• Bombs, guns, treasure: What Israel wants, the US gives
    Connor Echols12 March, 2024
    GettyImages-164224706.jpg
    This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft

    Close watchers of Israel’s war in Gaza have faced a question in recent months: If the US is rushing weapons to Israel, then why hasn’t the public heard of any arms sales besides two relatively small transfers late last year?

    The Washington Post delivered an answer last week. Reporter John Hudson revealed that the Biden administration has approved over 100 smaller weapons packages for Israel since 7 October that fell under the $25 million threshold for formally notifying Congress - and thus the public - about the transfers.

    In total, these mini-sales could add up to more than $1 billion worth of US military aid.

    The decision to deliver US aid in smaller packages is far from unusual. The US government has done so in the past for practical and nefarious purposes alike; only about 2% of weapons transfers occur above the threshold to notify Congress, according to former officials.

    "When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there's a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law"

    But what is abnormal is the fact that many of those weapons were likely pre-positioned on Israeli territory before the war. Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access.

    When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there’s a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law.

    “It’s clear that it’s been a major source of arms for Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of US support for Israel’s war. Unfortunately, Paul added, “it’s an opaque process, so it’s hard to say exactly what weapons they’re getting” from the stockpile.

    RELATED

    Analysis

    Giorgio Cafiero

    This cache of arms is just a small piece of the puzzle. Taken as a whole, US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country, according to experts and former senior US officials.

    These advantages include modified human rights vetting, special access to US weapons, and a veto on American arms sales to Israel’s neighbours. Up to this point, the State Department hasn’t carried out a formal assessment of Israel’s compliance with the law in its Gaza war.

    Experts claim these arms transfer cutouts have continued or, in some areas, been expanded since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza, which has left over 31,000 Palestinians dead and much of the strip’s population in famine or famine-like conditions. Even last month, as war crime accusations mounted, the US reportedly gave Israel at least 1,000 precision-guided munitions and artillery shells.

    Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access. [Getty]
    “The bottom line is that either you have human rights standards and legal standards or you don't,” Paul said. When US officials fail to hold Israel accountable for alleged abuses, “it not only creates an exception for Israel, but it also undermines your diplomacy with other countries,” he told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab.

    "I have serious concerns that the continued transfer of weapons to Israel is facilitating indiscriminate bombing that may violate international humanitarian law," Rep. Joaquin Castro told Responsible Statecraft/ The New Arab in a statement. "Congress needs to push the Biden administration to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for any use of U.S. security assistance that violates international law."

    State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab that all transfers to Israel since 7 October have followed US law and policy, including notifications to Congress.

    “We have followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly brief members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement,” Miller said in a statement, adding that claims that the US has cut up weapons packages in order to avoid public scrutiny are “unequivocally false”.

    The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

    "US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country"

    Exceptions make the rules

    When a Middle Eastern country asks the US for weapons, American officials’ minds go straight to Israel. Would Tel Aviv approve of the transfer? Could new fighter jets give Egypt an edge over Israel on the battlefield if their peace deal fell apart? Would Israeli officials come around if we offer them better weapons to sweeten the pot?

    This line of reasoning doesn’t have anything to do with the personal opinions of US officials. In fact, US law explicitly states that the US must give Israel a “qualitative military edge” over its neighbours to counter a threat from “any individual state or possible coalition of states or [...] non-state actors”.

    US partners are starkly aware of - and unhappy about - this reality, according to a former senior US military official in Cairo who requested anonymity to speak freely about his experience.

    Egyptian officials would sometimes request high-tech weapons just to “watch us squirm and come up with some way to say ‘no’ without saying the Israelis won't approve it,” the former official recalled.

    RELATED

    Analysis

    Hanna Davis

    “This is another place where it’s very explicit that Israel has a special status that no other country enjoys,” said John Ramming-Chappell of the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

    This qualitative advantage is enforced by the quantitative side. Since World War II, Israel is far and away the largest recipient of US military aid. Washington’s funding for the Israeli military, which now totals $3.8 billion per year, makes up about 16% of its total budget, according to the Congressional Research Service. Israel, which can spend part of its US aid on Israeli weapons, gets this cash in an interest-bearing account in New York, making it one of only two states that get a multimillion-dollar tip on top of baseline US support.

    When it comes to human rights, Israel also gets special protections. Take the Leahy law, a statute that prevents specific units of foreign militaries from receiving US aid if American officials have evidence they’ve committed “gross violations of human rights”.

    For most countries, Leahy vetting happens before aid is disbursed. Israel gets the equipment first, and the ensuing vetting process looks different than for other countries. Lower-level State Department officials have found multiple cases in which Israeli units should lose access to American weapons under US law, but those cases are consistently blocked by higher-ups in government who usually don’t weigh in on such cases for other countries, according to Paul.

    The result is that, unlike Egypt and other US partners in the Middle East, no Israeli unit has ever been sanctioned under the Leahy law despite numerous credible allegations of human rights abuses, a fact that the statute’s namesake has loudly railed against.

    Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since October in Israel's war on Gaza. [Getty]
    The State Department has previously justified this disparity by pointing to Israel’s judicial system, which US officials believe is capable of handling human rights violations internally.

    In recent weeks, congressional attention has focused on whether Israel is violating a US law that prevents countries from receiving American weapons if they block US humanitarian aid in whole or in part. While the statute has rarely been enforced, the Biden administration promised to hold states accountable to the law in a recent memorandum.

    At this point, many experts and lawmakers believe Israel is in clear violation of this law given how little aid now enters Gaza. Yet the White House has still not offered a reason - or a formal waiver - to justify its failure to enforce its own commitment.

    "Given the evidence that Israel is intentionally blocking the passage of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the Biden administration has an obligation to enforce Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act and move towards limitations on further offensive aid to Israel as long as the aid blockade continues," Rep. Castro told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab.

    "US law explicitly states that America must give Israel a 'qualitative military edge' over its neighbours"

    'As supportive as possible'

    When the White House moved to expedite weapons transfers to Israel after 7 October, it faced an unusual problem. The president already had more than enough authority to make this happen, but officials wanted to signal that they were being “as supportive as possible”.

    The solution was to further loosen laws around US arms transfers, according to Paul, who still worked in government at the time.

    “It's not that those were things that we'd been previously thinking about,” Paul said. “The previous position within government had been [that] Israel already has more than you could possibly want in terms of authorities and funding.”

    RELATED

    In-depth

    Jessica Buxbaum

    Now, the Senate’s supplemental spending package for Israel has provisions that would dramatically expand the secretive US stockpile on Israeli soil while loosening public reporting requirements about transfers from it. A bill with similar changes passed the House as well, signalling broad support for the proposal in Congress.

    Alongside already existing loopholes, these new restrictions weaken America’s case that it is committed to protecting human rights on the world stage, according to Ramming-Chappell.

    “The exceptional status that Israel enjoys in US arms transfer policy and law, when taken in conjunction with the devastating effects of Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, really undermines US leadership and claims to moral authority in the international sphere,” he said.

    Connor Echols is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously an associate editor at the Nonzero Foundation, where he co-wrote a weekly foreign policy newsletter.

    Follow him on Twitter: @connor_echols

    https://www.newarab.com/analysis/bombs-guns-treasure-what-israel-wants-us-gives


    https://telegra.ph/Bombs-guns-treasure-What-Israel-wants-the-US-gives-03-20
    Bombs, guns, treasure: What Israel wants, the US gives Connor Echols12 March, 2024 GettyImages-164224706.jpg This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft Close watchers of Israel’s war in Gaza have faced a question in recent months: If the US is rushing weapons to Israel, then why hasn’t the public heard of any arms sales besides two relatively small transfers late last year? The Washington Post delivered an answer last week. Reporter John Hudson revealed that the Biden administration has approved over 100 smaller weapons packages for Israel since 7 October that fell under the $25 million threshold for formally notifying Congress - and thus the public - about the transfers. In total, these mini-sales could add up to more than $1 billion worth of US military aid. The decision to deliver US aid in smaller packages is far from unusual. The US government has done so in the past for practical and nefarious purposes alike; only about 2% of weapons transfers occur above the threshold to notify Congress, according to former officials. "When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there's a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law" But what is abnormal is the fact that many of those weapons were likely pre-positioned on Israeli territory before the war. Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access. When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there’s a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law. “It’s clear that it’s been a major source of arms for Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of US support for Israel’s war. Unfortunately, Paul added, “it’s an opaque process, so it’s hard to say exactly what weapons they’re getting” from the stockpile. RELATED Analysis Giorgio Cafiero This cache of arms is just a small piece of the puzzle. Taken as a whole, US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country, according to experts and former senior US officials. These advantages include modified human rights vetting, special access to US weapons, and a veto on American arms sales to Israel’s neighbours. Up to this point, the State Department hasn’t carried out a formal assessment of Israel’s compliance with the law in its Gaza war. Experts claim these arms transfer cutouts have continued or, in some areas, been expanded since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza, which has left over 31,000 Palestinians dead and much of the strip’s population in famine or famine-like conditions. Even last month, as war crime accusations mounted, the US reportedly gave Israel at least 1,000 precision-guided munitions and artillery shells. Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access. [Getty] “The bottom line is that either you have human rights standards and legal standards or you don't,” Paul said. When US officials fail to hold Israel accountable for alleged abuses, “it not only creates an exception for Israel, but it also undermines your diplomacy with other countries,” he told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab. "I have serious concerns that the continued transfer of weapons to Israel is facilitating indiscriminate bombing that may violate international humanitarian law," Rep. Joaquin Castro told Responsible Statecraft/ The New Arab in a statement. "Congress needs to push the Biden administration to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for any use of U.S. security assistance that violates international law." State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab that all transfers to Israel since 7 October have followed US law and policy, including notifications to Congress. “We have followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly brief members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement,” Miller said in a statement, adding that claims that the US has cut up weapons packages in order to avoid public scrutiny are “unequivocally false”. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. "US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country" Exceptions make the rules When a Middle Eastern country asks the US for weapons, American officials’ minds go straight to Israel. Would Tel Aviv approve of the transfer? Could new fighter jets give Egypt an edge over Israel on the battlefield if their peace deal fell apart? Would Israeli officials come around if we offer them better weapons to sweeten the pot? This line of reasoning doesn’t have anything to do with the personal opinions of US officials. In fact, US law explicitly states that the US must give Israel a “qualitative military edge” over its neighbours to counter a threat from “any individual state or possible coalition of states or [...] non-state actors”. US partners are starkly aware of - and unhappy about - this reality, according to a former senior US military official in Cairo who requested anonymity to speak freely about his experience. Egyptian officials would sometimes request high-tech weapons just to “watch us squirm and come up with some way to say ‘no’ without saying the Israelis won't approve it,” the former official recalled. RELATED Analysis Hanna Davis “This is another place where it’s very explicit that Israel has a special status that no other country enjoys,” said John Ramming-Chappell of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. This qualitative advantage is enforced by the quantitative side. Since World War II, Israel is far and away the largest recipient of US military aid. Washington’s funding for the Israeli military, which now totals $3.8 billion per year, makes up about 16% of its total budget, according to the Congressional Research Service. Israel, which can spend part of its US aid on Israeli weapons, gets this cash in an interest-bearing account in New York, making it one of only two states that get a multimillion-dollar tip on top of baseline US support. When it comes to human rights, Israel also gets special protections. Take the Leahy law, a statute that prevents specific units of foreign militaries from receiving US aid if American officials have evidence they’ve committed “gross violations of human rights”. For most countries, Leahy vetting happens before aid is disbursed. Israel gets the equipment first, and the ensuing vetting process looks different than for other countries. Lower-level State Department officials have found multiple cases in which Israeli units should lose access to American weapons under US law, but those cases are consistently blocked by higher-ups in government who usually don’t weigh in on such cases for other countries, according to Paul. The result is that, unlike Egypt and other US partners in the Middle East, no Israeli unit has ever been sanctioned under the Leahy law despite numerous credible allegations of human rights abuses, a fact that the statute’s namesake has loudly railed against. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since October in Israel's war on Gaza. [Getty] The State Department has previously justified this disparity by pointing to Israel’s judicial system, which US officials believe is capable of handling human rights violations internally. In recent weeks, congressional attention has focused on whether Israel is violating a US law that prevents countries from receiving American weapons if they block US humanitarian aid in whole or in part. While the statute has rarely been enforced, the Biden administration promised to hold states accountable to the law in a recent memorandum. At this point, many experts and lawmakers believe Israel is in clear violation of this law given how little aid now enters Gaza. Yet the White House has still not offered a reason - or a formal waiver - to justify its failure to enforce its own commitment. "Given the evidence that Israel is intentionally blocking the passage of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the Biden administration has an obligation to enforce Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act and move towards limitations on further offensive aid to Israel as long as the aid blockade continues," Rep. Castro told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab. "US law explicitly states that America must give Israel a 'qualitative military edge' over its neighbours" 'As supportive as possible' When the White House moved to expedite weapons transfers to Israel after 7 October, it faced an unusual problem. The president already had more than enough authority to make this happen, but officials wanted to signal that they were being “as supportive as possible”. The solution was to further loosen laws around US arms transfers, according to Paul, who still worked in government at the time. “It's not that those were things that we'd been previously thinking about,” Paul said. “The previous position within government had been [that] Israel already has more than you could possibly want in terms of authorities and funding.” RELATED In-depth Jessica Buxbaum Now, the Senate’s supplemental spending package for Israel has provisions that would dramatically expand the secretive US stockpile on Israeli soil while loosening public reporting requirements about transfers from it. A bill with similar changes passed the House as well, signalling broad support for the proposal in Congress. Alongside already existing loopholes, these new restrictions weaken America’s case that it is committed to protecting human rights on the world stage, according to Ramming-Chappell. “The exceptional status that Israel enjoys in US arms transfer policy and law, when taken in conjunction with the devastating effects of Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, really undermines US leadership and claims to moral authority in the international sphere,” he said. Connor Echols is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously an associate editor at the Nonzero Foundation, where he co-wrote a weekly foreign policy newsletter. Follow him on Twitter: @connor_echols https://www.newarab.com/analysis/bombs-guns-treasure-what-israel-wants-us-gives https://telegra.ph/Bombs-guns-treasure-What-Israel-wants-the-US-gives-03-20
    WWW.NEWARAB.COM
    Bombs, guns, treasure: What Israel wants, the US gives
    In-depth: Israel's exceptional status in US arms policy and law ensures that unending military aid is shielded from scrutiny over human rights abuses.
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  • Bombs, guns, treasure: What Israel wants, the US gives
    Connor Echols12 March, 2024
    GettyImages-164224706.jpg
    This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft

    Close watchers of Israel’s war in Gaza have faced a question in recent months: If the US is rushing weapons to Israel, then why hasn’t the public heard of any arms sales besides two relatively small transfers late last year?

    The Washington Post delivered an answer last week. Reporter John Hudson revealed that the Biden administration has approved over 100 smaller weapons packages for Israel since 7 October that fell under the $25 million threshold for formally notifying Congress - and thus the public - about the transfers.

    In total, these mini-sales could add up to more than $1 billion worth of US military aid.

    The decision to deliver US aid in smaller packages is far from unusual. The US government has done so in the past for practical and nefarious purposes alike; only about 2% of weapons transfers occur above the threshold to notify Congress, according to former officials.

    "When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there's a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law"

    But what is abnormal is the fact that many of those weapons were likely pre-positioned on Israeli territory before the war. Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access.

    When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there’s a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law.

    “It’s clear that it’s been a major source of arms for Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of US support for Israel’s war. Unfortunately, Paul added, “it’s an opaque process, so it’s hard to say exactly what weapons they’re getting” from the stockpile.

    RELATED

    Analysis

    Giorgio Cafiero

    This cache of arms is just a small piece of the puzzle. Taken as a whole, US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country, according to experts and former senior US officials.

    These advantages include modified human rights vetting, special access to US weapons, and a veto on American arms sales to Israel’s neighbours. Up to this point, the State Department hasn’t carried out a formal assessment of Israel’s compliance with the law in its Gaza war.

    Experts claim these arms transfer cutouts have continued or, in some areas, been expanded since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza, which has left over 31,000 Palestinians dead and much of the strip’s population in famine or famine-like conditions. Even last month, as war crime accusations mounted, the US reportedly gave Israel at least 1,000 precision-guided munitions and artillery shells.

    Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access. [Getty]
    “The bottom line is that either you have human rights standards and legal standards or you don't,” Paul said. When US officials fail to hold Israel accountable for alleged abuses, “it not only creates an exception for Israel, but it also undermines your diplomacy with other countries,” he told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab.

    "I have serious concerns that the continued transfer of weapons to Israel is facilitating indiscriminate bombing that may violate international humanitarian law," Rep. Joaquin Castro told Responsible Statecraft/ The New Arab in a statement. "Congress needs to push the Biden administration to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for any use of U.S. security assistance that violates international law."

    State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab that all transfers to Israel since 7 October have followed US law and policy, including notifications to Congress.

    “We have followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly brief members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement,” Miller said in a statement, adding that claims that the US has cut up weapons packages in order to avoid public scrutiny are “unequivocally false”.

    The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

    "US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country"

    Exceptions make the rules

    When a Middle Eastern country asks the US for weapons, American officials’ minds go straight to Israel. Would Tel Aviv approve of the transfer? Could new fighter jets give Egypt an edge over Israel on the battlefield if their peace deal fell apart? Would Israeli officials come around if we offer them better weapons to sweeten the pot?

    This line of reasoning doesn’t have anything to do with the personal opinions of US officials. In fact, US law explicitly states that the US must give Israel a “qualitative military edge” over its neighbours to counter a threat from “any individual state or possible coalition of states or [...] non-state actors”.

    US partners are starkly aware of - and unhappy about - this reality, according to a former senior US military official in Cairo who requested anonymity to speak freely about his experience.

    Egyptian officials would sometimes request high-tech weapons just to “watch us squirm and come up with some way to say ‘no’ without saying the Israelis won't approve it,” the former official recalled.

    RELATED

    Analysis

    Hanna Davis

    “This is another place where it’s very explicit that Israel has a special status that no other country enjoys,” said John Ramming-Chappell of the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

    This qualitative advantage is enforced by the quantitative side. Since World War II, Israel is far and away the largest recipient of US military aid. Washington’s funding for the Israeli military, which now totals $3.8 billion per year, makes up about 16% of its total budget, according to the Congressional Research Service. Israel, which can spend part of its US aid on Israeli weapons, gets this cash in an interest-bearing account in New York, making it one of only two states that get a multimillion-dollar tip on top of baseline US support.

    When it comes to human rights, Israel also gets special protections. Take the Leahy law, a statute that prevents specific units of foreign militaries from receiving US aid if American officials have evidence they’ve committed “gross violations of human rights”.

    For most countries, Leahy vetting happens before aid is disbursed. Israel gets the equipment first, and the ensuing vetting process looks different than for other countries. Lower-level State Department officials have found multiple cases in which Israeli units should lose access to American weapons under US law, but those cases are consistently blocked by higher-ups in government who usually don’t weigh in on such cases for other countries, according to Paul.

    The result is that, unlike Egypt and other US partners in the Middle East, no Israeli unit has ever been sanctioned under the Leahy law despite numerous credible allegations of human rights abuses, a fact that the statute’s namesake has loudly railed against.

    Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since October in Israel's war on Gaza. [Getty]
    The State Department has previously justified this disparity by pointing to Israel’s judicial system, which US officials believe is capable of handling human rights violations internally.

    In recent weeks, congressional attention has focused on whether Israel is violating a US law that prevents countries from receiving American weapons if they block US humanitarian aid in whole or in part. While the statute has rarely been enforced, the Biden administration promised to hold states accountable to the law in a recent memorandum.

    At this point, many experts and lawmakers believe Israel is in clear violation of this law given how little aid now enters Gaza. Yet the White House has still not offered a reason - or a formal waiver - to justify its failure to enforce its own commitment.

    "Given the evidence that Israel is intentionally blocking the passage of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the Biden administration has an obligation to enforce Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act and move towards limitations on further offensive aid to Israel as long as the aid blockade continues," Rep. Castro told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab.

    "US law explicitly states that America must give Israel a 'qualitative military edge' over its neighbours"

    'As supportive as possible'

    When the White House moved to expedite weapons transfers to Israel after 7 October, it faced an unusual problem. The president already had more than enough authority to make this happen, but officials wanted to signal that they were being “as supportive as possible”.

    The solution was to further loosen laws around US arms transfers, according to Paul, who still worked in government at the time.

    “It's not that those were things that we'd been previously thinking about,” Paul said. “The previous position within government had been [that] Israel already has more than you could possibly want in terms of authorities and funding.”

    RELATED

    In-depth

    Jessica Buxbaum

    Now, the Senate’s supplemental spending package for Israel has provisions that would dramatically expand the secretive US stockpile on Israeli soil while loosening public reporting requirements about transfers from it. A bill with similar changes passed the House as well, signalling broad support for the proposal in Congress.

    Alongside already existing loopholes, these new restrictions weaken America’s case that it is committed to protecting human rights on the world stage, according to Ramming-Chappell.

    “The exceptional status that Israel enjoys in US arms transfer policy and law, when taken in conjunction with the devastating effects of Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, really undermines US leadership and claims to moral authority in the international sphere,” he said.

    Connor Echols is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously an associate editor at the Nonzero Foundation, where he co-wrote a weekly foreign policy newsletter.

    Follow him on Twitter: @connor_echols

    https://www.newarab.com/analysis/bombs-guns-treasure-what-israel-wants-us-gives
    Bombs, guns, treasure: What Israel wants, the US gives Connor Echols12 March, 2024 GettyImages-164224706.jpg This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft Close watchers of Israel’s war in Gaza have faced a question in recent months: If the US is rushing weapons to Israel, then why hasn’t the public heard of any arms sales besides two relatively small transfers late last year? The Washington Post delivered an answer last week. Reporter John Hudson revealed that the Biden administration has approved over 100 smaller weapons packages for Israel since 7 October that fell under the $25 million threshold for formally notifying Congress - and thus the public - about the transfers. In total, these mini-sales could add up to more than $1 billion worth of US military aid. The decision to deliver US aid in smaller packages is far from unusual. The US government has done so in the past for practical and nefarious purposes alike; only about 2% of weapons transfers occur above the threshold to notify Congress, according to former officials. "When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there's a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law" But what is abnormal is the fact that many of those weapons were likely pre-positioned on Israeli territory before the war. Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access. When a US-made bomb slams into Gaza, there’s a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law. “It’s clear that it’s been a major source of arms for Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of US support for Israel’s war. Unfortunately, Paul added, “it’s an opaque process, so it’s hard to say exactly what weapons they’re getting” from the stockpile. RELATED Analysis Giorgio Cafiero This cache of arms is just a small piece of the puzzle. Taken as a whole, US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country, according to experts and former senior US officials. These advantages include modified human rights vetting, special access to US weapons, and a veto on American arms sales to Israel’s neighbours. Up to this point, the State Department hasn’t carried out a formal assessment of Israel’s compliance with the law in its Gaza war. Experts claim these arms transfer cutouts have continued or, in some areas, been expanded since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza, which has left over 31,000 Palestinians dead and much of the strip’s population in famine or famine-like conditions. Even last month, as war crime accusations mounted, the US reportedly gave Israel at least 1,000 precision-guided munitions and artillery shells. Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access. [Getty] “The bottom line is that either you have human rights standards and legal standards or you don't,” Paul said. When US officials fail to hold Israel accountable for alleged abuses, “it not only creates an exception for Israel, but it also undermines your diplomacy with other countries,” he told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab. "I have serious concerns that the continued transfer of weapons to Israel is facilitating indiscriminate bombing that may violate international humanitarian law," Rep. Joaquin Castro told Responsible Statecraft/ The New Arab in a statement. "Congress needs to push the Biden administration to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for any use of U.S. security assistance that violates international law." State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab that all transfers to Israel since 7 October have followed US law and policy, including notifications to Congress. “We have followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly brief members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement,” Miller said in a statement, adding that claims that the US has cut up weapons packages in order to avoid public scrutiny are “unequivocally false”. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. "US efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country" Exceptions make the rules When a Middle Eastern country asks the US for weapons, American officials’ minds go straight to Israel. Would Tel Aviv approve of the transfer? Could new fighter jets give Egypt an edge over Israel on the battlefield if their peace deal fell apart? Would Israeli officials come around if we offer them better weapons to sweeten the pot? This line of reasoning doesn’t have anything to do with the personal opinions of US officials. In fact, US law explicitly states that the US must give Israel a “qualitative military edge” over its neighbours to counter a threat from “any individual state or possible coalition of states or [...] non-state actors”. US partners are starkly aware of - and unhappy about - this reality, according to a former senior US military official in Cairo who requested anonymity to speak freely about his experience. Egyptian officials would sometimes request high-tech weapons just to “watch us squirm and come up with some way to say ‘no’ without saying the Israelis won't approve it,” the former official recalled. RELATED Analysis Hanna Davis “This is another place where it’s very explicit that Israel has a special status that no other country enjoys,” said John Ramming-Chappell of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. This qualitative advantage is enforced by the quantitative side. Since World War II, Israel is far and away the largest recipient of US military aid. Washington’s funding for the Israeli military, which now totals $3.8 billion per year, makes up about 16% of its total budget, according to the Congressional Research Service. Israel, which can spend part of its US aid on Israeli weapons, gets this cash in an interest-bearing account in New York, making it one of only two states that get a multimillion-dollar tip on top of baseline US support. When it comes to human rights, Israel also gets special protections. Take the Leahy law, a statute that prevents specific units of foreign militaries from receiving US aid if American officials have evidence they’ve committed “gross violations of human rights”. For most countries, Leahy vetting happens before aid is disbursed. Israel gets the equipment first, and the ensuing vetting process looks different than for other countries. Lower-level State Department officials have found multiple cases in which Israeli units should lose access to American weapons under US law, but those cases are consistently blocked by higher-ups in government who usually don’t weigh in on such cases for other countries, according to Paul. The result is that, unlike Egypt and other US partners in the Middle East, no Israeli unit has ever been sanctioned under the Leahy law despite numerous credible allegations of human rights abuses, a fact that the statute’s namesake has loudly railed against. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since October in Israel's war on Gaza. [Getty] The State Department has previously justified this disparity by pointing to Israel’s judicial system, which US officials believe is capable of handling human rights violations internally. In recent weeks, congressional attention has focused on whether Israel is violating a US law that prevents countries from receiving American weapons if they block US humanitarian aid in whole or in part. While the statute has rarely been enforced, the Biden administration promised to hold states accountable to the law in a recent memorandum. At this point, many experts and lawmakers believe Israel is in clear violation of this law given how little aid now enters Gaza. Yet the White House has still not offered a reason - or a formal waiver - to justify its failure to enforce its own commitment. "Given the evidence that Israel is intentionally blocking the passage of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the Biden administration has an obligation to enforce Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act and move towards limitations on further offensive aid to Israel as long as the aid blockade continues," Rep. Castro told Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab. "US law explicitly states that America must give Israel a 'qualitative military edge' over its neighbours" 'As supportive as possible' When the White House moved to expedite weapons transfers to Israel after 7 October, it faced an unusual problem. The president already had more than enough authority to make this happen, but officials wanted to signal that they were being “as supportive as possible”. The solution was to further loosen laws around US arms transfers, according to Paul, who still worked in government at the time. “It's not that those were things that we'd been previously thinking about,” Paul said. “The previous position within government had been [that] Israel already has more than you could possibly want in terms of authorities and funding.” RELATED In-depth Jessica Buxbaum Now, the Senate’s supplemental spending package for Israel has provisions that would dramatically expand the secretive US stockpile on Israeli soil while loosening public reporting requirements about transfers from it. A bill with similar changes passed the House as well, signalling broad support for the proposal in Congress. Alongside already existing loopholes, these new restrictions weaken America’s case that it is committed to protecting human rights on the world stage, according to Ramming-Chappell. “The exceptional status that Israel enjoys in US arms transfer policy and law, when taken in conjunction with the devastating effects of Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, really undermines US leadership and claims to moral authority in the international sphere,” he said. Connor Echols is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously an associate editor at the Nonzero Foundation, where he co-wrote a weekly foreign policy newsletter. Follow him on Twitter: @connor_echols https://www.newarab.com/analysis/bombs-guns-treasure-what-israel-wants-us-gives
    WWW.NEWARAB.COM
    Bombs, guns, treasure: What Israel wants, the US gives
    In-depth: Israel's exceptional status in US arms policy and law ensures that unending military aid is shielded from scrutiny over human rights abuses.
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  • What If Everything They’ve Been Telling You About Food Is… WRONG?
    Vigilant NewsFebruary 2, 2024
    By Brian Cates

    The last 9 months have been an exceedingly strange journey for me.

    While I had already figured out the FDA food pyramid was garbage and had watched in real-time as all the federal “medical” “health” “science” agencies played a direct role in suppressing accurate information on COVID-19 and C-19 origins, treatments, vaccines, etc., it took me the better of part of 3 years to begin critically and logically examining what these self-same propagandists disguised as ‘experts’ have been telling all of us about food and what supposedly comprises a healthy diet.


    I’d struggled with my weight since I was a young man of 24. I am soon turning 60.

    I’d spent the past few years talking about losing weight and the all the issues I was dealing with from lugging around over 100+ pounds of useless bodyfat.

    But I was still eating 4-5 times a day, at least two of those meals being sizable. And though I cut down on the sweets and was eating what I was told were ‘healthy whole grains’, the weight not only refused to go down, it kept going up.

    I would go through the same cycle several times from when I was around 26 to last year: Start working out religiously, while eating what I was told was mostly ‘healthy’ food. I’d add some muscle, my weight would drop maybe 20 pounds or so…and then after 3-4 months, hit the wall. No changes, and despite working out, the weight crept back up. Quit working out, gain all the weight back, a year goes by…then start the cycle again.

    34 years or so I ran on this hamster wheel.

    When this picture was taken, I’d just started writing for The Epoch Times in mid-2018. I was 350 pounds or so. Hadn’t weighed myself in a while. I was too scared to look anyway.

    Image
    I had just gone through the cycle again early last year.

    Working out, eating the “healthy food” chock full of carbs, various forms of sugars and toxic seed oils & chemicals, etc., etc. Then in May, I quit again.

    In late June, my stepmom visited me in my new house in Florida while I was on an RV tour around the US, and when she saw how I was living and eating, she read me the riot act. She kicked me in the ass and got me not only moving again, but that visit was also the catalyst I needed to go back and re-examine 35+ years of failure and why trying the same thing over and over again wasn’t working.

    For years, people like me were told this was a willpower/laziness thing. You’re fat and you can’t lose the weight because you don’t eat right/work out hard enough or long enough, etc.

    So I was mentally beaten down after exhausting myself on this hamster’s wheel as I was headed into decade #4 with the wrong programming in my head.

    Overweight Man Tired after Training, with Hand on Forehead Against ...
    But here’s the thing.

    As a journalist, I’d just spent the last 3 1/2 years extensively and exhaustively covering how federal and state and county ‘health’ ‘medical’ and ‘science’ ‘experts’ had just engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to hide and censor true and accurate information from the American public.

    Not to mention also covering the amount of gaslighting we were all being hit with following the blatant theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

    So at this time, in late June/early July of last year, I started my re-examination of around 35 years of failure with an intriguing thought:

    **COULD IT BE** that the very same ‘health’ ‘medical’ & ‘science’ experts who’d just exposed and outed themselves as Big Pharma propagandists and business partners lying to us about COVID & many of the drugs involved in the treatment/prevention of infection…were also wrong or deliberately misleading us about….food?

    Image
    Could it possibly be….
    One of the first things I realized, when I began examining what the federal ‘health’ ‘medical’ ‘science’ agencies tout as a ‘healthy’ diet, is that when they last changed the food pyramid in the early 1990’s, the rates of both obesity and diabetes exploded in this country as people began following this ‘expert’ advice.

    As you can see from the graphs below, an already alarming rising trend suddenly shot dramatically upward in the early 1990s.

    Image
    Image
    How bad has the obesity/diabetes/insulin resistance crisis gotten in the US?

    It is now so bad they’ve coined a bullshit term – ‘prediabetes’ – to try to mask the deadly seriousness of the crisis. If you are diagnosed as ‘prediabetic,’ you ARE diabetic; it’s just that your insulin resistance hasn’t progressed to such an extent that they’ll officially call it ‘diabetes.’

    Image
    Or as actor Wilford Brimley would say:

    Wilford Brimley Has Diabeetus - Misc - quickmeme
    Insulin resistance leads directly to a massive amount of chronic health issues of which diabetes is only one.


    By giving Americans the ‘expert’ advice that they needed to start chugging down ‘6-11 servings’ every day of ‘healthy whole grains’ and cook their food with seed oils while counseling them to also **reduce** the amount of meat and animal fats they were eating, Americans began ingesting way more carbohydrates and PUFA’s [that’s ‘polyunsaturated fatty acids, for those of you in Rio Linda…] every day than they’d been eating before.


    And yet I recall for the past 30 years or so watching the popular culture health reporters scratch their heads and wondering what could possibly be causing the massive explosion of obesity and chronic illnesses, as well as the dropping testosterone and estrogen levels they were observing.


    So the fact that the federal ‘health’ agencies caused much of the country to make a dramatic wrong turn that exacerbated the rising trends of obesity and chronic illness with their drastically wrong official ‘food pyramid’ in the early 1990s, caused me to wonder:

    If they were giving the American public such rotten, terrible, horrible, no-good ‘expert’ instructions on what they should be eating every day, **what else** have they been telling us that is utter bullshit?

    And the very first thing I stumbled over in this regard was the history of SEED OILS and how medical scientists doing animal experiments back in the 1890s/early 1900s quickly established that seed oils were toxic and harmful to growing and developing animals.

    By the end of July last year, I was sharing the alarming stuff I was finding in my research with my readers on my Substack:

    Image
    You have to fully grasp this. They **knew** from animal experiments on rats and cows and horses and birds **exactly** what SEED OILS did to growing and developing animals.

    Many of these experiments were carried out from the late 1880s through the 1910s. Experiment results were published in books, such as this one from scientist E.V. McCollum in 1918.



    There was no mystery here. The results were established and easily observable.

    And yet…what ended up happening over the next 100 years?

    Government ‘health’ experts working hand-in-glove with Big Food corporations convinced most Americans to stop cooking their food with butter, lard, and tallow, and instead use the new ‘Crisco’ and other highly processed seed oils and margarine. Because they claimed these new processed products were ‘healthier’.

    And because Americans back then were very trusting people who didn’t know their government was controlled by hidden corporations and interests out to make massive profits while not caring about their health, they followed this ‘expert’ advice from authority figures they were taught to trust.

    From the 1920s through today, Big Food, working in conjunction with Big Government, began creating many new highly processed foods that contained large amounts of these seed oils and myriad toxic chemicals and food additives. Our American culture is now flooded with highly processed fake ‘food’ that didn’t exist even 100 years ago. And they are inventing new kinds of fake food every year.

    Image
    If they knew what seed oils would do to human beings who began eating them early in life, and ate them throughout their physical development and into adulthood – and evidence seems to suggest they did – then the only possible reason for them to do that would be to arrest the development of children, cause chronic illnesses throughout life, and ensure a premature death.

    What I saw through my research was **deeply disturbing to me**.

    Image
    This can’t be just about profit motive, the fact they’d make a lot of MONEY creating new addictive processed sugar-and-carb-and-seed oil-filled foods. They had to also have seen the very real and OBVIOUS HARM they would be doing to their fellow citizens by introducing these heavily toxic and health-destroy products into the American food supply.

    Not when you realize the wealthy elite who run everything in this fallen world behind the scenes are constantly wringing their hands and brainstorming about how to ‘fix’ the world’s overpopulation problem, think even the concept of human rights is a big funny hilarious joke, and that human rights don’t exist, just like God doesn’t exist.

    They’ve always sat around at their big, important conferences in places like Davos and talked about culling the human herd like they’re ranchers planning for the next cattle drive. It’s just that they’re starting to get embarrassed that the cows are now spying on them in the barn and figuring out what they’re talking about, their plans for the rest of us.

    What more clever way could be devised than convincing people to simply EAT themselves into chronic illnesses that will guide them expeditiously into an early grave?

    The rise in life expectancy rates over the past 100 years is not because people are HEALTHIER overall.

    Image
    Far from it.

    The rates rose because of medical advancements in keeping chronically ill people alive longer.

    Were people not being tricked and misled into fattening themselves with constant insulin resistance and filling their bodies with toxins, most people would very likely be living into their upper 90s by now. Instead, life expectancy is dropping because the amount of toxic and unhealthy food Americans are eating is going up.

    This cannot be overstated. With the medical/health/scientific advancements in knowledge and technology over the past 120 years, the only way this was allowed to happen and to become so widespread at this point millions of people are dying from easily preventable chronic illnesses is that…

    …and I know some of you will struggle to accept this….

    …the real owners of the world out there **wanted** this to happen. They demanded it.

    There’s no way they don’t know. So if they know…and nothing’s been done to stop it? It’s not just about money. There’s what looks like an exceedingly nefarious agenda at work here.

    Image
    Sometimes in my more paranoid moments, I wonder if….

    Nah. Couldn’t be….

    Could it?

    Image
    Tastes like chicken!
    https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/W-JhfjGtlp8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
    So the first two things I discovered in my new research starting in the middle of last year:

    1. The food pyramid was a massive ‘mistake’…or was it?

    2. Seed Oils are toxic and harm human development and shorten the human lifespan Yet they were allowed to proliferate into the American food supply by accident…or was it really an ‘accident’?

    Next, I discovered that the conventional ‘expert’ findings about animal fat were wrong.

    For decades I’d been endlessly told and had read that too much dietary animal fat caused health/heart issues. Cut down dramatically on the red meat, the eggs, the butter, replace the fat with ‘healthy’ food…

    And yet what do you actually **FIND** when you examine the medical research?

    You find when people dramatically reduced their animal fat intake they still got FATTER and more CHRONICALLY ILL. After all, one of the biggest reasons for creating a ‘new and improved!’ food pyramid back in the early 1990s was to convince people to CUT the amount of meat and animal fat they were eating and replace them with ‘healthy’ carbs.

    For people who were supposedly becoming more ‘healthy’ by following the new food pyramid’s ‘expert’ advice, Americans seemed to be getting fatter, heavier, and more unhealthy.

    It’s been noticed for some time now that people in America in the 1940s and 1950s sure do look pretty darn healthy, even though we were constantly being told by our modern ‘health experts’ that those poor folks were eating WAY too much animal fats and red meat and eggs and [gasp!] butter.

    I mean…there’s just NO WAY that Americans back then eating all that bad stuff were healthier than US today, right?

    🤔

    Why, that very idea would be absurd! They didn’t know any better! They didn’t have our advantages!

    Image
    Image
    Image
    Hey…maybe it’s time for us to stop, go back and look, and rethink this all out again…

    Because SOMETHING clearly isn’t working.

    We’re **supposed to be** far healthier than those poor fools back in the 1940s and 1950s…but we’re NOT.

    Why is that?

    If you commit yourself to finding the truth and facing it unflinchingly, no matter where it leads…you can find it.

    The brutal truth is…people here in America have been misled. Just about EVERYTHING the ‘health’ and ‘diet’ ‘experts’ have been telling them all their lives is….SURPRISE!…wrong.

    It’s not your fault. It is THEIR fault. They either didn’t know what they were talking about when they were teaching you how to eat, or they had a hidden agenda.

    Either way…NOT YOUR FAULT.

    Image
    Image
    Image
    Its not that you lack willpower. Or that you’re lazy. Or that you don’t work out enough.

    Its that what the ‘experts’ taught you about how to eat a proper diet wasn’t true. You were not getting accurate information.

    You were steered towards unhealthy seed oil/sugar/carb-filled processed foods because authority figures you trusted gave you terrible advice.

    You were given bad information by government and medical authority figures on 7 dietary subjects:

    1. Cholesterol levels

    2. Salt/mineral levels

    3. Protein levels

    4. Animal Fats

    5. Fiber

    6. Seed oils

    7. Meal frequency

    My research has led me to conclude that we need to go BACK to how our ancestors ate. A mostly meat diet where we do not eat large meals of highly processed fake foods several times a day with snacks in between.

    We’re not designed to put food into our stomachs 3-6 times a day, constantly spiking our insulin levels and hormonal system, developing lifelong insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome-related chronic illnesses and diseases.

    Especially not the kind of food we’re surrounded by in our popular culture, the highly over-processed stuff that didn’t exist 100 years ago that are now chock-full of toxic seed oils, sugars, and chemicals.

    Sure, people back in the 1940s and 1950s were eating 3 squares a day, but look at **what** they were eating compared to what we are surrounded by now. Until around 120 years ago, most people lived on farms, and even if they didn’t, most of the food they ate came almost directly from a farm.

    Have you heard stories about people who travel to Europe and visit places like France and Italy where they eat all the bread and pasta, drink all the wine they want, etc. and don’t get fat? Know why that is?

    Because it’s ILLEGAL over there in many European countries to add in the toxic chemical crap they put into US processed food on this side of the pond. Look at the following links for just a HINT of how bad this issue is. Why are European governments taking better care of their people’s health than our supposedly superior US government?

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-food-additives-banned-europe-making-americans-sick-expert-says/
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/28/bread-additives-chemicals-us-toxic-america
    https://foodrevolution.org/blog/banned-ingredients-in-other-countries/
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/23/titanium-dioxide-banned-chemicals-carcinogen-eu-us
    Image
    So, when I began changing my diet again in 2023, I switched to a [O]ne [M]eal [A] [D]ay program [OMAD] where I ate only once time in every 24-hour period.

    I adopted a 4-hour ‘feeding window’ from 4 pm to 8 pm.

    I also cut out most of the processed foods I had been eating – including the Weight Watcher’s stuff. I increased the amount of meat I ate from around 1/3rd of my diet to 2/3rds.

    From late June through early September, I went from 345 pounds [my stepmom made me get on the scale with her watching. I expected to see around 320. Ulp!] down to 320.

    And then I got stuck. The weight stopped coming off and I fluctuated between 317 and 320 for around a month and a half.


    Then my ‘little sister from another Mister,’ investigative journalist and head editor of Uncover DC, Tracy Beanz, shared some pictures and testimony about her husband William, who had lost over 160 pounds on a Carnivore Diet in one year. He not only lost a massive amount of unhealthy body fat, but he also had several chronic health issues evaporate.

    Image
    Image
    So….in early November, I decided to cut out the bread and the potatoes and the ‘healthy’ cereal I was still eating and stay only with raw milk and unpasteurized cheese for my carbs, and the rest of my diet was Amish-farm raised beef, bison, chicken, turkey, and fish with large brown eggs.

    The weight started coming again…slowly. I went from 320 down to my current weight of 295. I’ve gone down to 293, but 295 is what I saw the last 2 times I weighed myself.

    So. I learned a lot in the last 8 months. I wanted to share some of what I learned in this thread.

    I am not telling or advising anyone to do what I’m doing. I’m providing information and asking for people to check this out for themselves and make up their own minds.

    A key part of The Great Awakening is, I am convinced, teaching people how to get healthy and stay that way. And if people have been getting wrong and perhaps even deliberate disinformation from ‘health experts,’ the more people realize that and start reassessing what they’ve been told over the past few decades?

    THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING.



    https://vigilantnews.com/post/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling-you-about-food-is-wrong/


    https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling.html
    What If Everything They’ve Been Telling You About Food Is… WRONG? Vigilant NewsFebruary 2, 2024 By Brian Cates The last 9 months have been an exceedingly strange journey for me. While I had already figured out the FDA food pyramid was garbage and had watched in real-time as all the federal “medical” “health” “science” agencies played a direct role in suppressing accurate information on COVID-19 and C-19 origins, treatments, vaccines, etc., it took me the better of part of 3 years to begin critically and logically examining what these self-same propagandists disguised as ‘experts’ have been telling all of us about food and what supposedly comprises a healthy diet. I’d struggled with my weight since I was a young man of 24. I am soon turning 60. I’d spent the past few years talking about losing weight and the all the issues I was dealing with from lugging around over 100+ pounds of useless bodyfat. But I was still eating 4-5 times a day, at least two of those meals being sizable. And though I cut down on the sweets and was eating what I was told were ‘healthy whole grains’, the weight not only refused to go down, it kept going up. I would go through the same cycle several times from when I was around 26 to last year: Start working out religiously, while eating what I was told was mostly ‘healthy’ food. I’d add some muscle, my weight would drop maybe 20 pounds or so…and then after 3-4 months, hit the wall. No changes, and despite working out, the weight crept back up. Quit working out, gain all the weight back, a year goes by…then start the cycle again. 34 years or so I ran on this hamster wheel. When this picture was taken, I’d just started writing for The Epoch Times in mid-2018. I was 350 pounds or so. Hadn’t weighed myself in a while. I was too scared to look anyway. Image I had just gone through the cycle again early last year. Working out, eating the “healthy food” chock full of carbs, various forms of sugars and toxic seed oils & chemicals, etc., etc. Then in May, I quit again. In late June, my stepmom visited me in my new house in Florida while I was on an RV tour around the US, and when she saw how I was living and eating, she read me the riot act. She kicked me in the ass and got me not only moving again, but that visit was also the catalyst I needed to go back and re-examine 35+ years of failure and why trying the same thing over and over again wasn’t working. For years, people like me were told this was a willpower/laziness thing. You’re fat and you can’t lose the weight because you don’t eat right/work out hard enough or long enough, etc. So I was mentally beaten down after exhausting myself on this hamster’s wheel as I was headed into decade #4 with the wrong programming in my head. Overweight Man Tired after Training, with Hand on Forehead Against ... But here’s the thing. As a journalist, I’d just spent the last 3 1/2 years extensively and exhaustively covering how federal and state and county ‘health’ ‘medical’ and ‘science’ ‘experts’ had just engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to hide and censor true and accurate information from the American public. Not to mention also covering the amount of gaslighting we were all being hit with following the blatant theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump. So at this time, in late June/early July of last year, I started my re-examination of around 35 years of failure with an intriguing thought: **COULD IT BE** that the very same ‘health’ ‘medical’ & ‘science’ experts who’d just exposed and outed themselves as Big Pharma propagandists and business partners lying to us about COVID & many of the drugs involved in the treatment/prevention of infection…were also wrong or deliberately misleading us about….food? Image Could it possibly be…. One of the first things I realized, when I began examining what the federal ‘health’ ‘medical’ ‘science’ agencies tout as a ‘healthy’ diet, is that when they last changed the food pyramid in the early 1990’s, the rates of both obesity and diabetes exploded in this country as people began following this ‘expert’ advice. As you can see from the graphs below, an already alarming rising trend suddenly shot dramatically upward in the early 1990s. Image Image How bad has the obesity/diabetes/insulin resistance crisis gotten in the US? It is now so bad they’ve coined a bullshit term – ‘prediabetes’ – to try to mask the deadly seriousness of the crisis. If you are diagnosed as ‘prediabetic,’ you ARE diabetic; it’s just that your insulin resistance hasn’t progressed to such an extent that they’ll officially call it ‘diabetes.’ Image Or as actor Wilford Brimley would say: Wilford Brimley Has Diabeetus - Misc - quickmeme Insulin resistance leads directly to a massive amount of chronic health issues of which diabetes is only one. By giving Americans the ‘expert’ advice that they needed to start chugging down ‘6-11 servings’ every day of ‘healthy whole grains’ and cook their food with seed oils while counseling them to also **reduce** the amount of meat and animal fats they were eating, Americans began ingesting way more carbohydrates and PUFA’s [that’s ‘polyunsaturated fatty acids, for those of you in Rio Linda…] every day than they’d been eating before. And yet I recall for the past 30 years or so watching the popular culture health reporters scratch their heads and wondering what could possibly be causing the massive explosion of obesity and chronic illnesses, as well as the dropping testosterone and estrogen levels they were observing. So the fact that the federal ‘health’ agencies caused much of the country to make a dramatic wrong turn that exacerbated the rising trends of obesity and chronic illness with their drastically wrong official ‘food pyramid’ in the early 1990s, caused me to wonder: If they were giving the American public such rotten, terrible, horrible, no-good ‘expert’ instructions on what they should be eating every day, **what else** have they been telling us that is utter bullshit? And the very first thing I stumbled over in this regard was the history of SEED OILS and how medical scientists doing animal experiments back in the 1890s/early 1900s quickly established that seed oils were toxic and harmful to growing and developing animals. By the end of July last year, I was sharing the alarming stuff I was finding in my research with my readers on my Substack: Image You have to fully grasp this. They **knew** from animal experiments on rats and cows and horses and birds **exactly** what SEED OILS did to growing and developing animals. Many of these experiments were carried out from the late 1880s through the 1910s. Experiment results were published in books, such as this one from scientist E.V. McCollum in 1918. There was no mystery here. The results were established and easily observable. And yet…what ended up happening over the next 100 years? Government ‘health’ experts working hand-in-glove with Big Food corporations convinced most Americans to stop cooking their food with butter, lard, and tallow, and instead use the new ‘Crisco’ and other highly processed seed oils and margarine. Because they claimed these new processed products were ‘healthier’. And because Americans back then were very trusting people who didn’t know their government was controlled by hidden corporations and interests out to make massive profits while not caring about their health, they followed this ‘expert’ advice from authority figures they were taught to trust. From the 1920s through today, Big Food, working in conjunction with Big Government, began creating many new highly processed foods that contained large amounts of these seed oils and myriad toxic chemicals and food additives. Our American culture is now flooded with highly processed fake ‘food’ that didn’t exist even 100 years ago. And they are inventing new kinds of fake food every year. Image If they knew what seed oils would do to human beings who began eating them early in life, and ate them throughout their physical development and into adulthood – and evidence seems to suggest they did – then the only possible reason for them to do that would be to arrest the development of children, cause chronic illnesses throughout life, and ensure a premature death. What I saw through my research was **deeply disturbing to me**. Image This can’t be just about profit motive, the fact they’d make a lot of MONEY creating new addictive processed sugar-and-carb-and-seed oil-filled foods. They had to also have seen the very real and OBVIOUS HARM they would be doing to their fellow citizens by introducing these heavily toxic and health-destroy products into the American food supply. Not when you realize the wealthy elite who run everything in this fallen world behind the scenes are constantly wringing their hands and brainstorming about how to ‘fix’ the world’s overpopulation problem, think even the concept of human rights is a big funny hilarious joke, and that human rights don’t exist, just like God doesn’t exist. They’ve always sat around at their big, important conferences in places like Davos and talked about culling the human herd like they’re ranchers planning for the next cattle drive. It’s just that they’re starting to get embarrassed that the cows are now spying on them in the barn and figuring out what they’re talking about, their plans for the rest of us. What more clever way could be devised than convincing people to simply EAT themselves into chronic illnesses that will guide them expeditiously into an early grave? The rise in life expectancy rates over the past 100 years is not because people are HEALTHIER overall. Image Far from it. The rates rose because of medical advancements in keeping chronically ill people alive longer. Were people not being tricked and misled into fattening themselves with constant insulin resistance and filling their bodies with toxins, most people would very likely be living into their upper 90s by now. Instead, life expectancy is dropping because the amount of toxic and unhealthy food Americans are eating is going up. This cannot be overstated. With the medical/health/scientific advancements in knowledge and technology over the past 120 years, the only way this was allowed to happen and to become so widespread at this point millions of people are dying from easily preventable chronic illnesses is that… …and I know some of you will struggle to accept this…. …the real owners of the world out there **wanted** this to happen. They demanded it. There’s no way they don’t know. So if they know…and nothing’s been done to stop it? It’s not just about money. There’s what looks like an exceedingly nefarious agenda at work here. Image Sometimes in my more paranoid moments, I wonder if…. Nah. Couldn’t be…. Could it? Image Tastes like chicken! https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/W-JhfjGtlp8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0 So the first two things I discovered in my new research starting in the middle of last year: 1. The food pyramid was a massive ‘mistake’…or was it? 2. Seed Oils are toxic and harm human development and shorten the human lifespan Yet they were allowed to proliferate into the American food supply by accident…or was it really an ‘accident’? Next, I discovered that the conventional ‘expert’ findings about animal fat were wrong. For decades I’d been endlessly told and had read that too much dietary animal fat caused health/heart issues. Cut down dramatically on the red meat, the eggs, the butter, replace the fat with ‘healthy’ food… And yet what do you actually **FIND** when you examine the medical research? You find when people dramatically reduced their animal fat intake they still got FATTER and more CHRONICALLY ILL. After all, one of the biggest reasons for creating a ‘new and improved!’ food pyramid back in the early 1990s was to convince people to CUT the amount of meat and animal fat they were eating and replace them with ‘healthy’ carbs. For people who were supposedly becoming more ‘healthy’ by following the new food pyramid’s ‘expert’ advice, Americans seemed to be getting fatter, heavier, and more unhealthy. It’s been noticed for some time now that people in America in the 1940s and 1950s sure do look pretty darn healthy, even though we were constantly being told by our modern ‘health experts’ that those poor folks were eating WAY too much animal fats and red meat and eggs and [gasp!] butter. I mean…there’s just NO WAY that Americans back then eating all that bad stuff were healthier than US today, right? 🤔 Why, that very idea would be absurd! They didn’t know any better! They didn’t have our advantages! Image Image Image Hey…maybe it’s time for us to stop, go back and look, and rethink this all out again… Because SOMETHING clearly isn’t working. We’re **supposed to be** far healthier than those poor fools back in the 1940s and 1950s…but we’re NOT. Why is that? If you commit yourself to finding the truth and facing it unflinchingly, no matter where it leads…you can find it. The brutal truth is…people here in America have been misled. Just about EVERYTHING the ‘health’ and ‘diet’ ‘experts’ have been telling them all their lives is….SURPRISE!…wrong. It’s not your fault. It is THEIR fault. They either didn’t know what they were talking about when they were teaching you how to eat, or they had a hidden agenda. Either way…NOT YOUR FAULT. Image Image Image Its not that you lack willpower. Or that you’re lazy. Or that you don’t work out enough. Its that what the ‘experts’ taught you about how to eat a proper diet wasn’t true. You were not getting accurate information. You were steered towards unhealthy seed oil/sugar/carb-filled processed foods because authority figures you trusted gave you terrible advice. You were given bad information by government and medical authority figures on 7 dietary subjects: 1. Cholesterol levels 2. Salt/mineral levels 3. Protein levels 4. Animal Fats 5. Fiber 6. Seed oils 7. Meal frequency My research has led me to conclude that we need to go BACK to how our ancestors ate. A mostly meat diet where we do not eat large meals of highly processed fake foods several times a day with snacks in between. We’re not designed to put food into our stomachs 3-6 times a day, constantly spiking our insulin levels and hormonal system, developing lifelong insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome-related chronic illnesses and diseases. Especially not the kind of food we’re surrounded by in our popular culture, the highly over-processed stuff that didn’t exist 100 years ago that are now chock-full of toxic seed oils, sugars, and chemicals. Sure, people back in the 1940s and 1950s were eating 3 squares a day, but look at **what** they were eating compared to what we are surrounded by now. Until around 120 years ago, most people lived on farms, and even if they didn’t, most of the food they ate came almost directly from a farm. Have you heard stories about people who travel to Europe and visit places like France and Italy where they eat all the bread and pasta, drink all the wine they want, etc. and don’t get fat? Know why that is? Because it’s ILLEGAL over there in many European countries to add in the toxic chemical crap they put into US processed food on this side of the pond. Look at the following links for just a HINT of how bad this issue is. Why are European governments taking better care of their people’s health than our supposedly superior US government? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-food-additives-banned-europe-making-americans-sick-expert-says/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/28/bread-additives-chemicals-us-toxic-america https://foodrevolution.org/blog/banned-ingredients-in-other-countries/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/23/titanium-dioxide-banned-chemicals-carcinogen-eu-us Image So, when I began changing my diet again in 2023, I switched to a [O]ne [M]eal [A] [D]ay program [OMAD] where I ate only once time in every 24-hour period. I adopted a 4-hour ‘feeding window’ from 4 pm to 8 pm. I also cut out most of the processed foods I had been eating – including the Weight Watcher’s stuff. I increased the amount of meat I ate from around 1/3rd of my diet to 2/3rds. From late June through early September, I went from 345 pounds [my stepmom made me get on the scale with her watching. I expected to see around 320. Ulp!] down to 320. And then I got stuck. The weight stopped coming off and I fluctuated between 317 and 320 for around a month and a half. Then my ‘little sister from another Mister,’ investigative journalist and head editor of Uncover DC, Tracy Beanz, shared some pictures and testimony about her husband William, who had lost over 160 pounds on a Carnivore Diet in one year. He not only lost a massive amount of unhealthy body fat, but he also had several chronic health issues evaporate. Image Image So….in early November, I decided to cut out the bread and the potatoes and the ‘healthy’ cereal I was still eating and stay only with raw milk and unpasteurized cheese for my carbs, and the rest of my diet was Amish-farm raised beef, bison, chicken, turkey, and fish with large brown eggs. The weight started coming again…slowly. I went from 320 down to my current weight of 295. I’ve gone down to 293, but 295 is what I saw the last 2 times I weighed myself. So. I learned a lot in the last 8 months. I wanted to share some of what I learned in this thread. I am not telling or advising anyone to do what I’m doing. I’m providing information and asking for people to check this out for themselves and make up their own minds. A key part of The Great Awakening is, I am convinced, teaching people how to get healthy and stay that way. And if people have been getting wrong and perhaps even deliberate disinformation from ‘health experts,’ the more people realize that and start reassessing what they’ve been told over the past few decades? THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING. https://vigilantnews.com/post/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling-you-about-food-is-wrong/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling.html
    VIGILANTNEWS.COM
    What If Everything They’ve Been Telling You About Food Is… WRONG?
    Have our trusted health authority figures led us astray? And if so... what can we do about it?
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  • Despite all of the warnings i have been giving many of the accounts violating Hive Rules. These same accounts continue to spam Images and Memes without sourcing them nor claiming rights to them, which is a violation of Hive Rules. If you don't source the Memes or images. Hive Watchers will source the Memes or Images for you, and will assume you are claiming ownership of them, when you are not the owner. They will flag you for this. And if you continue, your account will get blacklisted..

    These accounts responsible of doing this think that because they block me from SoMee's main Platform they have immunity in not getting downvoted by me, which they don't by the way because i can downvote the same accounts responsible for this on Hive. I am not doing this because i am your enemy. I am doing this so you stay out of trouble on Hive. Nobody wants their account blacklisted. The people i know that had their accounts blacklisted went months without being able to post until they got the problem resolved.

    If you are doing this, you need to understand users of Hive will report you for breaking the rules. Please review the report they use via the link i have provided below.

    Source: https://hivewatchers.com/reports/new

    You need to source images if you want to stay out of trouble on Hive. The process of sourcing images is extremely easy. Go to google image search, click on the little camera to the right hand side of the search box. Upload the image on your gallery you are going to source. You will get quite a few sources as options once you cover the entire image when sourcing. Choose one source and provide the link of that source in your post.

    Below i will provide an image of the Platform owner of MemeHive explaining to me how it works before i understood this.

    Source: https://ecency.com/hive-104024/@greywarden100/questions#@memehive/re-greywarden100-lh4jsncm

    Image source below:

    https://peakd.com/someeofficial/@greywarden100/the-hive-watchers

    If you follow the rules. Which really isn't that hard. You will never get into trouble on Hive. It isn't hard at all to source images. If you need me to give you a crash course i can do that and for free. I just want SoMeeans to stay out of trouble. I do not want to be your enemy!
    Despite all of the warnings i have been giving many of the accounts violating Hive Rules. These same accounts continue to spam Images and Memes without sourcing them nor claiming rights to them, which is a violation of Hive Rules. If you don't source the Memes or images. Hive Watchers will source the Memes or Images for you, and will assume you are claiming ownership of them, when you are not the owner. They will flag you for this. And if you continue, your account will get blacklisted.. These accounts responsible of doing this think that because they block me from SoMee's main Platform they have immunity in not getting downvoted by me, which they don't by the way because i can downvote the same accounts responsible for this on Hive. I am not doing this because i am your enemy. I am doing this so you stay out of trouble on Hive. Nobody wants their account blacklisted. The people i know that had their accounts blacklisted went months without being able to post until they got the problem resolved. If you are doing this, you need to understand users of Hive will report you for breaking the rules. Please review the report they use via the link i have provided below. Source: https://hivewatchers.com/reports/new You need to source images if you want to stay out of trouble on Hive. The process of sourcing images is extremely easy. Go to google image search, click on the little camera to the right hand side of the search box. Upload the image on your gallery you are going to source. You will get quite a few sources as options once you cover the entire image when sourcing. Choose one source and provide the link of that source in your post. Below i will provide an image of the Platform owner of MemeHive explaining to me how it works before i understood this. Source: https://ecency.com/hive-104024/@greywarden100/questions#@memehive/re-greywarden100-lh4jsncm Image source below: https://peakd.com/someeofficial/@greywarden100/the-hive-watchers If you follow the rules. Which really isn't that hard. You will never get into trouble on Hive. It isn't hard at all to source images. If you need me to give you a crash course i can do that and for free. I just want SoMeeans to stay out of trouble. I do not want to be your enemy!
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  • @Dallyboy, @Christopherkramer.10, @nick.ds and @zackrspv.. Please look at the images below. LEO has this section they call thread, which is specifically for monetized micro posting and doesn't lead to harrasment in their Community from the Marxist Hive Watchers as micro content is what that section is made for. Is it possible for SoMee to also integrate something like this? This is a very neat feature in my opinion and would be great for SoMee, as most SoMeeans aren't bloggers anyways.
    @Dallyboy, @Christopherkramer.10, @nick.ds and @zackrspv.. Please look at the images below. LEO has this section they call thread, which is specifically for monetized micro posting and doesn't lead to harrasment in their Community from the Marxist Hive Watchers as micro content is what that section is made for. Is it possible for SoMee to also integrate something like this? This is a very neat feature in my opinion and would be great for SoMee, as most SoMeeans aren't bloggers anyways.
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  • Kudos to who ever pulled this off, actually hope they get away with it haha. Nice take for a victimless crime, but that’s just the dreamer in me speaking probably. There’s a reason heist movies are popular I suppose… dream big or go home lol
    https://watcher.guru/news/100-million-worth-of-gold-stolen-from-canadas-largest-airport
    Kudos to who ever pulled this off, actually hope they get away with it haha. Nice take for a victimless crime, but that’s just the dreamer in me speaking probably. There’s a reason heist movies are popular I suppose… dream big or go home lol https://watcher.guru/news/100-million-worth-of-gold-stolen-from-canadas-largest-airport
    WATCHER.GURU
    $100 Million Worth of Gold Stolen from Canada's Largest Airport
    According to Canada’s national police force, thieves may have stolen more than $100 million worth of gold from the country's largest airport.
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  • ➡️ To all the good people onboarding new users: It's also important to tell newbies about the Hive earning rules.

    Michaa, you should verify your identity so you won't get in trouble with Hive. (please see pictures. If questions, message me)

    link to Hivewatcher's report: https://hive.blog/hivewatchers/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-march-2023-689-reports-part-1-a-to-r
    ➡️ To all the good people onboarding new users: It's also important to tell newbies about the Hive earning rules. [Michaa], you should verify your identity so you won't get in trouble with Hive. (please see pictures. If questions, message me) link to Hivewatcher's report: https://hive.blog/hivewatchers/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-march-2023-689-reports-part-1-a-to-r
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  • Another one from the Hivewatcher's report: somee.official zackrspv bejodohmen , I know you have a good relationship with Hive but I see many posts are getting flagged recently. Be careful.

    Link to the report: https://hive.blog/hivewatchers/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-march-2023-689-reports-part-2-s-to-z
    Another one from the Hivewatcher's report: [somee.official] [zackrspv] [bejodohmen] , I know you have a good relationship with Hive but I see many posts are getting flagged recently. Be careful. Link to the report: https://hive.blog/hivewatchers/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-march-2023-689-reports-part-2-s-to-z
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  • Every month I scan the Hivewatchers' report to see if any Someeians were flagged he previous month.

    This time I found this: esmeree.sterling, you should consider "verifying" your ID if you want to minimize the risk to end up on the Hive ban list.

    link to the report: https://hive.blog/hivewatchers/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-march-2023-689-reports-part-1-a-to-r
    Every month I scan the Hivewatchers' report to see if any Someeians were flagged he previous month. This time I found this: [esmeree.sterling], you should consider "verifying" your ID if you want to minimize the risk to end up on the Hive ban list. link to the report: https://hive.blog/hivewatchers/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-march-2023-689-reports-part-1-a-to-r
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  • Spaminator taking away the Hive crumbs on my Putrid Glowing One Splinterlands meme shitpost(like they do every post) .....how poetic????

    https://www.splintertalk.io/@themcgwire/the-putrid-glowing-one

    #hivewatchers #hive #Splinterlands #Splintertalk #SPT #Humor
    Spaminator taking away the Hive crumbs on my Putrid Glowing One Splinterlands meme shitpost(like they do every post) .....how poetic???? https://www.splintertalk.io/@themcgwire/the-putrid-glowing-one #hivewatchers #hive #Splinterlands #Splintertalk #SPT #Humor
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  • Here is another user stealing images online and post as his own. Not a single post has a source to the creator or website. Threats from this person has come as well.
    #keepsomeeclean #hivewatchers
    #keephiveclean #spamming #spam
    https://hive.blog/welcome
    Here is another user stealing images online and post as his own. Not a single post has a source to the creator or website. Threats from this person has come as well. #keepsomeeclean #hivewatchers #keephiveclean #spamming #spam https://hive.blog/welcome
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  • Finally the hivewatchers stopped by as [yafet.ashkenazi] warned earlier to be careful about the images we post.
    Finally the hivewatchers stopped by as [yafet.ashkenazi] warned earlier to be careful about the images we post.
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  • Greywarden > SoMee's new features are off the chain. SoMee is putting a fire on the asses of other Decentralized Social Media Platforms including Hive and their Socialist Watchers! Torch them all SoMee ????
    Greywarden > SoMee's new features are off the chain. SoMee is putting a fire on the asses of other Decentralized Social Media Platforms including Hive and their Socialist Watchers! Torch them all SoMee ????
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    35
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  • fuck hivewatchers<br/>fuck hivewatchers
    fuck hivewatchers<br/>fuck hivewatchers
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  • Attention Dallyboy (but this post is a lesson for all users in fact). Did you know 2 posts of you were flagged on Hive? It's easy to miss if you're not scanning through the monthly hivewatchers report.

    Afak, you used 2 memes which is dangerous territory, as many on here can attest.

    You can find the report here: https://hive.blog/abuse/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-february-2023-508-reports. Just look for your name.
    Attention [Dallyboy] (but this post is a lesson for all users in fact). Did you know 2 posts of you were flagged on Hive? It's easy to miss if you're not scanning through the monthly hivewatchers report. Afak, you used 2 memes which is dangerous territory, as many on here can attest. You can find the report here: https://hive.blog/abuse/@hivewatchers/hivewatchers-report-for-february-2023-508-reports. Just look for your name.
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