Yeah, look, they’re engaged. We’re really proud of Minnesota civic responsibility. We have some of the highest voter turnouts. These are voters that are deeply concerned as we all are. The situation in Gaza is intolerable. And I think trying to find a solution, a lasting two-state solution, certainly the President’s move towards humanitarian aid and asking us to get to a ceasefire, that’s what they’re asking to be heard. And that’s what they should be doing. We’ve gone through this before. And we know that now we make sure we’ve got eight months. We start bringing these folks back in. We listen to what they’re saying.”

The important thing here is that Walz did not simply dismiss the Uncommitted movement or condemn it. He heard their concern and said it mirrored his own. “The situation in Gaza is intolerable.” He approved of getting “to a ceasefire” and humanitarian aid.

The Intercept reports: “Harris’s selection of Walz could also signal a shift from President Joe Biden’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza.”

“Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, contrasted Walz with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was widely reported to be the other frontrunner for Harris’s running mate, and believes that rejecting Shapiro in favor of Walz bodes well for Harris’s approach to the world.”

“It’s impossible to know exactly what calculations were made and what issues mattered the most,” Duss said, referring to the Walz selection. “But I think it’s clear that there is a growing constituency in the Democratic Party that takes the issue of Palestinian rights much more seriously than in previous years, and it has to be engaged with and its views have to be taken into account.”

“By deciding against Shapiro, Duss said, Harris is showing that she is to some degree listening to this movement within the party…”

“Some observers also noted Walz’s antiwar record while a member of Congress, pointing to his opposition to a war in Syria in 2013 and his support of repealing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which has given the White House broad powers to bypass Congress to conduct attacks and military operations in other countries.”

The NY times reports: “Selecting Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania could mollify many Jewish voters and other centrists over a subject that has bedeviled the Biden-Harris administration for nearly a year, Israel’s war in Gaza. It could also inflame the left, which has been protesting the administration for months.

“Ms. Harris’s selection of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota likely avoided fueling the Gaza demonstrations.”

[Tim Walz [File: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images via AFP]
[Tim Walz [File: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images via AFP] (photo)
Blinken says ceasefire negotiations have reached ‘final stage’

Al Jazeera reports: US Secretary of State Blinken has pressed for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and warned against the possibility of worsening regional escalation.

Here are a few of Blinken’s key remarks:

An agreement between Israel and Hamas is in the “final stage” and called on all parties to finalise it “as soon as possible”.
Further attacks “only perpetuate” conflict, instability and insecurity.
The US has told Iran and Israel “directly” that regional fighting must not escalate further.
The Cradle reported yesterday that the US has agreed to guarantee that Israel will be able to resume the war against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza after the first phase of an exchange deal, according to Hebrew media.

If the ceasefire agreement says that Israel can resume the war, it is unlikely that Hamas will agree.

Turkey submits bid to join ICJ case against Israel

Middle East Eye reports: Turkey has reportedly submitted its formal bid to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.

According to the report, Turkey’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Selcuk Unal, presented a “comprehensive and detailed” application to the UN court in The Hague on Wednesday.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who announced the move on Monday, said that Ankara has prepared a dossier that will likely significantly impact the trial.

Turkey’s intervention is expected to be the most impactful in the case, and likely to encourage other countries to join.

International Court of Justice, The Hague, Netherlands
International Court of Justice, The Hague, Netherlands (photo)
US and UK to boycott Nagasaki bombing memorial after Israel disinvited

Middle East Eye reports: The American and British ambassadors to Japan have announced they will skip an upcoming ceremony commemorating the victims of the US’s 1945 atomic bombing because the city’s mayor did not invite the Israeli ambassador.

The Russian and Belarusian ambassadors have also been excluded from the event this Friday by Japanese authorities.

The Nagasaki Peace Memorial Ceremony is intended to mark the 79th anniversary of the US atomic bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima that killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, with many more later dying from radiation poisoning.

Pentagon confirms US troops injured in attack on Iraqi air base

The Cradle reports: At least five US soldiers and contractors were injured during a rocket attack that hit Iraq’s Ain al-Asad air base late on 5 August, Pentagon officials have confirmed.

US defense officials revealed to Reuters that at least one person was “seriously injured.” “Base personnel are conducting a post-attack damage assessment,” the unnamed officials added.

The US military took control of Ain al-Assad in 2003 following the White House’s illegal invasion and occupation of the country but withdrew its forces in 2011 when Barack Obama failed to secure a new Status of Forces (SOFA) agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

However, US forces returned to the base under the pretext of training Iraqis to fight ISIS six months after the extremist group invaded and occupied Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014. They have remained there since.

Ain al-Assad air base had been targeted at least twice over the past three weeks as local resistance groups working under the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) umbrella have steadily resumed pro-Palestine operations that were halted earlier this year.

Wednesday’s attack comes just a few days after a US airstrike killed four members of the anti-terror Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) north of Babil.

[Note: Israel partisans were largely responsible for the disastrous US decision to invade Iraq.]

RECOMMENDED READING: The U.S. has dozens of secret bases across the Middle East. They keep getting attacked.

MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

Drop Site News: Microsoft Encourages Employee Donations to Illegal West Bank Settlements, While Barring UNRWA

STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – AUGUST 6:

Palestinian death toll from October 7 – August 6: at least 40,292* (39,677 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,251 children as of July 22. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 615 in the West Bank (~140 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 46,848 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 18 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**.
About 1.7 million, or 75% of Gaza’s population are currently displaced.
2.15 million (out of total population of 2.3 million) are projected to face Crisis or worse levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – August 6: at least 97,065 (including at least 91,645 in Gaza and 5,420 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7 – August 6: ~1,486 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 331 military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 16 in the West Bank) and~8,730 injured.

Times of Israel reports: The IDF listed 41 soldiers killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents – nearly 16%.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries in Israel on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.**

Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children
What Would You Do With An Extra $320 Million?
Assassination of Haniyeh an intentional, dangerous escalation – Parsi, Macgregor
When Israel Burned Refugees Alive, Establishment Media Called It a ‘Tragic Accident’
Israel has turbocharged West Bank housing demolitions under the cover of war
Western media ignores Israeli confirmation of Hannibal Directive on 7 Oct
US Should Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu When He’s in Washington
Airwars investigation: Israeli airstrikes uniquely lethal (video)
Hesen Jabr paid the price of conscience
Gaza genocide denial
Why the news media’s job is to groom us
‘Disappeared, buried, detained’: The horrors of Gaza’s missing children
Hundreds of social media influencers attend Israel strategy summit in NYC
Supporting Israel Is Big Business in the U.S. for Israel partisans
Toys, spices, sewing machines: the items Israel banned from entering Gaza
Synopsis of ICJ’s decision on Israeli occupation, reactions, and take-aways
Russia attacks hospitals in Ukraine; Israel does the same in Gaza. The US response couldn’t be more different.
‘I have the prison inside me’: The emaciated Palestinian bodybuilder broken by Israel
Israel has manufactured an industrial-scale version of Jim Crow rape hoaxes
If Americans Knew Mobile Billboard Truck at Republican Convention
Col. Douglas MacGregor: US is under the control of Israel, likens Gaza to Warsaw Ghetto

https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-killing-gaza-torture-rape-allegations-surface-day-304/

Intermittent Fasting Myths Expertly Debunked in New Video
Anthony Colpo

As regular readers will know, I recently released a book on intermittent fasting (IF) and time restricted eating (TRE) called Not So Fast.

The bulk of the book deals with the misleading fat loss/weight loss claims made for IF and TRE. Instead of relying on anecdote or forum bro-science, I carefully review each of the published, peer-reviewed studies that compared IF diets with more conventional calorie-restricted diets.

I do the same for TRE, but in that case I also include studies with non-calorie-restricted regular diets, because many of the TRE groups in those studies were instructed to eat ad libitum (without restriction) in their assigned eating windows.

Those studies show the lavish weight loss claims made for IF and TRE are pure bunkum.

In many of the studies, there is no difference in fat or weight loss between groups. When differences were noted in favour of IF or TRE, it was entirely explained by differences in caloric intake.

Many of you may be familiar with Dave Asprey, a self-proclaimed "biohacker" who I consider the epitome of pseudoscience (you can read my dissection of his "Bulletproof Coffee" bollockery here).

Asprey has convinced a lot of people he holds the keys to anti-aging, and charges thousands to share those 'secrets' at “Biohacking” conferences. In a January 2021 story, he claimed to have spent $2 million on his quest to “biohack” his way to eternal youth, but by December 2022 had revised that figure down to $300,000. He’s a former Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, which probably explains the dodgey figures.


A grey-haired Asprey, now 50, who claims to have spent … well, lots … on “biohacking”.
In his book Fast This Way, Asprey writes, in a section titled "PAY NO MIND TO THE CALORIE COPS" (pages 60-61):

"Nothing makes you feel more like a failure than enduring suffering to lose 25 pounds, only to gain them back in a few weeks, plus a dozen more."

And nothing makes you realize you're dealing with a world-class BSer than the fantasmagorical claim you can gain 37 pounds in only a few weeks, when even deliberate overfeeding studies fail to replicate such an astonishing rate of weight gain.

Even the Guinness Book of World Records lists the greatest ever alleged weight gain at 325 lb (147 kg) over 12 months. That averages out at 27 lbs per month, which casts serious doubt on the veracity of Asprey's 37 lb-in-a-month claim.

Not to be deterred, Asprey continues with more utter bollocks:

"... the 'calories in, calories out' model, commonly abbreviated as CICO, should be relegated to the dustbin of failed science. This approach treats your body as though it's a meat robot when in reality it's a dynamic system that responds to calories differently based on their source, the time they're consumed, and the unique physiological makeup of the person consuming them. Yet the myth lives on, leaving obesity, shame, and suffering in its wake."

Oh boy. It's hard to know where to start with such complete and utter hogwash.

CICO will never be relegated to the dustbin of science, because it has been verified time and time again by real scientists, as opposed to reality-denying diet gurus and 'biohackers'.

Time and again, I've challenged the anti-CICO reality-deniers to book themselves into a metabolic ward, and prove their claim that you can gain or lose different amounts of weight (from fat, not dehydration, diarrhea or glycogen losses) on their pet diet when compared to an isocaloric high-carb/mixed diet, and in every instance my challenge has been met with deafening silence.

There's a good reason: It's an impossible challenge to meet, because it defies physiological reality.

Asprey's claim that CICO can be rendered invalid by "the unique physiological makeup of the person consuming [calories]" is a real crack-up.

Again, I've been asking for proof of the existence of these metabolic freaks-of-nature to whom the laws of nature have been magically suspended, but again, my requests keep drawing a blank.

Scientists haven't been able to find them either, as decades of metabolic ward studies have confirmed. Even a ward study commissioned and funded by NuSI, a low-carb propaganda outfit masquerading as a non-profit, failed to produce the magical "metabolic advantage" that flabby diet gurus incessantly wank on about.

All someone like Asprey needs to do is give a small portion of his millions to researchers, who can then put out the call for these freaks of nature to live in a metabolic ward for a set period of time. When these subjects lose more weight on a IF/TRE/low-carb/keto diet than on an isocaloric mixed diet, or they lose weight despite eating more than their verified energy maintenance needs - as some especially shameless/deluded diet gurus would have you believe is possible - then we can start questioning CICO.

Until then, the only thing that should be questioned is the ethics and motives of people who make nonsensical statements about diet and calories they know full well have no scientific backing.

When people follow IF and TRE diets and proceed to lose weight, it's for one reason and one reason only: They created a calorie deficit.

Just because you're not actively counting calories, it does not change one iota the fact you still consumed a calorie deficit. I've been driving manual cars for so long that I don't even think about changing gears. If you were to ask me immediately after a drive how many times I just changed gears, I'd have absolutely no idea because I wasn't counting. That doesn't mean I go around telling everyone my car's an automatic.

That would be delusional. Just like the anti-CICO crowd.

As I explain in Not So Fast, the science shows these diets do not "boost" metabolism, they do not boost growth hormone, nor do they flip some magical "metabolic switch". That's pure marketing flimflam.

In fact, TRE studies in active males found reductions in testosterone and the key thyroid hormone triiodothyronine (T3). That's the kind of "metabolic switch" I'll happily leave off.

Another demonstration of Asprey's anti-scientific tendencies comes when he then bangs on about Ancel Keys. The late Keys is an easy target, because he's roundly hated by anyone who knows what an outright fraud the whole anti-cholesterol/anti-saturate hysteria campaign is. But what Asprey doesn't mention is the then-groundbreaking study Keys conducted before he became an anti-cholesterol quack. This was the famous Minnesota Study, that showed when men were fed a very low-calorie mixed diet in conjunction with daily physical labor, they lost weight. Lots of it. Sometimes they lost too much weight and became emaciated. That tends to happen when you work like a lumberjack but eat like a small secretary.

When Keys and his colleagues then greatly increased the men’s caloric intakes, they gained weight. Just as CICO dictates they would. But Asprey doesn't mention the Minnesota Experiment because, like most diet hucksters, he tells a one-sided story designed to sell whatever he's peddling at the time, be it "Bulletproof" coffee or the nouveau-trendy phenomenon of skipping breakfast.

A Reality Check from New Zealand

Like Australia, there hasn't been much good to say about New Zealand over the past few years. Earlier this year however, Dr Brad Stanfield, a Primary Care Physician in Auckland, posted a very insightful video titled "Why Many People Are Abandoning Intermittent Fasting." You can watch it at the end of this post.

The video briefly discusses the fallacy of the weight loss claims, so if you want a detailed breakdown of that research, then Chapters 2 and 3 of Not So Fast are where you need to be.

But Dr Brad touches upon some additional research when he addresses some of the untenable "autophagy", hormone, glycemic and general health claims made for these diets. It's a must-watch for anyone considering these diets.

The comments below the video are also a must-read for anyone fascinated by the psychology endemic in the diet and health arena.

Many of the commenters swear IF or TRE is the best thing they ever did. That it changed their life, even. Just like low-carbers and vegans used to insist whenever I wrote anything remotely critical of their pet diet theories. Funnily enough, I don't hear from them anymore.

Look, I don't doubt many of these people did experience improvements. That happens with many diets, at least initially. And one of the major reasons is that when people embrace a new diet, they often do so as part of a sweeping "get my sh!t together" campaign that includes increasing physical activity, improving their food choices, cutting back on the booze, keeping better sleep hours, and so on.

Here are some cases in point:


Despite Dr Brad saying absolutely nothing offensive and relying on actual science in the video, some of the comments ooze butt-hurtedness.

So much so, that if I was a billionaire philanthropist, I'd offer some of the negative commenters a lifetime supply of Preparation H. Like this person:

Wow.

I don't know why people get so ridiculously defensive about diet. Dr Brad presents the facts, and I note that a grand total of nobody in the comments section refutes even a single of the studies he cites.

He even posts links to each of the studies below the video but, hey, why let a little thing like science get in the way of knee-jerk emotional reactions?

Rest assured, however much folks like mfcypher claim to love IF and TRE, I love cannoli more. But when I meet someone who says they don't like cannoli (it's happened), as utterly shocked, astounded and flabbergasted as I might be, I don't scowl and get all Joe Pesci.

Instead, I just quietly think to myself, "wow, someone who doesn't like cannoli! The world really is full of surprises!"

Look, if someone ever posts a video earnestly claiming the best way to fight ageing and lose weight is to molest the village goat once a week, then please, get angry and indignant. At least for the goat's sake.

But when someone posts a video critiquing your pet diet, and you can't factually refute any of the abundant science he presents, and so you instead get all ad hominem and carry on like he just asked you to molest the village goat, then the problem lies not with the poster of the video.

The problem lies with you.

As I stated in Not So Fast, I'm an information provider, not a dictator. Dr Brad hardly comes across as a domineering "my way or the highway" type either.

We present the side of the story that all the hyperbolic hucksters won't tell you, because it's the side of the story that desperately needs to be told. If IF or TRE seem to work for you, more power to you! But the reality is that they do not work for everybody, as a number of the YouTube comments would attest.

Some people do experience negative effects from IF and TRE, and this is hardly surprising given scientific research has already detected negative hormonal effects.

Don’t expect the anti-CICO crowd to tell you about these negative effects. If they can’t accept the reality of calories in, calories out, what on Earth would they know about the potential pitfalls of, say, routinely raising counterregulatory hormones?

Do they even know what counterregulatory hormones are?

Even if there was only a single person on this entire planet who could be harmed by IF and TRE, then that person has every right to know these diets may not be the best for him or her.

The reality is there are a lot more folks in the world who won't do well on these diets. Information about the potential pitfalls of IF and TRE shouldn't be withheld from these people because a bunch of IF and TRE fanboys and girls will have their remarkably fragile feelings hurt.

Anyways, here's Dr Brad's video, enjoy.



Ciao,

Anthony.


Anthony's new book, Not So Fast: The Truth About Intermittent Fasting & Time-Restricted Eating is now available at at Amazon and Lulu.

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https://substack.com/home/post/p-139452240

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/

The COVID-19 Vaccine Antigen Is ANTHRAX
Dr. Ariyana Love
By Dr. Ariyana Love

Covid-19 vaccines use self-replicating, programmable nanotechnology and synthetic, modified RNA (modRNA) otherwise known as Spike Protein.

We are told that a vaccine antigen is used in the Covid-19 technology to “evoke an immune response” but what if the Covid-19 vaccine antigen is ANTHRAX?

“…hardly any natural pathogens are really well suited to being biowarfare agents from a military point of view. Such a bioweapon must fulfill a variety of demands: it needs to be produced in large amounts, it must act fast, it must be environmentally robust, and the disease must be treatable… only a minority of natural pathogens are suitable for military purposes. “Anthrax is of course the first choice because the causative agent, B. anthracis, fulfills nearly all of these specifications.”

Anthrax was developed by Russia in 1950. According to the NIH, the USSR’s ‘invisible anthrax’ was created by introducing an “alien gene” into the highly deadly Bacillus Anthracis bacteria. This means that Cross-Species-Genomics capability was acquired by governments before 1950. A lethal bacterium and an alien gene were genetically altered and blended together to produce the deadly bioweapon known as Anthrax. Russia’s Anthrax could be treated with antibiotics even several days after exposure, and thus it met the requirements under the Biological Weapons Convention.

A bioweapon of choice, Anthony Fauci decided to increase Anthrax lethality and the NIH began genetic attenuation before 2006. Through GAIN-and-LOSS-of-Function the NIH produced a more drastic and deadly Anthrax that’s resistant to antibiotics and more.

According to a University of Minnesota publication, the United States D.O.D smuggled shipments of live B anthracis spores from the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, to other labs in the United States and abroad (Source: USA Today). The U.S. Army sent shipments of live samples of Anthrax to 86 labs outside the U.S. over a period of 10 years (Source: The Daily Beast).

Transfers of samples of live B anthracis and the H5N1 influenza bioweapon were sent from CDC labs to other labs. CDC correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that labs studying bioterror pathogens “have failed over and over to comply with important safety and security regulations.”

The D.O.D. tried to cover for the CDC, claiming “system failure” was to blame for the lab leaks, but we already know that the D.O.D spearheaded this “Covid-19 vaccine” roll-out.


Please see: Aerosolized inoculation of Anthrax – Aerosolized Intratracheal Inoculation of Recombinant Protective Antigen (rPA) Vaccine Provides


In 2007, Anthony Fauci created the H7N9 bioweapon, otherwise known as the “influenza vaccine.” The NIH, CCP and the Israeli state collaborated through GAIN-and-LOSS-of-Function to produce the H7N9 “flu vaccine” and the new and improved “Aerosolized Anthrax Vaccine”.

Ofir Israeli from the Israel Institute of Biological Research, sequenced the Bacillus anthracis V770-NP1-R Strain in 2014, creating a synthetic chemical bioweapon. The Israeli state oversaw the animal trials for the Anthrax “vaccine” and told us it was safe and effective. Meanwhile, the Israeli company called Sanofi Pasteur developed the first H7N9 “vaccine” and trialed it for the NIH in 2014. Also in 2014, the NIH developed the H7N9 “influenza vaccine” to be droplet transmissible.

Simultaneously, in 2014 China achieved a 99% transmissibility of the H7N9 “flu vaccine”. China also trialed the first aerosolized intratracheal Anthrax “vaccine” on mice. The study revealed severe side effects.


PLEASE SEE: NIH Using DEAD CORPSES To Make “Virus”; Gain Of Function Weaponized Dead Corpses


The Israeli state, NIH and China turned their new and improved Anthrax bioweapon into an attenuated antigen to be used in vaccines under the guise of “evoking an immune response” and “vaccine immunity.” The nations have been intentionally poisoned with biowarfare.

In March 2022, the Russian military discovered that the Covid-19 bioweapons are being developed in U.S. biolabs in Ukraine. This includes the plague, Ebola, Filoviruses’, Anthrax and more. Anthrax causes hemorrhaging. So does Ebola and Marburg.

Ebola is used in the J&J and Sinovax jabs, while Filovirus is used in Moderna. Ebola and Marburg are both Anthrax. H7N9 is used in all “flu vaccines” while Anthrax is being used as a “vaccine adjuvant” in all Covid-19 jabs and swabs.

Through Loss-Of-Function, genetic deletions were performed inside the B. anthracis bacteria to improve replication of the bacteria in vivo. This ensured hospital protocols would not work to stop the Anthrax from replicating inside the human body after inoculation due to it being antibiotic resistant.

The B. anthracis bacteria was also genetically modified to survive in insect hosts so as not to sporulate before it’s injected into the human host by a Bill Gates GMO mosquito which is part of DARPA’s weaponized insect project called The Sentinels.

Incidentally, the CDC owns the Anthrax isolate patent that was funded by the U.S. Government. This is treason. The CDC also says that a bioterrorist attack would most likely be Anthrax.

Please see: Malaria Parasites In “Vaccines” Target Placenta, Kill Babies In Utero

SPIKE PROTEIN IS AEROSOLIZED ANTHRAX

There are 232 B. anthracis genomes that are currently available in the GenBank database. There’s an Anthrax “vaccine” for cattle and two strains are licensed for use in humans. There exist two patents for an “Aerosolized Anthrax Vaccine.”

The first Anthrax “vaccine” patent for humans is partly owned by the U.S. Government. The second is a “Recombinant Anthrax Vaccine”.

“The spores of the toxigenic, nonencapsulated B. anthracis STI-1 strain and the cell-free PA-based “vaccines” consisting of aluminum hydroxide-adsorbed supernatant material from cultures of the toxigenic, nonencapsulated B. anthracis strain V770-NPI-R or alum-precipitated culture filtrate from the Sterne strain. Each of these Anthrax toxins are being used for “cellular entry in humans“. The LF is a metalloprotease recently shown to cleave the amino termini of the mitogen-activated protein kinase kinases 1 and 2, which results in their inactivation.”

The above quote from the Recombinant Anthrax Vaccine patent reveals that the poisonous Anthrax “antigen” is being used to genetically modify the genome of humans (cellular entry into humans). By cleaving to the amino termini, protein kinases 1 and 2 are inactivated. This is accomplished by genetic deletions.

The molecular basis of Anthrax “vaccines” includes “spores and DNA plasmids” that are entering human cells.

The following quote about the Anthrax “protective antigen” is particularly revealing:

“PA (protective antigen) is the common receptor binding domain of the toxins and can interact with the two different effector domains, EF and LF, to mediate their entry into target cells (14).”

Anthrax is being used to “regulate gene expression by binding to DNA sequences and modulating transcriptional activity through their effector domains”.

Pharma has essentially found a way to encode any synthetic proteins into the human genome from any species they want, including bacteria. The “Aerosolized Anthrax Antigen” is being encoded into target cells to make those cells produce the chemical drug called Anthrax. This is how the Anthrax “vaccine” is aerosolized. Once a person is inoculated with the Covid-19 bioweapon through subcutaneous injection or nasopharyngeal delivery with contaminated PCR swabs, the weapon system will begin genetic deletions and encoding the genome of target cells with the Anthrax spike protein. A person begins producing the toxic spike protein and shedding Anthrax into the air, exposing everyone to Inhalation Anthrax. It’s a weapon system that is intentionally aerosolized.

This study admits that the Anthrax spores from B. anthracis STI-1 strain and B. anthracis strain V770-NPI-R used in the “aerosolized Anthrax vaccines” are toxigenic. The Sterne strain which is used to inoculate our food supply (animals) is also genotoxic.

This NIH study explains how a “replicon” of the Bacillus anthracis bacteria was cloned into an Escherichia coli (E. coli) “vector” using cross-species-genomics. These two bacteria were synthetically fused together to enhance lethality.

ALHYDROGEL

According to the “aerosolized Anthrax vaccine” patents, the so-called “vaccine adjuvant” used is a DARPA weapon system called Alhydrogel.

Hydrogel technology was developed over many years during a collaboration between DARPA and Profusa, a private biotech company specializing in the development of tissue-integrated biosensors. In 2018, DARPA published a video revealing their intention to use this biosensing technology for both military and public health.

In the Alhydrogel invention, Anthrax was fused together into a nanogel called Alhydrogel, consisting of fibrous nanoparticles (Nanofibers) that are “antigen specific to CD4+ T cells”.

In layman’s terms, the nanorobots are intentionally programmed to target and alter the genome of CD4-T cells, inducing cell death. This essential part of our immune system (T-cells) stop foreign invaders from entering our cells. Destroying our T-cells enables the government’s operating system to take root in the body and quicken death.

Alhydrogel is infused with 750 μg of aluminum, making it magnetic. Nanofibers are used for self-assembly and electrospinning, for tissue engineering and delivery of drugs and chemicals into the brain. Being magnetic and nanotech based, the Alhydrogel can replicate everywhere in the body and wire a new neural network.

Astonishingly, Alhydrogel is already the most widely used vaccine adjuvant! There are many Alhydrogel patents that contain toxic cocktails that will overwhelm anyone’s immune system.

This Alhydrogel patent demonstrates it’s use of the B anthracis bacteria, E. coli, N. gonorrhoeae, Chlamydia, Staphylococcus, TB and more. It also contains the H5N1 influenza bioweapon, RNA, DNA synthesis and Polysorbate 80 for Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) permeability. This begs the question, where do venereal diseases come from?

This Nature article reveals that 2% Alhydrogel is used in all Covid-19 “vaccines”. Previously, aluminum salts were the only adjuvants licensed for vaccine use in humans in the U.S. In recent decades, nanoparticle adjuvants in hydrated gels were introduced. The article continues by saying that the “influenza vaccine” was the first to use Alhydrogel.

“Aluminum salt-based adjuvants such as alhydrogel have been a mainstay of vaccines for decades” boasts Christopher B. Fox and colleagues at the Infectious Disease Research Institute in Seattle, USA.

Both nanoparticles and Anthrax have been used in vaccines for decades already, without the Informed Consent of the public.

Alhydrogel was improved and transformed into the Nanoalum adjuvant.

Here, we introduce a top-down manufacturing process—high-pressure microfluidization—to generate aluminum oxyhydroxide nanoparticles, hereupon referred to as nanoalum, using the clinically approved Alhydrogel adjuvant as the precursor.

Alhydrogel is also carried in the lipid coating of nanoparticles.

The “Aerosolized Anthrax Vaccines” also contain SEQ ID NO: 1 which is owned by the Pirbright Institute (Bill & Melinda Gates). SEQ ID NO: 1 contains the world’s most deadly genetically modified parasites.


Please see: MEGA BOMBS! GMO Parasites Are The mRNA Vector!


ANTHRAX SYMPTOMS AND TREATMENT

Anthrax has been deployed on the population by three methods; injection, inhalation and skin penetration. The mortality rate for Anthrax varies depending on the method of exposure. It’s approximately 20% fatality for cutaneous Anthrax and 25–75% for Gastrointestinal Anthrax. Inhalation Anthrax is by far the worst with a fatality rate that is 80% or higher. Inhalation Anthrax is what we’re all being exposed to from the Covid-19 jabs and contaminated PCR swabs.

Antibiotics constitute the mainstay of treatment against Anthrax, despite the fact that they won’t work to stop its replication due to the NIH, China and Israel’s GAIN-and-LOSS-of-Function enhancements (antibiotic resistance).

Pharmaceutical experimental genotoxic drugs such as Oblitoxaximab and Raxibacumab are being touted as Anthrax treatments but these are monoclonal antibodies. We know from the monoclonal antibody patents that they’re also the “mRNA vaccine” weapon system. Anytime you inject recombinant proteins or modRNA into humans, it’s extremely toxic and will be rejected by our immune system 100% of the time.


Please read: Monoclonal Antibodies Is mRNA Gene Knockdown Tech, Encoding HIV – Patent Review


Pharma wants us to believe that the only known effective “prevention” against Anthrax is the Anthrax “vaccine”. However, the Anthrax “vaccine” inoculation given to U.S. military troops was a horrific disaster. U.S. Army statistics that were never published, show the Anthrax “vaccine” induces turbo cancers.

The toxicological harms of Anthrax are many. It causes severe heart issues. Could this be a contributing factor to Myocarditis and Pericarditis?

Anthrax also coagulates the blood.

“Pathophysiological changes associated with anthrax lethal toxin included loss of plasma proteins, decreased platelet count, slower clotting times, fibrin deposits in tissue sections, and gross and histopathological evidence of hemorrhage. These findings suggest that blood vessel leakage and hemorrhage lead to disseminating intravascular coagulation and/or circulatory shock as an underlying pathophysiological mechanism.”

Read more here and here.

Anthrax induces hemorrhaging. So this explains all the excessive bleeding people have experienced over the last 4 years, following Covid-19 inoculation and from aerosolized exposure, otherwise known as the “shedding” phenomenon. This is a result of Inhalation Anthrax.

It becomes clear that the newly dubbed “White Lung Syndrome” and the Chinese ‘pneumonia’ outbreak is none other than Inhalation Anthrax. Mycoplasma pneumonia is on the rise, and it’s listed on Pfizer’s internal documentation as a known Adverse Effect of the Covid-19 inoculation.


This study reveals that Mycoplasma Pneumonia is aerosolized. WHO also confirms this phenomenon is Mycoplasma Pneumonia.

All naturally occurring bacterium have cell walls. Mycoplasmas are spherical to filamentous cells with no cell walls. It’s genetically manipulated in a laboratory by GAIN-of-Function for the purpose of enhancing replication inside the human body, making it more lethal.

Mice “treated” with anthrax lethal toxin (LT) exhibit hemorrhage and liver damage. Monocyte procoagulant responses to anthrax peptidoglycan are reinforced by proinflammatory cytokine signaling and histological lesions in the spleen.

Anthrax has already been tested on the public. According to the NIH, Anthrax spores were intentionally released into “some environments” in NYC during 9/11. According to the NIH, the FBI launched an investigation called “Amerithrax”. It was “one of the largest and most complex (investigation) in the history of law enforcement”, according to the FBI.

Heroine users in Europe have been tested with Injection Anthrax.

Our skies are sprayed with smart dust and chemicals daily. Our governments have launched an all-out war against their constituents. We are being poisoned in a myriad of ways, so please keep this in mind:

“Anthrax is easy to produce in large quantities, highly lethal, relatively easy to develop as a weapon, easily spread over a large area, easily stored and dangerous for a long time. Given appropriate weather and wind conditions, 50 kilograms of aerosolised anthrax spores released from an aircraft along a 2 kilometer line could create a lethal cloud of anthrax spores that would extend beyond 20 kilometers downwind. The aerosol cloud would be colorless, odorless and invisible following its release. Given the small size of the spores, people indoors would receive the same amount of exposure as on the street. There are currently no atmospheric warning systems to detect an aerosol cloud of anthrax spores. The first sign of a bioterrorist attack would most likely be patients presenting with symptoms of inhalation anthrax. A 1970 analysis by World Health Organization concluded that the release of aerosolized anthrax upwind to a population of 5,000,000 could lead to an estimated 250,000 casualties, of whom as many as 100,000 could be expected to die. A later analysis, by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress estimated that 130,000 to 3 million deaths could occur following the release of 100 kilograms of aerosolized anthrax over Washington D.C., making such an attack as lethal as a hydrogen bomb.”

TREATMENT

If you have been inoculated with Covid-19 or PCR swabbed, and you are suffering from heart pain, unusual bleeding, skin rashes and abrasions, it could be Injection Anthrax. If you are “unvaccinated” and hemorrhaging from being around “vaccinated”, then you may have been exposed to Inhalation Anthrax.

Many doctors, including myself, have documented persistent bleeding rectally, violent bleeding vaginally, nasally and in the eyes. Since October 4th, I have received many reports of a red eye syndrome where the entire eye is blood-red. This makes sense because eye tissue is more sensitive. If you have been exposed to Inhalation Anthrax, you may feel hot and severely flushed, and you may break out in big, red splotches on your skin, followed by a completely red eye in the morning.

Although they don’t get much attention, “anti-toxins have long been considered an essential ‘adjunctive’ therapy, and remain so”, according to the NIH. Anti-toxins are the natural medicines that detox poisons. In other words, you need an effective natural medicine detox protocol.

I have been successfully detoxing people from the Covid-19 bioweapons for three years. Since I began treating people presenting with Anthrax poisoning with strong antibacterials, my clients are experiencing quicker detox results. If you would like to schedule a consultation with me, please do so through my online booking system.

Please follow me on Telegram @drloveariyana and X @drloveariyana.

If you would like to donate to my research, please do so here.


UPDATE: My Anthrax article is now fully edited and published on Substack. Please review and SHARE.

The Covid-19 Vaccine Antigen Is ANTHRAX

Read more:
https://open.substack.com/pub/drloveariyana/p/the-covid-19-vaccine-antigen-is-anthrax?r=2juwfo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true


https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-covid-19-vaccine-antigen-is-anthrax.html

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Biden became ‘Genocide Joe’ thanks to the Israel lobby
Philip WeissNovember 29, 2023
Netanyahu and Biden meet, July 14, 2022. Photo by Israeli government press office.
Netanyahu and Biden meet, July 14, 2022. Photo by Israeli government press office.
At Thanksgiving, a friend took me aside and said, “How does Israel get away with this? They are wiping these people out, you can see it before your eyes. But people here are losing their jobs if they say anything against it on social media. Health care workers have lost their jobs at hospitals.”

My friend is not alone. The upside of our government’s greenlight to Israel’s unending massacre and destruction in Gaza, with disease and famine looming, is that many are asking the same questions. Why is Joe Biden incapable of doing what any decent person would do, and any leader—of saying, Stop this madness now!

An overwhelming majority of countries in the region and world have condemned the brutal military offensive– what BBC describes as “apocalyptic,” and one high UN official says is “the worst” destruction he’s ever seen. (“They stopped counting the number of women and children killed.. . It’s complete and utter carnage.”)

And the progressive Democratic base is appalled. And there have been resignations at the State Department and at mainstream media. Even as Israelis regularly appear on our broadcasts, thanking Biden for his unwavering support.

The answer to this puzzle is that Biden fears the domestic political cost: the loss of the Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party. Biden fears the disaffection of the Jewish establishment that has for over 50 years dedicated itself to the principle that there must be no daylight between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even as war crimes are blasted over the airwaves.

This dynamic is rarely discussed in our media because it is thought to foster antisemitic theories of Jewish control. Even addressing the Israel lobby is labeled a conspiracy theory with lawless consequences — such as the reported vandalism of the Los Angeles home of the head of the Israel lobby group AIPAC, with red paint flung on his property as protesters shouted, Baby killer.

There is plenty of evidence for the idea that the lobby’s support is what weighs on Biden’s mind.

Jews are an important part of Biden’s Democratic base. 70 percent of Jews say they are Democrats. And the Jewish community appears to be overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, just as it was during other historical crises– with notable and honorable exceptions. We are “working around the clock to bring urgent relief to the people of Israel,” the Jewish Federations announces in its regular ad on WNYC, the NPR station I listen to.

The dissent of liberal Zionists is over – J Street is back with the rightwing pro-Israel groups in backing Israel’s “right to defend itself” and in opposing a ceasefire.

Zionists are flexing their political muscle in plain sight. AIPAC is said to be planning a multi-million-dollar offensive to pick off Squad members in Congress who have been critical of Israel. A progressive senatorial candidate in Michigan has reportedly been offered $20 million in campaign contributions from a former AIPAC donor to drop his bid and take on Rep. Rashida Tlaib instead. Big donors have withdrawn gifts from universities or threatened to do so in anger over anti-Zionist demonstrations and faculty statements. One Forbes headline said a “Jewish billionaire” was pulling his money from Columbia; and craven remarks equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism from Harvard’s president and Columbia’s too appear to be responses to donor pressure. Columbia’s banning of pro-Palestinian groups has the backing of the president and former president and has sent chills through the academic community.

The media are under similar top-down pressure from Israel supporters. “We are horrified and deeply saddened by the brutal attack on Israel,” the chairman of Comcast/MSNBC (who once participated in the Israeli Maccabee games) said last month, even as Israel was already pounding the Gaza Strip.

The CEO of Warner/CNN, David Zaslav, also issued a statement of support for Israel after it experienced “one of the deadliest [days] in Jewish history since the Holocaust.” Later Zaslav was reported to be considering taking part in a $50 million publicity campaign to “define Hamas to the American people as a terrorist organization.”

CNN’s coverage has been distinctly pro-Israel, as has MSNBC’s. While both networks have aired reports that portray the Palestinian nightmare of the last seven weeks, generally the coverage has been from the Israeli point of view, often with a propaganda-like tone. Israeli government spokespeople are frequent guests, and the Zionist ideology is happily ensconced throughout liberal media. Wolf Blitzer once worked for AIPAC; the Atlantic’s editor once was an Israeli prison guard; and Tom Friedman told a Jewish audience in 2021 that “Israel had me at hello,” and “Don’t worry. In times of crisis, I know where I will be. When the Jewish state is under threat.” Joe Scarborough regularly equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Our official political culture is Zionist. Joe Biden calls himself a Zionist. Last summer House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries took 22 first-year Democratic congresspeople on a tour of Israel and stood at Netanyahu’s side, alongside the head of AIPAC (whose house is the target of demonstrations).

Biden and Jeffries are surely concerned about Democratic fundraising. Israel supporters use campaign contributions to make sure that the policy debate in the U.S. “remains extremely narrow,” as Nathan Thrall wrote in the New York Times in 2019.

“Despite pointed critiques of American support for Israel by representatives like Betty McCollum of Minnesota, [Rashida] Tlaib and [Ilhan] Omar, there is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel,” Thrall said. “In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors. This provides fodder for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and for some, it is the elephant in the room. Though the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing in the opposite direction.”

Yes, it’s about “Jewish donors.” At J Street in 2016 political experts described the “gigantic” and “shocking” magnitude of Jewish donors in Democratic Party campaigns– who are perceived to be pro-Israel. A former finance director for many Democratic congressional campaigns said she had always gone to AIPAC for a position paper on Israel before undertaking to raise money from the Jewish community.

To understand what Joe Biden is thinking, it is worth reviewing presidential history, to remind ourselves how significant the Israel lobby is as a force. A few key moments:

–Truman overrode his own State Department and his own opposition to the idea of a religious state to back Israel’s establishment and then turn a blind eye to its expansions. John Judis wrote in his history, “Genesis,” that Truman did so because he needed $100,000 from political donors Abe Feinberg and Ed Kaufmann – a huge sum in 1948–for a whistlestop campaign trip through the midwest when his campaign was broke and Thomas Dewey was threatening to make him a one-termer.

–Both Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush lost their bids for a second term in the White House, and it is said that both politicians saw the Israel lobby as a factor in those losses.

Carter repeatedly challenged Israel over its settlements and believed that taking on Israel and its American lobby cost him his job. “From the New York primary [in March 1980] onward, I believe Carter was left with the view that New York Jews had not only defeated him in the primary but were also a factor in his loss in November,” Carter aide Stuart Eizenstat writes.

Bush also hammered Israel over settlements, “because I think this is what the American people want,” he said. But Bill Clinton ran to Bush’s right in 1992 with the support of the Israel lobby and defeated him. Tom Friedman summarized the lesson: “President Bush the first stood outside the White House one day and said I’m one lonely man standing up against the Israel lobby. What happened as a result of that… is that Republicans post Bush I, and manifested most in his son Bush 2, took a strategic decision, they will never be out pro-Israel’d again. That they believe cost them electorally a lot.”

–Obama made the same calculation. His need for the endorsement of Haim Saban and other “major Jewish donors” caused him to give in on Israel’s unending landgrabs, Judis writes. And Obama aide Ben Rhodes confirms that view. When Obama and Netanyahu clashed the year before Obama’s reelection campaign, Rhodes had to call “a list of leading Jewish donors . . . to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.”

Obama waited for his second term to take Israel on over the Iran deal in 2015. In a major speech, he said that Israel was the only country in the world that opposed the deal. And while Benjamin Netanyahu is completely “sincere” in his opposition, Obama said, “As president of the United States, it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty” to defer to Israel’s wishes on this matter.

–Trump of course abrogated his duty. He did whatever Israel wanted including trashing the Iran deal and moving the embassy and seeking to legalize illegal settlements – all to maintain the support of his largest donor Sheldon Adelson, who gave 100s of millions to Republicans.

This is the history that counts for Joe Biden. He is going to go by the playbook that has evolved over his lifetime — regardless of the growing sympathy for Palestinians in the Democratic base that is evident in poll after poll.

The good thing about today’s crisis is that the lobby’s influence is naked. “Sleepy Joe has a new nickname– Genocide Joe,” cracked another friend at Thanksgiving. It is impossible to imagine Biden ignoring the world’s calls for ceasefire or his own base’s outrage over the images of slaughtered Palestinian families and children – impossible to imagine that without the influence of the organized Jewish community, which patently does not care about these victims, or when it does mention them says that Hamas is to blame.

Another good effect of this crisis is that it has provided a different picture of the Jewish community from blind support for Israel: the vigorous opposition to Israel’s militarism among young and progressive Jews. Witness the incredible cease-fire demonstrations organized by IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. The growth of anti-Zionism will transform (and redeem) the Jewish community. And be a major factor in transforming U.S. policy, as well.

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https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/biden-became-genocide-joe-thanks-to-the-israel-lobby/