• ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 170: Israel assaults al-Shifa, Nasser, and al-Amal hospitals in one day
    Mustafa Abu SneinehMarch 23, 2024
    Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah for treatment following Israeli airstrikes, March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
    Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah for treatment following Israeli airstrikes, March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
    Casualties

    32,223 + killed* and at least 74,518 wounded in the Gaza Strip.
    435+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.**
    Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147.
    594 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.***
    *Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead.

    ** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on March 17, this is the latest figure.

    *** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”

    Key Developments

    Israeli forces commit eight massacres in Gaza, kill at least 84 people and injure 106.
    Israeli forces shell and bomb vicinity of al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, killing one volunteer with PRCS.
    PRCS says Israeli tanks and forces are “besieging both al-Amal Hospital and al-Naser Hospital amidst very intense shelling and heavy gunfire.”
    Wafa reports infected wounds of injured Palestinians inside al-Shifa due to lack of essential medical supplies.
    Al-Jazeera Arabic reports Israeli tanks ran over evacuating people from al-Shifa Hospital, shows blurred footage of Palestinian with marks of tank wheel on lower body.
    Jamila al-Hissi, survivor of storming of al-Shifa, tells Al-Jazeera Arabic that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.”
    UN chief Antonio Guterres says “horror and starvation stalk the people of Gaza” in visit to Rafah crossing.
    U.S. Secretary of State warns Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Rafah offensive would “further isolate” Israel in the region.
    Netanyahu hopes to invade Rafah with “the support of the U.S., but if we have to – we will do it alone.”
    Hamas says 34-year-old Israeli captive died in Gaza as “he did not escape the lack of food and medicine.”
    Dozens of settlers storm al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem to mark Jewish holiday of Purim.
    Israeli forces block Palestinian Christians in occupied West Bank from entering Jerusalem to participate in Palm Sunday.
    Al-Amal Hospital in ‘extreme danger’ as Israel attacks

    Gaza’s two major hospitals were under attack on Sunday morning as thousands of Palestinians in the coastal enclave have been living under bombardment for the past 170 days.

    Overnight, Israeli forces committed eight massacres in various areas of the Gaza Strip, according to the Ministry of Health on Telegram, killing at least 84 people and injuring 106. Thousands remain under the rubble of bombed buildings.

    Israeli forces shelled and bombed the vicinity of al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). Amir Abu Aisha, a volunteer with the PRCS, was killed by Israeli gunfire inside al-Amal.

    His last post on Instagram was a video of Israeli airstrikes near al-Amal.

    PRCS said the medical team inside the facility are “in extreme danger…and are completely immobilized.”

    “They are unable to bury the body of our colleague Amir Abu Aisha within the hospital’s backyard,” PRCS continued as Israeli forces razed and excavated the area.

    Since October, Israeli bombardment killed at least 364 medical workers in the Gaza Strip, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics, and damaged dozens of clinics and ambulances.

    On Sunday morning, PRCS also said that Israeli tanks and forces are “besieging both Al-Amal Hospital and Al-Naser Hospital amidst very intense shelling and heavy gunfire.”

    PRCS said that one of the displaced Palestinians at al-Amal was “injured in the head,” while Israeli drones are ordering that all people inside the hospital “leave it naked.”

    “Smoke bombs are being launched at the hospital to force the staff, wounded, and displaced individuals to leave it,” the PRCS wrote on in a post on X.

    “Israeli vehicles [are] surrounding Al-Amal Hospital and are now bulldozing the area in front and around it and closing the hospital gates with barriers,” the post added.

    Israeli atrocities in al-Shifa, say eyewitnesses

    In northern Gaza, al-Shifa Hospital has been under Israeli assault for a week.

    Israeli forces continued to besiege, shell, and bomb al-Shifa Hospital and its vicinity for the seventh day in a row, saying that Hamas senior leaders had used the facility, a claim which the movement denies.

    Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians and officials while storming al-Shifa, including Faiq al-Mabhouh, an officer in the Gaza Police force who was responsible for the successful deliveries of food, rice, and flour to thousands of inhabitants of northern Gaza.

    Hamas accused Israel of attempting to spread chaos and civilian disorder by killing officials who coordinate with clans, the UN, and international groups to prevent a famine in the north Gaza.

    On Saturday afternoon, at least five people were killed by Israel and several injured in the al-Shifa medical complex, while Palestinians and medical staff have been living with little food and water. Wafa news agency reported that the wounds of some injured Palestinians inside Al-Shifa got infected and inflamed amid the lack of essential medical supplies.

    Al-Jazeera Arabic reported that Israeli tanks ran over Palestinians who were ordered to evacuate the hospital. Al-Jazeera released blurred footage of a person’s dead body with marks of a tank wheel on his lower body.

    Jamila al-Hissi, a Palestinian woman who survived the Israeli storming of al-Shifa, told Al-Jazeera Arabic that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.”

    “This is what we witnessed. They raped women. They kidnapped women. they executed women, pulled bodies from under the rubble, and unleashed their dogs to eat them. Is there anything worse?” Al-Hissi told Al-Jazeera in a phone call.

    She left with her daughter, who was bleeding, and evacuated a building belonging to the UN Development Program (UNDP), which was set on fire by Israeli forces, who also burned and destroyed several buildings surrounding al-Shifa in the past days.

    It is unclear how many people remain inside al-Shifa, but prior to Israel’s second storming of the hospital since November, there were 7,000 patients and injured people receiving treatment administered by hundreds of medical staff.

    Al-Shifa is one of Gaza’s oldest medical facilities, built on top of a British barracks in 1946.

    The complex includes several buildings for surgery, internal disease, obstetrics and gynecology, a nursery for premature babies, an emergency department, intensive care units, a radiology department, and a blood bank. Some of these buildings have been damaged, burned by Israel, or have ceased operating fully due to the lack of fuel to generate electricity.

    The complex is built on 45,000 square meters of land west of Gaza City. Prior to October of last year, al-Shifa employed 1,500 medical staff, including 500 doctors and 760 nurses.

    Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, said on Sunday that “Horror & starvation stalk the people of Gaza.”

    “Any further onslaught will make everything worse. Worse for Palestinian civilians, for the hostages, for all people of the region,” he added.

    Guterres visited Egypt on Saturday to inspect the Rafah land crossing, and al-Arish General Hospital in northern Sinai to check on injured Palestinians receiving treatment.

    Israeli forces bomb Rafah, Khan Younis, and Deir al-Balah

    Wafa reported that Israeli forces bombed a house in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip overnight, killing at least eight people in the al-Hakar area. Meanwhile, in Rafah, Palestinian rescue teams recovered the bodies of eight Palestinians under the rubble of a bombed house belonging to the Farwana family in the Jneina neighborhood.

    In Khan Younis, Israeli forces heavily bombed areas in the southeastern part of the city, besieging the Nasser and al-Amal hospitals. In Rafah, they bombed a house near the Rabaa School, killing at least two people, Wafa reported.

    The Israeli government has vowed to invade Rafah, where 1.4 million Palestinians are currently displaced and live in shelters. During his visit to Israel on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned that an offensive on Rafah would “further isolate” Israel in the region, according to Reuters.

    Blinken, who met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that “a major military ground operation in Rafah is not the way to do it,” although the U.S. shares Israel’s goal to “defeat Hamas.”

    “It risks further isolating Israel around the world and jeopardizing its long-term security and standing,” Blinken said during a press briefing after the meeting.

    Netanyahu, however, appeared to be undeterred in invading Rafah, stating in a video statement that he told Blinken, “I hope we will do it with the support of the U.S., but if we have to — we will do it alone.”

    Meanwhile, fighting is still ongoing between Israeli forces and Palestinian resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip. On Saturday, Hamas said that a 34-year-old Israeli captive died in Gaza.

    “Although he survived the army’s attack, he did not escape the lack of food and medicine,” the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades wrote in a video message.

    In another video, Hamas fighters fired al-Yaseen 105mm anti-tank shells on Israeli military vehicles in the vicinity of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.

    Israel had been blocking sufficient food and medical supplies from entering Gaza, although some of them were funded or sponsored by ally countries such as the UK.

    The Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron, accused Israel last week of delaying U.K. aid to Gaza, which was stopped at the crossing point for three weeks.

    Israeli settlers storm al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Pruim

    Dozens of Israeli settlers stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem on Sunday morning to mark the Jewish holiday of Purim, which ends on Monday.

    Israeli forces emptied the al-Aqsa compound of Palestinian worshippers on Saturday evening in preparation for the settlers’ tour, Wafa reported. Israeli forces barred Palestinians from staying overnight in al-Aqsa’s al-Qibli mosque after Ramadan’s tarawih prayers ended, which were attended by 45,000 people.

    During Ramadan, it is worshippers often stay in mosques overnight to pray after tarawih. In 2021, Israeli forces raided the al-Qibli mosque, firing bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas canisters at worshipers who were performing night prayers and reciting the Quran.

    Israeli settlers’ storming of al-Aqsa further escalated tensions in the city, according to Wafa, as Israeli forces prevented Palestinians from entering the site on Sunday morning.

    Wafa said that two settlers were dressed up as Jewish temple priests. Settlers have long stated their wish to rebuild the third Jewish temple in the middle of the al-Aqsa compound atop the Dome of the Rock.

    Meanwhile, Israeli forces blocked Palestinian Christians in the occupied West Bank from entering Jerusalem to take part in the commemoration of Palm Sunday, the anniversary of Jesus’s entry into the city. Those who participated in the ceremony in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher were Palestinians from Jerusalem or from inside Israel.

    Israeli forces arrested 16 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank overnight, from the towns of Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, and also Jerusalem. Since October, 7,755 Palestinians have been detained by Israel. This figure, released by the Ministry of Detainees’ and Ex-Destainees’ Affairs, does not include Palestinians who were released later or those arrested from the Gaza Strip.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-170-israel-assaults-al-shifa-nasser-and-al-amal-hospitals-in-one-day/
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 170: Israel assaults al-Shifa, Nasser, and al-Amal hospitals in one day Mustafa Abu SneinehMarch 23, 2024 Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah for treatment following Israeli airstrikes, March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah for treatment following Israeli airstrikes, March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Casualties 32,223 + killed* and at least 74,518 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 435+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.** Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147. 594 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.*** *Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead. ** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on March 17, this is the latest figure. *** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Key Developments Israeli forces commit eight massacres in Gaza, kill at least 84 people and injure 106. Israeli forces shell and bomb vicinity of al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, killing one volunteer with PRCS. PRCS says Israeli tanks and forces are “besieging both al-Amal Hospital and al-Naser Hospital amidst very intense shelling and heavy gunfire.” Wafa reports infected wounds of injured Palestinians inside al-Shifa due to lack of essential medical supplies. Al-Jazeera Arabic reports Israeli tanks ran over evacuating people from al-Shifa Hospital, shows blurred footage of Palestinian with marks of tank wheel on lower body. Jamila al-Hissi, survivor of storming of al-Shifa, tells Al-Jazeera Arabic that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.” UN chief Antonio Guterres says “horror and starvation stalk the people of Gaza” in visit to Rafah crossing. U.S. Secretary of State warns Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Rafah offensive would “further isolate” Israel in the region. Netanyahu hopes to invade Rafah with “the support of the U.S., but if we have to – we will do it alone.” Hamas says 34-year-old Israeli captive died in Gaza as “he did not escape the lack of food and medicine.” Dozens of settlers storm al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem to mark Jewish holiday of Purim. Israeli forces block Palestinian Christians in occupied West Bank from entering Jerusalem to participate in Palm Sunday. Al-Amal Hospital in ‘extreme danger’ as Israel attacks Gaza’s two major hospitals were under attack on Sunday morning as thousands of Palestinians in the coastal enclave have been living under bombardment for the past 170 days. Overnight, Israeli forces committed eight massacres in various areas of the Gaza Strip, according to the Ministry of Health on Telegram, killing at least 84 people and injuring 106. Thousands remain under the rubble of bombed buildings. Israeli forces shelled and bombed the vicinity of al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). Amir Abu Aisha, a volunteer with the PRCS, was killed by Israeli gunfire inside al-Amal. His last post on Instagram was a video of Israeli airstrikes near al-Amal. PRCS said the medical team inside the facility are “in extreme danger…and are completely immobilized.” “They are unable to bury the body of our colleague Amir Abu Aisha within the hospital’s backyard,” PRCS continued as Israeli forces razed and excavated the area. Since October, Israeli bombardment killed at least 364 medical workers in the Gaza Strip, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics, and damaged dozens of clinics and ambulances. On Sunday morning, PRCS also said that Israeli tanks and forces are “besieging both Al-Amal Hospital and Al-Naser Hospital amidst very intense shelling and heavy gunfire.” PRCS said that one of the displaced Palestinians at al-Amal was “injured in the head,” while Israeli drones are ordering that all people inside the hospital “leave it naked.” “Smoke bombs are being launched at the hospital to force the staff, wounded, and displaced individuals to leave it,” the PRCS wrote on in a post on X. “Israeli vehicles [are] surrounding Al-Amal Hospital and are now bulldozing the area in front and around it and closing the hospital gates with barriers,” the post added. Israeli atrocities in al-Shifa, say eyewitnesses In northern Gaza, al-Shifa Hospital has been under Israeli assault for a week. Israeli forces continued to besiege, shell, and bomb al-Shifa Hospital and its vicinity for the seventh day in a row, saying that Hamas senior leaders had used the facility, a claim which the movement denies. Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians and officials while storming al-Shifa, including Faiq al-Mabhouh, an officer in the Gaza Police force who was responsible for the successful deliveries of food, rice, and flour to thousands of inhabitants of northern Gaza. Hamas accused Israel of attempting to spread chaos and civilian disorder by killing officials who coordinate with clans, the UN, and international groups to prevent a famine in the north Gaza. On Saturday afternoon, at least five people were killed by Israel and several injured in the al-Shifa medical complex, while Palestinians and medical staff have been living with little food and water. Wafa news agency reported that the wounds of some injured Palestinians inside Al-Shifa got infected and inflamed amid the lack of essential medical supplies. Al-Jazeera Arabic reported that Israeli tanks ran over Palestinians who were ordered to evacuate the hospital. Al-Jazeera released blurred footage of a person’s dead body with marks of a tank wheel on his lower body. Jamila al-Hissi, a Palestinian woman who survived the Israeli storming of al-Shifa, told Al-Jazeera Arabic that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.” “This is what we witnessed. They raped women. They kidnapped women. they executed women, pulled bodies from under the rubble, and unleashed their dogs to eat them. Is there anything worse?” Al-Hissi told Al-Jazeera in a phone call. She left with her daughter, who was bleeding, and evacuated a building belonging to the UN Development Program (UNDP), which was set on fire by Israeli forces, who also burned and destroyed several buildings surrounding al-Shifa in the past days. It is unclear how many people remain inside al-Shifa, but prior to Israel’s second storming of the hospital since November, there were 7,000 patients and injured people receiving treatment administered by hundreds of medical staff. Al-Shifa is one of Gaza’s oldest medical facilities, built on top of a British barracks in 1946. The complex includes several buildings for surgery, internal disease, obstetrics and gynecology, a nursery for premature babies, an emergency department, intensive care units, a radiology department, and a blood bank. Some of these buildings have been damaged, burned by Israel, or have ceased operating fully due to the lack of fuel to generate electricity. The complex is built on 45,000 square meters of land west of Gaza City. Prior to October of last year, al-Shifa employed 1,500 medical staff, including 500 doctors and 760 nurses. Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, said on Sunday that “Horror & starvation stalk the people of Gaza.” “Any further onslaught will make everything worse. Worse for Palestinian civilians, for the hostages, for all people of the region,” he added. Guterres visited Egypt on Saturday to inspect the Rafah land crossing, and al-Arish General Hospital in northern Sinai to check on injured Palestinians receiving treatment. Israeli forces bomb Rafah, Khan Younis, and Deir al-Balah Wafa reported that Israeli forces bombed a house in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip overnight, killing at least eight people in the al-Hakar area. Meanwhile, in Rafah, Palestinian rescue teams recovered the bodies of eight Palestinians under the rubble of a bombed house belonging to the Farwana family in the Jneina neighborhood. In Khan Younis, Israeli forces heavily bombed areas in the southeastern part of the city, besieging the Nasser and al-Amal hospitals. In Rafah, they bombed a house near the Rabaa School, killing at least two people, Wafa reported. The Israeli government has vowed to invade Rafah, where 1.4 million Palestinians are currently displaced and live in shelters. During his visit to Israel on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned that an offensive on Rafah would “further isolate” Israel in the region, according to Reuters. Blinken, who met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that “a major military ground operation in Rafah is not the way to do it,” although the U.S. shares Israel’s goal to “defeat Hamas.” “It risks further isolating Israel around the world and jeopardizing its long-term security and standing,” Blinken said during a press briefing after the meeting. Netanyahu, however, appeared to be undeterred in invading Rafah, stating in a video statement that he told Blinken, “I hope we will do it with the support of the U.S., but if we have to — we will do it alone.” Meanwhile, fighting is still ongoing between Israeli forces and Palestinian resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip. On Saturday, Hamas said that a 34-year-old Israeli captive died in Gaza. “Although he survived the army’s attack, he did not escape the lack of food and medicine,” the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades wrote in a video message. In another video, Hamas fighters fired al-Yaseen 105mm anti-tank shells on Israeli military vehicles in the vicinity of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Israel had been blocking sufficient food and medical supplies from entering Gaza, although some of them were funded or sponsored by ally countries such as the UK. The Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron, accused Israel last week of delaying U.K. aid to Gaza, which was stopped at the crossing point for three weeks. Israeli settlers storm al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Pruim Dozens of Israeli settlers stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem on Sunday morning to mark the Jewish holiday of Purim, which ends on Monday. Israeli forces emptied the al-Aqsa compound of Palestinian worshippers on Saturday evening in preparation for the settlers’ tour, Wafa reported. Israeli forces barred Palestinians from staying overnight in al-Aqsa’s al-Qibli mosque after Ramadan’s tarawih prayers ended, which were attended by 45,000 people. During Ramadan, it is worshippers often stay in mosques overnight to pray after tarawih. In 2021, Israeli forces raided the al-Qibli mosque, firing bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas canisters at worshipers who were performing night prayers and reciting the Quran. Israeli settlers’ storming of al-Aqsa further escalated tensions in the city, according to Wafa, as Israeli forces prevented Palestinians from entering the site on Sunday morning. Wafa said that two settlers were dressed up as Jewish temple priests. Settlers have long stated their wish to rebuild the third Jewish temple in the middle of the al-Aqsa compound atop the Dome of the Rock. Meanwhile, Israeli forces blocked Palestinian Christians in the occupied West Bank from entering Jerusalem to take part in the commemoration of Palm Sunday, the anniversary of Jesus’s entry into the city. Those who participated in the ceremony in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher were Palestinians from Jerusalem or from inside Israel. Israeli forces arrested 16 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank overnight, from the towns of Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, and also Jerusalem. Since October, 7,755 Palestinians have been detained by Israel. This figure, released by the Ministry of Detainees’ and Ex-Destainees’ Affairs, does not include Palestinians who were released later or those arrested from the Gaza Strip. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-170-israel-assaults-al-shifa-nasser-and-al-amal-hospitals-in-one-day/
    MONDOWEISS.NET
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 170: Israel assaults al-Shifa, Nasser, and al-Amal hospitals in one day
    Israeli forces ordered Palestinians inside al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis to leave “naked,” while survivors of the al-Shifa Hospital raid witnessed numerous atrocities committed by the Israeli army. In Jerusalem, Israeli settlers stormed al-Aqsa.
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  • https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/clearer-safety-rules-for-food-containing-insects-genetically-modified-and-novel-ingredients

    It's coming. The days of bug eating. Please sign and share my petition. Why are the safety studies?

    https://chng.it/KmFmrFjfB2
    https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/clearer-safety-rules-for-food-containing-insects-genetically-modified-and-novel-ingredients It's coming. The days of bug eating. Please sign and share my petition. Why are the safety studies? https://chng.it/KmFmrFjfB2
    WWW.STRAITSTIMES.COM
    Clearer safety rules for food containing insects, genetically modified and novel ingredients
    SFA’s approval for some 16 species of insects will likely come by June 2024. Read more at straitstimes.com.
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  • COVID Vaccine Gene Could Integrate Into Human Cancer Cells: Researcher
    What Mr. McKernan and his team have found contradicts the latest arguments from fact-checkers.

    COVID Vaccine Gene Could Integrate Into Human Cancer Cells: Researcher
    (CROCOTHERY/Shutterstock)
    Following his discovery of DNA contamination in COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, genomic researcher Kevin McKernan has recently found that the DNA in these vaccines can potentially integrate into human DNA.

    The COVID-19 vaccine spike sequence was detected in two types of chromosomes in cancer cell lines following exposure to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. Mr. McKernan’s findings, which he presents on his Substack blog, haven’t been peer-reviewed.
    These are expected to be “rare events,” but they can happen, Mr. McKernan told The Epoch Times.
    DNA Integration

    Since the introduction of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, some members of the public have been concerned that the vaccines may modify human DNA by combining their sequences with the human genome.

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    “Fact-checkers” refuted this, saying mRNA cannot be changed into DNA. Yet Mr. McKernan’s earlier work shows that DNA in the vaccine vials may be capable of changing human DNA.
    Ulrike Kämmerer, a professor of human biology at the University Hospital of Würzburg in Germany, conducted earlier stages of this research.

    Exposing breast and ovarian human cancer cells to Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, Ms. Kämmerer found that about half of the cells expressed the COVID-19 spike protein on their cellular surface, indicating that they had absorbed the vaccines.

    Mr. McKernan then performed gene sequencing and found that these cells and their descendant cells contained vaccine DNA.

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    After this, he tested to see whether any vaccine DNA combined with the cancer cell DNA, a process known as DNA integration. Integration is more of a concern in healthy cells than cancer cells because it disrupts cells’ genetic stability and integrity, increasing cancer risk.

    However, because cancer cells already have unstable DNA, the effects of DNA integration are less clear.

    Currently, in biomedical research, most experiments are carried out in cancer cell lines, as they are easier to obtain, experiment on, and maintain in the laboratory.

    Mr. McKernan detected vaccine DNA sequences on two chromosomes in the cancer cell lines: chromosome 9 and chromosome 12. The sequencing machine detected both instances of integration twice. It is important to get two readings of the DNA integration to ensure that the integration is not a result of misreading or random error, he said.

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    “The integration of ‘vaccine’ genetic information into the genome of cells was not such a surprise for me—more the confirmation of what we had to expect, unfortunately,” he told The Epoch Times.

    Mr. McKernan said it is unsurprising that integration was detected on only two chromosomes with two readings of each integration. This is because integration is rare, and the genes must be sequenced many times to get more sensitive results.

    The current findings are still preliminary, he said. More tests are also needed to determine whether DNA integration could be passed on to descendant cancer cells and whether this may affect cancer patients.

    Also, since the test was conducted in cancer cells and not in healthy human cells, it does not suggest the same integration would occur in healthy human cells.

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    However, Hiroshi Arakawa, a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Oncology who has a doctorate in molecular biology and immunology, wrote in his blog that “what happens in cultured cells can also occur in normal cells” after examining Mr. McKernan’s data.
    His review of Mr. McKernan’s data also found signs of DNA integration at chromosomes 9 and 12.

    “A wide variety of abnormalities can occur [in normal cells] depending on the site of genome integration,” Mr. Arakawa said.
    Not Random Events

    The two integration events into chromosome 9 occurred at the same place, as did the integration events into chromosome 12.

    Mr. McKernan said the odds of this occurring are one in 3 billion, highlighting that where the DNA integrates may not be random.

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    “There’s likely hotspots for this,” he told The Epoch Times, highlighting that in the human genome, jumping genes—short segments of DNA sequences—tend to “jump” into highly activated areas of DNA.

    Highly activated DNA tends to play important roles in the human body.

    The DNA integration into chromosome 12 occurred within the FAIM2 gene. Once activated, this gene creates a protein involved in programmed cell death. Since cancer cells evade cell death, the integration at chromosome 12 may be a survival-driven change.
    Vaccine DNA Is Active in the Cells

    Mr. McKernan said he believes that vaccine DNA is highly active in cancer cells. His sequencing machine detected the DNA of cancer cells 30 times but detected spike DNA 3,000 times.

    Not only did he detect much higher levels of vaccine DNA, but he also detected new variants in certain segments of the vaccine DNA.

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    These new DNA variations were not observed in unvaccinated cancer cells nor in the vaccine not exposed to the cancer cells.

    Mr. McKernan said he believes that these new gene variants likely occurred because the cancer cell made copies of the vaccine DNA and created small errors.

    What he and his team have found contradicts the latest arguments from fact-checkers claiming that the DNA from the mRNA vaccines cannot get into the cell, nor can it be active, he said.
    DNA Contamination From mRNA Vaccine Manufacturing

    DNA is present in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines because of the manufacturing process.
    This has been verified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Canada, and the European Medicines Agency.
    The mRNA vaccines are made from DNA; some of this DNA persists in the final product because of insufficient clearance.
    Initially, Pfizer reported that it would use a PCR machine to produce the DNA for its mRNA vaccine. The PCR machine first makes many copies of DNA, which is then sequenced into RNA.

    However, because this process wouldn’t be fast enough to meet demands, the vaccine manufacturers switched to using bacteria to mass-produce DNA as the template for the mRNA vaccine.

    In this process, vaccine manufacturers introduce bacterial DNA containing the vaccine spike sequences. The bacteria make many copies of this spike DNA as they divide. This spike DNA is then harvested and transcribed into mRNA in a machine. The mRNA is then packaged into lipid nanoparticles for use in vaccination.

    However, some bacterial DNA containing spike protein and other sequences could be packaged into lipid nanoparticles during the process, which would then be transported into cells during vaccination. Mr. McKernan’s earlier works have demonstrated this.
    Works by molecular virologist David Speicher have shown that the amount of DNA in the mRNA vaccine vials is higher than the FDA’s allowable threshold of 10 nanograms per vaccine dose.
    Mr. McKernan highlighted that compared with previous vaccines, mainly composed of naked DNA that had difficulty entering the cells, the DNA carried in the mRNA vaccines presents greater health risks, as it is packed into lipid nanoparticles and delivered straight into the cells.

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/covid-vaccine-gene-could-integrate-into-human-cancer-cells-researcher-5604184
    COVID Vaccine Gene Could Integrate Into Human Cancer Cells: Researcher What Mr. McKernan and his team have found contradicts the latest arguments from fact-checkers. COVID Vaccine Gene Could Integrate Into Human Cancer Cells: Researcher (CROCOTHERY/Shutterstock) Following his discovery of DNA contamination in COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, genomic researcher Kevin McKernan has recently found that the DNA in these vaccines can potentially integrate into human DNA. The COVID-19 vaccine spike sequence was detected in two types of chromosomes in cancer cell lines following exposure to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. Mr. McKernan’s findings, which he presents on his Substack blog, haven’t been peer-reviewed. These are expected to be “rare events,” but they can happen, Mr. McKernan told The Epoch Times. DNA Integration Since the introduction of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, some members of the public have been concerned that the vaccines may modify human DNA by combining their sequences with the human genome. Story continues below advertisement “Fact-checkers” refuted this, saying mRNA cannot be changed into DNA. Yet Mr. McKernan’s earlier work shows that DNA in the vaccine vials may be capable of changing human DNA. Ulrike Kämmerer, a professor of human biology at the University Hospital of Würzburg in Germany, conducted earlier stages of this research. Exposing breast and ovarian human cancer cells to Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, Ms. Kämmerer found that about half of the cells expressed the COVID-19 spike protein on their cellular surface, indicating that they had absorbed the vaccines. Mr. McKernan then performed gene sequencing and found that these cells and their descendant cells contained vaccine DNA. Story continues below advertisement After this, he tested to see whether any vaccine DNA combined with the cancer cell DNA, a process known as DNA integration. Integration is more of a concern in healthy cells than cancer cells because it disrupts cells’ genetic stability and integrity, increasing cancer risk. However, because cancer cells already have unstable DNA, the effects of DNA integration are less clear. Currently, in biomedical research, most experiments are carried out in cancer cell lines, as they are easier to obtain, experiment on, and maintain in the laboratory. Mr. McKernan detected vaccine DNA sequences on two chromosomes in the cancer cell lines: chromosome 9 and chromosome 12. The sequencing machine detected both instances of integration twice. It is important to get two readings of the DNA integration to ensure that the integration is not a result of misreading or random error, he said. Story continues below advertisement “The integration of ‘vaccine’ genetic information into the genome of cells was not such a surprise for me—more the confirmation of what we had to expect, unfortunately,” he told The Epoch Times. Mr. McKernan said it is unsurprising that integration was detected on only two chromosomes with two readings of each integration. This is because integration is rare, and the genes must be sequenced many times to get more sensitive results. The current findings are still preliminary, he said. More tests are also needed to determine whether DNA integration could be passed on to descendant cancer cells and whether this may affect cancer patients. Also, since the test was conducted in cancer cells and not in healthy human cells, it does not suggest the same integration would occur in healthy human cells. Story continues below advertisement However, Hiroshi Arakawa, a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Oncology who has a doctorate in molecular biology and immunology, wrote in his blog that “what happens in cultured cells can also occur in normal cells” after examining Mr. McKernan’s data. His review of Mr. McKernan’s data also found signs of DNA integration at chromosomes 9 and 12. “A wide variety of abnormalities can occur [in normal cells] depending on the site of genome integration,” Mr. Arakawa said. Not Random Events The two integration events into chromosome 9 occurred at the same place, as did the integration events into chromosome 12. Mr. McKernan said the odds of this occurring are one in 3 billion, highlighting that where the DNA integrates may not be random. Story continues below advertisement “There’s likely hotspots for this,” he told The Epoch Times, highlighting that in the human genome, jumping genes—short segments of DNA sequences—tend to “jump” into highly activated areas of DNA. Highly activated DNA tends to play important roles in the human body. The DNA integration into chromosome 12 occurred within the FAIM2 gene. Once activated, this gene creates a protein involved in programmed cell death. Since cancer cells evade cell death, the integration at chromosome 12 may be a survival-driven change. Vaccine DNA Is Active in the Cells Mr. McKernan said he believes that vaccine DNA is highly active in cancer cells. His sequencing machine detected the DNA of cancer cells 30 times but detected spike DNA 3,000 times. Not only did he detect much higher levels of vaccine DNA, but he also detected new variants in certain segments of the vaccine DNA. Story continues below advertisement These new DNA variations were not observed in unvaccinated cancer cells nor in the vaccine not exposed to the cancer cells. Mr. McKernan said he believes that these new gene variants likely occurred because the cancer cell made copies of the vaccine DNA and created small errors. What he and his team have found contradicts the latest arguments from fact-checkers claiming that the DNA from the mRNA vaccines cannot get into the cell, nor can it be active, he said. DNA Contamination From mRNA Vaccine Manufacturing DNA is present in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines because of the manufacturing process. This has been verified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Canada, and the European Medicines Agency. The mRNA vaccines are made from DNA; some of this DNA persists in the final product because of insufficient clearance. Initially, Pfizer reported that it would use a PCR machine to produce the DNA for its mRNA vaccine. The PCR machine first makes many copies of DNA, which is then sequenced into RNA. However, because this process wouldn’t be fast enough to meet demands, the vaccine manufacturers switched to using bacteria to mass-produce DNA as the template for the mRNA vaccine. In this process, vaccine manufacturers introduce bacterial DNA containing the vaccine spike sequences. The bacteria make many copies of this spike DNA as they divide. This spike DNA is then harvested and transcribed into mRNA in a machine. The mRNA is then packaged into lipid nanoparticles for use in vaccination. However, some bacterial DNA containing spike protein and other sequences could be packaged into lipid nanoparticles during the process, which would then be transported into cells during vaccination. Mr. McKernan’s earlier works have demonstrated this. Works by molecular virologist David Speicher have shown that the amount of DNA in the mRNA vaccine vials is higher than the FDA’s allowable threshold of 10 nanograms per vaccine dose. Mr. McKernan highlighted that compared with previous vaccines, mainly composed of naked DNA that had difficulty entering the cells, the DNA carried in the mRNA vaccines presents greater health risks, as it is packed into lipid nanoparticles and delivered straight into the cells. https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/covid-vaccine-gene-could-integrate-into-human-cancer-cells-researcher-5604184
    WWW.THEEPOCHTIMES.COM
    COVID Vaccine Gene Could Integrate Into Human Cancer Cells: Researcher
    What Mr. McKernan and his team have found contradicts the latest arguments from fact-checkers.
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  • NEW ARTICLE: The Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton has been diagnosed with Cancer - there is a high probability she has Turbo Cancer, caused by COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines she took in 2021.

    What are the most likely mRNA Induced Turbo Cancers that would require major abdominal surgery and "preventative chemotherapy"?

    1. Turbo Colon Cancer - one of most common
    2. Turbo Ovarian Cancer - on the rise, poor prognosis
    3. Turbo Uterine Cancer - endometrial or sarcoma
    4. Rare Turbo Cancers - appendix, gallbladder, pancreas, gastric

    I go through each of these Turbo Cancer scenarios in detail in my article.

    Turbo Colon Cancer would be the most common scenario, it is the top 5 cancer that occurs following vaccination with Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines.

    Turbo Colon Cancer is skyrocketing and presents now in younger and younger men and women. It grows rapidly and often doesn't respond to standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy regimens. Immunotherapy also doesn't work, which tends to shock Oncologists.

    Turbo Ovarian Cancer is on the rise in younger women. These often present as ovarian cysts and in many cases are initially assumed to be benign.

    Many cases of Turbo Ovarian Cancer have been ignored by doctors until they were so large that they had to be surgically removed - and only then is cancer discovered. These have a poor prognosis.

    Turbo Uterine cancer is also skyrocketing and this could present with abdominal pain or bleeding, and thought initially to be benign tumors like fibroids. These are either endometrial cancers or sarcomas.

    Rare Turbo Cancers in the abdomen would include appendix, gallbladder, pancreas, gastric, liver.

    Appendix can present as appendicitis, gallbladder as acute cholecystitis - upon removal, cancer can be discovered, hidden and unexpected. These are not "major abdominal surgeries", however, so they are less likely.

    My hypothesis and concern is that the major abdominal surgery The Princess of Wales had was a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy and the cancer is either an Ovarian cancer or a Uterine cancer that was discovered unexpectedly after pathological examination of the surgical specimen.

    The need for "preventative chemotherapy" suggests a Turbo Ovarian Cancer, or a more advanced stage Turbo Uterine Cancer (or more aggressive subtypes such as Uterine carcinosarcomas, clear cell cancers, or serous cancers) which would also require chemotherapy.

    If The Princess of Wales is suffering from Turbo Ovarian Cancer or an advanced or aggressive Turbo Uterine Cancer, she will need a much more comprehensive Cancer Treatment plan than her UK Oncologists will offer her.

    Turbo Cancers in general don't respond to standard chemotherapy, radiotherapy or immunotherapy regimens.

    This is especially true for Turbo Ovarian Cancers.

    The Princess will need a Treatment plan that addresses some of the unique characteristics of mRNA Induced Turbo Cancer.

    This will include a spike protein “detoxification” protocol (that involves spike protein breakdown agents such as Nattokinase and spike protein binding agents with anti-cancer properties such as Quercetin, Olive Leaf, Nigella Sativa or Curcumin)

    as well as an “Alternative treatment plan” that includes high dose Ivermectin and high dose Fenbendazole/Mebendazole/Albendazole.

    She must also eliminate sugar from her diet, as cancer thrives on sugar, and consider certain foods with powerful anti-cancer properties (Soursop, Turkey Tail mushroom, etc are great examples)

    I hope The Princess of Wales can surround herself with doctors who didn’t abandon their Hippocratic Oath during the COVID-19 pandemic (unfortunately vast majority did, including virtually all Oncologists).

    She also needs doctors who understand the very real and dangerous phenomenon of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Induced Turbo Cancer.

    William Makis MD

    ROBINMG 🚀
    NEW ARTICLE: The Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton has been diagnosed with Cancer - there is a high probability she has Turbo Cancer, caused by COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines she took in 2021. What are the most likely mRNA Induced Turbo Cancers that would require major abdominal surgery and "preventative chemotherapy"? 1. Turbo Colon Cancer - one of most common 2. Turbo Ovarian Cancer - on the rise, poor prognosis 3. Turbo Uterine Cancer - endometrial or sarcoma 4. Rare Turbo Cancers - appendix, gallbladder, pancreas, gastric I go through each of these Turbo Cancer scenarios in detail in my article. Turbo Colon Cancer would be the most common scenario, it is the top 5 cancer that occurs following vaccination with Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines. Turbo Colon Cancer is skyrocketing and presents now in younger and younger men and women. It grows rapidly and often doesn't respond to standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy regimens. Immunotherapy also doesn't work, which tends to shock Oncologists. Turbo Ovarian Cancer is on the rise in younger women. These often present as ovarian cysts and in many cases are initially assumed to be benign. Many cases of Turbo Ovarian Cancer have been ignored by doctors until they were so large that they had to be surgically removed - and only then is cancer discovered. These have a poor prognosis. Turbo Uterine cancer is also skyrocketing and this could present with abdominal pain or bleeding, and thought initially to be benign tumors like fibroids. These are either endometrial cancers or sarcomas. Rare Turbo Cancers in the abdomen would include appendix, gallbladder, pancreas, gastric, liver. Appendix can present as appendicitis, gallbladder as acute cholecystitis - upon removal, cancer can be discovered, hidden and unexpected. These are not "major abdominal surgeries", however, so they are less likely. My hypothesis and concern is that the major abdominal surgery The Princess of Wales had was a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy and the cancer is either an Ovarian cancer or a Uterine cancer that was discovered unexpectedly after pathological examination of the surgical specimen. The need for "preventative chemotherapy" suggests a Turbo Ovarian Cancer, or a more advanced stage Turbo Uterine Cancer (or more aggressive subtypes such as Uterine carcinosarcomas, clear cell cancers, or serous cancers) which would also require chemotherapy. If The Princess of Wales is suffering from Turbo Ovarian Cancer or an advanced or aggressive Turbo Uterine Cancer, she will need a much more comprehensive Cancer Treatment plan than her UK Oncologists will offer her. Turbo Cancers in general don't respond to standard chemotherapy, radiotherapy or immunotherapy regimens. This is especially true for Turbo Ovarian Cancers. The Princess will need a Treatment plan that addresses some of the unique characteristics of mRNA Induced Turbo Cancer. This will include a spike protein “detoxification” protocol (that involves spike protein breakdown agents such as Nattokinase and spike protein binding agents with anti-cancer properties such as Quercetin, Olive Leaf, Nigella Sativa or Curcumin) as well as an “Alternative treatment plan” that includes high dose Ivermectin and high dose Fenbendazole/Mebendazole/Albendazole. She must also eliminate sugar from her diet, as cancer thrives on sugar, and consider certain foods with powerful anti-cancer properties (Soursop, Turkey Tail mushroom, etc are great examples) I hope The Princess of Wales can surround herself with doctors who didn’t abandon their Hippocratic Oath during the COVID-19 pandemic (unfortunately vast majority did, including virtually all Oncologists). She also needs doctors who understand the very real and dangerous phenomenon of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Induced Turbo Cancer. William Makis MD ROBINMG 🚀
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  • FDA Loses its War on Ivermectin: Agrees to Remove All Related Social Media Content and Consumer Advisories on Ivermectin Usage for COVID-19
    by Jim Hᴏft Mar. 22, 2024 8:30 am
    In December 2021, the FDA warned Americans not to use Ivermectin, which “is intended for animals” to treat or prevent COVID-19.

    “Never use medications intended for animals on yourself or other people. Animal ivermectin products are very different from those approved for humans. Use of animal ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous,” FDA said at the time.

    This was a very controversial statement at the time since the FDA pushed the drug on African migrants back in 2015, and the drug was praised in several scientific journals.

    There have now been 101 Ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies that show a 62% lower risk in early treatment in COVID-19 patients.

    New Deals At The Gateway Pundit Discounts Page At MyPillow – Up to 71% Off With Promo Code TGP

    A group of brave doctors had filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the agencies’ unlawful attempts to block the use of ivermectin in treating COVID-19.

    The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Southern District of Texas in Galveston, argues that the FDA has overstepped its authority and unjustifiably interfered with their medical practice.

    The plaintiffs, Drs. Mary Talley Bowden, Paul E. Marik, and Robert L. Apter, are contesting the FDA’s portrayal of ivermectin as dangerous for human consumption. They note that the FDA has approved ivermectin for human use since 1996 for a variety of diseases. However, they allege that with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA began releasing documents and social media posts discouraging the use of the anti-viral drug for COVID-19 treatment.

    “We’re suing the FDA for lying to the public about ivermectin,” said Dr. Bowden.

    Claims were made that the initial article misrepresented the law by stating the FDA’s official stance against Ivermectin use without mentioning that doctors were allowed to administer the medicine.

    U.S. law is cited in the complaint, including the provision that the FDA “may not interfere with the authority of a health care provider to prescribe or administer any legally marked device to a patient for any condition or disease within a legitimate health care practitioner-patient relationship.”

    On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly agreed to remove all its previous social media posts and consumer advisories that specifically addressed the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.

    “FDA loses its war on ivermectin and agrees to remove all social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and COVID, including its most popular tweet in FDA history. This landmark case sets an important precedent in limiting FDA overreach into the doctor-patient relationship,” Dr. Bowden wrote on her social media.

    Emily Post News reported:

    The FDA agreed to delete the Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts from August 21, 2021 that read, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (A screencap of the X/twitter one is above and still online here.)

    It will also remove the Twitter post (below) from April 26, 2022 that reads, “Hold your horses, y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.

    Further, the FDA will delete all other social media posts on FDA accounts that link to its website (below) called “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.”

    It will “retire” this website (called a consumer update) originally posted on March 5, 2021 and revised on September 7, 2021. The FDA retains the right to post a revised update.

    Bowden said she and her co-plaintiffs Dr. Paul E. Marik and Dr. Robert L. Apter decided to drop the lawsuit they got what they wanted.

    “After nearly two years and a resounding rebuke by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the FDA has agreed to remove its misleading social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and Covid-19,” said Bowden.

    Trending: MAGA Beauty Isabella DeLuca’s Arrest Is Proof Positive That Biden’s Weaponized Justice System Has Become Outright Despotic Against Political Dissidents


    The Gateway Pundit previously reported that during a hearing, the agency’s lawyers argued that the FDA was only giving advice and it was not mandatory when it told people to “stop” taking Ivermectin for COVID-19.

    “The cited statements were not directives,” said Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers. “They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin.”

    “They use informal language, that is true… It’s conversational but not mandatory,” he continued.

    However, the statement from the lawyer contradicted the FDA’s social media post, stating, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” and another tweet says, “Hold your horses, y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.”

    Both tweets displayed the title of “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19” and included a link to that publication.

    Last year, Doctors Mary Talley Bowden, Paul Marik, & Robert Apter appeared in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as part of their lawsuit.

    “The FDA is not your doctor. Yesterday we took them to court to remind them of that,” Dr. Bowden wrote.

    “A pharmacist cites CDC and US FDA as why she will continue to deny filling prescriptions for ivermectin. On Tuesday, the FDA’s attorney declared the FDA has no problem with doctors prescribing ivermectin off-label. It’s time for them to make a formal announcement and set the record straight,” Bowden wrote on Thursday.

    During the oral argument, Ashley Cheung Honold, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA stated that the agency “explicitly recognizes” that doctors do have the authority to administer ivermectin to treat COVID.

    “”FDA explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” said Honold.

    “FDA made these statements in response to multiple reports of consumers being hospitalized, after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses, which is available for purchase over the counter without the need for prescription,” Honold said.

    “In some contexts, those words could be construed as a command,” Ms. Honold said. “But in this context, where FDA was simply using these words in the context of a quippy tweet meant to share its informational article, those statements do not rise to the level of a command.”

    “FDA is clearly acknowledging that doctors have the authority to prescribe human ivermectin to treat COVID. So they are not interfering with the authority of doctors to prescribe drugs or to practice medicine,” she said.

    It can be recalled that Houston Methodist launched an investigation into Bowden and suspended her for defying health authorities and exercising free speech.

    The hospital excoriated Bowden for “using her social media accounts to express her personal opinions about the COVID-19 vaccine and treatments,” NBC News reports. The suspension barred the physician from admitting or treating patients at the hospital.

    Bowden repeatedly warned that it is “wrong” to mandate the experimental mRNA vaccines and continuously touted Ivermectin as a safe and effective treatment amid threats from public health officials against prescribing the drug.

    Bowden was forced to resign. In her resignation letter, Bowden doubled down on the efficacy of Ivermectin.

    “I have worked hard to provide early treatment for victims of COVID-19. My efforts have been successful. I have treated more than 200 COVID-19 patients, including many with co-morbidities, and none of these patients have required hospitalization. This is a testament to the success of my treatment methods,” she wrote. “Throughout this pandemic, there has been no FDA-approved treatment for COVID. Therefore I have done my best to care for patients and save lives in the absence of a clear scientific consensus.”

    “Early treatment must still be part of any strategy for patient care. That is why physicians and hospitals should pay more attention to medications such as Ivermectin, which significant research and my clinical experience indicate is effective,” she continued. “I have decided to part ways with Houston Methodist because of the accusation that I have been spreading “dangerous information.” This is false and defamatory. I do not spread misinformation, and my opinions are supported by science. There is substantial evidence for the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID-19, and no evidence for serious or fatal side effects associated with the doses used to treat COVID-19.”


    The U.S. FDA was sued over its false statements about ivermectin and now has to remove those false statements from their social media posts https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/fda-loses-its-war-ivermectin-agrees-remove-all/. I wonder if the Singapore MOH is following this development.


    FDA Loses its War on Ivermectin: Agrees to Remove All Related Social Media Content and Consumer Advisories on Ivermectin Usage for COVID-19 by Jim Hᴏft Mar. 22, 2024 8:30 am In December 2021, the FDA warned Americans not to use Ivermectin, which “is intended for animals” to treat or prevent COVID-19. “Never use medications intended for animals on yourself or other people. Animal ivermectin products are very different from those approved for humans. Use of animal ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous,” FDA said at the time. This was a very controversial statement at the time since the FDA pushed the drug on African migrants back in 2015, and the drug was praised in several scientific journals. There have now been 101 Ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies that show a 62% lower risk in early treatment in COVID-19 patients. New Deals At The Gateway Pundit Discounts Page At MyPillow – Up to 71% Off With Promo Code TGP A group of brave doctors had filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the agencies’ unlawful attempts to block the use of ivermectin in treating COVID-19. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Southern District of Texas in Galveston, argues that the FDA has overstepped its authority and unjustifiably interfered with their medical practice. The plaintiffs, Drs. Mary Talley Bowden, Paul E. Marik, and Robert L. Apter, are contesting the FDA’s portrayal of ivermectin as dangerous for human consumption. They note that the FDA has approved ivermectin for human use since 1996 for a variety of diseases. However, they allege that with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA began releasing documents and social media posts discouraging the use of the anti-viral drug for COVID-19 treatment. “We’re suing the FDA for lying to the public about ivermectin,” said Dr. Bowden. Claims were made that the initial article misrepresented the law by stating the FDA’s official stance against Ivermectin use without mentioning that doctors were allowed to administer the medicine. U.S. law is cited in the complaint, including the provision that the FDA “may not interfere with the authority of a health care provider to prescribe or administer any legally marked device to a patient for any condition or disease within a legitimate health care practitioner-patient relationship.” On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly agreed to remove all its previous social media posts and consumer advisories that specifically addressed the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. “FDA loses its war on ivermectin and agrees to remove all social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and COVID, including its most popular tweet in FDA history. This landmark case sets an important precedent in limiting FDA overreach into the doctor-patient relationship,” Dr. Bowden wrote on her social media. Emily Post News reported: The FDA agreed to delete the Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts from August 21, 2021 that read, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (A screencap of the X/twitter one is above and still online here.) It will also remove the Twitter post (below) from April 26, 2022 that reads, “Hold your horses, y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19. Further, the FDA will delete all other social media posts on FDA accounts that link to its website (below) called “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.” It will “retire” this website (called a consumer update) originally posted on March 5, 2021 and revised on September 7, 2021. The FDA retains the right to post a revised update. Bowden said she and her co-plaintiffs Dr. Paul E. Marik and Dr. Robert L. Apter decided to drop the lawsuit they got what they wanted. “After nearly two years and a resounding rebuke by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the FDA has agreed to remove its misleading social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and Covid-19,” said Bowden. Trending: MAGA Beauty Isabella DeLuca’s Arrest Is Proof Positive That Biden’s Weaponized Justice System Has Become Outright Despotic Against Political Dissidents The Gateway Pundit previously reported that during a hearing, the agency’s lawyers argued that the FDA was only giving advice and it was not mandatory when it told people to “stop” taking Ivermectin for COVID-19. “The cited statements were not directives,” said Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers. “They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin.” “They use informal language, that is true… It’s conversational but not mandatory,” he continued. However, the statement from the lawyer contradicted the FDA’s social media post, stating, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” and another tweet says, “Hold your horses, y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.” Both tweets displayed the title of “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19” and included a link to that publication. Last year, Doctors Mary Talley Bowden, Paul Marik, & Robert Apter appeared in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as part of their lawsuit. “The FDA is not your doctor. Yesterday we took them to court to remind them of that,” Dr. Bowden wrote. “A pharmacist cites CDC and US FDA as why she will continue to deny filling prescriptions for ivermectin. On Tuesday, the FDA’s attorney declared the FDA has no problem with doctors prescribing ivermectin off-label. It’s time for them to make a formal announcement and set the record straight,” Bowden wrote on Thursday. During the oral argument, Ashley Cheung Honold, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA stated that the agency “explicitly recognizes” that doctors do have the authority to administer ivermectin to treat COVID. “”FDA explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” said Honold. “FDA made these statements in response to multiple reports of consumers being hospitalized, after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses, which is available for purchase over the counter without the need for prescription,” Honold said. “In some contexts, those words could be construed as a command,” Ms. Honold said. “But in this context, where FDA was simply using these words in the context of a quippy tweet meant to share its informational article, those statements do not rise to the level of a command.” “FDA is clearly acknowledging that doctors have the authority to prescribe human ivermectin to treat COVID. So they are not interfering with the authority of doctors to prescribe drugs or to practice medicine,” she said. It can be recalled that Houston Methodist launched an investigation into Bowden and suspended her for defying health authorities and exercising free speech. The hospital excoriated Bowden for “using her social media accounts to express her personal opinions about the COVID-19 vaccine and treatments,” NBC News reports. The suspension barred the physician from admitting or treating patients at the hospital. Bowden repeatedly warned that it is “wrong” to mandate the experimental mRNA vaccines and continuously touted Ivermectin as a safe and effective treatment amid threats from public health officials against prescribing the drug. Bowden was forced to resign. In her resignation letter, Bowden doubled down on the efficacy of Ivermectin. “I have worked hard to provide early treatment for victims of COVID-19. My efforts have been successful. I have treated more than 200 COVID-19 patients, including many with co-morbidities, and none of these patients have required hospitalization. This is a testament to the success of my treatment methods,” she wrote. “Throughout this pandemic, there has been no FDA-approved treatment for COVID. Therefore I have done my best to care for patients and save lives in the absence of a clear scientific consensus.” “Early treatment must still be part of any strategy for patient care. That is why physicians and hospitals should pay more attention to medications such as Ivermectin, which significant research and my clinical experience indicate is effective,” she continued. “I have decided to part ways with Houston Methodist because of the accusation that I have been spreading “dangerous information.” This is false and defamatory. I do not spread misinformation, and my opinions are supported by science. There is substantial evidence for the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID-19, and no evidence for serious or fatal side effects associated with the doses used to treat COVID-19.” The U.S. FDA was sued over its false statements about ivermectin and now has to remove those false statements from their social media posts https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/fda-loses-its-war-ivermectin-agrees-remove-all/. I wonder if the Singapore MOH is following this development.
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2188 Views
  • Vladimir Putin: Satanism’s political power is waning
    When Putin mentioned the “Western vampire ball,” he conveyed a profound message.

    Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorMarch 19, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

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

    …by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor

    No, Putin did not use the word “satanism” this time, but the words he did use are close enough. Recently, Putin explicitly referred to the ‘Western vampire ball’ and highlighted its imminent collapse before our eyes. First of all, what exactly is a vampire? Let’s consider Dracula, for example. How does he thrive?

    Dracula sustains himself by drinking the blood of others, his existence entirely reliant on this gruesome act. This gives him a perverse sense of satisfaction. Therefore, when Putin mentioned the “Western vampire ball,” he conveyed a profound message. Consider how certain groups, such as Jewish Satanists, have metaphysically “drunk the blood” of people across the Middle East. Are they content?

    No, because they are Satanists. Their insatiable thirst for blood cannot be satisfied, even with the vast resources of the Middle East and much of the world. When Putin entered the political arena a few years ago, he undoubtedly brought a breath of fresh air everywhere.

    Additionally, when he won the election by a landslide, we know that Jewish Satanists in the United States, Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and even within NATO, must have been trembling because Putin isn’t going to surrender to these ethnic cleansers and nation destroyers. According to Putin,

    “Western elites have been ‘tearing to pieces [the] poor peoples of Africa’ and have exploited Latin America and Asia for 500 years.”

    Putin doesn’t make statements that he can’t back up. One could argue that he is well-versed in history and political ideology, hence he knows that statements like this would agitate Satanists. But is the statement false? Just take a look at the twentieth century itself, and the evidence clearly shows that Putin is telling the truth. Putin elaborated:

    “For centuries, they got used to stuffing their stomachs with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must realize that this ‘ball of vampires’ is coming to an end.”

    From Russia Today:

    “Hawkish recent rhetoric by French President Emmanual Macron may have been an emotional outburst after his country retreated from its former colonial domains in Africa, Putin suggested. Paris has accused Moscow of undermining it, although Putin insisted that Russia ‘did not squeeze anyone out’ of the continent.”

    Putin has more to say about Satanists who persist in drinking other people’s blood, particularly in Ukraine:

    “They were sending their people into the meat grinder. Soldiers were literally barefoot recently [due to supply problems]. For us [the Ukraine conflict] is a matter of life and death; for them it’s a matter of improving their tactical position [globally and in Europe].”



    In other words, Putin isn’t going to surrender to Jewish Satanists and Neocon shills. He will continue the fight to the end.

    Two thumbs up for Vladimir Putin.

    First published on March 18, 2024.


    ATTENTION READERS

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

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

    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/vladimir-putin-satanisms-political-power-is-waning/
    Vladimir Putin: Satanism’s political power is waning When Putin mentioned the “Western vampire ball,” he conveyed a profound message. Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorMarch 19, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. …by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor No, Putin did not use the word “satanism” this time, but the words he did use are close enough. Recently, Putin explicitly referred to the ‘Western vampire ball’ and highlighted its imminent collapse before our eyes. First of all, what exactly is a vampire? Let’s consider Dracula, for example. How does he thrive? Dracula sustains himself by drinking the blood of others, his existence entirely reliant on this gruesome act. This gives him a perverse sense of satisfaction. Therefore, when Putin mentioned the “Western vampire ball,” he conveyed a profound message. Consider how certain groups, such as Jewish Satanists, have metaphysically “drunk the blood” of people across the Middle East. Are they content? No, because they are Satanists. Their insatiable thirst for blood cannot be satisfied, even with the vast resources of the Middle East and much of the world. When Putin entered the political arena a few years ago, he undoubtedly brought a breath of fresh air everywhere. Additionally, when he won the election by a landslide, we know that Jewish Satanists in the United States, Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and even within NATO, must have been trembling because Putin isn’t going to surrender to these ethnic cleansers and nation destroyers. According to Putin, “Western elites have been ‘tearing to pieces [the] poor peoples of Africa’ and have exploited Latin America and Asia for 500 years.” Putin doesn’t make statements that he can’t back up. One could argue that he is well-versed in history and political ideology, hence he knows that statements like this would agitate Satanists. But is the statement false? Just take a look at the twentieth century itself, and the evidence clearly shows that Putin is telling the truth. Putin elaborated: “For centuries, they got used to stuffing their stomachs with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must realize that this ‘ball of vampires’ is coming to an end.” From Russia Today: “Hawkish recent rhetoric by French President Emmanual Macron may have been an emotional outburst after his country retreated from its former colonial domains in Africa, Putin suggested. Paris has accused Moscow of undermining it, although Putin insisted that Russia ‘did not squeeze anyone out’ of the continent.” Putin has more to say about Satanists who persist in drinking other people’s blood, particularly in Ukraine: “They were sending their people into the meat grinder. Soldiers were literally barefoot recently [due to supply problems]. For us [the Ukraine conflict] is a matter of life and death; for them it’s a matter of improving their tactical position [globally and in Europe].” In other words, Putin isn’t going to surrender to Jewish Satanists and Neocon shills. He will continue the fight to the end. Two thumbs up for Vladimir Putin. First published on March 18, 2024. ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/vladimir-putin-satanisms-political-power-is-waning/
    WWW.VTFOREIGNPOLICY.COM
    Vladimir Putin: Satanism’s political power is waning
    When Putin mentioned the “Western vampire ball,” he conveyed a profound message.
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  • ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 169: Israel kills 7 aid-seekers in northern Gaza, 4 children in Rafah as siege of al-Shifa Hospital enters sixth day
    Israel continued its airstrikes on Rafah, killing four children, while in northern Gaza Israel turned back food aid for the second time in a week and killed at least 7 Palestinian aid-seekers near the Kuwaiti roundabout.

    Mondoweiss Palestine BureauMarch 23, 2024
    Injured Palestinians, including children, brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza following Israeli attacks on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images)
    Injured Palestinians, including children, brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza following Israeli attacks on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images)
    Casualties

    32,070+ killed* and at least 74,412 wounded in the Gaza Strip.
    435+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.**
    Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147.
    590 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.***
    *Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel on March 22, 2024. Some rights groups put the death toll number closer to 35,000 when accounting for those presumed dead.

    ** The death toll in West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to PA’s Ministry of Health on March 6, this is the latest figure.

    *** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”

    Advertisement

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    Key Developments

    Israeli airstrikes on Rafah continue, killing four children in a residential home and injuring several others.
    UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres visits Rafah, calls blocking of aid “moral outrage.”
    Israeli siege of al-Shifa Hospital enters sixth day, army reportedly sets buildings on fire around hospital, tortures and kills civilians who attempt to evacuate.
    Israeli army kills at least 7 Palestinian aid-seekers at aid distribution point near Kuwaiti roundabout in northern Gaza.
    New UN Security Council resolution calling for immediate ceasefire postponed to Monday, March 25.
    Martyred Palestinian, who injured 7 Israeli soldiers near Kufr Ni’ma ambushed soldiers after chase, targeted soldiers with sniper fire during five-hour standoff, according to Ynet.
    136 Palestinian journalists in Gaza killed since October, says Gaza media office.
    Siege of al-Shifa enters sixth day, airstrikes on Rafah kill 4 children

    Israel’s siege on al-Shifa Hospital has entered its sixth consecutive day. The government media office in Gaza released a statement saying it holds the U.S. and the international community responsible for Israel’s “crime” perpetrated against al-Shifa’s doctors, staff, patients, and the displaced people sheltering at the medical compound. As reported by Al Jazeera, the media office said that the Israeli army was bombing buildings inside the medical complex and engaging in acts of torture and extrajudicial field executions.

    The Israeli army claims it has arrested over 170 Hamas fighters and 800 suspects at al-Shifa. Moreover, according to Al Jazeera, the Israeli army has reportedly set fire to the buildings around the hospital.

    The siege on al-Shifa comes in the context of Israel’s attempt to target civil employees and members of the police in Gaza who were based in al-Shifa, in an attempt to sow civil unrest and cause a breakdown in social order in the north. Claiming these civil employees to be “top Hamas operatives,” Israel assassinated the Director of the Operations of the Gaza Police, Faiq Mabhouh, on March 18. Mabhouh was an instrumental figure in successfully coordinating the delivery of humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in cooperation with international organizations, local tribes, and UNRWA. In light of the widespread compliance of the populace with the directives of Gaza’s civil employees, Israel has laid siege to al-Shifa, where many of them are based. Israel continues to claim that these civil and police employees are Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, despite offering no evidence to back up its claims.

    The Gaza government media office said that the Israeli army has threatened al-Shifa’s hospital’s staff and displaced civilians that the buildings they are staying in will be bombed in the event that they do not evacuate. The media office based its statement on testimonies from people who remain stranded inside the medical compound as Israel lays siege to it, asserting that those who have evacuated the buildings are either arrested, tortured, or killed, as reported by Middle East Eye.

    MEE also reported that six wounded patients in the hospital died amid the Israeli siege due to the lack of medical care, quoting the Gaza Ministry of Health as saying that “besieged medical teams and patients are appealing to UN institutions and the international community to intervene urgently to save their lives.”

    In southern Gaza, Israel continued its airstrikes on Rafah and Khan Younis, killing several civilians. In one airstrike on the north of the city of Rafah, five civilians were killed, four of them children, following the bombing of a two-story residential building in the Mirage area, reports Wafa.

    The number of casualties from Israeli airstrikes and shelling in the last 24 hours has risen to 72 people killed and 114 injured.

    Meanwhile, on Friday, the Israeli army released a statement on X saying that it had opened an investigation into the incident of the deliberate killing of four unarmed Palestinian men in civilian clothing in Khan Younis last February by an Israeli attack drone, the footage of which recently came to light after Al Jazeera obtained from sources in Gaza. The footage of the deliberate killing of the unarmed men made shockwaves, highlighting Israel’s deliberate policy of killing civilians.

    Gaza drone video shows killing of Palestinians in Israeli air attack | Al Jazeera Newsfeed
    ‘The unbearable cannot become the new normal’

    In a statement on X, Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said that food aid had been denied to northern Gaza for the second time in a week.

    “Today, the Israeli Authorities denied another UNRWA convoy with much needed food supplies from going to the north where people are on the verge of famine,” the UNRWA chief said. “The last time UNRWA was able to send food aid to the north was nearly 2 month [sic] ago.”

    Lazzarini went on to say that Israel the “man made hunger & looming famine” in Gaza could still be averted if Israel allowed “delivering food aid at scale to the north including via UNRWA, the largest humanitarian organisation in Gaza.”

    “Meanwhile, children will continue to die of malnutrition & dehydration under our watch,” he added. “The unbearable cannot become the new normal.”

    By late afternoon, Al Jazeera correspondents reported that Israeli shelling on Palestinian aid-seekers at the Kuwaiti roundabout had killed at least seven people. This latest attack on civilians at aid distribution points comes after the assassination of Faiq Mabhouh and Gaza’s civil employees, who were instrumental in organizing orderly deliveries of aid to Gaza without resulting in these Israeli attacks on starving Palestinians. The most infamous of such attacks was the “Flour Massacre” on March 3, which killed over 100 people.

    Meanwhile, 7,000 trucks carrying humanitarian aid and food aid are currently stationed outside the Rafah crossing, waiting to enter the besieged Gaza Strip. As reported by Al Jazeera, the governor of North Sinai, Muhammad Shousha, said that the Israeli inspection procedures are holding up the flow of trucks into Gaza.

    Shousha received UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres at al-Arish Airport in the Egyptian Sinai for the UN chief’s planned visit to the Rafah border crossing later today. During his press conference at the Rafah crossing, Guterres lambasted the blocking of aid to Gaza as a “moral outrage” and said that he had made his trip to the border to shed light on the pain of Palestinians in Gaza.

    New UN Security Council resolution postponed to Monday

    Following China and Russia’s vetoing of the U.S.-led draft resolution for a Gaza ceasefire at the UN Security Council, a new resolution demanding an “immediate ceasefire” during Ramadan in advance of a more “permanent sustainable ceasefire” has been postponed to Monday, March 25, according to diplomatic sources that spoke to AFP, as reported on Al Mayadeen.

    In the earlier U.S.-led draft, China and Russia used their veto against the resolution, with Russia citing it as a “hypocritical spectacle” that contained an “effective green light” for Israel to continue its invasion of Rafah, while China believed that the resolution “dodged the most central issue, that of a ceasefire” through the use of nebulous language.”

    The ambiguous language to which Russia and China referred was the resolution’s emphasis on the “imperative of an immediate and sustained ceasefire,” instead of demanding its implementation in the short term. The U.S. resolution also condemned the Hamas-led attacks on October 7.

    West Bank: resistance operation and record settlement expansion

    In the West Bank, Israeli settlement building has reached a record high. As reported by Middle East Eye, the United Nations and Israeli rights group Peace Now have asserted that in 2023, Israel expanded its settlements at a record pace in the occupied West Bank. According to Peace Now, ten out of the 26 illegal outposts established in the West Bank were built after October 7, resulting in the forcible displacement of 21 Palestinian communities (16 of which were uprooted since the outbreak of the war). Meanwhile, UN human rights chief Volker Turk asserted that the record expansion of settlements risks eliminating the chances for a Palestinian state, and that 24,300 new settlement housing units were built in 2023, a record high since the UN began monitoring in 2017.

    Yesterday, a Palestinian man from the village of Kufr Ni’ma, west of Ramallah, launched a shooting operation against Israeli soldiers, injuring seven soldiers before an Israeli attack helicopter fired missiles on his position in the hills, killing him. New details have emerged since the incident that shed light on the nature of the resistance operation and detail the expertise of the shooter, identified as Mujahid Mansour.

    According to reports by Ynet and Quds News Network, Mansour had opened fire on a settler bus, resulting in no fatalities, before retreating and being chased by Israeli army vehicles. It would seem that Mansour was leading the soldiers into an ambush, perching himself on top of a hill and hiding behind trees and bushes. Mansour then proceeded to intermittently engage the forces with a sniper rifle from a distance, resulting in a standoff that lasted for five hours due to the inability of Israeli drones and helicopters to identify him as a result of poor weather. Mansour was able to down an Israeli drone with his rifle during the standoff, while at other times, he fell silent and maintained his cover, while the Israeli troops were reluctant to advance. An Israeli helicopter eventually launched a missile where he was hiding when the weather cleared. Reports have since emerged that Mansour was a member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces.

    In preparation for the punitive demolition of Mansour’s family home, the Israeli army took measurements for the house on Saturday, Wafa reported. This is part of Israel’s larger policy of punitive home demolitions, in which the Israeli army destroys the homes of the families of Palestinians who launched attacks against Israel, which has been described as a policy of collective punishment.

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

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

    Support our journalists with a donation today.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-169-israel-kills-7-aid-seekers-in-northern-gaza-4-children-in-rafah-as-siege-of-al-shifa-hospital-enters-sixth-day/
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 169: Israel kills 7 aid-seekers in northern Gaza, 4 children in Rafah as siege of al-Shifa Hospital enters sixth day Israel continued its airstrikes on Rafah, killing four children, while in northern Gaza Israel turned back food aid for the second time in a week and killed at least 7 Palestinian aid-seekers near the Kuwaiti roundabout. Mondoweiss Palestine BureauMarch 23, 2024 Injured Palestinians, including children, brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza following Israeli attacks on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images) Injured Palestinians, including children, brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza following Israeli attacks on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images) Casualties 32,070+ killed* and at least 74,412 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 435+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.** Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147. 590 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.*** *Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel on March 22, 2024. Some rights groups put the death toll number closer to 35,000 when accounting for those presumed dead. ** The death toll in West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to PA’s Ministry of Health on March 6, this is the latest figure. *** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Advertisement Subscribe to the Mondoweiss YouTube Channel! Key Developments Israeli airstrikes on Rafah continue, killing four children in a residential home and injuring several others. UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres visits Rafah, calls blocking of aid “moral outrage.” Israeli siege of al-Shifa Hospital enters sixth day, army reportedly sets buildings on fire around hospital, tortures and kills civilians who attempt to evacuate. Israeli army kills at least 7 Palestinian aid-seekers at aid distribution point near Kuwaiti roundabout in northern Gaza. New UN Security Council resolution calling for immediate ceasefire postponed to Monday, March 25. Martyred Palestinian, who injured 7 Israeli soldiers near Kufr Ni’ma ambushed soldiers after chase, targeted soldiers with sniper fire during five-hour standoff, according to Ynet. 136 Palestinian journalists in Gaza killed since October, says Gaza media office. Siege of al-Shifa enters sixth day, airstrikes on Rafah kill 4 children Israel’s siege on al-Shifa Hospital has entered its sixth consecutive day. The government media office in Gaza released a statement saying it holds the U.S. and the international community responsible for Israel’s “crime” perpetrated against al-Shifa’s doctors, staff, patients, and the displaced people sheltering at the medical compound. As reported by Al Jazeera, the media office said that the Israeli army was bombing buildings inside the medical complex and engaging in acts of torture and extrajudicial field executions. The Israeli army claims it has arrested over 170 Hamas fighters and 800 suspects at al-Shifa. Moreover, according to Al Jazeera, the Israeli army has reportedly set fire to the buildings around the hospital. The siege on al-Shifa comes in the context of Israel’s attempt to target civil employees and members of the police in Gaza who were based in al-Shifa, in an attempt to sow civil unrest and cause a breakdown in social order in the north. Claiming these civil employees to be “top Hamas operatives,” Israel assassinated the Director of the Operations of the Gaza Police, Faiq Mabhouh, on March 18. Mabhouh was an instrumental figure in successfully coordinating the delivery of humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in cooperation with international organizations, local tribes, and UNRWA. In light of the widespread compliance of the populace with the directives of Gaza’s civil employees, Israel has laid siege to al-Shifa, where many of them are based. Israel continues to claim that these civil and police employees are Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, despite offering no evidence to back up its claims. The Gaza government media office said that the Israeli army has threatened al-Shifa’s hospital’s staff and displaced civilians that the buildings they are staying in will be bombed in the event that they do not evacuate. The media office based its statement on testimonies from people who remain stranded inside the medical compound as Israel lays siege to it, asserting that those who have evacuated the buildings are either arrested, tortured, or killed, as reported by Middle East Eye. MEE also reported that six wounded patients in the hospital died amid the Israeli siege due to the lack of medical care, quoting the Gaza Ministry of Health as saying that “besieged medical teams and patients are appealing to UN institutions and the international community to intervene urgently to save their lives.” In southern Gaza, Israel continued its airstrikes on Rafah and Khan Younis, killing several civilians. In one airstrike on the north of the city of Rafah, five civilians were killed, four of them children, following the bombing of a two-story residential building in the Mirage area, reports Wafa. The number of casualties from Israeli airstrikes and shelling in the last 24 hours has risen to 72 people killed and 114 injured. Meanwhile, on Friday, the Israeli army released a statement on X saying that it had opened an investigation into the incident of the deliberate killing of four unarmed Palestinian men in civilian clothing in Khan Younis last February by an Israeli attack drone, the footage of which recently came to light after Al Jazeera obtained from sources in Gaza. The footage of the deliberate killing of the unarmed men made shockwaves, highlighting Israel’s deliberate policy of killing civilians. Gaza drone video shows killing of Palestinians in Israeli air attack | Al Jazeera Newsfeed ‘The unbearable cannot become the new normal’ In a statement on X, Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said that food aid had been denied to northern Gaza for the second time in a week. “Today, the Israeli Authorities denied another UNRWA convoy with much needed food supplies from going to the north where people are on the verge of famine,” the UNRWA chief said. “The last time UNRWA was able to send food aid to the north was nearly 2 month [sic] ago.” Lazzarini went on to say that Israel the “man made hunger & looming famine” in Gaza could still be averted if Israel allowed “delivering food aid at scale to the north including via UNRWA, the largest humanitarian organisation in Gaza.” “Meanwhile, children will continue to die of malnutrition & dehydration under our watch,” he added. “The unbearable cannot become the new normal.” By late afternoon, Al Jazeera correspondents reported that Israeli shelling on Palestinian aid-seekers at the Kuwaiti roundabout had killed at least seven people. This latest attack on civilians at aid distribution points comes after the assassination of Faiq Mabhouh and Gaza’s civil employees, who were instrumental in organizing orderly deliveries of aid to Gaza without resulting in these Israeli attacks on starving Palestinians. The most infamous of such attacks was the “Flour Massacre” on March 3, which killed over 100 people. Meanwhile, 7,000 trucks carrying humanitarian aid and food aid are currently stationed outside the Rafah crossing, waiting to enter the besieged Gaza Strip. As reported by Al Jazeera, the governor of North Sinai, Muhammad Shousha, said that the Israeli inspection procedures are holding up the flow of trucks into Gaza. Shousha received UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres at al-Arish Airport in the Egyptian Sinai for the UN chief’s planned visit to the Rafah border crossing later today. During his press conference at the Rafah crossing, Guterres lambasted the blocking of aid to Gaza as a “moral outrage” and said that he had made his trip to the border to shed light on the pain of Palestinians in Gaza. New UN Security Council resolution postponed to Monday Following China and Russia’s vetoing of the U.S.-led draft resolution for a Gaza ceasefire at the UN Security Council, a new resolution demanding an “immediate ceasefire” during Ramadan in advance of a more “permanent sustainable ceasefire” has been postponed to Monday, March 25, according to diplomatic sources that spoke to AFP, as reported on Al Mayadeen. In the earlier U.S.-led draft, China and Russia used their veto against the resolution, with Russia citing it as a “hypocritical spectacle” that contained an “effective green light” for Israel to continue its invasion of Rafah, while China believed that the resolution “dodged the most central issue, that of a ceasefire” through the use of nebulous language.” The ambiguous language to which Russia and China referred was the resolution’s emphasis on the “imperative of an immediate and sustained ceasefire,” instead of demanding its implementation in the short term. The U.S. resolution also condemned the Hamas-led attacks on October 7. West Bank: resistance operation and record settlement expansion In the West Bank, Israeli settlement building has reached a record high. As reported by Middle East Eye, the United Nations and Israeli rights group Peace Now have asserted that in 2023, Israel expanded its settlements at a record pace in the occupied West Bank. According to Peace Now, ten out of the 26 illegal outposts established in the West Bank were built after October 7, resulting in the forcible displacement of 21 Palestinian communities (16 of which were uprooted since the outbreak of the war). Meanwhile, UN human rights chief Volker Turk asserted that the record expansion of settlements risks eliminating the chances for a Palestinian state, and that 24,300 new settlement housing units were built in 2023, a record high since the UN began monitoring in 2017. Yesterday, a Palestinian man from the village of Kufr Ni’ma, west of Ramallah, launched a shooting operation against Israeli soldiers, injuring seven soldiers before an Israeli attack helicopter fired missiles on his position in the hills, killing him. New details have emerged since the incident that shed light on the nature of the resistance operation and detail the expertise of the shooter, identified as Mujahid Mansour. According to reports by Ynet and Quds News Network, Mansour had opened fire on a settler bus, resulting in no fatalities, before retreating and being chased by Israeli army vehicles. It would seem that Mansour was leading the soldiers into an ambush, perching himself on top of a hill and hiding behind trees and bushes. Mansour then proceeded to intermittently engage the forces with a sniper rifle from a distance, resulting in a standoff that lasted for five hours due to the inability of Israeli drones and helicopters to identify him as a result of poor weather. Mansour was able to down an Israeli drone with his rifle during the standoff, while at other times, he fell silent and maintained his cover, while the Israeli troops were reluctant to advance. An Israeli helicopter eventually launched a missile where he was hiding when the weather cleared. Reports have since emerged that Mansour was a member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces. In preparation for the punitive demolition of Mansour’s family home, the Israeli army took measurements for the house on Saturday, Wafa reported. This is part of Israel’s larger policy of punitive home demolitions, in which the Israeli army destroys the homes of the families of Palestinians who launched attacks against Israel, which has been described as a policy of collective punishment. BEFORE YOU GO – At Mondoweiss, we understand the power of telling Palestinian stories. For 17 years, we have pushed back when the mainstream media published lies or echoed politicians’ hateful rhetoric. Now, Palestinian voices are more important than ever. Our traffic has increased ten times since October 7, and we need your help to cover our increased expenses. Support our journalists with a donation today. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-169-israel-kills-7-aid-seekers-in-northern-gaza-4-children-in-rafah-as-siege-of-al-shifa-hospital-enters-sixth-day/
    MONDOWEISS.NET
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 169: Israel kills 7 aid-seekers in northern Gaza, 4 children in Rafah as siege of al-Shifa Hospital enters sixth day
    Israel continued its airstrikes on Rafah, killing four children, while in northern Gaza Israel turned back food aid for the second time in a week and killed at least 7 Palestinian aid-seekers near the Kuwaiti roundabout.
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  • Lawsuit Drops Bombshell on FDA’s Orwellian Lie About Ivermectin
    The FDA has lost its war on ivermectin and agreed to remove all related social media content and consumer advisories on ivermectin usage for COVID-19.

    vnninfluencersMarch 22, 2024
    This article originally appeared on The Gateway Pundit and was republished with permission.

    Guest post by Jim Hᴏft

    In December 2021, the FDA warned Americans not to use Ivermectin, which “is intended for animals” to treat or prevent COVID-19.

    “Never use medications intended for animals on yourself or other people. Animal ivermectin products are very different from those approved for humans. Use of animal ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous,” FDA said at the time.

    This was a very controversial statement at the time since the FDA pushed the drug on African migrants back in 2015, and the drug was praised in several scientific journals.

    There have now been 101 Ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies that show a 62% lower risk in early treatment in COVID-19 patients.



    A group of brave doctors had filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the agencies’ unlawful attempts to block the use of ivermectin in treating COVID-19.

    The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Southern District of Texas in Galveston, argues that the FDA has overstepped its authority and unjustifiably interfered with their medical practice.

    The plaintiffs, Drs. Mary Talley Bowden, Paul E. Marik, and Robert L. Apter, are contesting the FDA’s portrayal of ivermectin as dangerous for human consumption. They note that the FDA has approved ivermectin for human use since 1996 for a variety of diseases. However, they allege that with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA began releasing documents and social media posts discouraging the use of the anti-viral drug for COVID-19 treatment.

    “We’re suing the FDA for lying to the public about ivermectin,” said Dr. Bowden.

    Claims were made that the initial article misrepresented the law by stating the FDA’s official stance against Ivermectin use without mentioning that doctors were allowed to administer the medicine.

    U.S. law is cited in the complaint, including the provision that the FDA “may not interfere with the authority of a health care provider to prescribe or administer any legally marked device to a patient for any condition or disease within a legitimate health care practitioner-patient relationship.”

    On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly agreed to remove all its previous social media posts and consumer advisories that specifically addressed the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.

    “FDA loses its war on ivermectin and agrees to remove all social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and COVID, including its most popular tweet in FDA history. This landmark case sets an important precedent in limiting FDA overreach into the doctor-patient relationship,” Dr. Bowden wrote on her social media.

    The plaintiffs have recently received the signed court order and are preparing to issue a press release about it later today.


    The Gateway Pundit previously reported that during a hearing, the agency’s lawyers argued that the FDA was only giving advice and it was not mandatory when it told people to “stop” taking Ivermectin for COVID-19.

    “The cited statements were not directives,” said Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers. “They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin.”

    “They use informal language, that is true… It’s conversational but not mandatory,” he continued.

    However, the statement from the lawyer contradicted the FDA’s social media post, stating, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” and another tweet says, “Hold your horses, y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.”

    Both tweets displayed the title of “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19” and included a link to that publication.




    Last year, Doctors Mary Talley Bowden, Paul Marik, & Robert Apter appeared in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as part of their lawsuit.

    “The FDA is not your doctor. Yesterday we took them to court to remind them of that,” Dr. Bowden wrote.

    “A pharmacist cites CDC and US FDA as why she will continue to deny filling prescriptions for ivermectin. On Tuesday, the FDA’s attorney declared the FDA has no problem with doctors prescribing ivermectin off-label. It’s time for them to make a formal announcement and set the record straight,” Bowden wrote on Thursday.

    During the oral argument, Ashley Cheung Honold, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA stated that the agency “explicitly recognizes” that doctors do have the authority to administer ivermectin to treat COVID.

    “”FDA explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” said Honold.

    “FDA made these statements in response to multiple reports of consumers being hospitalized, after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses, which is available for purchase over the counter without the need for prescription,” Honold said.

    “In some contexts, those words could be construed as a command,” Ms. Honold said. “But in this context, where FDA was simply using these words in the context of a quippy tweet meant to share its informational article, those statements do not rise to the level of a command.”

    “FDA is clearly acknowledging that doctors have the authority to prescribe human ivermectin to treat COVID. So they are not interfering with the authority of doctors to prescribe drugs or to practice medicine,” she said.

    It can be recalled that Houston Methodist launched an investigation into Bowden and suspended her for defying health authorities and exercising free speech.

    The hospital excoriated Bowden for “using her social media accounts to express her personal opinions about the COVID-19 vaccine and treatments,” NBC News reports. The suspension barred the physician from admitting or treating patients at the hospital.

    Bowden repeatedly warned that it is “wrong” to mandate the experimental mRNA vaccines and continuously touted Ivermectin as a safe and effective treatment amid threats from public health officials against prescribing the drug.

    Bowden was forced to resign. In her resignation letter, Bowden doubled down on the efficacy of Ivermectin.

    “I have worked hard to provide early treatment for victims of COVID-19. My efforts have been successful. I have treated more than 200 COVID-19 patients, including many with co-morbidities, and none of these patients have required hospitalization. This is a testament to the success of my treatment methods,” she wrote. “Throughout this pandemic, there has been no FDA-approved treatment for COVID. Therefore I have done my best to care for patients and save lives in the absence of a clear scientific consensus.”

    “Early treatment must still be part of any strategy for patient care. That is why physicians and hospitals should pay more attention to medications such as Ivermectin, which significant research and my clinical experience indicate is effective,” she continued. “I have decided to part ways with Houston Methodist because of the accusation that I have been spreading “dangerous information.” This is false and defamatory. I do not spread misinformation, and my opinions are supported by science. There is substantial evidence for the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID-19, and no evidence for serious or fatal side effects associated with the doses used to treat COVID-19.”

    Copyright 2024 The Gateway Pundit


    https://vigilantnews.com/post/lawsuit-drops-bombshell-on-fdas-orwellian-lie-about-ivermectin/
    Lawsuit Drops Bombshell on FDA’s Orwellian Lie About Ivermectin The FDA has lost its war on ivermectin and agreed to remove all related social media content and consumer advisories on ivermectin usage for COVID-19. vnninfluencersMarch 22, 2024 This article originally appeared on The Gateway Pundit and was republished with permission. Guest post by Jim Hᴏft In December 2021, the FDA warned Americans not to use Ivermectin, which “is intended for animals” to treat or prevent COVID-19. “Never use medications intended for animals on yourself or other people. Animal ivermectin products are very different from those approved for humans. Use of animal ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous,” FDA said at the time. This was a very controversial statement at the time since the FDA pushed the drug on African migrants back in 2015, and the drug was praised in several scientific journals. There have now been 101 Ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies that show a 62% lower risk in early treatment in COVID-19 patients. A group of brave doctors had filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the agencies’ unlawful attempts to block the use of ivermectin in treating COVID-19. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Southern District of Texas in Galveston, argues that the FDA has overstepped its authority and unjustifiably interfered with their medical practice. The plaintiffs, Drs. Mary Talley Bowden, Paul E. Marik, and Robert L. Apter, are contesting the FDA’s portrayal of ivermectin as dangerous for human consumption. They note that the FDA has approved ivermectin for human use since 1996 for a variety of diseases. However, they allege that with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA began releasing documents and social media posts discouraging the use of the anti-viral drug for COVID-19 treatment. “We’re suing the FDA for lying to the public about ivermectin,” said Dr. Bowden. Claims were made that the initial article misrepresented the law by stating the FDA’s official stance against Ivermectin use without mentioning that doctors were allowed to administer the medicine. U.S. law is cited in the complaint, including the provision that the FDA “may not interfere with the authority of a health care provider to prescribe or administer any legally marked device to a patient for any condition or disease within a legitimate health care practitioner-patient relationship.” On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly agreed to remove all its previous social media posts and consumer advisories that specifically addressed the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. “FDA loses its war on ivermectin and agrees to remove all social media posts and consumer directives regarding ivermectin and COVID, including its most popular tweet in FDA history. This landmark case sets an important precedent in limiting FDA overreach into the doctor-patient relationship,” Dr. Bowden wrote on her social media. The plaintiffs have recently received the signed court order and are preparing to issue a press release about it later today. The Gateway Pundit previously reported that during a hearing, the agency’s lawyers argued that the FDA was only giving advice and it was not mandatory when it told people to “stop” taking Ivermectin for COVID-19. “The cited statements were not directives,” said Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers. “They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin.” “They use informal language, that is true… It’s conversational but not mandatory,” he continued. However, the statement from the lawyer contradicted the FDA’s social media post, stating, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” and another tweet says, “Hold your horses, y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.” Both tweets displayed the title of “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19” and included a link to that publication. Last year, Doctors Mary Talley Bowden, Paul Marik, & Robert Apter appeared in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as part of their lawsuit. “The FDA is not your doctor. Yesterday we took them to court to remind them of that,” Dr. Bowden wrote. “A pharmacist cites CDC and US FDA as why she will continue to deny filling prescriptions for ivermectin. On Tuesday, the FDA’s attorney declared the FDA has no problem with doctors prescribing ivermectin off-label. It’s time for them to make a formal announcement and set the record straight,” Bowden wrote on Thursday. During the oral argument, Ashley Cheung Honold, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA stated that the agency “explicitly recognizes” that doctors do have the authority to administer ivermectin to treat COVID. “”FDA explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” said Honold. “FDA made these statements in response to multiple reports of consumers being hospitalized, after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses, which is available for purchase over the counter without the need for prescription,” Honold said. “In some contexts, those words could be construed as a command,” Ms. Honold said. “But in this context, where FDA was simply using these words in the context of a quippy tweet meant to share its informational article, those statements do not rise to the level of a command.” “FDA is clearly acknowledging that doctors have the authority to prescribe human ivermectin to treat COVID. So they are not interfering with the authority of doctors to prescribe drugs or to practice medicine,” she said. It can be recalled that Houston Methodist launched an investigation into Bowden and suspended her for defying health authorities and exercising free speech. The hospital excoriated Bowden for “using her social media accounts to express her personal opinions about the COVID-19 vaccine and treatments,” NBC News reports. The suspension barred the physician from admitting or treating patients at the hospital. Bowden repeatedly warned that it is “wrong” to mandate the experimental mRNA vaccines and continuously touted Ivermectin as a safe and effective treatment amid threats from public health officials against prescribing the drug. Bowden was forced to resign. In her resignation letter, Bowden doubled down on the efficacy of Ivermectin. “I have worked hard to provide early treatment for victims of COVID-19. My efforts have been successful. I have treated more than 200 COVID-19 patients, including many with co-morbidities, and none of these patients have required hospitalization. This is a testament to the success of my treatment methods,” she wrote. “Throughout this pandemic, there has been no FDA-approved treatment for COVID. Therefore I have done my best to care for patients and save lives in the absence of a clear scientific consensus.” “Early treatment must still be part of any strategy for patient care. That is why physicians and hospitals should pay more attention to medications such as Ivermectin, which significant research and my clinical experience indicate is effective,” she continued. “I have decided to part ways with Houston Methodist because of the accusation that I have been spreading “dangerous information.” This is false and defamatory. I do not spread misinformation, and my opinions are supported by science. There is substantial evidence for the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID-19, and no evidence for serious or fatal side effects associated with the doses used to treat COVID-19.” Copyright 2024 The Gateway Pundit https://vigilantnews.com/post/lawsuit-drops-bombshell-on-fdas-orwellian-lie-about-ivermectin/
    VIGILANTNEWS.COM
    Lawsuit Drops Bombshell on FDA’s Orwellian Lie About Ivermectin
    The FDA has lost its war on ivermectin and agreed to remove all related social media content and consumer advisories on ivermectin usage for COVID-19.
    1 Comments 0 Shares 1883 Views
  • "It is obviously un-American for the government to develop a ‘hit list’ of citizens to mute in the public square through secret pressure on communications monopolies."

    This Country Can't Afford A SCOTUS Weak On Internet Censorship
    Joy Pullmann
    The Biden administration attempted to distract the Supreme Court from the voluminous evidence of federal abuse of Americans’ speech rights during oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri Monday. It sounded like several justices followed the feds’ waving red flag.

    “The government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech, but it is entitled to speak for itself by informing, persuading, or criticizing private speakers,” said Biden administration lawyer Brian Fletcher in his opening remarks. He and several justices asserted government speech prerogatives that would flip the Constitution upside down.

    The government doesn’t have constitutional rights. Constitutional rights belong to the people and restrain the government. The people’s right to speak may not be abridged. Government officials’ speaking, in their official capacities, may certainly be abridged. Indeed, it often must be, precisely to restrict officials from abusing the state’s monopoly on violence to bully citizens into serfdom.

    It is obviously un-American and unconstitutional for the government to develop a “hit list” of citizens to mute in the public square through secret pressure on communications monopolies beholden to the government for their monopoly powers. There is simply no way it’s “protected speech” for the feds to use intermediaries to silence anyone who disagrees with them on internet forums where the majority of the nation’s political organizing and information dissemination occurs.

    Bullying, Not the Bully Pulpit

    What’s happening is not government expressing its views to media, or “encouraging press to suppress their own speech,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it. This is government bullying third parties to suppress Americans’ speech that officials dislike.

    In the newspaper analogy, it would be like government threatening an IRS audit or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) investigation, or pulling the business license of The Washington Post if the Post published an op-ed from Jay Bhattacharya. As Norwood v. Harrison established in 1973, that’s blatantly unconstitutional. Government cannot “induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

    Yet, notes Matt Taibbi, some justices and Fletcher “re-framed the outing of extravagantly funded, ongoing content-flagging programs, designed by veterans of foreign counterterrorism operations and targeting the domestic population, as a debate about what Fletcher called ‘classic bully pulpit exhortations.’”

    Every Fake Excuse for Censorship Is Already Illegal

    We have laws against all the harms the government and several justices put forth as excuses for government censorship. Terrorism is illegal. Promoting terrorism is illegal, as an incitement to treason and violence. Inciting children to injure or murder themselves by jumping out windows — a “hypothetical” brought up by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and discussed at length in oral arguments — is illegal.

    If someone is spreading terrorist incitements to violence on Facebook, law enforcement needs to go after the terrorist plotters, not Facebook. Just like it’s unjust to punish gun, knife, and tire iron manufacturers for the people who use their products to murder, it’s unjust and unconstitutional for government to effectively commandeer Facebook under the pretext of all the evils people use it to spread. If they have a problem with those evils, they should address those evils directly, not pressure Facebook to do what they can’t get through Congress like it’s some kind of substitute legislature.

    It’s also ridiculous to, as Jackson and Fletcher did in oral argument, assume that the government is the only possible solution to every social ill. Do these hypothetically window-jumping children not have parents? Teachers? Older siblings? Neighbors? Would the social media companies not have an interest in preventing their products from being used to promote death, and wouldn’t that be an easy thing to explain publicly? Apparently, Jackson couldn’t conceive of any other solution to problems like these than government censorship, when our society has handled far bigger problems like war, pandemics, and foreign invasion without government censorship for 250 years!

    Voters Auditing Government Is Exactly How Our System Should Work

    Fletcher described it as a “problem” that in this case, “two states and five individuals are trying to use the Article III courts to audit all of the executive branch’s communications with and about social media platforms.” That’s called transparency, and it’s only a problem if the government is trying to escape accountability to voters for its actions.

    The people have a fundamental right to audit what their government is doing with public positions, institutions, and funds! How do we have government by consent of the governed if the people can have no idea what their government is doing?

    Under federal laws, all communications like those this lawsuit uncovered are public records. Yet these public records are really hard to get. The executive branch has been effectively nullifying open records laws by absurdly lengthening disclosure times — to as long as 636 days — increasingly forcing citizens to wage expensive lawsuits to get federal agencies to cough up records years beyond the legal deadline.

    Congress should pass a law forcing the automatic disclosure of all government communications with tech monopolies that don’t concern actual classified information and “national security” designations, which the government expands unlawfully to avoid transparency. No justice should support government secrecy about its speech pressure efforts outside of legitimate national security actions.

    Government Is So Big, It’s Always Coercive

    Fletcher’s argument also claimed to draw a line between government persuasion and government coercion. The size and minute harassment powers of our government long ago obliterated any such line, if it ever existed. Federal agencies now have the power to try citizens in non-Article III courts, outside constitutional protections for due process. Citizens can be bankrupted long before they finally get to appeal to a real court. That’s why most of them just do whatever the agencies say, even when it’s clearly unlawful.

    Federal agencies demand power over almost every facet of life, from puddles in people’s backyards to the temperature of cheese served in a tiny restaurant. If they put a target on any normal citizen’s back, he goes bankrupt after regulatory torture.

    As Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust” planned, government is now the “senior partner” of every business, giving every “request” from government officials automatic coercion power. Federal agencies have six ways from Sunday of getting back at a noncompliant company, from the EEOC to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency to Health and Human Services to Securities and Exchange Commission investigations and more. Use an accurate pronoun? Investigation. Hire “one too many” white guys? Investigation.

    TikTok legislation going through Congress right now would codify federal power to seize social media companies accused of being owned by foreign interests. Shortly after he acquired X, Elon Musk faced a regulatory shakedown costing him tens of millions, and more on the way. He has money like that, but the rest of us don’t.

    Speech from a private citizen does not have the threat of violence behind it. Speech from a government official, on the other hand, absolutely does and always has. Government officials have powers that other people don’t, and those powers are easily abused, which is exactly why we have a Constitution. SCOTUS needs to take this crucial context into account, making constitutional protections stronger because the government is far, far outside its constitutional bounds.

    Big tech companies’ very business model depends on government regulators and can be destroyed — or kneecapped — at the stroke of an activist president’s pen. Or, at least, that’s what the president said when Facebook and Twitter didn’t do what he wanted: Section 230 should “immediately be revoked.” This is a president who claims the executive power to unilaterally rewrite laws, ignore laws, and ignore Supreme Court decisions. It’s a president who issues orders as press releases so they go into effect months before they can even begin to be challenged in court.

    Constitutionally Protected Speech Isn’t Terrorism

    If justices buy the administration’s nice-guy pretenses of “concern about terrorism,” and “once in a lifetime pandemic measures,” they didn’t read the briefs in this case and see that is simply a cover for the U.S. government turning counterterrorism tools on its own citizens in an attempt to control election outcomes. This is precisely what the First Amendment was designed to check, and we Americans need our Supreme Court to understand that and act to protect us. Elections mean nothing when the government is secretly keeping voters from talking to each other.

    The Supreme Court may not be able to return the country to full constitutional government by eradicating the almost entirely unconstitutional administrative state. But it should enforce as many constitutional boundaries as possible on such agencies. That clearly includes prohibiting all of government from outsourcing to allegedly “private” organizations actions that would be illegal for the government to take.

    That includes not just coercive instructions to social media companies, but also developing social media censorship tools and organizations as cutouts for the rogue security state that is targeting peaceful citizens instead of actual terrorists. Even false speech is not domestic terrorism, and no clearheaded Supreme Court justice looking at the evidence could let the Biden administration weaponize antiterrorism measures to strip law-abiding Americans of our fundamental human rights.

    Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include "Classic Books For Young Children," and "101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation." An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books.


    https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/21/this-country-cannot-afford-a-weak-supreme-court-decision-on-internet-censorship/

    Join ➡️ @MartinKulldorf
    "It is obviously un-American for the government to develop a ‘hit list’ of citizens to mute in the public square through secret pressure on communications monopolies." This Country Can't Afford A SCOTUS Weak On Internet Censorship Joy Pullmann The Biden administration attempted to distract the Supreme Court from the voluminous evidence of federal abuse of Americans’ speech rights during oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri Monday. It sounded like several justices followed the feds’ waving red flag. “The government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech, but it is entitled to speak for itself by informing, persuading, or criticizing private speakers,” said Biden administration lawyer Brian Fletcher in his opening remarks. He and several justices asserted government speech prerogatives that would flip the Constitution upside down. The government doesn’t have constitutional rights. Constitutional rights belong to the people and restrain the government. The people’s right to speak may not be abridged. Government officials’ speaking, in their official capacities, may certainly be abridged. Indeed, it often must be, precisely to restrict officials from abusing the state’s monopoly on violence to bully citizens into serfdom. It is obviously un-American and unconstitutional for the government to develop a “hit list” of citizens to mute in the public square through secret pressure on communications monopolies beholden to the government for their monopoly powers. There is simply no way it’s “protected speech” for the feds to use intermediaries to silence anyone who disagrees with them on internet forums where the majority of the nation’s political organizing and information dissemination occurs. Bullying, Not the Bully Pulpit What’s happening is not government expressing its views to media, or “encouraging press to suppress their own speech,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it. This is government bullying third parties to suppress Americans’ speech that officials dislike. In the newspaper analogy, it would be like government threatening an IRS audit or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) investigation, or pulling the business license of The Washington Post if the Post published an op-ed from Jay Bhattacharya. As Norwood v. Harrison established in 1973, that’s blatantly unconstitutional. Government cannot “induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Yet, notes Matt Taibbi, some justices and Fletcher “re-framed the outing of extravagantly funded, ongoing content-flagging programs, designed by veterans of foreign counterterrorism operations and targeting the domestic population, as a debate about what Fletcher called ‘classic bully pulpit exhortations.’” Every Fake Excuse for Censorship Is Already Illegal We have laws against all the harms the government and several justices put forth as excuses for government censorship. Terrorism is illegal. Promoting terrorism is illegal, as an incitement to treason and violence. Inciting children to injure or murder themselves by jumping out windows — a “hypothetical” brought up by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and discussed at length in oral arguments — is illegal. If someone is spreading terrorist incitements to violence on Facebook, law enforcement needs to go after the terrorist plotters, not Facebook. Just like it’s unjust to punish gun, knife, and tire iron manufacturers for the people who use their products to murder, it’s unjust and unconstitutional for government to effectively commandeer Facebook under the pretext of all the evils people use it to spread. If they have a problem with those evils, they should address those evils directly, not pressure Facebook to do what they can’t get through Congress like it’s some kind of substitute legislature. It’s also ridiculous to, as Jackson and Fletcher did in oral argument, assume that the government is the only possible solution to every social ill. Do these hypothetically window-jumping children not have parents? Teachers? Older siblings? Neighbors? Would the social media companies not have an interest in preventing their products from being used to promote death, and wouldn’t that be an easy thing to explain publicly? Apparently, Jackson couldn’t conceive of any other solution to problems like these than government censorship, when our society has handled far bigger problems like war, pandemics, and foreign invasion without government censorship for 250 years! Voters Auditing Government Is Exactly How Our System Should Work Fletcher described it as a “problem” that in this case, “two states and five individuals are trying to use the Article III courts to audit all of the executive branch’s communications with and about social media platforms.” That’s called transparency, and it’s only a problem if the government is trying to escape accountability to voters for its actions. The people have a fundamental right to audit what their government is doing with public positions, institutions, and funds! How do we have government by consent of the governed if the people can have no idea what their government is doing? Under federal laws, all communications like those this lawsuit uncovered are public records. Yet these public records are really hard to get. The executive branch has been effectively nullifying open records laws by absurdly lengthening disclosure times — to as long as 636 days — increasingly forcing citizens to wage expensive lawsuits to get federal agencies to cough up records years beyond the legal deadline. Congress should pass a law forcing the automatic disclosure of all government communications with tech monopolies that don’t concern actual classified information and “national security” designations, which the government expands unlawfully to avoid transparency. No justice should support government secrecy about its speech pressure efforts outside of legitimate national security actions. Government Is So Big, It’s Always Coercive Fletcher’s argument also claimed to draw a line between government persuasion and government coercion. The size and minute harassment powers of our government long ago obliterated any such line, if it ever existed. Federal agencies now have the power to try citizens in non-Article III courts, outside constitutional protections for due process. Citizens can be bankrupted long before they finally get to appeal to a real court. That’s why most of them just do whatever the agencies say, even when it’s clearly unlawful. Federal agencies demand power over almost every facet of life, from puddles in people’s backyards to the temperature of cheese served in a tiny restaurant. If they put a target on any normal citizen’s back, he goes bankrupt after regulatory torture. As Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust” planned, government is now the “senior partner” of every business, giving every “request” from government officials automatic coercion power. Federal agencies have six ways from Sunday of getting back at a noncompliant company, from the EEOC to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency to Health and Human Services to Securities and Exchange Commission investigations and more. Use an accurate pronoun? Investigation. Hire “one too many” white guys? Investigation. TikTok legislation going through Congress right now would codify federal power to seize social media companies accused of being owned by foreign interests. Shortly after he acquired X, Elon Musk faced a regulatory shakedown costing him tens of millions, and more on the way. He has money like that, but the rest of us don’t. Speech from a private citizen does not have the threat of violence behind it. Speech from a government official, on the other hand, absolutely does and always has. Government officials have powers that other people don’t, and those powers are easily abused, which is exactly why we have a Constitution. SCOTUS needs to take this crucial context into account, making constitutional protections stronger because the government is far, far outside its constitutional bounds. Big tech companies’ very business model depends on government regulators and can be destroyed — or kneecapped — at the stroke of an activist president’s pen. Or, at least, that’s what the president said when Facebook and Twitter didn’t do what he wanted: Section 230 should “immediately be revoked.” This is a president who claims the executive power to unilaterally rewrite laws, ignore laws, and ignore Supreme Court decisions. It’s a president who issues orders as press releases so they go into effect months before they can even begin to be challenged in court. Constitutionally Protected Speech Isn’t Terrorism If justices buy the administration’s nice-guy pretenses of “concern about terrorism,” and “once in a lifetime pandemic measures,” they didn’t read the briefs in this case and see that is simply a cover for the U.S. government turning counterterrorism tools on its own citizens in an attempt to control election outcomes. This is precisely what the First Amendment was designed to check, and we Americans need our Supreme Court to understand that and act to protect us. Elections mean nothing when the government is secretly keeping voters from talking to each other. The Supreme Court may not be able to return the country to full constitutional government by eradicating the almost entirely unconstitutional administrative state. But it should enforce as many constitutional boundaries as possible on such agencies. That clearly includes prohibiting all of government from outsourcing to allegedly “private” organizations actions that would be illegal for the government to take. That includes not just coercive instructions to social media companies, but also developing social media censorship tools and organizations as cutouts for the rogue security state that is targeting peaceful citizens instead of actual terrorists. Even false speech is not domestic terrorism, and no clearheaded Supreme Court justice looking at the evidence could let the Biden administration weaponize antiterrorism measures to strip law-abiding Americans of our fundamental human rights. Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include "Classic Books For Young Children," and "101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation." An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books. https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/21/this-country-cannot-afford-a-weak-supreme-court-decision-on-internet-censorship/ Join ➡️ @MartinKulldorf
    THEFEDERALIST.COM
    This Country Can't Afford A SCOTUS Weak On Internet Censorship
    It is obviously un-American for the government to develop a 'hit list' of citizens to mute through secret pressure on tech monopolies.
    1 Comments 0 Shares 2431 Views
  • Inside the anti-Syria lobby’s Capitol Hill push for more starvation sanctions
    Hekmat AboukhaterMarch 20, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

    Stabilization for me but not for thee

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

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

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

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




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

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




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

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

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

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




    Overtures Towards Israel

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

    I have many American friends and I admire a great deal about America. But I suspect that many Americans, even or maybe especially the most patriotic, will agree with what I have to say in this short essay, which is taken from my book ‘Their Terrifying Plan’:

    `Look back and it is clear that America has now been at war with the rest of the world for around 80 years. The designer or proxy war against Russia, taking place in Ukraine, followed, almost seamlessly, after the disastrous and damaging war in Afghanistan. which was a disaster to start with, a disaster throughout and a disaster at the end. Huge numbers of Afghans and Americans died for absolutely no reason and billions of dollars were wasted. As usual, no one has ever been sacked or held accountable.

    It seems that for the Americans, or rather their political leaders, peace is now just a memory, not even available as an interlude between wars which have become a never-ending opportunity to spend more money on bombs, rockets and depleted uranium shells.

    Since the end of World War II, America has created seemingly endless wars artificially based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion or a drive for ‘democracy’, but really about acquiring money, power and control of resources. America has become a pirate nation. (In the 1990s I wrote two books about American adventures. One was called Rogue Nation and the other was called Global Bully.) None of those wars was fought to defend American lives or property; all were fought to give the conspirators greater power and more money. All of those wars ended up costing Americans many lives and a great deal of money; all involved the transfer of money from citizens everywhere to the bank accounts and trust funds of the conspirators.

    NATO and the CIA have been destabilising countries all over the world for more than half a century – paying for terrorist help whenever it has seemed useful and appropriate. They have, for example, destabilised much of Europe, with the result that atlases and history books are out of date almost before they are printed. One minute one leader in one country will be in favour and then, suddenly favours will move to another leader in another country. Groups of dissidents are encouraged, financed and armed if they promise to build a better financial relationship with America.

    It was always inevitable that we would head straight for World War III, immediately after Russia was forced to invade Ukraine, previously described as one of the most corrupt countries on earth. Ukraine, remember, has persecuted Christians with a relentlessness that would have aroused screams of outrage a few years ago and has an army whose soldiers delight in wearing Nazi insignia.

    America needs to attack and suppress both China and Russia. The conspirators have chosen to target Russia first but there is no doubt the militant conspirators in the United States plan to start a war with China.

    We are being manipulated and controlled by a cabal of well-known politicians and billionaires and taken into a totalitarian society, with fear being the main driving force. The significance of fear in our lives can never be underestimated.

    While writing this short book I was sitting in a café reading a volume of work by Petrarch and found these lines from Virgil in a piece by him entitled The Ascent of Mount Ventoux:

    ‘Blessed the man who is skilled to understand

    The hidden cause of things; who beneath his feet

    All fear casts, and death’s relentless doom,

    And the howlings of greedy Acheron.’

    If the real history of the 20th century and beyond is ever written (something which I am beginning to doubt) then Obama and the Clintons and their fellow neoliberals will be remembered as the world’s most evil terrorists.

    It is surprising, is it not, how many Presidents and Prime Ministers (such as Blair et al) began their terms of office with very little money in the bank, spent their years in office earning quite modest salaries (supported in the case of Biden with money paid into his account from Ukraine and China) and then, shortly after the conclusion of their term of office, become immensely rich.

    The money paid to these former Presidents and Prime Ministers is usually handed over as massive advances for autobiographies that virtually no one will ever want to read or as extraordinarily high speaking fees for making speeches that virtually no one will ever want to listen to. The two Clintons were, between them, paid millions of dollars for their memoirs. When they were being investigated over corruption charges neither of them could remember anything.

    The fees paid out to the conspirators and the collaborators are, of course, payments for services rendered while the individual was in office. And the main service rendered has been the creation of fear and the steady progress towards the Great Reset, the New World Order and a world government.


    NOTE
    Taken from the book `Their Terrifying Plan’ by Vernon Coleman, which is available via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com

    Copyright Vernon Coleman March 2024

    It is also worth noting that the Manchurian Candidate Barack Hussein Obama is a CIA creation and fabrication from the ground up. His mother was also a CIA sex operative asset, and his real father Frank Marshall was a hardcore communist and pornagrapher who took the following photographs of his lover:


    https://open.substack.com/pub/2ndsmartestguyintheworld/p/america-at-war-with-the-world?r=29hg4d&utm_medium=ios
    America – at War with the World 2nd Smartest Guy in the World I have many American friends and I admire a great deal about America. But I suspect that many Americans, even or maybe especially the most patriotic, will agree with what I have to say in this short essay, which is taken from my book ‘Their Terrifying Plan’: `Look back and it is clear that America has now been at war with the rest of the world for around 80 years. The designer or proxy war against Russia, taking place in Ukraine, followed, almost seamlessly, after the disastrous and damaging war in Afghanistan. which was a disaster to start with, a disaster throughout and a disaster at the end. Huge numbers of Afghans and Americans died for absolutely no reason and billions of dollars were wasted. As usual, no one has ever been sacked or held accountable. It seems that for the Americans, or rather their political leaders, peace is now just a memory, not even available as an interlude between wars which have become a never-ending opportunity to spend more money on bombs, rockets and depleted uranium shells. Since the end of World War II, America has created seemingly endless wars artificially based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion or a drive for ‘democracy’, but really about acquiring money, power and control of resources. America has become a pirate nation. (In the 1990s I wrote two books about American adventures. One was called Rogue Nation and the other was called Global Bully.) None of those wars was fought to defend American lives or property; all were fought to give the conspirators greater power and more money. All of those wars ended up costing Americans many lives and a great deal of money; all involved the transfer of money from citizens everywhere to the bank accounts and trust funds of the conspirators. NATO and the CIA have been destabilising countries all over the world for more than half a century – paying for terrorist help whenever it has seemed useful and appropriate. They have, for example, destabilised much of Europe, with the result that atlases and history books are out of date almost before they are printed. One minute one leader in one country will be in favour and then, suddenly favours will move to another leader in another country. Groups of dissidents are encouraged, financed and armed if they promise to build a better financial relationship with America. It was always inevitable that we would head straight for World War III, immediately after Russia was forced to invade Ukraine, previously described as one of the most corrupt countries on earth. Ukraine, remember, has persecuted Christians with a relentlessness that would have aroused screams of outrage a few years ago and has an army whose soldiers delight in wearing Nazi insignia. America needs to attack and suppress both China and Russia. The conspirators have chosen to target Russia first but there is no doubt the militant conspirators in the United States plan to start a war with China. We are being manipulated and controlled by a cabal of well-known politicians and billionaires and taken into a totalitarian society, with fear being the main driving force. The significance of fear in our lives can never be underestimated. While writing this short book I was sitting in a café reading a volume of work by Petrarch and found these lines from Virgil in a piece by him entitled The Ascent of Mount Ventoux: ‘Blessed the man who is skilled to understand The hidden cause of things; who beneath his feet All fear casts, and death’s relentless doom, And the howlings of greedy Acheron.’ If the real history of the 20th century and beyond is ever written (something which I am beginning to doubt) then Obama and the Clintons and their fellow neoliberals will be remembered as the world’s most evil terrorists. It is surprising, is it not, how many Presidents and Prime Ministers (such as Blair et al) began their terms of office with very little money in the bank, spent their years in office earning quite modest salaries (supported in the case of Biden with money paid into his account from Ukraine and China) and then, shortly after the conclusion of their term of office, become immensely rich. The money paid to these former Presidents and Prime Ministers is usually handed over as massive advances for autobiographies that virtually no one will ever want to read or as extraordinarily high speaking fees for making speeches that virtually no one will ever want to listen to. The two Clintons were, between them, paid millions of dollars for their memoirs. When they were being investigated over corruption charges neither of them could remember anything. The fees paid out to the conspirators and the collaborators are, of course, payments for services rendered while the individual was in office. And the main service rendered has been the creation of fear and the steady progress towards the Great Reset, the New World Order and a world government. NOTE Taken from the book `Their Terrifying Plan’ by Vernon Coleman, which is available via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com Copyright Vernon Coleman March 2024 It is also worth noting that the Manchurian Candidate Barack Hussein Obama is a CIA creation and fabrication from the ground up. His mother was also a CIA sex operative asset, and his real father Frank Marshall was a hardcore communist and pornagrapher who took the following photographs of his lover: https://open.substack.com/pub/2ndsmartestguyintheworld/p/america-at-war-with-the-world?r=29hg4d&utm_medium=ios
    OPEN.SUBSTACK.COM
    America – at War with the World
    by Vernon Coleman I have many American friends and I admire a great deal about America. But I suspect that many Americans, even or maybe especially the most patriotic, will agree with what I have to say in this short essay, which is taken from my book ‘Their Terrifying Plan’:
    1 Comments 0 Shares 2046 Views
  • Mistakes Were Made
    CJ Hopkins


    Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes.

    Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

    Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.”

    Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

    This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

    Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

    OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

    No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

    OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

    For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.


    Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

    Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”


    And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.


    Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.


    And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again…



    And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS”…


    And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …


    And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”


    And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council”…



    Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

    Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us…


    …and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

    CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

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    https://off-guardian.org/2024/03/19/mistakes-were-made/

    https://telegra.ph/Mistakes-Were-Made-03-20
    Mistakes Were Made CJ Hopkins Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans. Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.” This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that. Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges. OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here. No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus! OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever. For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights. Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.” Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.” And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution. Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim. And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again… And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS”… And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” … And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!” And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council”… Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.” Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us… …and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy! CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org. SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive. For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE. https://off-guardian.org/2024/03/19/mistakes-were-made/ https://telegra.ph/Mistakes-Were-Made-03-20
    OFF-GUARDIAN.ORG
    Mistakes Were Made
    CJ Hopkins Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility …
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  • Pfizer sued for “false and deceptive” COVID-19 vaccine claims
    Maryanne Demasi, PhD

    I, and others, have reported on the exaggerated claims made by vaccine manufacturers about the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines.

    In November 2020 for example, Pfizer published results in a press release claiming its mRNA vaccine was “95% effective against COVID-19.” The statistic was widely cited by politicians, academics, and the media.

    Several weeks later, when details of the trial were published, it became evident the ‘relative risk reduction’ of 95% corresponded with an ‘absolute risk reduction’ of only 0.84% - a far more conservative number which was never publicly promoted.

    The way in which the statistic was communicated to the public was likely to have distorted people’s perception of the vaccine’s benefit and increased their willingness to be vaccinated.

    I also wrote about how Pfizer hid its data on waning immunity. Regulatory filings showed Pfizer had evidence, early into the vaccination campaign, that its vaccine’s efficacy waned, but the company waited months before alerting the public.

    Pfizer would not explain why it delayed the publication of its data, but if the public was told about the vaccine’s fading efficacy at the time, it would have hampered the uptake of the vaccine.

    Pfizer hid data on waning immunity as millions queued to get vaccinated.

    Read full story

    These deceptive practises are now part of a lawsuit against Pfizer.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced this week that he’s suing Pfizer, saying the company “intentionally misrepresented the efficacy” of its vaccine and censored people “who threatened to disseminate the truth” about the vaccine in public discussions.


    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
    In a statement, Paxton wrote, “We are pursuing justice for the people of Texas, many of whom were coerced by tyrannical vaccine mandates to take a defective product sold by lies…The facts are clear. Pfizer did not tell the truth about their COVID-19 vaccines.”

    Paxton is seeking more than $US 10 million in civil fines and a court order barring Pfizer from speaking publicly about the efficacy of its vaccine.

    The lawsuit

    https://blog.maryannedemasi.com/p/pfizer-sued-for-false-and-deceptive

    👉https://telegra.ph/Pfizer-sued-for-false-and-deceptive-COVID-19-vaccine-claims-03-20
    Pfizer sued for “false and deceptive” COVID-19 vaccine claims Maryanne Demasi, PhD I, and others, have reported on the exaggerated claims made by vaccine manufacturers about the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines. In November 2020 for example, Pfizer published results in a press release claiming its mRNA vaccine was “95% effective against COVID-19.” The statistic was widely cited by politicians, academics, and the media. Several weeks later, when details of the trial were published, it became evident the ‘relative risk reduction’ of 95% corresponded with an ‘absolute risk reduction’ of only 0.84% - a far more conservative number which was never publicly promoted. The way in which the statistic was communicated to the public was likely to have distorted people’s perception of the vaccine’s benefit and increased their willingness to be vaccinated. I also wrote about how Pfizer hid its data on waning immunity. Regulatory filings showed Pfizer had evidence, early into the vaccination campaign, that its vaccine’s efficacy waned, but the company waited months before alerting the public. Pfizer would not explain why it delayed the publication of its data, but if the public was told about the vaccine’s fading efficacy at the time, it would have hampered the uptake of the vaccine. Pfizer hid data on waning immunity as millions queued to get vaccinated. Read full story These deceptive practises are now part of a lawsuit against Pfizer. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced this week that he’s suing Pfizer, saying the company “intentionally misrepresented the efficacy” of its vaccine and censored people “who threatened to disseminate the truth” about the vaccine in public discussions. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton In a statement, Paxton wrote, “We are pursuing justice for the people of Texas, many of whom were coerced by tyrannical vaccine mandates to take a defective product sold by lies…The facts are clear. Pfizer did not tell the truth about their COVID-19 vaccines.” Paxton is seeking more than $US 10 million in civil fines and a court order barring Pfizer from speaking publicly about the efficacy of its vaccine. The lawsuit https://blog.maryannedemasi.com/p/pfizer-sued-for-false-and-deceptive 👉https://telegra.ph/Pfizer-sued-for-false-and-deceptive-COVID-19-vaccine-claims-03-20
    BLOG.MARYANNEDEMASI.COM
    Pfizer sued for “false and deceptive” COVID-19 vaccine claims
    I, and others, have reported on the exaggerated claims made by vaccine manufacturers about the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines. In November 2020 for example, Pfizer published results in a press release claiming its mRNA vaccine was “95% effective against COVID-19.” The statistic was widely cited by politicians, academics, and the media.
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