• ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 171: ‘Horrific’ eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Israel’s siege on Gaza’s hospitals
    Leila WarahMarch 25, 2024
    Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
    Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
    Casualties

    32,333 + killed* and at least 74,694 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

    UNRWA: Israel says no more UNRWA food convoys to north Gaza.
    UNRWA chief: Israeli decision to deny all UNRWA food convoys to northern Gaza is “obstruct[ing] lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine.”
    Doctors Without Borders “deeply concerned” after medical staff arrested at al-Shifa Hospital amid “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” nearby.
    Tanks crushed bodies, ambulances at al-Shifa Hospital, reports AP News, citing witnesses.
    Footage emerges of Israeli soldiers assaulting Palestinian boy
    Casualties in Israeli attack on aid distributors at Kuwaiti roundabout in Gaza City, reports Al Jazeera.
    Israeli forces raid Al Aqsa mosque during nightly prayers, assault and expel worshipers, reports Al Jazeera journalist.
    WHO Chief: Israel must reverse decision on blocking north Gaza aid.
    Israeli war cabinet minister threatens to quit if bill exempting ultra-Orthodox Jews from conscription passes
    UNRWA: U.S. funding cut will ‘compromise access to food’ in Gaza.
    UN special rapporteurs decry underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians.
    Israel blocks access to Jerusalem for West Bank Christians on Palm Sunday, reports Wafa.
    PRCS says it has lost radio contact with staff at al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis.
    Euro-Med: Israel’s attacks on academics in line with Gaza ‘genocide’
    WAFA correspondent killed along with son Israeli airstrike on Gaza
    MAP report: Doctor says conditions inside European Gaza Hospital ‘unimaginable’
    Gaza: Three Hospitals under military siege

    The Israeli military has imposed ongoing sieges on at least three medical facilities in the besieged enclave, terrorizing, injuring, and killing thousands of civilians in the process.

    Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza has entered its seventh day under siege, and the civilians able to flee are reporting ruthless massacres in and around the medical complex.

    A teenage Palestinian boy, Farouk Mohammed Hamd, told Al Jazeera he witnessed Israeli soldiers executing a group of eight people, including his father and brother, inside al-Shifa Hospital.

    He said he and the others were stripped of their clothing and moved several times inside the al-Shifa Hospital building in central Gaza over the course of hours before being taken to the top floor of the facility.

    “They left us for about three hours, then said, ‘You are safe. You can go south.”

    “We stood up, but then they opened fire. We all laid down on the floor again. Then, the snipers entertained themselves by shooting us one after the other.”

    Hamad said his father told him before being killed to run away if he could, and he managed to run, but not before seeing the unresponsive bodies of the executed group.

    On Sunday, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its staff have reported “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” in the vicinity of al-Shifa hospital, “endangering patients, medical staff and people trapped inside with very few supplies.”

    Jameel al-Ayoubi, one of the thousands of Palestinians sheltering at the hospital, saw Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers drive over at least four bodies in the hospital courtyard, AP News reports. Ambulances were also crushed, he says.

    Kareem Ayman Hathat, who lived in a five-story building about 100 meters (328 feet) from the hospital, told AP he hid in his kitchen for days waiting as explosions shook the building.

    “From time to time, the tank would fire a shell,” he said. “It was to terrorise us.”

    MSF added that Israeli forces have carried out a mass-arrest campaign of medical staff and other people and that the organization is “deeply concerned” for the safety of those detained.

    Meanwhile, another two hospitals in Khan Younis have been under Israeli military siege for the last 24 hours: al-Amal and Nasser hospitals, reports Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud from Gaza.

    “Military vehicles, tanks and attack drones are encircling these two facilities. They’re also blocking the entrance with piles of sand, preventing medical staff, patients and injured people inside from leaving safely and constantly failing to provide a safe corridor for people and evacuees trapped inside the hospital,” Mahmoud said.

    Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) gave their latest update on the situation in al Amal hospital on Sunday afternoon, saying Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have completely surrounded all entrances to the hospital and control any movement in and out.

    Israeli forces attacked the hospital earlier on Sunday, surrounding it with tanks and forcing nearly everyone inside, from patients to displaced Palestinians sheltering there, to evacuate.

    “What we’re getting confirmed from al-Amal Hospital is that not only has it been under constant bombing and tank shells, but loudspeakers are ordering people inside the hospital to come out only with their underwear on. And that has been confirmed by multiple sources and witnesses on the ground, those who managed to flee the harrowing situation,” Mahmoud added.

    On Sunday evening, the PRCS announced that they lost radio contact with their staff at the hospital.

    While all displaced Palestinians and patients who could move independently were evacuated towards the al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis, hospital staff remain, along with nine patients and their ten companions and a displaced family with children who have disabilities. PCRS says all of them need to be safely evacuated.

    PRCS added that staff member Amir Abu Aisha and a wounded individual who was being treated at the hospital after being shot in the head by the Israeli military were both killed, and their bodies need to be removed.

    In a statement, Hamas said the Israeli military is systematically targeting hospitals across Gaza with the goal of displacing all Palestinians from their lands, showing Israel wants to continue its “war of extermination” against Palestinians and forcibly displace them from their land “by destroying all means of life in the Gaza Strip, especially hospitals,” reported Al Jazeera.

    Underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians

    Witnesses at al-Shifa hospital have reported that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.”

    Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said in a post on X that it is “abhorrent” that reports of rape by Israeli forces keep coming out without any consequences.

    “Rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide! It must stop!”

    Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, similarly said, “I lost count of how many renowned journalists interviewed me on the alleged mistreatment of/sexual abuse against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, and never published any article on this.”

    “What we can see on the ground is a systematic creation of a corrosive environment in which Israel, with its destruction of neighborhoods and hospitals, is making Gaza unliveable for the majority of Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera co-respondent, Tareq Abu Azzoum from Gaza while reporting on the besieged hospitals.

    “Horrific scenes” at European Hospital

    Meanwhile, at Gaza’s European Hospital near Khan Younis, one of the last functioning medical facilities, medical staff report “horrific scenes” at the hospital with patients “dying from infections with evidence of serious malnutrition,” reported Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).

    Husam Basheer, an orthopedic surgeon working at the hospital, says he and his staff are “managing with the bare minimum of resources” at the medical facility due to Israeli restrictions on medical aid entering the besieged enclave.

    “One day we wanted to do a plate and screw, which is a standard procedure for bone fixation, but we didn’t have the right equipment. Sometimes we’ve also lacked gauze which is a basic supply for surgery. We worked around the challenges we faced and managed in a different way, but the staff here are overwhelmed,” he said.

    Similarly, Konstantina Ilia Karydi, an anesthetist, described the situation inside the medical facility as “unimaginable.”

    “This hospital had an original capacity of just 200 beds. Now, it has expanded to 1,000 beds,” she said.

    “There are around 22,000 displaced people sheltering in the corridors and in tents inside the hospital because people feel that it’s safer to be here than anywhere else.”

    Israel bars UNRWA from northern Gaza

    The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced on Sunday that Israel has officially barred it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is highest.

    “This is outrageous [and] makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine. These restrictions must be lifted,” the head of the UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, wrote in an X post.

    Famine is likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July, according to the world’s hunger watchdog, Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said last week.

    Lazzarini warned that Israel’s decision would speed up the coming of famine in the north of the Strip and said that “many more will die of hunger, dehydration.”

    Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), says Israel must “urgently reverse” its decision to block the entry of food convoys organized by UNRWA into northern Gaza, where humanitarian needs are most urgent.

    “The levels of hunger are acute. All efforts to deliver food should not only be permitted but there should be an immediate acceleration of food deliveries,” Ghebreyesus said in a post on X.

    Martin Griffiths, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN, says he repeatedly urged Israel to lift all its restrictions on aid to Gaza. Still, it has now done the exact opposite.

    “UNRWA is the beating heart of the humanitarian response in Gaza,” Griffiths said on X , “The decision to block its food convoys to the north only pushes thousands closer to famine. It must be revoked.”

    No other agency is able to provide lifesaving assistance in Gaza in the same way as UNRWA, Natalie Boucly, the deputy commissioner-general of the UN agency, has said on X.

    Boucly added that attempts to “isolate” UNRWA will result in more people dying, “UNRWA is part of the UN and it was given a specific mandate by the General Assembly.”

    In January, several countries cut funding to UNRWA following unverified Israeli allegations that less than a dozen employees participated in Hamas’s operation on October 7.

    While some countries, including Canada and Sweden, have since reinstated their funding, several countries, including the US, have yet to follow suit, which will have severe implications for Palestinians in Gaza and the region.

    Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera.
    “In Gaza, the humanitarian community is racing against the clock to avert famine. As the backbone of the humanitarian response, any gap in funding to UNRWA will compromise access to food, shelter, primary health care & education at a time of deep trauma,” the organization’s chief, Lazzarini, wrote on X.

    “Palestine Refugees are counting on the international community to step up support to meet their basic needs.”

    Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera.

    The “dream” of many far-right politicians in Israel is to make Gaza “uninhabitable” for Palestinians, with the goal of re-establishing settlements for the Israelis, Ghafar continued.

    “The destruction of schools, hospitals, infrastructure [is making Gaza] almost unlivable and it will force the international community to take further refugees and thin out the population of Gaza,” he said.

    “I think Israel wants to have a big chunk of the population leave and become refugees elsewhere.”

    UN Resolution for ceasefire

    On Monday, the UN Security Council is expected to vote on yet another resolution regarding Israel’s war on Gaza. Since October seven, only two of eight resolutions have been accepted, with both mainly dealing with humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave.

    Guterres says the most recent UN Security Council resolution does not link a ceasefire in Gaza to the release of Israeli captives, reported Al Jazeera.

    In the resolution, “a ceasefire is required together with, but not in a linkage with, the unconditional release of all hostages,” he said. “And we have also claimed the need for that release.”

    Diplomats told the AFP news agency that the resolution had been worked on with the U.S. to avoid a veto, reported France 24. The U.S. has vetoed three resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

    “We expect, barring a last-minute twist, that the resolution will be adopted and that the US will not vote against it,” one diplomat told AFP.

    Last Friday, the Security Council voted on a draft submitted by the U.S. that called for an “immediate” ceasefire linked to the release of captives. China and Russia vetoed the resolution, criticizing it for stopping short of explicitly demanding Israel halt its campaign.

    No progress on negotiations.

    Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas have continued negotiations mediated by Qatar with little progress.

    Hamas’s political bureau official Basem Naim says a lot of “misinformation” has recently been circulated through the media regarding the ongoing truce talks in Doha, reported Al Jazeera.

    Naim said the Israelis are focusing on only one aspect of the negotiations, the release of captives, and are unwilling to discuss Hamas’s three demands – a permanent end to the war, “total withdrawal” from Gaza, and the return of displaced people to their homes.

    Hamas had proposed the release of some 100 Israeli captives in phases in exchange for a permanent end to the war, total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and the return of displaced people to their homes; however, according to Al Jazeera, Israel rejected the demand to end the war and withdraw troops from Gaza.

    Al Jazeera added that Israeli negotiators said they would allow only 2,000 Palestinians to return to their homes each day, meaning it would take more than two years for all displaced Palestinians to leave Rafah.

    Meanwhile, Israel wants all Israeli captives released immediately. Hamas has indicated it will only release women and children in the first phase.

    As negotiations continue, Yossi Amrosi, an ex-senior official of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, was quoted by The Jerusalem Post as admitting that the Israeli army does not have the means to return all captives currently held in Gaza by Hamas and other Palestinian groups.

    Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said at the start of the war that it had taken 250 captives during its October 7 incursion into Israel.

    According to the Qassam Brigades, 50 captives have been killed in Israeli air raids. Israeli intelligence officers say 30 captives have died in Gaza so far since they were taken to the enclave.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-171-horrific-eyewitness-accounts-continue-to-emerge-from-israels-siege-on-gazas-hospitals/
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 171: ‘Horrific’ eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Israel’s siege on Gaza’s hospitals Leila WarahMarch 25, 2024 Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Casualties 32,333 + killed* and at least 74,694 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 UNRWA: Israel says no more UNRWA food convoys to north Gaza. UNRWA chief: Israeli decision to deny all UNRWA food convoys to northern Gaza is “obstruct[ing] lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine.” Doctors Without Borders “deeply concerned” after medical staff arrested at al-Shifa Hospital amid “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” nearby. Tanks crushed bodies, ambulances at al-Shifa Hospital, reports AP News, citing witnesses. Footage emerges of Israeli soldiers assaulting Palestinian boy Casualties in Israeli attack on aid distributors at Kuwaiti roundabout in Gaza City, reports Al Jazeera. Israeli forces raid Al Aqsa mosque during nightly prayers, assault and expel worshipers, reports Al Jazeera journalist. WHO Chief: Israel must reverse decision on blocking north Gaza aid. Israeli war cabinet minister threatens to quit if bill exempting ultra-Orthodox Jews from conscription passes UNRWA: U.S. funding cut will ‘compromise access to food’ in Gaza. UN special rapporteurs decry underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians. Israel blocks access to Jerusalem for West Bank Christians on Palm Sunday, reports Wafa. PRCS says it has lost radio contact with staff at al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis. Euro-Med: Israel’s attacks on academics in line with Gaza ‘genocide’ WAFA correspondent killed along with son Israeli airstrike on Gaza MAP report: Doctor says conditions inside European Gaza Hospital ‘unimaginable’ Gaza: Three Hospitals under military siege The Israeli military has imposed ongoing sieges on at least three medical facilities in the besieged enclave, terrorizing, injuring, and killing thousands of civilians in the process. Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza has entered its seventh day under siege, and the civilians able to flee are reporting ruthless massacres in and around the medical complex. A teenage Palestinian boy, Farouk Mohammed Hamd, told Al Jazeera he witnessed Israeli soldiers executing a group of eight people, including his father and brother, inside al-Shifa Hospital. He said he and the others were stripped of their clothing and moved several times inside the al-Shifa Hospital building in central Gaza over the course of hours before being taken to the top floor of the facility. “They left us for about three hours, then said, ‘You are safe. You can go south.” “We stood up, but then they opened fire. We all laid down on the floor again. Then, the snipers entertained themselves by shooting us one after the other.” Hamad said his father told him before being killed to run away if he could, and he managed to run, but not before seeing the unresponsive bodies of the executed group. On Sunday, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its staff have reported “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” in the vicinity of al-Shifa hospital, “endangering patients, medical staff and people trapped inside with very few supplies.” Jameel al-Ayoubi, one of the thousands of Palestinians sheltering at the hospital, saw Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers drive over at least four bodies in the hospital courtyard, AP News reports. Ambulances were also crushed, he says. Kareem Ayman Hathat, who lived in a five-story building about 100 meters (328 feet) from the hospital, told AP he hid in his kitchen for days waiting as explosions shook the building. “From time to time, the tank would fire a shell,” he said. “It was to terrorise us.” MSF added that Israeli forces have carried out a mass-arrest campaign of medical staff and other people and that the organization is “deeply concerned” for the safety of those detained. Meanwhile, another two hospitals in Khan Younis have been under Israeli military siege for the last 24 hours: al-Amal and Nasser hospitals, reports Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud from Gaza. “Military vehicles, tanks and attack drones are encircling these two facilities. They’re also blocking the entrance with piles of sand, preventing medical staff, patients and injured people inside from leaving safely and constantly failing to provide a safe corridor for people and evacuees trapped inside the hospital,” Mahmoud said. Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) gave their latest update on the situation in al Amal hospital on Sunday afternoon, saying Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have completely surrounded all entrances to the hospital and control any movement in and out. Israeli forces attacked the hospital earlier on Sunday, surrounding it with tanks and forcing nearly everyone inside, from patients to displaced Palestinians sheltering there, to evacuate. “What we’re getting confirmed from al-Amal Hospital is that not only has it been under constant bombing and tank shells, but loudspeakers are ordering people inside the hospital to come out only with their underwear on. And that has been confirmed by multiple sources and witnesses on the ground, those who managed to flee the harrowing situation,” Mahmoud added. On Sunday evening, the PRCS announced that they lost radio contact with their staff at the hospital. While all displaced Palestinians and patients who could move independently were evacuated towards the al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis, hospital staff remain, along with nine patients and their ten companions and a displaced family with children who have disabilities. PCRS says all of them need to be safely evacuated. PRCS added that staff member Amir Abu Aisha and a wounded individual who was being treated at the hospital after being shot in the head by the Israeli military were both killed, and their bodies need to be removed. In a statement, Hamas said the Israeli military is systematically targeting hospitals across Gaza with the goal of displacing all Palestinians from their lands, showing Israel wants to continue its “war of extermination” against Palestinians and forcibly displace them from their land “by destroying all means of life in the Gaza Strip, especially hospitals,” reported Al Jazeera. Underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians Witnesses at al-Shifa hospital have reported that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.” Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said in a post on X that it is “abhorrent” that reports of rape by Israeli forces keep coming out without any consequences. “Rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide! It must stop!” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, similarly said, “I lost count of how many renowned journalists interviewed me on the alleged mistreatment of/sexual abuse against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, and never published any article on this.” “What we can see on the ground is a systematic creation of a corrosive environment in which Israel, with its destruction of neighborhoods and hospitals, is making Gaza unliveable for the majority of Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera co-respondent, Tareq Abu Azzoum from Gaza while reporting on the besieged hospitals. “Horrific scenes” at European Hospital Meanwhile, at Gaza’s European Hospital near Khan Younis, one of the last functioning medical facilities, medical staff report “horrific scenes” at the hospital with patients “dying from infections with evidence of serious malnutrition,” reported Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). Husam Basheer, an orthopedic surgeon working at the hospital, says he and his staff are “managing with the bare minimum of resources” at the medical facility due to Israeli restrictions on medical aid entering the besieged enclave. “One day we wanted to do a plate and screw, which is a standard procedure for bone fixation, but we didn’t have the right equipment. Sometimes we’ve also lacked gauze which is a basic supply for surgery. We worked around the challenges we faced and managed in a different way, but the staff here are overwhelmed,” he said. Similarly, Konstantina Ilia Karydi, an anesthetist, described the situation inside the medical facility as “unimaginable.” “This hospital had an original capacity of just 200 beds. Now, it has expanded to 1,000 beds,” she said. “There are around 22,000 displaced people sheltering in the corridors and in tents inside the hospital because people feel that it’s safer to be here than anywhere else.” Israel bars UNRWA from northern Gaza The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced on Sunday that Israel has officially barred it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is highest. “This is outrageous [and] makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine. These restrictions must be lifted,” the head of the UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, wrote in an X post. Famine is likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July, according to the world’s hunger watchdog, Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said last week. Lazzarini warned that Israel’s decision would speed up the coming of famine in the north of the Strip and said that “many more will die of hunger, dehydration.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), says Israel must “urgently reverse” its decision to block the entry of food convoys organized by UNRWA into northern Gaza, where humanitarian needs are most urgent. “The levels of hunger are acute. All efforts to deliver food should not only be permitted but there should be an immediate acceleration of food deliveries,” Ghebreyesus said in a post on X. Martin Griffiths, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN, says he repeatedly urged Israel to lift all its restrictions on aid to Gaza. Still, it has now done the exact opposite. “UNRWA is the beating heart of the humanitarian response in Gaza,” Griffiths said on X , “The decision to block its food convoys to the north only pushes thousands closer to famine. It must be revoked.” No other agency is able to provide lifesaving assistance in Gaza in the same way as UNRWA, Natalie Boucly, the deputy commissioner-general of the UN agency, has said on X. Boucly added that attempts to “isolate” UNRWA will result in more people dying, “UNRWA is part of the UN and it was given a specific mandate by the General Assembly.” In January, several countries cut funding to UNRWA following unverified Israeli allegations that less than a dozen employees participated in Hamas’s operation on October 7. While some countries, including Canada and Sweden, have since reinstated their funding, several countries, including the US, have yet to follow suit, which will have severe implications for Palestinians in Gaza and the region. Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera. “In Gaza, the humanitarian community is racing against the clock to avert famine. As the backbone of the humanitarian response, any gap in funding to UNRWA will compromise access to food, shelter, primary health care & education at a time of deep trauma,” the organization’s chief, Lazzarini, wrote on X. “Palestine Refugees are counting on the international community to step up support to meet their basic needs.” Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera. The “dream” of many far-right politicians in Israel is to make Gaza “uninhabitable” for Palestinians, with the goal of re-establishing settlements for the Israelis, Ghafar continued. “The destruction of schools, hospitals, infrastructure [is making Gaza] almost unlivable and it will force the international community to take further refugees and thin out the population of Gaza,” he said. “I think Israel wants to have a big chunk of the population leave and become refugees elsewhere.” UN Resolution for ceasefire On Monday, the UN Security Council is expected to vote on yet another resolution regarding Israel’s war on Gaza. Since October seven, only two of eight resolutions have been accepted, with both mainly dealing with humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave. Guterres says the most recent UN Security Council resolution does not link a ceasefire in Gaza to the release of Israeli captives, reported Al Jazeera. In the resolution, “a ceasefire is required together with, but not in a linkage with, the unconditional release of all hostages,” he said. “And we have also claimed the need for that release.” Diplomats told the AFP news agency that the resolution had been worked on with the U.S. to avoid a veto, reported France 24. The U.S. has vetoed three resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. “We expect, barring a last-minute twist, that the resolution will be adopted and that the US will not vote against it,” one diplomat told AFP. Last Friday, the Security Council voted on a draft submitted by the U.S. that called for an “immediate” ceasefire linked to the release of captives. China and Russia vetoed the resolution, criticizing it for stopping short of explicitly demanding Israel halt its campaign. No progress on negotiations. Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas have continued negotiations mediated by Qatar with little progress. Hamas’s political bureau official Basem Naim says a lot of “misinformation” has recently been circulated through the media regarding the ongoing truce talks in Doha, reported Al Jazeera. Naim said the Israelis are focusing on only one aspect of the negotiations, the release of captives, and are unwilling to discuss Hamas’s three demands – a permanent end to the war, “total withdrawal” from Gaza, and the return of displaced people to their homes. Hamas had proposed the release of some 100 Israeli captives in phases in exchange for a permanent end to the war, total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and the return of displaced people to their homes; however, according to Al Jazeera, Israel rejected the demand to end the war and withdraw troops from Gaza. Al Jazeera added that Israeli negotiators said they would allow only 2,000 Palestinians to return to their homes each day, meaning it would take more than two years for all displaced Palestinians to leave Rafah. Meanwhile, Israel wants all Israeli captives released immediately. Hamas has indicated it will only release women and children in the first phase. As negotiations continue, Yossi Amrosi, an ex-senior official of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, was quoted by The Jerusalem Post as admitting that the Israeli army does not have the means to return all captives currently held in Gaza by Hamas and other Palestinian groups. Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said at the start of the war that it had taken 250 captives during its October 7 incursion into Israel. According to the Qassam Brigades, 50 captives have been killed in Israeli air raids. Israeli intelligence officers say 30 captives have died in Gaza so far since they were taken to the enclave. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-171-horrific-eyewitness-accounts-continue-to-emerge-from-israels-siege-on-gazas-hospitals/
    MONDOWEISS.NET
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 171: ‘Horrific’ eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Israel’s siege on Gaza’s hospitals
    Eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Gaza’s hospitals, including rape, torture, mass executions, and soldiers crushing Palestinian bodies with tanks. Hamas says Israel’s systematic attack on hospitals is central to its “war of extermination.”
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  • Anti-War Veterans Groups Echo Aaron Bushnell’s Demand for a Ceasefire in Gaza
    Anger over the civilian carnage in Gaza has galvanized some veterans who experienced disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan up close.

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

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


    Related

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

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

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

    Most Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/anti-war-veterans-aaron-bushnell-gaza/
    Anti-War Veterans Groups Echo Aaron Bushnell’s Demand for a Ceasefire in Gaza Anger over the civilian carnage in Gaza has galvanized some veterans who experienced disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan up close. Murtaza Hussain March 21 2024, 11:47 a.m. WASHINGTON DC, UNITED STATES - MARCH 06: Ann Wright, a retired US army colonel speaks during a press conference held by retired US army veterans and activists before US President Biden's State of the Union address to the country to demand that he calls for an immediate remnant Gaza ceasefire in Washington DC, United States on March 06, 2024. (Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images) When 25-year-old U.S. Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell took his life in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. this February, the phone lines at the anti-war organization Veterans for Peace started lighting up. Current and recently retired members of the military were calling to say they were disturbed by Bushnell’s act of self-immolation. Many of them had been privately nursing their own angst and misgivings about U.S. support for the war in Gaza. “We have been receiving many calls from concerned active duty and recently discharged veterans talking about their personal disgust with our foreign policy in light of recent events, and also talking about how these are effecting them psychologically,” said Mike Ferner, the director of Veterans for Peace. Related Aaron Bushnell, Who Self-Immolated for Palestine, Had Grown Deeply Disillusioned With the Military Members of Veterans for Peace, like other anti-war veterans groups, have mobilized around the Israeli war in Gaza, organizing protests across the country and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Following Bushnell’s death by self-immolation, veterans at a protest in Oregon burned their uniforms in tribute to the deceased airman and to register their opposition to the war. Anger over the civilian carnage from the war, coming on the heels of two decades of disastrous U.S. military involvement in the region, has galvanized some veterans who experienced these conflicts up close. “It’s fair to say that people’s psychological trauma is being activated again by what they are seeing in the news,” Ferner said, “especially people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and have been through the meat grinder once already with the U.S. military.” Most Read The U.S. has indeed been intimately involved in Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed at least 30,000 Palestinians since last October, providing its Middle East ally with extensive military aid and diplomatic cover, despite widespread public opposition. For years, Israel has received billions of dollars in military aid from the United States annually. The Biden administration has maintained that support and also asked Congress to approve another $14 billion in the wake of the war, while bypassing Congress to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel. The U.S. has also provided intelligence support for Israel during the offensive, much of it focused on efforts to deter Iranian-backed militants across the region. As The Intercept previously reported, the U.S. had begun quietly expanding a military base it operates in Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza, in the months prior to the war. That base, known as “Site 512,” is believed to help Israel track missile strikes, including from Iranian-backed groups in the region. Despite the desire of most Americans to stay out of the Middle East, blowback from the Israeli war in Gaza is directly dragging U.S. troops back in — with military casualties as the consequence. Earlier this year, Iraqi militias attacked a base in Jordan that was being used to help deter Iranian-backed groups seeking to build up their forces near Israel’s borders, killing three service members. Many military veterans who have sacrificed their physical and mental health over two decades of disastrous U.S. wars in the Middle East have been enraged by the continued waste of U.S. lives, resources, and moral credibility in the region. Following Bushnell’s death, Dennis Fritz, who served as an U.S. Air Force officer for 28 years, traveled to D.C. to attend a vigil at the site of Bushnell’s self-immolation. Fritz, who worked for years with wounded veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following his resignation from active duty, said that he felt an obligation to pay tribute to Bushnell’s sacrifice. “As a former senior enlisted leader in the air force, Aaron would have been my responsibility,” Fritz said. “As an officer I would have been the one who would have checked on him to make sure he was OK. So the news of his death struck me very hard.” Since leaving the military Fritz has worked in anti-war activism as part of the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military officers critical of U.S. foreign policy. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.” Fritz said that he and other former U.S. military officers who had already been critical of U.S. policy in the region are angered by what they are seeing unfold in Gaza. They now believe that the U.S. government is assisting in the perpetration of war crimes in Gaza. “They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.” “When we are in the military we are taught the Geneva Convention and the law of armed conflict. This teaches us not just that we must do everything we can to protect civilian life, but even the property of innocent people,” Fritz said. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “is definitely not doing that. They have the capacity to do precision bombing, but they are conducting indiscriminate bombing.” Bushnell himself has become well-known for his sacrifice, both in the U.S. and abroad where his image has often appeared at protests denouncing U.S. complicity in the Gaza war. After attending Bushnell’s vigil, Fritz himself said that he holds the U.S. government responsible for Bushnell’s sacrifice, given its lockstep support for Israel in its assault on Gaza. Fritz said, “Aaron died for the sins of our Congress and the Biden administration.” https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/anti-war-veterans-aaron-bushnell-gaza/
    THEINTERCEPT.COM
    Anti-War Veterans Groups Echo Aaron Bushnell’s Demand for a Ceasefire in Gaza
    Anger over the civilian carnage in Gaza has galvanized some veterans who experienced disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan up close.
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  • https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-bans-unrwa-funding-until-at-least-2025-while-leaving-room-for-flexibility/
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-bans-unrwa-funding-until-at-least-2025-while-leaving-room-for-flexibility/
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  • Israel's barbaric raid on Al-Shifa Hospital enters day six
    Israeli forces have abducted and killed hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in the hospital complex during the week-long assault


    As Israel continues its raid of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City for the sixth day in a row on 23 March, Gaza's Government Media Office was told by medical staff and displaced trapped inside that the army is threatening them with either destroying the hospital or torturing, interrogating, and executing them.

    The government media office said in a statement, "There are testimonies from within the Al-Shifa Medical Complex indicating that the occupation army threatened the medical staff inside the hospital buildings and the displaced, that it would bomb those buildings and destroy them over their heads, or that they would go out for torture, investigation, and execution."

    Al-Shifa Hospital used to be Gaza's largest and most equipped medical facility. Now, it lacks the means to treat patients altogether. Infections are spreading among trapped patients, and nurses are being executed.

    This invasion has been marketed as the further "destruction" of Hamas by the Israeli army, which claims it has arrested at least 500 and killed 170 fighters. Israel maintains that resistance fighters are "holed up" in the hospital.

    In a video statement on Thursday, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the assault would continue for "several more days." He claimed Israeli forces had detained over "500 suspects, 358 of which are Hamas and Islamic Jihad," and distributed a photo collage claiming to show their faces.

    However, the army provided no supporting evidence of the identities of the detainees, and some of the images originated from Palestinian Authority ID cards.

    The army later admitted the photo collage mistakenly included people "who have not yet been caught."

    It said that "due to human error, there are several photos in the graphic of terrorists who have not yet been caught but are, according to the information we have, in the area of ​​the hospital and are entrenched there."

    "When the operation is over, the identities of all the terrorists will be published," the army claimed.

    On 21 March, a Hamas security official told Al-Jazeera that the detainees' photos released by the Israeli army were inaccurate, adding that some were outside of Gaza, some dead, and some previously released. He said that the claim that dozens of resistance leaders were arrested is false, dismissing it as psychological warfare.

    One of the men pictured in the collage is Pediatric Doctor Anwar Sheikh Khalil, the Dean of the Medical Faculty at IUG University.

    AFP spoke to eyewitnesses at the hospital who said that "all men," including the sick and physically disabled, had been abducted by the Israeli army.

    A woman named Mariam said: "They asked us at around dawn with loudspeakers to go out or they would bomb the building."

    A 60-year-old patient interviewed by AFP said the army forced him to take his clothes off, and he was blindfolded and interrogated before being released.

    The Director General of the Government Information Office, Ismail Al-Thawabta, stated that Israeli forces killed more than 100 people inside the Al-Shifa Complex, including some medical personnel who were executed inside the complex.

    Thawabta reported that four patients were killed inside the hospital when Israeli forces prevented their treatment.

    Newly-released detainees and eyewitnesses told Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor earlier this week that Israeli forces executed abductees from the hospital.

    A survivor who asked to be identified only as “M.K.” stated to the rights monitor that, “The soldiers detained me and handcuffed me in the hospital courtyard; I was left undressed for more than nine hours."

    “About four times during that period, I saw soldiers lead groups of detainees—[always] at least three people and Never more than 10—into the hospital buildings, particularly the morgue building where bodies had previously been kept,” added M.K. “Gunshots were heard, with the soldiers then leaving the area to bring another group there," he said.

    https://thecradle.co/articles-id/24042
    Israel's barbaric raid on Al-Shifa Hospital enters day six Israeli forces have abducted and killed hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in the hospital complex during the week-long assault As Israel continues its raid of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City for the sixth day in a row on 23 March, Gaza's Government Media Office was told by medical staff and displaced trapped inside that the army is threatening them with either destroying the hospital or torturing, interrogating, and executing them. The government media office said in a statement, "There are testimonies from within the Al-Shifa Medical Complex indicating that the occupation army threatened the medical staff inside the hospital buildings and the displaced, that it would bomb those buildings and destroy them over their heads, or that they would go out for torture, investigation, and execution." Al-Shifa Hospital used to be Gaza's largest and most equipped medical facility. Now, it lacks the means to treat patients altogether. Infections are spreading among trapped patients, and nurses are being executed. This invasion has been marketed as the further "destruction" of Hamas by the Israeli army, which claims it has arrested at least 500 and killed 170 fighters. Israel maintains that resistance fighters are "holed up" in the hospital. In a video statement on Thursday, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the assault would continue for "several more days." He claimed Israeli forces had detained over "500 suspects, 358 of which are Hamas and Islamic Jihad," and distributed a photo collage claiming to show their faces. However, the army provided no supporting evidence of the identities of the detainees, and some of the images originated from Palestinian Authority ID cards. The army later admitted the photo collage mistakenly included people "who have not yet been caught." It said that "due to human error, there are several photos in the graphic of terrorists who have not yet been caught but are, according to the information we have, in the area of ​​the hospital and are entrenched there." "When the operation is over, the identities of all the terrorists will be published," the army claimed. On 21 March, a Hamas security official told Al-Jazeera that the detainees' photos released by the Israeli army were inaccurate, adding that some were outside of Gaza, some dead, and some previously released. He said that the claim that dozens of resistance leaders were arrested is false, dismissing it as psychological warfare. One of the men pictured in the collage is Pediatric Doctor Anwar Sheikh Khalil, the Dean of the Medical Faculty at IUG University. AFP spoke to eyewitnesses at the hospital who said that "all men," including the sick and physically disabled, had been abducted by the Israeli army. A woman named Mariam said: "They asked us at around dawn with loudspeakers to go out or they would bomb the building." A 60-year-old patient interviewed by AFP said the army forced him to take his clothes off, and he was blindfolded and interrogated before being released. The Director General of the Government Information Office, Ismail Al-Thawabta, stated that Israeli forces killed more than 100 people inside the Al-Shifa Complex, including some medical personnel who were executed inside the complex. Thawabta reported that four patients were killed inside the hospital when Israeli forces prevented their treatment. Newly-released detainees and eyewitnesses told Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor earlier this week that Israeli forces executed abductees from the hospital. A survivor who asked to be identified only as “M.K.” stated to the rights monitor that, “The soldiers detained me and handcuffed me in the hospital courtyard; I was left undressed for more than nine hours." “About four times during that period, I saw soldiers lead groups of detainees—[always] at least three people and [never] more than 10—into the hospital buildings, particularly the morgue building where bodies had previously been kept,” added M.K. “Gunshots were heard, with the soldiers then leaving the area to bring another group there," he said. https://thecradle.co/articles-id/24042
    THECRADLE.CO
    Israel's barbaric raid on Al-Shifa Hospital enters day six
    Israeli forces have abducted and killed hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in the hospital complex during the week-long assault
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1008 Views
  • Drone footage reveals Israel’s cold-blooded murder of Palestinians in Gaza
    The death toll in Israel's campaign of genocide in Gaza has exceeded over 31,000 Palestinians


    Israeli forces used drones to kill four Palestinian youths in Gaza in cold blood as they walked down a road in the city of Khan Yunis in Gaza, footage obtained by Al-Jazeera shows.

    The drone first fired two missiles at the youths as they walked on a dirt road, hoping to reach the remains of their

    destroyed homes. Israeli bulldozers had been active in the area but had withdrawn. Israeli forces continued to monitor the area by drone.

    The missiles killed two of the youths. The other two tried to escape, but Israeli drones opened fire with missiles a third and fourth time, killing them both separately as well.

    The last youth had tripped and fallen and was on his knees in the road as the missile struck him.

    The missiles obliterated the bodies, barely leaving a trace of them.

    The video shows the youths were unarmed and posed no threat to any Israeli forces.

    The drone was broadcasting video to an Israeli command center as it opened fire.

    On Thursday evening, the Gaza Media Office stated that the killings constituted evidence of a “deep crisis within the Israeli occupation.”

    “We strongly condemn this crime in which the occupation army bombed four civilian youths with drones, killing them vindictively and turning them into scattered remains, indicating the magnitude of the deep crisis that this occupation is going through by killing in this monstrous manner,” the media office said.

    “The US administration, the international community, and the Israeli occupation bear full responsibility for the continuation of these crimes against Palestinian civilians for the sixth consecutive month (of the war),” it added.

    Since 7 October, Israeli forces have killed over 31,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a campaign widely-viewed as genocide.


    https://thecradle.co/articles-id/24036
    Drone footage reveals Israel’s cold-blooded murder of Palestinians in Gaza The death toll in Israel's campaign of genocide in Gaza has exceeded over 31,000 Palestinians Israeli forces used drones to kill four Palestinian youths in Gaza in cold blood as they walked down a road in the city of Khan Yunis in Gaza, footage obtained by Al-Jazeera shows. The drone first fired two missiles at the youths as they walked on a dirt road, hoping to reach the remains of their destroyed homes. Israeli bulldozers had been active in the area but had withdrawn. Israeli forces continued to monitor the area by drone. The missiles killed two of the youths. The other two tried to escape, but Israeli drones opened fire with missiles a third and fourth time, killing them both separately as well. The last youth had tripped and fallen and was on his knees in the road as the missile struck him. The missiles obliterated the bodies, barely leaving a trace of them. The video shows the youths were unarmed and posed no threat to any Israeli forces. The drone was broadcasting video to an Israeli command center as it opened fire. On Thursday evening, the Gaza Media Office stated that the killings constituted evidence of a “deep crisis within the Israeli occupation.” “We strongly condemn this crime in which the occupation army bombed four civilian youths with drones, killing them vindictively and turning them into scattered remains, indicating the magnitude of the deep crisis that this occupation is going through by killing in this monstrous manner,” the media office said. “The US administration, the international community, and the Israeli occupation bear full responsibility for the continuation of these crimes against Palestinian civilians for the sixth consecutive month (of the war),” it added. Since 7 October, Israeli forces have killed over 31,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a campaign widely-viewed as genocide. https://thecradle.co/articles-id/24036
    THECRADLE.CO
    Drone footage reveals Israel’s cold-blooded murder of Palestinians in Gaza
    The death toll in Israel's campaign of genocide in Gaza has exceeded over 31,000 Palestinians
    0 Comments 0 Shares 585 Views
  • What a War Requires
    Yes, It's About Resources

    Dr Naomi Wolf

    Dear Readers, Dear Extended Family

    I am grateful that this Substack — which, if you read the comment section, is also one that is a home or meeting-place for many of the most interesting and idealistic people on the Internet — has 83,500 plus subscribers. That is almost the subscriber base of The New Republic. It had 737,000 plus views in the last 30 days — 249,000 plus more than the month prior. That is more views than the number of the audience of CNN.

    Every reader is equally precious to me. But you all count on me — you tell me this — to do all I can to affect national and even global outcomes. From the messages I receive, leaders from all walks of life do indeed read this Substack — and so it is having some impact on the public discussion and perhaps even on public outcomes.

    But this Substack has only a few more than 4000 paid subscribers.

    Why does this matter, more than to my personal finances?

    As you know, I believe — I think at this point it is incontrovertible - that a war is being waged upon us, one that will soon become a “hot war.” My husband Brian O’Shea, who cohosts the podcast “Unrestricted Invasion” with JJ Carrell, is documenting the positioning of military-age or gangland-age illegal-immigrant young men, in barracks-type situations in strategic points around the country. This week he went undercover to a budget hotel in Massachusetts, where security and the hotel staff sought to prevent him from filming what was happening inside in relation to scores of illegal incomers. He was subsequently followed by a maroon sedan that pulled up right as he was leaving the hotel; the drivers proceeded to wait til he was his car, and then followed him across three different exits til he shook them off.

    Brian was also confronted by security, and then followed, earlier this year, when he went to document a facility in Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field, an area with over 1000 flat acres of land, where illegal immigrants are being housed in military-style facilities. Illegal immigrants are being housed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, a sensitive strategic location for a possible attack on America, if there ever was one. Illegal immigrants, disproportionately fighting-age men, are being housed for months in hotels in midtown Manhattan, all basic expenses paid and with cleaning services.

    As they say, wake up and smell the coffee. This is not a domestic policy issue any longer — ie, what are these illegal immigrants getting that your legal immigrant parents or grandparents, your enslaved great-grandparents, did not get? To anyone who has ever been in a combat area, this set of situations depicts what is obviously a military or terrorist set of staging areas. Or, to be conservative, this set of landscapes has all the hallmarks of depicting military or terrorist staging areas.

    Meanwhile, the whips are being brought down on the shoulders of the last standing dissidents in the United States and globally. A Canadian court ordered psychologist and commentator Jordan Peterson to be forced into a re-education program. Literal Marxism. Ethical physician Dr Kulvinder Kaur Gill, who was critical of the mRNA injections, has been hit with a $1 million dollar fine after her libel suit in defense of her reputation, failed. She was forced to mobilize an online donations campaign in order not to lose her house. Under the guise of a credit review, as he points out, researcher and inventor of the mRNA vaccine Dr Robert Malone has been hit with a letter from payment processor Stripe, demanding his bank records. He was told that it will cost $100,000 to fight it. Other dissident voices on Substack, including conservative voices, are being hit in similar ways.

    Governor Hochul declared that National Guard would take on some civil policing roles in New York State, and she is appealing the court decision that prevented her from opening quarantine camps that could detain New Yorkers without trial or even without infection, indefinitely. If she prevails, and if the WHO treaty that declares WHO “pandemic” requirements superior to national or state law prevails in May, the National Guard (or the WHO’s own mercenaries) could show up at any New Yorker’s house, and this is the state where I live; and compel him or her to be transported to a detention facility, and that would be that.

    Why am I presenting all of this to you? Because things are getting very scary and we need your help.

    This Substack does not just provide personal income for me. It is the source of funds to meet costs for the independent news and opinion site DailyClout.io and for BillCam when our demands exceed our resources.

    Gloria Steinem says to look at your checkbook to see if you are walking your talk morally, and my checkbook speaks volumes. I had hoped by the age of 61, after decades of training for my profession, honing my craft as a writer, and fighting for humanity and for humane values, that I would be able to look at my checkbook records and see mostly expenses for travel, with other records perhaps of dinners in some lovely restaurants, an occasional nice dress or two, and funds devoted to caring for elderly relatives.

    But my primary expenditure is not for any of that. Most of the money I earn goes to scrambling to meet the extraordinary and unpredictable costs that running a war from the trenches of DailyClout can involve, and many of these high costs arise unpredictably. Remember, too, that those who use their own resources to oppose and harass us and me personally, include one of the biggest companies in the world, not to mention the United States government, including its justice arm — and state governments. One of our legal letters is against the Justice Department. One of our lawsuits is against the Biden administration, including the CDC.

    Though we are doing impressively well as a startup helmed by three people, and punching far above our weight, we have, as you know, bills that can top six figures for the various lawsuits we are waging on your behalf.

    To keep a dissident news startup — one that also crafts draft bills and passes them, as nonprofits cannot do, which activity involves traversing a minefield of FEC restrictions — so scrupulously kosher that it can’t be brought down by government tripwires, is itself a legal bill for tens of thousands.

    Though we are a lean machine, our technical costs are substantial. Our API, the feed from which our legislative technology that lets you see, share and act on any bill, costs thousands of dollars per quarter. Our developers have created tools — the latest being the extraordinary game changer LegiSector, at https://www.legisector.com (due to suppression, you need to cut and paste the whole url in order to see it) — that sweep away all obfuscation from state and federal legislation, and allow you to pass, share or stop bills from the ease of your own desktop, or even from your handheld. This is also a tens of thousands of dollars a year commitment. As we push to launch this revolutionary tool, Google appears to be suppressing it so thoroughly that it is difficult for us to let the world know that everything has changed now, as interviewers who have covered this tool are telling me, when it comes to legislative transparency. We need a marketing campaign in the tens of thousands to break through this censorship by another one of the biggest companies on Earth.

    It is my sleepless nights, no one else’s, that are involved in trying to figure out how.

    Then there are the fights to protect the reputation that allows me to lead this company and its mission and tools, forward; I was forced to spend tens of thousands on a lawsuit against Twitter for suppressing my (accurate, important) warnings about harms to women from the mRNA injections. My co-plaintiff? President Donald Trump. (Sadly I do not have the resources for legal representation, that my co-plaintiff does.)

    The point of all of the above is that staying credible, meaning fighting the constant government- and nonprofit-sponsored attacks on the credibility of my and my company’s reputations; staying on the right side of all government regulations, so that no harm can come to me or the company; fighting in the courts so that a precedent can be set to protect all Americans from the government leaning on private companies to destroy them — fighting Google’s algorithms with creative workarounds; fighting laws that constantly seek to imprison or bankrupt us — all of this, at times, as you know because I have shared it with you before, can take a terrible financial and psychic/energetic toll.

    It is tempting to just walk away and, to paraphrase Voltaire, “cultivate my own garden.”

    But to stay in these trenches and achieve it at all, all that so many of you tell me you are counting on, requires a robust and reliable stream of resources if we are to stay alive in this culture of lies and erasures.

    Think about the lives we have saved. Maybe yours or your loved ones. Think about whether anyone else’s technology lets you see and act on any state or Federal bill, or protect your investments; with both BillCam and LegiSector offering free searches.

    Think about whether anyone else is soliciting citizens’ input on draft model bills, hiring lawyers, drafting and passing them, in the way we do. Remember, nonprofits can give you a tax deduction, but they cannot lobby. They must stop short of actual political action with legislation and legislators. The fact that we aren’t a nonprofit allows us to lobby and draft and pass bills — a superpower — but makes it much harder for us to raise donation funding.

    Think about this Substack, for that matter. Did my writing help to balance and reassure you in this nightmarish struggle? Did it inform you of important issues that could affect your family? Did you find community and spiritual strength here?

    What would your world be like without my voice, or without DailyClout’s voice and tools and advocacy?

    There would be a lot more darkness, and you and your family’s position and knowledge base would be weakened. I do not think that is too strong a statement.

    If you want these voices and institutions to keep fighting this war, mine but also others’, there is no alternative but to support them with, dare I say it, your actual money.

    I know that many people cannot afford $8 a month. But many of the 83,000 subscribers who are now free, could afford to upgrade to the status of paid subscriber. And the difference between 4 per cent of my readers being paid subscribers and eight per cent being paid subscribers, is the difference between a precarious and easily extinguished position on the battlefield, versus a more secure one that can continue winning victory after victory for you.

    And I will tell you, speaking both as a writer and on behalf of a dissident company, without your financial support it is not only materially unsustainable to fight on, but emotionally unsustainable, as the battles grow more serious and more costly. Without your help, over time, the strain of trying to figure out, during many months, how to pay our lawyers, as well as our API invoices and our developers and our travel to statehouses to lobby for freedom for you, will simply become too great.

    We need your help in spiritual and emotional as well as in material ways.

    You should support us not as a charity but because our our approach works. Because of our draft Five Freedoms bill, which passed in 33 states in 2021, you do not have vaccine passports in the US, and kids went back to school earlier than they might have done. Our Election Integrity bill, which you all shared, has cosponsors in Wyoming, was introduced and defeated in Maine (but a successor has been tapped to re-introduce it in the Fall), and three other states, Michigan, Alabama and North Dakota, have citizens and legislators acting to push it forward. The Pfizer Papers comes out in May. The manuscript, which Amy Kelly and I edited, is 500 pages long. We edited 96 reports from the WarRoom/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Research Team, who in turn had reviewed 450,000 pages of internal Pfizer documents. They revealed the greatest crime against humanity in history in exhaustive detail, affecting people and governments worldwide. Their work is cited or used without citation by dozens of other freedom advocates, and legislators. And booster uptake is now down to 4%; Pfizer’s profits ground to pre-2016 levels.

    We saved, together, with your help, what may turn out to be millions of lives and countless unborn babies.

    But to continue, I need your help; seriously; now just now but into the future.

    If you can afford, it, and if the above is meaningful to you at all, do please upgrade your subscription from free to paid.

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    https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/what-a-war-requires
    What a War Requires Yes, It's About Resources Dr Naomi Wolf Dear Readers, Dear Extended Family I am grateful that this Substack — which, if you read the comment section, is also one that is a home or meeting-place for many of the most interesting and idealistic people on the Internet — has 83,500 plus subscribers. That is almost the subscriber base of The New Republic. It had 737,000 plus views in the last 30 days — 249,000 plus more than the month prior. That is more views than the number of the audience of CNN. Every reader is equally precious to me. But you all count on me — you tell me this — to do all I can to affect national and even global outcomes. From the messages I receive, leaders from all walks of life do indeed read this Substack — and so it is having some impact on the public discussion and perhaps even on public outcomes. But this Substack has only a few more than 4000 paid subscribers. Why does this matter, more than to my personal finances? 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Or, to be conservative, this set of landscapes has all the hallmarks of depicting military or terrorist staging areas. Meanwhile, the whips are being brought down on the shoulders of the last standing dissidents in the United States and globally. A Canadian court ordered psychologist and commentator Jordan Peterson to be forced into a re-education program. Literal Marxism. Ethical physician Dr Kulvinder Kaur Gill, who was critical of the mRNA injections, has been hit with a $1 million dollar fine after her libel suit in defense of her reputation, failed. She was forced to mobilize an online donations campaign in order not to lose her house. Under the guise of a credit review, as he points out, researcher and inventor of the mRNA vaccine Dr Robert Malone has been hit with a letter from payment processor Stripe, demanding his bank records. He was told that it will cost $100,000 to fight it. Other dissident voices on Substack, including conservative voices, are being hit in similar ways. 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What would your world be like without my voice, or without DailyClout’s voice and tools and advocacy? There would be a lot more darkness, and you and your family’s position and knowledge base would be weakened. I do not think that is too strong a statement. If you want these voices and institutions to keep fighting this war, mine but also others’, there is no alternative but to support them with, dare I say it, your actual money. I know that many people cannot afford $8 a month. But many of the 83,000 subscribers who are now free, could afford to upgrade to the status of paid subscriber. And the difference between 4 per cent of my readers being paid subscribers and eight per cent being paid subscribers, is the difference between a precarious and easily extinguished position on the battlefield, versus a more secure one that can continue winning victory after victory for you. And I will tell you, speaking both as a writer and on behalf of a dissident company, without your financial support it is not only materially unsustainable to fight on, but emotionally unsustainable, as the battles grow more serious and more costly. Without your help, over time, the strain of trying to figure out, during many months, how to pay our lawyers, as well as our API invoices and our developers and our travel to statehouses to lobby for freedom for you, will simply become too great. We need your help in spiritual and emotional as well as in material ways. You should support us not as a charity but because our our approach works. Because of our draft Five Freedoms bill, which passed in 33 states in 2021, you do not have vaccine passports in the US, and kids went back to school earlier than they might have done. Our Election Integrity bill, which you all shared, has cosponsors in Wyoming, was introduced and defeated in Maine (but a successor has been tapped to re-introduce it in the Fall), and three other states, Michigan, Alabama and North Dakota, have citizens and legislators acting to push it forward. The Pfizer Papers comes out in May. The manuscript, which Amy Kelly and I edited, is 500 pages long. We edited 96 reports from the WarRoom/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Research Team, who in turn had reviewed 450,000 pages of internal Pfizer documents. They revealed the greatest crime against humanity in history in exhaustive detail, affecting people and governments worldwide. Their work is cited or used without citation by dozens of other freedom advocates, and legislators. And booster uptake is now down to 4%; Pfizer’s profits ground to pre-2016 levels. We saved, together, with your help, what may turn out to be millions of lives and countless unborn babies. But to continue, I need your help; seriously; now just now but into the future. If you can afford, it, and if the above is meaningful to you at all, do please upgrade your subscription from free to paid. The war is here, and you need warriors fighting for you, who are not barefoot in the snow, but who have warm clothing, and weapons, and ammunition. https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/what-a-war-requires
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  • Inside the anti-Syria lobby’s Capitol Hill push for more starvation sanctions
    Hekmat AboukhaterMarch 20, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

    Stabilization for me but not for thee

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

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

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

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




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

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




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

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

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

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




    Overtures Towards Israel

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

    https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/20/anti-syria-lobbys-capitol-hill-sanctions/
    Inside the anti-Syria lobby’s Capitol Hill push for more starvation sanctions Hekmat AboukhaterMarch 20, 2024 A week from the 13th anniversary of the US-backed Syrian dirty war, the American Coalition for Syria held its annual day of advocacy in Washington DC. I went undercover into meetings with Senate policy advisors and witnessed the lobby’s cynical campaign to starve Syria into submission. On the morning of March 7, as the US Capitol teemed with lobbyists securing earmarks ahead of appropriations week and activists decrying the Gaza genocide, one special interest group on the Hill stood out. In the corridors of the Rayburn building, a group of roughly 50 people prepared for a busy day of advocating for sanctions to be levied against their homeland. They were the Anti-Syria lobby — and had I infiltrated their influence campaign. Throughout the day, I watched as this group pushed US officials to accept their policy of starvation sanctions while cynically ignoring famished Palestinians in Gaza. Among the lobbyists was Raed Saleh, the head of the Syrian White Helmets, who were to propagandize for regime change from behind humanitarian cover. I attended a total of seven meetings with policy teams representing Senators Sherrod Brown, Maggie Hassan, Ben Cardin, Mark Kelly, Chris Van Hollen, John Fetterman, and Rick Scott. Throughout these sessions, I witnessed the anti-Syria Lobby attempt to bully and manipulate US officials into accepting their policy of starvation while cynically throwing starving Palestinians in Gaza under the bus. At one moment, Raed Saleh, head of the Syrian White Helmets, which was founded by British intelligence, and funded by NATO states, painted Israeli air strikes against Syria in a positive light. During a separate meeting, Wa’el Alzayat of the pro-Zionist Muslim outreach Emgage even demanded Senator Chris Van Hollen’s office support the approval of aid for Al Qaeda-linked militias in Syria. “Stop freaking out about the stuff going to terrorists,” he insisted, adding that “the Brits are doing it, the Turks are doing it, [and] the Qataris are doing it.” Purporting to be a voice for all Syrians, the anti-Syria lobby is spearheaded by the American Coalition for Syria (ACS), an umbrella organization representing opposition groups such as the Syrian American Council (SAC), the Syrian Forum, and a handful of others located in the US and Turkey. Emgage, meanwhile, has been credited with getting the diaspora vote out for then-candidate Joe Biden in November 2020. The group has since fallen under criticism for acting as a de facto extension of the Biden White House and Democratic Party within the Muslim community. Emgage board member Farooq Mitha formally went to work for the Biden Pentagon in March 2021. On March 7, Alzayat aimed to weaponize Emgage’s influence against Democratic Senators who seemed uncomfortable with an escalating sanctions policy. “I need a good story for my voters,” he explained to Senator Van Hollen’s team. Throughout their sanctions campaign on the Hill, Alzayat and his cohorts operated like a miniature version of their Israel lobby allies, supplying roughly 50 volunteers with folders outlining talking points and the biographies of congressional representatives. The bios included a comprehensive list of the Senator or Representative’s recorded stance on Syria, such as their votes on the extension of the AUMF, the US military withdrawal from Syria, and previous sanctions packages targeting the country. The handouts also laid out the lobby’s key legislative requests, which largely focused on securing development aid for militia-controlled territory in Syria — including that held by Al Qaeda’s local ally in the country — and ensuring passage of the ‘Assad Regime Anti Normalization Bill,’ which seeks to extend and expand sanctions targeting Damascus. The Anti-Syria Lobby’s resemblance to their Israeli counterparts was no mistake. As Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s chief of staff reassured us, “the Israelis want you guys in charge.” Syrian Civil War map|Syrian Civil War map (November 24, 2023) via Wikimedia Commons. Edited by author More Starvation Sanctions Ever since the US included Syria on its inaugural State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) list over Damascus’ support for the Palestinian resistance in 1979, Washington has gradually ratcheted up its financial war on the Syrian people. When decades of covert hybrid war erupted into an all-out proxy battle for the country’s territory—and survival—in 2011, the Anti-Syria Lobby officially began to take shape in Washington. Syria is the unrivaled champion of the SST having never been delisted since the list’s inception in 1979. In 2019, as Syria’s government emerged victorious from a multi-year battle with foreign-backed militias, Washington decided that while Damascus may have won the war, it would not win the peace. That January, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, a recipient of $1.8 million in AIPAC donations, introduced a sanctions package known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. Trump signed the bill as part of the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2020. The US has a 45-year long tradition of sanctioning and isolating Syria economically in response to the country’s support of Palestinian resistance The bill was unprecedented in both the way that it sanctioned broad sectors of the Syrian economy rather than only specific individuals, and in its deployment of so-called “secondary sanctions.” Secondary sanctions are imposed on parties that do business with a sanctioned entity even if those exchanges occur outside of the sanctioning entity’s jurisdiction. Syria’s economy has been in free fall ever since the Caesar sanctions came into effect. Today, over 12 million Syrians representing more than half of the total population face food insecurity — a 51% increase from 2019. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. In 2019, the US dollar exchanged for 500 Syrian Pounds. Today, that number is more like 14,100— figures that represent a 2,720 percent devaluation. The Syrian currency has devalued by 35,150% since the initial exchange rate of 40 SYP to 1 USD early 2011 Though H.R. 3202 appears to be focused on addressing UN aid divergence, and sanctioning previously unsanctioned entities like Asma Al Assad’s Syria Trust for Development and the Syrian Red Crescent, the real agenda of the bill is found deep within its 22-page text. With the Caesar Sanctions set to expire by the end of 2024, H.R. 3202 seeks to quietly extend the aggressive financial measures until 2032. The new bill’s main aim, which received very little attention, is the extension of the Caesar Act for 8 more years. Having passed the House with overwhelming enthusiasm, H.R. 3202’s sister bill in the Senate can only pass with Democratic support. It was introduced by Israeli lobby-funded Republican Idaho Sen. James Risch last September and has since been co-sponsored by arch-neoconservative Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Because S. 2935 can only pass with Democratic sponsorship, the Anti-Syria Lobby chose Sen. Ben Cardin, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and sponsor of the anti-Russia Magnitsky Act, as a crucial target for influence. After meeting with Sherrod Brown’s office, Cardin’s Research and Legislative Assistant, Christopher Barr, hosted us in the Senator’s office. There, Raed Saleh of the White Helmets complained to Barr that USAID had slashed funding for his organization from $12 million to $3 million in recent years. Next, it was time to discuss the true purpose of our visit: the passage of S. 2935. Barr appeared uneasy from the outset and even expressed displeasure about the bill, complaining, “What passed the House was kind of a lot… the list of targets is vast.” “Syria has already been so heavily sanctioned,” he added. In response, Ghanem revealed a critical piece of information about the forces driving the dirty war on Syria, explaining that the impetus to expand and extend Caesar did not come from the Anti-Syria Lobby itself, but someone on Capitol Hill. Ghanem explained that the Hill source actually contacted the American Coalition for Syria to alert them to the fact that Caesar was set to expire, lamenting the fact that its sunset would amount to a loss of “US leverage over the Syrian regime.” This line echoed the disturbing language of officials representing both the Biden and Trump administration alike. In 2019, neoconservative operative Dana Stroul declared that thanks to Caesar, Washington “holds a card on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back,” to Syria. She lauded the fact that the U.S. could weaponize that “leverage” to keep Syria in “rubble.” Two years later, she would take up post as Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under Biden. Similarly, during an event at the neoconservative think tank, WINEP, the following year, the Special Envoy for Syria under Trump, Joel Rayburn, boasted that Caesar “lowers the bar” for evidence-based sanctions and allows for the broad targeting of any and all reconstruction projects in Syria. “We don’t have to prove, for example, that a company that’s going in to do a reconstruction project in the Damascus region is dealing directly with the Assad regime,” Rayburn explained. “We don’t have to have the evidence to prove that link,” he continued. “We just have to have the evidence that proves that a company or an individual is investing in […] the construction sector, the engineering sector, most of the aviation sector, the finance sector, energy sector, and so on.” These public confessions did not stop the Anti-Syria Lobby from lying to the faces of congressional staffers throughout their March 7 campaign. During a meeting with Sen. Mark Kelly’s office, Ghanem falsely stated that the Caesar Sanctions were “targeted,” “not sectoral,” and “not [an] embargo, nothing punishing to civilians.” Yet Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on Sanctions who visited Syria to document the effects of Washington’s unilateral sanctions regime on Syria, disagrees. In her 19-page report she clearly states that the sanctions are both illegal and inhumane in the way they affect the average Syrian. Stabilization for me but not for thee The second legislative ask came in the form of a well rehearsed speech by Ghanem, Zayat, and others, outlining what US tax dollars do and don’t fund in Syria. US aid packages are typically divided into two categories: “humanitarian funding” earmarked for goods such as food, water, and basic medical supplies or “stabilization” funding designed to secure a country as it transitions out of a period of turmoil. Unlike humanitarian assistance, stabilization funding may be used to support major investment and infrastructure projects such as roads, schools, healthcare facilities, and government services. The US is the primary funder of humanitarian aid in both North East (NE) and NW Syria. However, while the US spends abundantly on stabilization needs in NE Syria, it spends $0 on the NW. That is because while Washington has long dreamed of establishing a secessionist Kurdish state in Syria’s Northeast, it neglected to send stabilization funds to the Northwest in order to avoid providing direct support to HTS, the Al Qaeda offshoot that governs the territory. The Anti-Syria Lobby was in Washington to change that. Leading the push for US funds to Al Qaeda-affiliated elements in Northwest Syria was Wa’el Alzayat, a Syrian expat who proudly served in Iraq’s Green Zone under George Bush’s State Department and more recently published a shocking Washington Post oped begging US officials not to “lift sanctions to help Syria earthquake victims.” In the office of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Alzayat voiced his frustration with US hesitation in the Northwest. “Stop freaking out about the stuff going to terrorists,” he demanded, adding that “the Brits are doing it, the Turks are doing it, the Qataris are doing it.” We’re missing out on a golden opportunity here to stabilize the region and leverage it for a political settlement,” he pleaded. In other words, Alzayat was openly lobbying US officials to strengthen Al Qaeda’s position in Syria in order to leverage the terrorist group against the country’s government. Alzayat then weaponized his six-figure salary as head of Emgage to bully Van Hollen’s office into bowing before the anti-Syria Lobby, falsely claiming that his AIPAC-linked organization was “behind” the “Uncommitted” vote campaigns that damaged Biden’s primary performance in Michigan and Minnesota. Towards the end of the meeting, the regime change lobbyist cynically invoked Israel’s slaughter of 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza to make the case for Al Qaeda in Syria one last time. He argued that although “his community” is up in arms about the Biden administration’s funding and arming of the Gaza genocide, they would gladly flock back to the Democratic Party if the US funded roads and schools in Al Qaeda-controlled Idlib. “I need a good story for my voters,” Alzayat explained, noting the Muslim community’s disapproval of the Biden Administration’s policy in Gaza and Yemen. “You’re upset about all these disappointments,” he continued, play-acting a scenario in which he convinced a Muslim constituent to vote for Biden, again. “Guess what? They’re pumping 50 million into the school sector in the North [of Syria]!” Overtures Towards Israel The Israel-Palestine crisis loomed large throughout the ACS lobbying trip. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s secretary happened to be a hijabi Muslim woman sporting a pendant outlining the map of Palestine around her neck. As she greeted us, Farouk Belal, the head of the Syrian American Council, grumbled to Ghanem and me: “I hope she’s not with the resistance.” When I asked him to clarify what he meant as we exited the office, he explained that people aligned with the Palestinian cause in Washington “don’t like us.” Meanwhile, in Sen. Cardin’s office, Raed Salah of the White Helmets painted Israeli strikes on Syria which have crippled Syrian infrastructure, regularly damaged the country’s International civilian airports, and killed hundreds of Syrian Soldiers and civilians alike in a positive light: “The situation in Syria is very complicated. Every day we hear of Israeli strikes on the dens, or the bases of the IRGC and its militias. Even we as Syrians did not know the extent to which the Iranians were entrenched in the country…” For Saleh, the Israeli strikes do nothing but highlight the presence of the Syrian government-invited Iranian military presence in Syria. Later that day, Ghanem attempted to capitalize on Sen. Fetterman’s fanatical pro-Israel antics by describing recent developments in Syria to a 20-something staffer. Referring to the Syrian government’s successful campaign to retake southern territory, he explained that the South is “where they lob missiles on Israel, by the way.” The aide dutifully transcribed this seemingly random piece of information in her notepad. Towards the end of the meeting, Fetterman was discussed as a potential Democratic sponsor of S. 2935 in the Senate. In Senator Rick Scott’s office, a Cuban American Government Relations Associate for ACS, Alberto Hernandez, accidentally said the quiet part out loud. When Senator Scott’s ultra-Zionist National Security Advisor, Paul Bonicelli, asked if our group had connected with our “counterparts” in the Israeli lobby so that they could “vet” our proposals — revealing that Scott has apparently outsourced his brain to Zionists — Hernandez remarked: “Formally? No. Informally.” He then turned to the rest of the ACS team in the meeting room and said: “You didn’t hear me say that.” That admission prompted Bonicelli to suggest that ACS directly coordinate with groups such as the Aramaic Church in Israel, which has supported regime change efforts in Damascus despite overwhelming Christian support of the government within Syria itself. As the meeting wound to a close, Bonicelli informed us that he agreed with ACS on the necessity to oppose Iran and Russia. “If Obama had done the right thing in 2012, we wouldn’t be here,” he lamented, adding: “the Israelis want you guys in charge.” At one point during the meeting in Rick Scott’s Office, Alberto Hernandez, and Sarah Salas, a Cuban American legislative aide, expressed full agreement with US use of unilateral sanctions as means to “push” governments that “we don’t like.” Starving Syrians Without A Mandate Though several ACS volunteers shared painful personal encounters with the Syrian government throughout the day, many were simply too far removed from Syria to truly represent the voice of Syrian people, especially the 12 million plus civilians currently living in Syrian government-controlled territory. One 24-year-old woman who did not speak Arabic and has not been to Syria since 2003 described the Syrian Army’s 2016 liberation of Aleppo from Al Qaeda-linked militants as “the fall of Aleppo.” Other Syrians like myself experienced the terror of the West’s proxy war in Syria firsthand. In 2012, my aunt and cousins watched in horror as the Turkish-backed Liwa’ Al Tawhid, an umbrella group of takfiri jihadist militias, arrived on their street in the Seryan El Jdideh neighborhood of Aleppo. The militants proceeded to execute a local pick-up truck driver and steal his vehicle, leaving his bleeding corpse on the street. Shahba, where my family lived up until 2015, was located just a stone’s throw away from these sectarian death squads during our final months there. The Syrian dirty war was bloody and gruesome, yet the picture that ACS paints is entirely one-sided. Unfortunately, while organizations like ACS have flocked to the Beltway swamp throughout the last 13 years, there are no Syrians present in Washington DC to counter them. While these groups claim to speak on behalf of the Syrian people, those of us who have lived and still live in areas controlled by Syrian government — regardless of our political affiliations—are rendered voiceless in the very center of power where our perspective should matter most. Even Syria’s embassy has been shuttered since 2014, while Syrian diplomats at the UN in New York are heavily monitored and restricted from traveling beyond the NYC metro area. As I witnessed on Capitol Hill, there are few obstacles to the anti-Syria lobby’s ruthless push to prevent the majority of Syrians from emerging from the ruins of war. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/20/anti-syria-lobbys-capitol-hill-sanctions/
    THEGRAYZONE.COM
    Inside the anti-Syria lobby's Capitol Hill push for more starvation sanctions - The Grayzone
    A week from the 13th anniversary of the US-backed Syrian dirty war, the American Coalition for Syria held its annual day of advocacy in Washington DC. I went undercover into meetings with Senate policy advisors and witnessed the lobby’s cynical campaign to starve Syria into submission. On the morning of March 7, as the US Capitol teemed with lobbyists securing earmarks ahead of appropriations week and activists decrying the Gaza genocide, one special interest group on the Hill stood out. […]
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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/
    1 Comments 0 Shares 3249 Views 0
  • Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’ This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today. His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir. The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious. “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy” Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium. “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad. He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility. By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours. And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.” The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy. Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.” Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.” On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”. Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews. At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance. The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed. And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army. The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group. When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.” “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father. “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”. His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.” He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.” And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view. His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.” Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.” https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    WWW.JEWISHVOICEFORLABOUR.ORG.UK
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    Graham Bash reviews this groundbreaking personal and political memoir by Avi Shlaim in which he laments the lost world of…
    1 Comments 0 Shares 3099 Views
  • Subject: Fw: Dr Mike Yeadon: Introductory statement about serious crimes per Mark Sexton communication
    To: Ben.Bates@met.police.uk <Ben.Bates@met.police.uk>
    Cc: Mark Sexton

    Dear Ben Bates,

    I have been asked by former policeman, Mark Sexton (copied) to introduce myself to you & to indicate the fields in which I have unequivocal evidence of criminal activity.

    Let me begin my outlining my credentials to have realised that the areas I will outline were incorrect in the first place.

    My name is Dr Mike Yeadon. I am the most senior, former “big pharma” & biotech research executive speaking out about several serious crimes in relation to what I call the “Covid era”.

    My original training was in Biochemistry & Toxicology, in which I was awarded the strongest first class joint honours degree that the School of Biomedical Sciences had ever awarded at the time (1985, University of Surrey).

    Part of my undergraduate training involved research placements at the Chemical Defence Establishment, Porton Down, Wiltshire, where I was a small cog in the long term development of injected antidotes for nerve gas poisoning to protect British troops. I also worked at the then Central Laboratory of the Forensic Sciences Service, Aldermaston, Berkshire, adjacent to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. While with the Forensic Science Service, I received training on several precision analytical methods including mass spectrometry, then a highly technically complex method.
    As far as I recall, I had security clearance for both establishments. Porton Down, then as now, is a top security facility with an international reputation.

    My PhD, in the field of Pharmacology was “On the effect of opiates on respiratory function” (1988) and this was sponsored by the MOD.

    After securing my PhD, which gave me a sound training in several additional subdisciplines of biology, chemistry & drug metabolism, I joined the pharmaceutical industry.

    I spent 24years with “big pharma”, starting at Wellcome Research Laboratories, where I briefly worked alongside a Dr Patrick Vallance (who became Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government).

    For the longest period, I was in charge of Pfizer’s global research in the field of Allergic & Respiratory Disease Therapeutics. I left Pfizer in 2011, having reached the level of Vice President, because the company had decided to exit their large R&D base in Kent. The parting was cordial. Before leaving, I sought to find new homes for the portfolio of exploratory medicines I had helped create & was gratified that Mylan U.K. Ltd, the world’s second largest generics company, acquired much of my former portfolio soon after I had left.

    I later founded & lead as CEO a highly successful biotechnology company, Ziarco Pharma Ltd. Pfizer and four other venture capital firms were investors in my company, which was acquired by Novartis Pharmaceuticals, in 2017.

    My accomplishments are considered by some to have been unusual. So much so that a former Pfizer board member & previously worldwide head of R&D, Dr John LaMattina, wrote up my last venture in Forbes, a leading business magazine (February 2017).
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2017/03/15/turning-pfizer-discards-into-novartis-gold-the-story-of-ziarco/

    In summary, I have had a very strong training in multiple disciplines and over 30 years leadership experience in the field of inventing and testing new medicines for respiratory illnesses. I have an excellent analytical background and I can claim to be at least the equal of anyone advising the government in science.

    I have no history of “conspiracy theory” or political campaigns or protests. I don’t believe I made a single public comment on anything prior to 2020.

    My accomplishments in applied biomedical sciences qualify me to be taken seriously.
    I ask that the evidence I marshall is evaluated thoroughly. I am confident in my assessments, which have been tested by dozens of others, internationally well known scientists and doctors.

    👉 https://t.me/DrMikeYeadon
    Subject: Fw: Dr Mike Yeadon: Introductory statement about serious crimes per Mark Sexton communication To: Ben.Bates@met.police.uk <Ben.Bates@met.police.uk> Cc: Mark Sexton Dear Ben Bates, I have been asked by former policeman, Mark Sexton (copied) to introduce myself to you & to indicate the fields in which I have unequivocal evidence of criminal activity. Let me begin my outlining my credentials to have realised that the areas I will outline were incorrect in the first place. My name is Dr Mike Yeadon. I am the most senior, former “big pharma” & biotech research executive speaking out about several serious crimes in relation to what I call the “Covid era”. My original training was in Biochemistry & Toxicology, in which I was awarded the strongest first class joint honours degree that the School of Biomedical Sciences had ever awarded at the time (1985, University of Surrey). Part of my undergraduate training involved research placements at the Chemical Defence Establishment, Porton Down, Wiltshire, where I was a small cog in the long term development of injected antidotes for nerve gas poisoning to protect British troops. I also worked at the then Central Laboratory of the Forensic Sciences Service, Aldermaston, Berkshire, adjacent to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. While with the Forensic Science Service, I received training on several precision analytical methods including mass spectrometry, then a highly technically complex method. As far as I recall, I had security clearance for both establishments. Porton Down, then as now, is a top security facility with an international reputation. My PhD, in the field of Pharmacology was “On the effect of opiates on respiratory function” (1988) and this was sponsored by the MOD. After securing my PhD, which gave me a sound training in several additional subdisciplines of biology, chemistry & drug metabolism, I joined the pharmaceutical industry. I spent 24years with “big pharma”, starting at Wellcome Research Laboratories, where I briefly worked alongside a Dr Patrick Vallance (who became Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government). For the longest period, I was in charge of Pfizer’s global research in the field of Allergic & Respiratory Disease Therapeutics. I left Pfizer in 2011, having reached the level of Vice President, because the company had decided to exit their large R&D base in Kent. The parting was cordial. Before leaving, I sought to find new homes for the portfolio of exploratory medicines I had helped create & was gratified that Mylan U.K. Ltd, the world’s second largest generics company, acquired much of my former portfolio soon after I had left. I later founded & lead as CEO a highly successful biotechnology company, Ziarco Pharma Ltd. Pfizer and four other venture capital firms were investors in my company, which was acquired by Novartis Pharmaceuticals, in 2017. My accomplishments are considered by some to have been unusual. So much so that a former Pfizer board member & previously worldwide head of R&D, Dr John LaMattina, wrote up my last venture in Forbes, a leading business magazine (February 2017). https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2017/03/15/turning-pfizer-discards-into-novartis-gold-the-story-of-ziarco/ In summary, I have had a very strong training in multiple disciplines and over 30 years leadership experience in the field of inventing and testing new medicines for respiratory illnesses. I have an excellent analytical background and I can claim to be at least the equal of anyone advising the government in science. I have no history of “conspiracy theory” or political campaigns or protests. I don’t believe I made a single public comment on anything prior to 2020. My accomplishments in applied biomedical sciences qualify me to be taken seriously. I ask that the evidence I marshall is evaluated thoroughly. I am confident in my assessments, which have been tested by dozens of others, internationally well known scientists and doctors. 👉 https://t.me/DrMikeYeadon
    WWW.FORBES.COM
    Turning Pfizer Discards Into Novartis Gold: The Story Of Ziarco
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  • Scott Ritter: We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia | VT Foreign Policy
    March 10, 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.

    Tucker Carlson’s confused exasperation over Russian President Vladmir Putin’s extemporaneous history lesson at the start of their landmark February interview (which has been watched more than a billion times), underscored one realty. For a Western audience, the question of the historical bona fides of Russia’s claim of sovereign interest in territories located on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnieper River, currently claimed by Ukraine, is confusing to the point of incomprehension.

    Vladimir Putin, however, did not manufacture his history lesson from thin air. Anyone who has followed the speeches and writings of the Russian president over the years would have found his comments to Carlson quite familiar, echoing both in tone and content previous statements made concerning both the viability of the Ukrainian state from an historic perspective, and the historical ties between what Putin has called Novorossiya (New Russia) and the Russian nation.

    For example, on March 18, 2014, during his announcement regarding the annexation of Crimea, the president observed that “after the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917], for a number of reasons the Bolsheviks – let God judge them – added historical sections of the south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic composition of the population, and these regions today form the south-east of Ukraine.”

    Later during a televised question-and-answer session, Putin declared that “what was called Novorossiya back in tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet Government. Why? Who knows? They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.”

    Novorossiya isn’t just a construct of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, but rather a notion drawn from historic fact that resonated with the people who populated the territories it encompassed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an abortive effort by pro-Russia citizens of the new Ukrainian state to restore Novorossiya as an independent region.

    Scott Ritter: Helping Crimea recover from decades of Ukrainian misrule is a tough but necessary challenge

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    Scott Ritter: Helping Crimea recover from decades of Ukrainian misrule is a tough but necessary challenge

    While this effort failed, the concept of a greater Novorossiya confederation was revived in May 2014 by the newly proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. But this effort, too, was short-lived, being put on ice in 2015. This, however, did not mean the death of the idea of Novorossiya. On February 21, 2022, Putin delivered a lengthy address to the Russian nation on the eve of his decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine as part of what he termed a Special Military Operation. Those who watched Tucker Carlson’s February 9, 2024, interview with Putin would have been struck by the similarity between the two presentations.

    While he did not make a direct reference to Novorossiya, the president did outline fundamental historic and cultural linkages which serve as the foundation for any discussion about the viability and legitimacy of Novorossiya in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

    “I would like to emphasize,” Putin said, “once again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. It is our friends, our relatives, not only colleagues, friends, and former work colleagues, but also our relatives and close family members. Since the oldest times,” Putin continued, “the inhabitants of the south-western historical territories of ancient Russia have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. It was the same in the 17th century, when a part of these territories [i.e., Novorossiya] was reunited with the Russian state, and even after that.”

    The Russian president set forth his contention that the modern state of Ukraine was an invention of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy,” Putin stated, “and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents.”

    Putin went on to issue a threat which, when seen in the context of the present, proved ominously prescient. “And today the ’grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.”

    In September 2022 Putin followed through on this, ordering referendums in four territories (Kherson and Zaporozhye, and the newly independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) to determine whether the populations residing there wished to join the Russian Federation. All four did so. Putin has since then referred to these new Russian territories as Novorossiya, perhaps nowhere more poignantly that in June 2023, when he praised the Russian soldiers “who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya and for the unity of the Russian world.”

    The story of those who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya is one that I have wanted to tell for some time now. I have borne witness here in the United States to the extremely one-sided coverage of the military aspects of Russia’s military operation. Like many of my fellow analysts, I had to undertake the extremely difficult task of trying to parse out fact from an overwhelmingly fictional narrative. Nor was I helped in any way in this regard by the Russian side, which was parsimonious in the release of information that reflected its side of reality.

    In preparing for my December 2023 visit to Russia, I had hoped to be able to visit the four new Russian territories to see for myself what the truth was when it came to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. I also wanted to interview the Russian military and civilian leadership to get a broader perspective of the conflict. I had reached out to the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries through the Russian Embassy in the US, bending the ear of both the Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, and the Defense Attache, Major-General Evgeny Bobkin, about my plans.

    While both men supported my project and wrote recommendations back to their respective ministries in this regard, the Russian Defense Ministry, which had the final say over what happened in the four new territories, vetoed the idea. This veto was not because they didn’t like the idea of me writing an in-depth analysis of the conflict from the Russian perspective, but rather that the project as I outlined it, which would have required sustained access to frontline units and personnel, was deemed too dangerous. In short, the Russian Defense Ministry did not relish the idea of me being killed on its watch.

    Under normal circumstances, I would have backed off. I had no desire to create any difficulty with the Russian government, and I was always cognizant of the reality that I was a guest in the country.

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    Western ‘expertise’ on the Ukraine conflict could lead the world to a nuclear disaster

    The last thing I wanted to be was a “war tourist,” where I put myself and others at risk for purely personal reasons. But I also felt strongly that if I were going to continue to provide so-called “expert analysis” about the military operation and the geopolitical realities of Novorossiya and Crimea, then I needed to see these places firsthand. I strongly believed that I had a professional obligation to see the new territories. Fortunately for me, Aleksandr Zyryanov, a Crimea native and director general of the Novosibirsk Region Development Corporation, agreed.

    It wasn’t going to be easy.

    We first tried to enter the new territories via Donetsk, driving west out of Rostov-on-Don. However, when we arrived at the checkpoint, we were told that the Ministry of Defense had not cleared us for entry. Not willing to take no for an answer, Aleksandr drove south, towards Krasnodar, and then – after making some phone calls – across the Crimean Bridge into Crimea. Once it became clear that we were planning on entering the new territories from Crimea, the Ministry of Defense yielded, granting permission for me to visit the four new Russian territories under one non-negotiable condition – I was not to go anywhere near the frontlines.

    We left Feodosia early on the morning of January 15, 2024. At Dzhankoy, in northern Crimea, we took highway 18 north toward the Tup-Dzhankoy Peninsula and the Chongar Strait, which separates the Sivash lagoon system that forms the border between Crimea and the mainland into eastern and western portions. It was here that Red Army forces, on the night of November 12, 1920, broke through the defenses of the White Army of General Wrangel, leading to the capture of the Crimean Peninsula by Soviet forces. And it was also here that the Russian Army, on February 24, 2022, crossed into the Kherson Region from Crimea.

    The Chongar Bridge is one of three highway crossings that connect Crimea with Kherson. It has been struck twice by Ukrainian forces seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines, once, in June 2023, when it was hit by British-made Storm Shadow missiles, and once again that August when it was hit by French-made SCALP missiles (a variant of the Storm Shadow.) In both instances, the bridge was temporarily shut down for repairs, evidence of which was clearly visible as we made our way across, and on to the Chongar checkpoint, where we were cleared by Russian soldiers for entry into the Kherson Region.

    At the checkpoint we picked up a vehicle carrying a bodyguard detachment from the reconnaissance company of the Sparta Battalion, a veteran military formation whose roots date back to the very beginning of the Donbass revolt against the Ukrainian nationalists who seized power in Kiev during the February 2014 Maidan coup. They would be our escort through the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – even though we were going to give the frontlines a wide berth, Ukrainian “deep reconnaissance groups”, or DRGs, were known to target traffic along the M18 highway. Aleksandr was driving an armored Chevrolet Suburban, and the Sparta detachment had their own armored SUV. If we were to come under attack, our response would be to try and drive through the ambush. If that failed, then the Sparta boys would have to go to work.

    Our first destination was the city of Genichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov. Genichesk is the capital of the Genichesk District of the Kherson Region and, since November 9, 2022, when Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson, it has served as the temporary capital of the region. Aleksandr had been on his phone since morning, and his efforts had paid off – I was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Saldo, the local Governor.

    RT

    Genichesk is – literally – off the beaten path. When we reached the town of Novoalekseyevka, we got off the M18 highway and headed east along a two-lane road that took us toward the Sea of Azov. There were armed checkpoints all along the route, but the Sparta bodyguards were able to get us waved through without any issues. But the effect of these checkpoints was chilling – there was no doubt that one was in a region at war.

    To call Genichesk a ghost town would be misleading – it is populated, and the evidence of civilian life is everywhere you look. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be enough people present. The city, like the region, is in a general state of decay, a holdover from the neglect it had suffered at the hands of a Ukrainian government that largely ignored territories that had, since 2004, voted in favor of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in the February 2014 Maidan coup. Nearly two years of war had likewise contributed to the atmosphere of societal neglect, an impression which was magnified by the weather – overcast, cold, with a light sleet blowing in off the water.

    As we made our way into the building where the government of the Kherson Region had established its temporary offices, I couldn’t help but notice a statue of Lenin in the courtyard. Ukrainian nationalists had taken it down in July 2015, but the citizens of Genichesk had reinstalled it in April 2022, once the Russians had taken control of the city. Given Putin’s feeling about the role Lenin played in creating Ukraine, I found both the presence of this monument, and the role of the Russian citizens of Genichesk in restoring it, curiously ironic.

    Vladimir Saldo is a man imbued with enthusiasm for his work. A civil engineer by profession, with a PhD in economics, Saldo had served in senior management positions in the “Khersonbud” Project and Construction Company before moving on into politics, serving on the Kherson City Council, the Kherson Regional Administration, and two terms as the mayor of the city of Kherson. Saldo, as a member of the Party of Regions, moved to the opposition and was effectively subjected to political ostracism in 2014, when the Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power all but forced it out of politics.

    Aleksandr and I had the pleasure of meeting with Saldo in his office in the government building in downtown Genichesk. We talked about a wide range of issues, including his own path from a Ukrainian construction specialist to his current position as the governor of Kherson Oblast.

    We talked about the war.

    But Saldo’s passion was the economy, and how he could help revive the civilian economy of Kherson in a manner that best served the interests of its diminished population. On the eve of the military operation, back in early 2022, the population of the Kherson Region stood at just over a million, of which some 280,000 were residing in the city of Kherson. By November 2022, following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper River – including the city of Kherson – the population of the region had fallen below 400,000 and, with dismal economic prospects, the numbers kept falling. Many of those who left were Ukrainians who did not want to live under Russian rule. But others were Russians and Ukrainians who felt that they had no future in the war-torn region, and as such sought their fortunes elsewhere in Russia.

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    “My job is to give the people of Kherson hope for a better future,” Saldo told me. “And the time for this to happen is now, not when the war ends.”

    Restoration of Kherson’s once vibrant agricultural sector is a top priority, and Saldo has personally taken the lead in signing agreements for the provision of Kherson produce to Moscow supermarkets. Saldo has also turned the region into a special economic zone, where potential investors and entrepreneurs can receive preferential loans and financial support, as well as organizational and legal assistance for businesses willing to open shop there.

    The man responsible for making this vision a reality is Mikhail Panchenko, the Director of the Kherson Region Industry Development Fund. I met Mikhail in a restaurant located across the street from the governmental building which Saldo called home. Mikhail had come to Kherson in the summer of 2022, leaving a prominent position in Moscow in the process. “The Russian government was interested in rebuilding Kherson,” Mikhail told me, “and established the Industry Development Fund as a way of attracting businesses to the region.” Mikhail, who was born in 1968, was too old to enlist in the military. “When the opportunity came to direct the Industry Development Fund, I jumped at it as a way to do my patriotic duty.”

    The first year of the fund’s operation saw Mikhail hand out 300 million rubles (almost $3.3 million at the current rate) in loans and grants (some of which was used to open the very restaurant where we were meeting.) The second year saw the allotment grow to some 700 million rubles. One of the biggest projects was the opening of a concrete production line capable of producing 60 cubic meters of concrete per hour. Mikhail took Alexander and me on a tour of the plant, which had grown to three production lines generating some 180 cubic meters of concrete an hour. Mikhail had just approved funding for an additional four production lines, for a total concrete production rate of 420 cubic meters per hour.

    “That’s a lot of concrete,” I remarked to Mikhail.

    “We are making good use of it,” he replied. “We are rebuilding schools, hospitals, and government buildings that had been neglected over the years. Revitalizing the basic infrastructure a society needs if it is to nurture a growing population.”

    The problem Mikhail faces, however, is that most of the population growth being experienced in Kherson today comes from the military. The war can’t last forever, Mikhail noted. “Someday the army will leave, and we will need civilians. Right now, the people who left are not returning, and we’re having a hard time attracting newcomers. But we will keep building in anticipation of a time when the population of the Kherson region will grow from an impetus other than war. And for that,” he said, a twinkle in his eye, “we need concrete!”

    I thought long and hard about the words of Vladimir Saldo and Panchenko as Aleksandr drove back onto the M18 highway, heading northeast, toward Donetsk. The reconstruction efforts being undertaken are impressive. But the number that kept coming to mind was the precipitous decline in the population – more than 60% of the pre-war population has left the Kherson region since the Russian military operation began.

    According to statistics provided by the Russian Central Election Commission, some 571,000 voters took part in the referendum on joining Russia that was held in late September 2022. A little over 497,000, or some 87%, voted in favor, while slightly more than 68,800, or 12%, voted against. The turnout was almost 77%.

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    Sergey Poletaev: As the second anniversary of the Russia–Ukraine conflict approaches, who has the upper hand?

    These numbers, if accurate, implied that there was a population of over 740,000 eligible voters at the time of the election. While the loss of the city of Kherson in November 2022 could account for a significant source of the population drop that took place between September 2022 and the time of my visit in January 2024, it could not account for all of it.

    The Russian population of Kherson in 2022 stood at approximately 20%, or around 200,000. One can safely say that the number of Russians who fled west to Kiev following the start of the military operation amounts to a negligible figure. If one assumes that the Russian population of the Kherson Region remained relatively stable, then most of the population decline came from the Ukrainian population.

    While Saldo did not admit to such, the Governor of the neighboring Zaporozhya Region, Yevgeny Balitsky, has acknowledged that many Ukrainian families deemed by the authorities to be anti-Russian were deported following the initiation of the military operation (Russians accounted for a little more than 25% of the pre-conflict Zaporozhye population.) Many others fled to Russia to escape the deprivations of war.

    Evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen. While the conflict in Kherson has stabilized along a line defined by the Dnieper River, Zaporozhye is very much a frontline region. Indeed, the main direction of attack of the summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was from the Zaporozhye region village of Rabotino, toward the town of Tokmak, and on towards the temporary regional capital of Melitopol (the city of Zaporozhye has remained under Ukrainian control throughout the conflict to date.)

    I had petitioned to visit the frontlines near Rabotino but had been denied by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So, too, was my request to visit units deployed in the vicinity of Tokmak – too close to the front. The closest I would get would be the city of Melitopol, the ultimate objective of the Ukrainian counterattack. We drove past fields filled with the concrete “dragon’s teeth” and antitank ditches that marked the final layer of defenses that constituted the “Surovikin Line,” named after the Russian General, Sergey Surovikin, who had commanded the forces when the defenses were put in place.

    The Ukrainians had hoped to reach the city of Melitopol in a matter of days once their attack began; they never breached the first line of defense situated to the southeast of Rabotino.

    Melitopol, however, is not immune to the horrors of war, with Ukrainian artillery and rockets targeting it often to disrupt Russian military logistics. I kept this in mind as we drove through the streets of the city, past military checkpoints, and roving patrols. I was struck by the fact that the civilians I saw were going about their business, seemingly oblivious to the everyday reality of war that existed around them.

    As was the case in Kherson, the entirety of the Zaporozhye Region seemed strangely depopulated, as if one were driving through the French capital of Paris in August, when half the city is away on vacation. I had hoped to be able to talk with Balitsky about the reduced population and other questions I had about life in the region during wartime, but this time Aleksandr’s phone could not produce the desired result – Balitsky was away from the region and unavailable.

    If he had been available, I would have asked him the same question I had put to Saldo earlier in the day: given that Putin was apparently willing to return the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to Ukraine as part of the peace deal negotiated in March 2022, how does the population of his region feel about being part of Russia today? Are they convinced that Russia is, in fact, there to stay? Do they feel like they are a genuine part of the Novorossiya that Putin speaks about?

    Saldo had talked in depth about the transition from being occupied by Russian forces, which lasted until April-May 2022 (about the time that Ukraine backed out of the ceasefire agreement), to being administered by Moscow. “There never was a doubt in my mind, or anyone else’s, that Kherson was historically a part of Russia,” Saldo said, “or that, once Russian troops arrived, that we would forever be Russian again.”

    But the declining population, and the admission of forced deportations on the part of Balitsky, suggests that there was a significant part of the population that had, in fact, taken umbrage at such a future.

    I would have liked to hear what Balitsky had to say about this question.

    Reality, however, doesn’t deal with hypotheticals, and the present reality is that both Kherson and Zaporozhye are today part of the Russian Federation, and that both regions are populated by people who had made the decision to remain there as citizens of Russia. We will never know what the fate of these two territories would have been had the Ukrainian government honored the ceasefire agreement negotiated in March 2022. What we do know is that today both Kherson and Zaporozhye are part of the “New Territories” – Novorossiya.

    Russia will for some time find its acquisition of the “new territories” challenged by nations who question the legitimacy of Russia’s military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation. The reticence of foreigners to recognize these regions as being part of Russia, however, is the least of Russia’s problems. As was the case with Crimea, the Russian government will proceed irrespective of any international opposition.

    The real challenge facing Russia is to convince Russians that the new territories are as integral to the Russian motherland as Crimea, a region reabsorbed by Russia in 2014 which has seen its economic fortunes and its population grow over the past decade. The diminished demographics of Kherson and Zaporozhye represent a litmus test of sorts for the Russian government, and for the governments of both Kherson and Zaporozhye. If the populations of these regions cannot regenerate, then these regions will wither on the vine. If, however, these new Russian lands can be transformed into places where Russians can envision themselves raising families in an environment free from want and fear, then Novorossiya will flourish.

    Novorossiya is a reality, and the people who live there are citizens by choice more than circumstances. They are well served by men like Saldo and Balitsky, who are dedicated to the giant task of making these regions part of the Russian Motherland in actuality, not just in name.

    Behind Saldo and Balitsky are men like Panchenko, people who left an easy life in Moscow or some other Russian city to come to the “New Territories” not for the purpose of seeking their fortunes, but rather to improve the lives of the new Russian citizens of Novorossiya.



    For this to happen, Russia must emerge victorious in its struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists ensconced in Kiev, and their Western allies. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Russian military, this victory is in the process of being accomplished.

    Then the real test begins – turning Novorossiya into a place Russians will want to call home.


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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/scott-ritter-we-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-russia/


    https://telegra.ph/Scott-Ritter-We-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-Russia--VT-Foreign-Policy-03-11
    Scott Ritter: We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia | VT Foreign Policy March 10, 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. Tucker Carlson’s confused exasperation over Russian President Vladmir Putin’s extemporaneous history lesson at the start of their landmark February interview (which has been watched more than a billion times), underscored one realty. For a Western audience, the question of the historical bona fides of Russia’s claim of sovereign interest in territories located on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnieper River, currently claimed by Ukraine, is confusing to the point of incomprehension. Vladimir Putin, however, did not manufacture his history lesson from thin air. Anyone who has followed the speeches and writings of the Russian president over the years would have found his comments to Carlson quite familiar, echoing both in tone and content previous statements made concerning both the viability of the Ukrainian state from an historic perspective, and the historical ties between what Putin has called Novorossiya (New Russia) and the Russian nation. For example, on March 18, 2014, during his announcement regarding the annexation of Crimea, the president observed that “after the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917], for a number of reasons the Bolsheviks – let God judge them – added historical sections of the south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic composition of the population, and these regions today form the south-east of Ukraine.” Later during a televised question-and-answer session, Putin declared that “what was called Novorossiya back in tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet Government. Why? Who knows? They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.” Novorossiya isn’t just a construct of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, but rather a notion drawn from historic fact that resonated with the people who populated the territories it encompassed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an abortive effort by pro-Russia citizens of the new Ukrainian state to restore Novorossiya as an independent region. Scott Ritter: Helping Crimea recover from decades of Ukrainian misrule is a tough but necessary challenge Read more Scott Ritter: Helping Crimea recover from decades of Ukrainian misrule is a tough but necessary challenge While this effort failed, the concept of a greater Novorossiya confederation was revived in May 2014 by the newly proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. But this effort, too, was short-lived, being put on ice in 2015. This, however, did not mean the death of the idea of Novorossiya. On February 21, 2022, Putin delivered a lengthy address to the Russian nation on the eve of his decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine as part of what he termed a Special Military Operation. Those who watched Tucker Carlson’s February 9, 2024, interview with Putin would have been struck by the similarity between the two presentations. While he did not make a direct reference to Novorossiya, the president did outline fundamental historic and cultural linkages which serve as the foundation for any discussion about the viability and legitimacy of Novorossiya in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations. “I would like to emphasize,” Putin said, “once again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. It is our friends, our relatives, not only colleagues, friends, and former work colleagues, but also our relatives and close family members. Since the oldest times,” Putin continued, “the inhabitants of the south-western historical territories of ancient Russia have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. It was the same in the 17th century, when a part of these territories [i.e., Novorossiya] was reunited with the Russian state, and even after that.” The Russian president set forth his contention that the modern state of Ukraine was an invention of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy,” Putin stated, “and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents.” Putin went on to issue a threat which, when seen in the context of the present, proved ominously prescient. “And today the ’grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.” In September 2022 Putin followed through on this, ordering referendums in four territories (Kherson and Zaporozhye, and the newly independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) to determine whether the populations residing there wished to join the Russian Federation. All four did so. Putin has since then referred to these new Russian territories as Novorossiya, perhaps nowhere more poignantly that in June 2023, when he praised the Russian soldiers “who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya and for the unity of the Russian world.” The story of those who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya is one that I have wanted to tell for some time now. I have borne witness here in the United States to the extremely one-sided coverage of the military aspects of Russia’s military operation. Like many of my fellow analysts, I had to undertake the extremely difficult task of trying to parse out fact from an overwhelmingly fictional narrative. Nor was I helped in any way in this regard by the Russian side, which was parsimonious in the release of information that reflected its side of reality. In preparing for my December 2023 visit to Russia, I had hoped to be able to visit the four new Russian territories to see for myself what the truth was when it came to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. I also wanted to interview the Russian military and civilian leadership to get a broader perspective of the conflict. I had reached out to the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries through the Russian Embassy in the US, bending the ear of both the Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, and the Defense Attache, Major-General Evgeny Bobkin, about my plans. While both men supported my project and wrote recommendations back to their respective ministries in this regard, the Russian Defense Ministry, which had the final say over what happened in the four new territories, vetoed the idea. This veto was not because they didn’t like the idea of me writing an in-depth analysis of the conflict from the Russian perspective, but rather that the project as I outlined it, which would have required sustained access to frontline units and personnel, was deemed too dangerous. In short, the Russian Defense Ministry did not relish the idea of me being killed on its watch. Under normal circumstances, I would have backed off. I had no desire to create any difficulty with the Russian government, and I was always cognizant of the reality that I was a guest in the country. Western ‘expertise’ on the Ukraine conflict could lead the world to a nuclear disaster Read more Western ‘expertise’ on the Ukraine conflict could lead the world to a nuclear disaster The last thing I wanted to be was a “war tourist,” where I put myself and others at risk for purely personal reasons. But I also felt strongly that if I were going to continue to provide so-called “expert analysis” about the military operation and the geopolitical realities of Novorossiya and Crimea, then I needed to see these places firsthand. I strongly believed that I had a professional obligation to see the new territories. Fortunately for me, Aleksandr Zyryanov, a Crimea native and director general of the Novosibirsk Region Development Corporation, agreed. It wasn’t going to be easy. We first tried to enter the new territories via Donetsk, driving west out of Rostov-on-Don. However, when we arrived at the checkpoint, we were told that the Ministry of Defense had not cleared us for entry. Not willing to take no for an answer, Aleksandr drove south, towards Krasnodar, and then – after making some phone calls – across the Crimean Bridge into Crimea. Once it became clear that we were planning on entering the new territories from Crimea, the Ministry of Defense yielded, granting permission for me to visit the four new Russian territories under one non-negotiable condition – I was not to go anywhere near the frontlines. We left Feodosia early on the morning of January 15, 2024. At Dzhankoy, in northern Crimea, we took highway 18 north toward the Tup-Dzhankoy Peninsula and the Chongar Strait, which separates the Sivash lagoon system that forms the border between Crimea and the mainland into eastern and western portions. It was here that Red Army forces, on the night of November 12, 1920, broke through the defenses of the White Army of General Wrangel, leading to the capture of the Crimean Peninsula by Soviet forces. And it was also here that the Russian Army, on February 24, 2022, crossed into the Kherson Region from Crimea. The Chongar Bridge is one of three highway crossings that connect Crimea with Kherson. It has been struck twice by Ukrainian forces seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines, once, in June 2023, when it was hit by British-made Storm Shadow missiles, and once again that August when it was hit by French-made SCALP missiles (a variant of the Storm Shadow.) In both instances, the bridge was temporarily shut down for repairs, evidence of which was clearly visible as we made our way across, and on to the Chongar checkpoint, where we were cleared by Russian soldiers for entry into the Kherson Region. At the checkpoint we picked up a vehicle carrying a bodyguard detachment from the reconnaissance company of the Sparta Battalion, a veteran military formation whose roots date back to the very beginning of the Donbass revolt against the Ukrainian nationalists who seized power in Kiev during the February 2014 Maidan coup. They would be our escort through the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – even though we were going to give the frontlines a wide berth, Ukrainian “deep reconnaissance groups”, or DRGs, were known to target traffic along the M18 highway. Aleksandr was driving an armored Chevrolet Suburban, and the Sparta detachment had their own armored SUV. If we were to come under attack, our response would be to try and drive through the ambush. If that failed, then the Sparta boys would have to go to work. Our first destination was the city of Genichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov. Genichesk is the capital of the Genichesk District of the Kherson Region and, since November 9, 2022, when Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson, it has served as the temporary capital of the region. Aleksandr had been on his phone since morning, and his efforts had paid off – I was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Saldo, the local Governor. RT Genichesk is – literally – off the beaten path. When we reached the town of Novoalekseyevka, we got off the M18 highway and headed east along a two-lane road that took us toward the Sea of Azov. There were armed checkpoints all along the route, but the Sparta bodyguards were able to get us waved through without any issues. But the effect of these checkpoints was chilling – there was no doubt that one was in a region at war. To call Genichesk a ghost town would be misleading – it is populated, and the evidence of civilian life is everywhere you look. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be enough people present. The city, like the region, is in a general state of decay, a holdover from the neglect it had suffered at the hands of a Ukrainian government that largely ignored territories that had, since 2004, voted in favor of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in the February 2014 Maidan coup. Nearly two years of war had likewise contributed to the atmosphere of societal neglect, an impression which was magnified by the weather – overcast, cold, with a light sleet blowing in off the water. As we made our way into the building where the government of the Kherson Region had established its temporary offices, I couldn’t help but notice a statue of Lenin in the courtyard. Ukrainian nationalists had taken it down in July 2015, but the citizens of Genichesk had reinstalled it in April 2022, once the Russians had taken control of the city. Given Putin’s feeling about the role Lenin played in creating Ukraine, I found both the presence of this monument, and the role of the Russian citizens of Genichesk in restoring it, curiously ironic. Vladimir Saldo is a man imbued with enthusiasm for his work. A civil engineer by profession, with a PhD in economics, Saldo had served in senior management positions in the “Khersonbud” Project and Construction Company before moving on into politics, serving on the Kherson City Council, the Kherson Regional Administration, and two terms as the mayor of the city of Kherson. Saldo, as a member of the Party of Regions, moved to the opposition and was effectively subjected to political ostracism in 2014, when the Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power all but forced it out of politics. Aleksandr and I had the pleasure of meeting with Saldo in his office in the government building in downtown Genichesk. We talked about a wide range of issues, including his own path from a Ukrainian construction specialist to his current position as the governor of Kherson Oblast. We talked about the war. But Saldo’s passion was the economy, and how he could help revive the civilian economy of Kherson in a manner that best served the interests of its diminished population. On the eve of the military operation, back in early 2022, the population of the Kherson Region stood at just over a million, of which some 280,000 were residing in the city of Kherson. By November 2022, following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper River – including the city of Kherson – the population of the region had fallen below 400,000 and, with dismal economic prospects, the numbers kept falling. Many of those who left were Ukrainians who did not want to live under Russian rule. But others were Russians and Ukrainians who felt that they had no future in the war-torn region, and as such sought their fortunes elsewhere in Russia. Fyodor Lukyanov: How does the Russia-Ukraine conflict end? Read more Fyodor Lukyanov: How does the Russia-Ukraine conflict end? “My job is to give the people of Kherson hope for a better future,” Saldo told me. “And the time for this to happen is now, not when the war ends.” Restoration of Kherson’s once vibrant agricultural sector is a top priority, and Saldo has personally taken the lead in signing agreements for the provision of Kherson produce to Moscow supermarkets. Saldo has also turned the region into a special economic zone, where potential investors and entrepreneurs can receive preferential loans and financial support, as well as organizational and legal assistance for businesses willing to open shop there. The man responsible for making this vision a reality is Mikhail Panchenko, the Director of the Kherson Region Industry Development Fund. I met Mikhail in a restaurant located across the street from the governmental building which Saldo called home. Mikhail had come to Kherson in the summer of 2022, leaving a prominent position in Moscow in the process. “The Russian government was interested in rebuilding Kherson,” Mikhail told me, “and established the Industry Development Fund as a way of attracting businesses to the region.” Mikhail, who was born in 1968, was too old to enlist in the military. “When the opportunity came to direct the Industry Development Fund, I jumped at it as a way to do my patriotic duty.” The first year of the fund’s operation saw Mikhail hand out 300 million rubles (almost $3.3 million at the current rate) in loans and grants (some of which was used to open the very restaurant where we were meeting.) The second year saw the allotment grow to some 700 million rubles. One of the biggest projects was the opening of a concrete production line capable of producing 60 cubic meters of concrete per hour. Mikhail took Alexander and me on a tour of the plant, which had grown to three production lines generating some 180 cubic meters of concrete an hour. Mikhail had just approved funding for an additional four production lines, for a total concrete production rate of 420 cubic meters per hour. “That’s a lot of concrete,” I remarked to Mikhail. “We are making good use of it,” he replied. “We are rebuilding schools, hospitals, and government buildings that had been neglected over the years. Revitalizing the basic infrastructure a society needs if it is to nurture a growing population.” The problem Mikhail faces, however, is that most of the population growth being experienced in Kherson today comes from the military. The war can’t last forever, Mikhail noted. “Someday the army will leave, and we will need civilians. Right now, the people who left are not returning, and we’re having a hard time attracting newcomers. But we will keep building in anticipation of a time when the population of the Kherson region will grow from an impetus other than war. And for that,” he said, a twinkle in his eye, “we need concrete!” I thought long and hard about the words of Vladimir Saldo and Panchenko as Aleksandr drove back onto the M18 highway, heading northeast, toward Donetsk. The reconstruction efforts being undertaken are impressive. But the number that kept coming to mind was the precipitous decline in the population – more than 60% of the pre-war population has left the Kherson region since the Russian military operation began. According to statistics provided by the Russian Central Election Commission, some 571,000 voters took part in the referendum on joining Russia that was held in late September 2022. A little over 497,000, or some 87%, voted in favor, while slightly more than 68,800, or 12%, voted against. The turnout was almost 77%. Sergey Poletaev: As the second anniversary of the Russia–Ukraine conflict approaches, who has the upper hand? Read more Sergey Poletaev: As the second anniversary of the Russia–Ukraine conflict approaches, who has the upper hand? These numbers, if accurate, implied that there was a population of over 740,000 eligible voters at the time of the election. While the loss of the city of Kherson in November 2022 could account for a significant source of the population drop that took place between September 2022 and the time of my visit in January 2024, it could not account for all of it. The Russian population of Kherson in 2022 stood at approximately 20%, or around 200,000. One can safely say that the number of Russians who fled west to Kiev following the start of the military operation amounts to a negligible figure. If one assumes that the Russian population of the Kherson Region remained relatively stable, then most of the population decline came from the Ukrainian population. While Saldo did not admit to such, the Governor of the neighboring Zaporozhya Region, Yevgeny Balitsky, has acknowledged that many Ukrainian families deemed by the authorities to be anti-Russian were deported following the initiation of the military operation (Russians accounted for a little more than 25% of the pre-conflict Zaporozhye population.) Many others fled to Russia to escape the deprivations of war. Evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen. While the conflict in Kherson has stabilized along a line defined by the Dnieper River, Zaporozhye is very much a frontline region. Indeed, the main direction of attack of the summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was from the Zaporozhye region village of Rabotino, toward the town of Tokmak, and on towards the temporary regional capital of Melitopol (the city of Zaporozhye has remained under Ukrainian control throughout the conflict to date.) I had petitioned to visit the frontlines near Rabotino but had been denied by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So, too, was my request to visit units deployed in the vicinity of Tokmak – too close to the front. The closest I would get would be the city of Melitopol, the ultimate objective of the Ukrainian counterattack. We drove past fields filled with the concrete “dragon’s teeth” and antitank ditches that marked the final layer of defenses that constituted the “Surovikin Line,” named after the Russian General, Sergey Surovikin, who had commanded the forces when the defenses were put in place. The Ukrainians had hoped to reach the city of Melitopol in a matter of days once their attack began; they never breached the first line of defense situated to the southeast of Rabotino. Melitopol, however, is not immune to the horrors of war, with Ukrainian artillery and rockets targeting it often to disrupt Russian military logistics. I kept this in mind as we drove through the streets of the city, past military checkpoints, and roving patrols. I was struck by the fact that the civilians I saw were going about their business, seemingly oblivious to the everyday reality of war that existed around them. As was the case in Kherson, the entirety of the Zaporozhye Region seemed strangely depopulated, as if one were driving through the French capital of Paris in August, when half the city is away on vacation. I had hoped to be able to talk with Balitsky about the reduced population and other questions I had about life in the region during wartime, but this time Aleksandr’s phone could not produce the desired result – Balitsky was away from the region and unavailable. If he had been available, I would have asked him the same question I had put to Saldo earlier in the day: given that Putin was apparently willing to return the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to Ukraine as part of the peace deal negotiated in March 2022, how does the population of his region feel about being part of Russia today? Are they convinced that Russia is, in fact, there to stay? Do they feel like they are a genuine part of the Novorossiya that Putin speaks about? Saldo had talked in depth about the transition from being occupied by Russian forces, which lasted until April-May 2022 (about the time that Ukraine backed out of the ceasefire agreement), to being administered by Moscow. “There never was a doubt in my mind, or anyone else’s, that Kherson was historically a part of Russia,” Saldo said, “or that, once Russian troops arrived, that we would forever be Russian again.” But the declining population, and the admission of forced deportations on the part of Balitsky, suggests that there was a significant part of the population that had, in fact, taken umbrage at such a future. I would have liked to hear what Balitsky had to say about this question. Reality, however, doesn’t deal with hypotheticals, and the present reality is that both Kherson and Zaporozhye are today part of the Russian Federation, and that both regions are populated by people who had made the decision to remain there as citizens of Russia. We will never know what the fate of these two territories would have been had the Ukrainian government honored the ceasefire agreement negotiated in March 2022. What we do know is that today both Kherson and Zaporozhye are part of the “New Territories” – Novorossiya. Russia will for some time find its acquisition of the “new territories” challenged by nations who question the legitimacy of Russia’s military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation. The reticence of foreigners to recognize these regions as being part of Russia, however, is the least of Russia’s problems. As was the case with Crimea, the Russian government will proceed irrespective of any international opposition. The real challenge facing Russia is to convince Russians that the new territories are as integral to the Russian motherland as Crimea, a region reabsorbed by Russia in 2014 which has seen its economic fortunes and its population grow over the past decade. The diminished demographics of Kherson and Zaporozhye represent a litmus test of sorts for the Russian government, and for the governments of both Kherson and Zaporozhye. If the populations of these regions cannot regenerate, then these regions will wither on the vine. If, however, these new Russian lands can be transformed into places where Russians can envision themselves raising families in an environment free from want and fear, then Novorossiya will flourish. Novorossiya is a reality, and the people who live there are citizens by choice more than circumstances. They are well served by men like Saldo and Balitsky, who are dedicated to the giant task of making these regions part of the Russian Motherland in actuality, not just in name. Behind Saldo and Balitsky are men like Panchenko, people who left an easy life in Moscow or some other Russian city to come to the “New Territories” not for the purpose of seeking their fortunes, but rather to improve the lives of the new Russian citizens of Novorossiya. For this to happen, Russia must emerge victorious in its struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists ensconced in Kiev, and their Western allies. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Russian military, this victory is in the process of being accomplished. Then the real test begins – turning Novorossiya into a place Russians will want to call home. 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/scott-ritter-we-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-russia/ https://telegra.ph/Scott-Ritter-We-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-Russia--VT-Foreign-Policy-03-11
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    Scott Ritter: We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia
    Building Novorossiya back up after Ukrainian neglect and war is a monumental but unavoidable task
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  • The Rothschild Deep State Cabal Is Imploding
    Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorFebruary 23, 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.

    Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776

    That same momentous year that kicked off the American Revolution, 1776 was also the year that ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria founded his Illuminati Order, sponsored by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as House of Rothschild patriarch in nearby Frankfurt, Germany. And it was America’s third US President Thomas Jefferson, who refused renewal of the Rothschild controlled First Bank of America’s charter in 1811. The American Revolution may have been fought for independence from King George’s British monarchy, but not independence from the Rothschild central banking cartel, whose controlling 70% foreign interests in First Bank of America indebted America’s earliest citizens. At the end of George Washington’s eight years as first US president, in 1791 the federalist Rothschild agent Alexander Hamilton installed for the Rothschilds their First Bank of America.

    Not renewing its charter, Jefferson kicked the Rothschild owned bank out of the US, which became the basis for America’s first war as a sovereign independent country, once again facing the same British enemy in the War of 1812. This war fought over financial independence from Britain’s City of London, only caused young America to drown further in war debt, as Nathan Rothschild backing both sides to every conflict he creates was determined to bankrupt the US to force it into recolonization. Despite the hard-fought American military victory, by 1815 with the US war debt nearly tripled at $119.2 million in the red, America financially was already a major debtor nation owing the infamous bloodline banking dynasty. That same year, making a colossal fortune over the Battle of Waterloo outcome by pre-rigging his investment, the gloating crook Nathan Rothschild proclaimed:

    I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.

    Sadly, America’s War of 1812 struggle for financial independence from the Rothschild controllers was lost. A brief excerpt from my Pedophilia & Empire series, Book 3, chapter one on the Rothschild family:

    In 1816 with yet a Second Bank of the United States foisted on American citizens for the next 20 years, in effect, Rothschild was simply seizing his predatory ownership of the United States. And once again, private control over the US money supply tacking on parasitic interest went into the coffers of as many as 1000 foreign investors, with [Nathan’s younger brother] Baron James de Rothschild in Paris holding the controlling shares.

    When the Second Bank of America’s charter was up for renewal 20 years later in 1836, that year Nathan Rothschild died. But France’s James de Rothschild assuming control over both the London and Paris banking branches, battled playing dirty as usual for charter renewal. He met his match as the resolute, feisty President Andrew Jackson was up for the challenge, declaring war on the House of Rothschild:

    You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by eternal God, I will rout you out.

    President Jackson’s turn to oppose the centralized moneychangers ultimately proved successful, kicking the Rothschilds out of America yet again, and the second British dynasty US takeover was again foiled, at least temporarily. However, the year prior in 1835, amidst the battle over the US private central bank, Jackson barely dodged a bullet to literally escape an assassination attempt attributed to Rothschild wrath. From 1836 to 1913, the US was largely free of the treacherous Rothschild leeches from Europe, signifying America’s longest period of foremost economic growth and prosperity in its entire history.

    Having acquired central banking control over Europe and through Nathan Rothschild’s ownership of the Bank of England by early 19th century, the British East India Company monopoly over international trade, including both the drug and slave trade, spanned the globe from Africa, the Indian and Pacific Oceans to North America and Europe, the flourishing international banking cartel consolidated its growing global money lending power over every commercial trade on every continent. But one vast sprawling nation covering two continents over the centuries resisted and eluded the Rothschild clutches. As a result, Russia was repeatedly targeted, as its ruling Romanov monarchy managed to successfully evade the Rothschild predatory conquest, but not without murderous retribution. From author Eustice Mullens’ New World Order:

    After the fall of Napoleon, the Rothschilds turned all their hatred against the Romanovs. In 1825, they poisoned Alexander I; in 1855, they poisoned Nicholas I. Other assassinations followed, culminating on the night of November 6, 1917, when a dozen Red Guards drove a truck up to the Imperial Bank Building in Moscow. They loaded the Imperial jewel collection and $700 million gold, loot totaling more than a billion dollars. The new regime also confiscated the 150 million acres in Russia personally owned by the Czar.

    In addition to a century of assassinating Romanov czars by poison, when Czar Alexander II came to the aid of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, which by many accounts attribute Russian support to preserving the Union, the vindictive Rothschild cartel as primary backer of the Confederacy, vowed eternal revenge against the Russia and its royal family. The Rothschilds et al’s war at all cost against Russia today in Ukraine is merely this same long legacy’s outcome.

    Just prior to the Rothschilds’ planned First World War in 1914, a few months earlier in late 1913, they deceptively snuck through Congress their Federal Reserve Act on December 23rd, after most members had already left on Christmas break. The Jekyll Island rendezvous of the Fed Reserve architects included Paul Warburg, the German born chief central banking Rothschild agent moved to the US, ending up the second Vice Fed chairman. Continuity of one thought mind pervades the Warburg clan as Paul’s son James Paul Warburg before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950 emphatically declared:

    We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.

    Thus, the third Rothschild central private bank in America was established to take permanent full usury-debtor system control over the US money supply, through bribery of Washington’s political puppet class, and the American people through their engineered debtor system. 1913 also saw the passage of the Federal Income Tax Act, illegally squeezing tax dollars to rip off hardworking US citizens just to pay off debt interests from all the bankers’ war loans. This vicious control cycle is how Khazarian mafia swindlers have cunningly operated since their identity snatching days of their ancient Khazar kingdom over a millennium ago.

    The Rothschild central banking controllers hired one of their own, distant cousin Karl Marx to write his Marxist Communist Manifesto in 1848. And it was the Rothschild cartel money along with Rothschild agent Jacob Schiff in America that financed his fellow Jews’ Bolshevik Revolution and their plotted murder and theft of Russian Czar Nicholas II’s family in 1917. And that billion plus of stolen Russian gold is said to have wound up stored in Rothschild’s underground chambers at City of London’s Bank of England. A centuries long pattern of covert deception, murder, war, corruption and insatiable appetite for greed and increasing power characterize all that is behind today’s still operating Khazarian mafia bankster dynasty rooted in ancient Khazar more than a millennium ago. Closer to this century historically, one world government tyranny and depopulation eugenics have both reflected the elites’ obsession.

    Rothschild crimes funded all three of the most bloodthirsty dictators in all of human history. The 1917 Russian Revolution spawned the rise of the Lenin-Stalin Communist Soviet Union democide, killing 66 million mostly Christian Russians. Then, since the early 1930s, in addition to Bush, Rothschild and Rockefeller bloodlines also funded the rise of Adolph Hitler. His alleged sacrifice of 6 million Jews in WWII was used coldheartedly as Zionist bargaining chips for the non-Hebrew Ashkenazim false claim of “Israelite birthright” to a homeland in Palestine, promised to Lord Lionel Rothschild in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Three decades later, the pledge was fulfilled with the establishment of the Jewish State. Despite a non-Hebrew heritage, Ashkenazi [non]Jews that trace back originally to nomadic Turkic tribes, comprise 90% of today’s Israeli population.

    The Balfour Declaration also made another pledge:

    …Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

    The Jewish State since its 1948 inception, that’s the last three quarters of a century now, has brutally pushed out the true Semite Arabs living in Palestine, their rightful ancient homeland, yet they’ve been systematically destroyed by Israel’s official genocidal apartheid policy. This fact is neither anti-Semitic nor what should be allowed or tolerated by rest of the world, yet with impunity, it has for far too long. This shameful reality is largely due to the Zionist House of Rothschild’s influence and control over Israel.

    Also in the 1930s, the Rothschilds groomed and backed yet another notorious Yale educated dictator Mao Zedong, also covertly supporting his democide against 65 million of his own sacrificed fellow Chinese. Over the centuries, you can recognize a pattern, that these Luciferian bloodline controllers led by the likes of the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties, have had ample practice committing genocides, financing the rise to power of all three dictators responsible for the deadliest genocides in all of history on this planet… that is, until the current unprecedented genocide against today’s human race.

    In 1933 the globalists of the day attempted the first major coup against the United States government in a failed attempt to overthrew the Franklin Delano Roosevelt, singlehandedly prevented by the Medal of Honor and most decorated war hero US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler. His intervention stopped the plotted criminal takeover, exposing it publicly in the press in 1934 as well as in his book. And though his courageous actions successfully averted the treasonous subversion committed by some of America’s wealthiest, most powerful conspiratorial traitors as captains of industry, bankers and politicians, among them heir to the Singer Sewing fortune Robert Sterling Clark and George HW Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, during WWII as a Union Banking Corp. director, Bush’s company was linked to financing, aiding and abetting the US Nazi enemy Adolph Hitler, yet his shockingly treasonous past was covered up and he was sent to the US Senate from Connecticut. Of course, the Bush-Clinton crime families are notorious for getting away with multiple felonies of high treason. Pedophile George Bush senior was implicated in America’s largest publicly exposed child sex trafficking network, tagged the “Franklin scandal” involving Nebraska children some from Catholic Boys Town directly trafficked to the White House during the Reagan-Bush administrations.

    While the Bush crime family are Satanists, their fellow Satanist arrested in this scandal coverup was fall guy Lawrence E. King, though the entire operation was quickly swept under the carpet as ringleader King aided by the likes of Satanist Lt. Col. Michael Aquino hotel drop-off of a cash filled suitcase to King. Like Epstein, Lawrence King was also handed a sweetheart deal with next to no jailtime considering his ungodly crimes. Of course, Aquino always walked free despite being linked to multiple pedo-scandals, protected by his military status high up in America’s MK mind control operation, identified by a number of child victims at the Presidio daycare scandal as well as implicated by Cathy O’Brien as a MK-ultra top programmer. America’s highest-profile pedophile-child sex trafficker is supposedly deceased, Jeffrey Epstein, while his gal pal partner-in-crime Guislaine Maxwell serves her 20-year sentence in a Florida federal penitentiary.

    Whereas the Franklin scandal incriminates the Bush crime family, both the Epstein-Maxwell operation and Pizzagate scandal expose the Rothschild, Clinton, Podesta, Obama, Biden crime families, including Donald Trump touting what “a terrific guy” Epstein was to 2004 New York Magazine, adding how he loves “the young ones,” wink, wink. The fact is, America’s uniparty is infested with hundreds of compromised famous pedophiles and gatekeeping enablers still walking free, despite the tons of cameras capturing the crimes as evidence. Outside of King, Epstein and Maxwell, zero arrests and prosecutions of any prominent guilty pedo-criminals including British, Belgian, and Dutch royalty, prime ministers and presidents, as well as billionaire criminals like Bill Gates, hundreds, perhaps thousands of these blackmailed VIP politicians, judges, police chiefs, generals, CEOs, bankers and entertainers, all guilty of horrific child sex abuse crimes have yet to face their unholiest of unholy karma.

    Multiple chapters in Pedophilia & Empire Book 4 unravel the US pedo-scourge and other scandals throughout the world in the other books. The New World Order, secret societies and the global pedophilia network generating enormous black ops revenue involving colossal amounts of money laundering by all Rothschild private central banks, are explicitly intertwined and fully documented in the five volume series with access to all 50 plus chapters here.

    Because so much accelerated shocking truth is coming out weekly, with a one in 6 billion chance of so many disastrous chemical spill derailments all at once, manmade earthquakes punishing nations aligned with Russia, all are only further incriminating the bloodline controllers and their puppet minions at the highest echelons of Western power. The reason why the Ukraine war is so huge right now, carrying so much at stake, is because the entire New World Order’s one world government scheme is riding on the bloodline controllers’ defeat by Russia in Ukraine as their longtime “devil’s playground” hub gets further exposed to the global public. With all these bloodline criminals vis-à-vis the Rothschild dynasty atop this predatory food chain, busily bribing, blackmailing, and silencing facts and truthtellers through any and all means necessary, it’s to ensure that their psychopathic club of elites remains unreachable and immune from all prosecution and long overdue justice. They know more than enough criminal evidence is out there in the public domain to convict these genocidal killers for their unending crimes and they know that We the People are closing in on them. And because of this, the monstrous beasts are willing to unleash nuclear Armageddon. We are living through epic times, and though millions have already perished and perhaps billions more will follow, in this war between good and evil, we have them on the run, rushing like cockroaches for the cover of darkness. But armed and united by the truth, justice will be done.

    As a consequence of the covert subversive overthrow of the United States government taking place in recent years, both the complete absence of rule of law and rampant treasonous failure to uphold the US Constitution, currently has Americans and people around the world waking up in righteous anger by the thousands every single day. Our founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson bestowed fundamental rights of liberty and freedom to every citizen, granting us clear-cut legal justification and guidelines to, in his words, “abolish” the illegitimate treasonous regime occupying Washington today. Taking into account the US government’s repeated terrorist acts constituting democide against its own American citizenry as well as having committed acts of war against US closest allies like Germany via the Nord Stream sabotage, the Biden regime’s intent to destroy both America and West must be opposed immediately.

    A growing majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance as imposter president, more so than any previous president in US modern history during the entire 78 years of presidential poll ratings. After the US Supreme Court declined the Brunson case out of Utah last month for a second time this year, the longshot effort to hold the vast majority of Congress accountable for illegally ratifying a fraudulent, rigged 2020 election has been thwarted. All three branches of government – the executive, legislative and judiciary, have systemically failed Americans by repeatedly violating the US Constitution in clear breech of their sworn oaths to uphold and defend. All three branches have committed treason for destroying our nation through reckless, willful crimes endangering both the American as well as global population, targeted for extermination by the elites. Nuremberg 2.0 needs to immediately be invoked for mass tribunal trials of multitudes of genocidal traitors determined to impose their diabolical, exposed depopulation agenda on humanity.

    The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the president that vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces,” reduce the power of the Federal Reserve and avert a decade long costly war in Vietnam, set the stage for the Deep State to fester and thrive ever since November 22, 1963. Every US president ever since has been a mere puppet for bloodline controllers to rape the earth and humanity in the name of the military industrial security Big Pharma complex. In this century the Khazarian mafia infested and controlled international criminal cabal manufactured their “new Pearl Harbor” 9/11, an Israeli-neocon grand Satanic blood sacrifice after the prewritten Patriot Act straight out of the dialectical “problem, reaction, solution” con-game playbook intended to strip away all Americans’ constitutional rights, a lose-lose our less freedom for less security and win-win for the Satanists, thinly disguised as collateral damage behind their fabricated war on terror against Muslim terrorists they create, train and finance as fake proxy war US enemies, supplementing their ongoing “war on drugs” to destroy African American families for the prison security complex, then when convenient again switch the revolving “enemy” back to the Russians and Chinese in Cold War #2 to drive humanity off the Armageddon cliff with today’s nuclear World War III countdown.

    And now along with the threat of a mushroom cloud, their enemy target today expands to a genocidal war against the entire human species with their fake pandemic/killer jab’s malevolent agenda to destroy national sovereignty via the United Nations’ World Health Organization, subversively imposing more fake or deadly health emergencies possessing an unlimited bioweapon arsenal bringing more draconian lockdowns, more killer mandates, along with their 15-minute smart cities control grid prison enslavement, planetwide mass surveillance, Chinese modeled social credit scores freezing dissidents’ bank accounts requiring digital ID approval and cashless World Bank Digital Currency, all part of their “Great Reset.”

    The globalists’ wet dream is our never-ending nightmare of absolute myopic control over the culled down, beaten down, traumatized, lobotomized population of jabbed, DNA altered, group hived, AI mind-controlled cyborg survivors. This is our bleak Lucifer controlled future if we remain weak, passive, defeated and ignorant. Activism is growing in a planetwide movement protesting against the Ukraine debacle along with the price inflation, smart cities and World Economic Forum’s enslavement. Legal challenges against the technocratic tyranny, the genocide, the wokist insanity. Our enemy is on notice and no doubt will be unleashing more false flags and WMDs at us, but the momentum of growing resistance and opposition is mobilizing for the long war.

    Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.

    The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolical pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, like Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jameshfetzer.org. As a published bestselling author on Amazon of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, his A-Z sourcebook series exposes the global pedophilia scourge is available free at https://pedoempire.org/contents/. Joachim also hosts the Revolution Radio weekly broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed,” every Friday morning at 6AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!).


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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/the-rothschild-deep-state-cabal-is-imploding/
    The Rothschild Deep State Cabal Is Imploding Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorFebruary 23, 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. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776 That same momentous year that kicked off the American Revolution, 1776 was also the year that ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria founded his Illuminati Order, sponsored by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as House of Rothschild patriarch in nearby Frankfurt, Germany. And it was America’s third US President Thomas Jefferson, who refused renewal of the Rothschild controlled First Bank of America’s charter in 1811. The American Revolution may have been fought for independence from King George’s British monarchy, but not independence from the Rothschild central banking cartel, whose controlling 70% foreign interests in First Bank of America indebted America’s earliest citizens. At the end of George Washington’s eight years as first US president, in 1791 the federalist Rothschild agent Alexander Hamilton installed for the Rothschilds their First Bank of America. Not renewing its charter, Jefferson kicked the Rothschild owned bank out of the US, which became the basis for America’s first war as a sovereign independent country, once again facing the same British enemy in the War of 1812. This war fought over financial independence from Britain’s City of London, only caused young America to drown further in war debt, as Nathan Rothschild backing both sides to every conflict he creates was determined to bankrupt the US to force it into recolonization. Despite the hard-fought American military victory, by 1815 with the US war debt nearly tripled at $119.2 million in the red, America financially was already a major debtor nation owing the infamous bloodline banking dynasty. That same year, making a colossal fortune over the Battle of Waterloo outcome by pre-rigging his investment, the gloating crook Nathan Rothschild proclaimed: I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply. Sadly, America’s War of 1812 struggle for financial independence from the Rothschild controllers was lost. A brief excerpt from my Pedophilia & Empire series, Book 3, chapter one on the Rothschild family: In 1816 with yet a Second Bank of the United States foisted on American citizens for the next 20 years, in effect, Rothschild was simply seizing his predatory ownership of the United States. And once again, private control over the US money supply tacking on parasitic interest went into the coffers of as many as 1000 foreign investors, with [Nathan’s younger brother] Baron James de Rothschild in Paris holding the controlling shares. When the Second Bank of America’s charter was up for renewal 20 years later in 1836, that year Nathan Rothschild died. But France’s James de Rothschild assuming control over both the London and Paris banking branches, battled playing dirty as usual for charter renewal. He met his match as the resolute, feisty President Andrew Jackson was up for the challenge, declaring war on the House of Rothschild: You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by eternal God, I will rout you out. President Jackson’s turn to oppose the centralized moneychangers ultimately proved successful, kicking the Rothschilds out of America yet again, and the second British dynasty US takeover was again foiled, at least temporarily. However, the year prior in 1835, amidst the battle over the US private central bank, Jackson barely dodged a bullet to literally escape an assassination attempt attributed to Rothschild wrath. From 1836 to 1913, the US was largely free of the treacherous Rothschild leeches from Europe, signifying America’s longest period of foremost economic growth and prosperity in its entire history. Having acquired central banking control over Europe and through Nathan Rothschild’s ownership of the Bank of England by early 19th century, the British East India Company monopoly over international trade, including both the drug and slave trade, spanned the globe from Africa, the Indian and Pacific Oceans to North America and Europe, the flourishing international banking cartel consolidated its growing global money lending power over every commercial trade on every continent. But one vast sprawling nation covering two continents over the centuries resisted and eluded the Rothschild clutches. As a result, Russia was repeatedly targeted, as its ruling Romanov monarchy managed to successfully evade the Rothschild predatory conquest, but not without murderous retribution. From author Eustice Mullens’ New World Order: After the fall of Napoleon, the Rothschilds turned all their hatred against the Romanovs. In 1825, they poisoned Alexander I; in 1855, they poisoned Nicholas I. Other assassinations followed, culminating on the night of November 6, 1917, when a dozen Red Guards drove a truck up to the Imperial Bank Building in Moscow. They loaded the Imperial jewel collection and $700 million gold, loot totaling more than a billion dollars. The new regime also confiscated the 150 million acres in Russia personally owned by the Czar. In addition to a century of assassinating Romanov czars by poison, when Czar Alexander II came to the aid of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, which by many accounts attribute Russian support to preserving the Union, the vindictive Rothschild cartel as primary backer of the Confederacy, vowed eternal revenge against the Russia and its royal family. The Rothschilds et al’s war at all cost against Russia today in Ukraine is merely this same long legacy’s outcome. Just prior to the Rothschilds’ planned First World War in 1914, a few months earlier in late 1913, they deceptively snuck through Congress their Federal Reserve Act on December 23rd, after most members had already left on Christmas break. The Jekyll Island rendezvous of the Fed Reserve architects included Paul Warburg, the German born chief central banking Rothschild agent moved to the US, ending up the second Vice Fed chairman. Continuity of one thought mind pervades the Warburg clan as Paul’s son James Paul Warburg before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950 emphatically declared: We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest. Thus, the third Rothschild central private bank in America was established to take permanent full usury-debtor system control over the US money supply, through bribery of Washington’s political puppet class, and the American people through their engineered debtor system. 1913 also saw the passage of the Federal Income Tax Act, illegally squeezing tax dollars to rip off hardworking US citizens just to pay off debt interests from all the bankers’ war loans. This vicious control cycle is how Khazarian mafia swindlers have cunningly operated since their identity snatching days of their ancient Khazar kingdom over a millennium ago. The Rothschild central banking controllers hired one of their own, distant cousin Karl Marx to write his Marxist Communist Manifesto in 1848. And it was the Rothschild cartel money along with Rothschild agent Jacob Schiff in America that financed his fellow Jews’ Bolshevik Revolution and their plotted murder and theft of Russian Czar Nicholas II’s family in 1917. And that billion plus of stolen Russian gold is said to have wound up stored in Rothschild’s underground chambers at City of London’s Bank of England. A centuries long pattern of covert deception, murder, war, corruption and insatiable appetite for greed and increasing power characterize all that is behind today’s still operating Khazarian mafia bankster dynasty rooted in ancient Khazar more than a millennium ago. Closer to this century historically, one world government tyranny and depopulation eugenics have both reflected the elites’ obsession. Rothschild crimes funded all three of the most bloodthirsty dictators in all of human history. The 1917 Russian Revolution spawned the rise of the Lenin-Stalin Communist Soviet Union democide, killing 66 million mostly Christian Russians. Then, since the early 1930s, in addition to Bush, Rothschild and Rockefeller bloodlines also funded the rise of Adolph Hitler. His alleged sacrifice of 6 million Jews in WWII was used coldheartedly as Zionist bargaining chips for the non-Hebrew Ashkenazim false claim of “Israelite birthright” to a homeland in Palestine, promised to Lord Lionel Rothschild in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Three decades later, the pledge was fulfilled with the establishment of the Jewish State. Despite a non-Hebrew heritage, Ashkenazi [non]Jews that trace back originally to nomadic Turkic tribes, comprise 90% of today’s Israeli population. The Balfour Declaration also made another pledge: …Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The Jewish State since its 1948 inception, that’s the last three quarters of a century now, has brutally pushed out the true Semite Arabs living in Palestine, their rightful ancient homeland, yet they’ve been systematically destroyed by Israel’s official genocidal apartheid policy. This fact is neither anti-Semitic nor what should be allowed or tolerated by rest of the world, yet with impunity, it has for far too long. This shameful reality is largely due to the Zionist House of Rothschild’s influence and control over Israel. Also in the 1930s, the Rothschilds groomed and backed yet another notorious Yale educated dictator Mao Zedong, also covertly supporting his democide against 65 million of his own sacrificed fellow Chinese. Over the centuries, you can recognize a pattern, that these Luciferian bloodline controllers led by the likes of the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties, have had ample practice committing genocides, financing the rise to power of all three dictators responsible for the deadliest genocides in all of history on this planet… that is, until the current unprecedented genocide against today’s human race. In 1933 the globalists of the day attempted the first major coup against the United States government in a failed attempt to overthrew the Franklin Delano Roosevelt, singlehandedly prevented by the Medal of Honor and most decorated war hero US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler. His intervention stopped the plotted criminal takeover, exposing it publicly in the press in 1934 as well as in his book. And though his courageous actions successfully averted the treasonous subversion committed by some of America’s wealthiest, most powerful conspiratorial traitors as captains of industry, bankers and politicians, among them heir to the Singer Sewing fortune Robert Sterling Clark and George HW Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, during WWII as a Union Banking Corp. director, Bush’s company was linked to financing, aiding and abetting the US Nazi enemy Adolph Hitler, yet his shockingly treasonous past was covered up and he was sent to the US Senate from Connecticut. Of course, the Bush-Clinton crime families are notorious for getting away with multiple felonies of high treason. Pedophile George Bush senior was implicated in America’s largest publicly exposed child sex trafficking network, tagged the “Franklin scandal” involving Nebraska children some from Catholic Boys Town directly trafficked to the White House during the Reagan-Bush administrations. While the Bush crime family are Satanists, their fellow Satanist arrested in this scandal coverup was fall guy Lawrence E. King, though the entire operation was quickly swept under the carpet as ringleader King aided by the likes of Satanist Lt. Col. Michael Aquino hotel drop-off of a cash filled suitcase to King. Like Epstein, Lawrence King was also handed a sweetheart deal with next to no jailtime considering his ungodly crimes. Of course, Aquino always walked free despite being linked to multiple pedo-scandals, protected by his military status high up in America’s MK mind control operation, identified by a number of child victims at the Presidio daycare scandal as well as implicated by Cathy O’Brien as a MK-ultra top programmer. America’s highest-profile pedophile-child sex trafficker is supposedly deceased, Jeffrey Epstein, while his gal pal partner-in-crime Guislaine Maxwell serves her 20-year sentence in a Florida federal penitentiary. Whereas the Franklin scandal incriminates the Bush crime family, both the Epstein-Maxwell operation and Pizzagate scandal expose the Rothschild, Clinton, Podesta, Obama, Biden crime families, including Donald Trump touting what “a terrific guy” Epstein was to 2004 New York Magazine, adding how he loves “the young ones,” wink, wink. The fact is, America’s uniparty is infested with hundreds of compromised famous pedophiles and gatekeeping enablers still walking free, despite the tons of cameras capturing the crimes as evidence. Outside of King, Epstein and Maxwell, zero arrests and prosecutions of any prominent guilty pedo-criminals including British, Belgian, and Dutch royalty, prime ministers and presidents, as well as billionaire criminals like Bill Gates, hundreds, perhaps thousands of these blackmailed VIP politicians, judges, police chiefs, generals, CEOs, bankers and entertainers, all guilty of horrific child sex abuse crimes have yet to face their unholiest of unholy karma. Multiple chapters in Pedophilia & Empire Book 4 unravel the US pedo-scourge and other scandals throughout the world in the other books. The New World Order, secret societies and the global pedophilia network generating enormous black ops revenue involving colossal amounts of money laundering by all Rothschild private central banks, are explicitly intertwined and fully documented in the five volume series with access to all 50 plus chapters here. Because so much accelerated shocking truth is coming out weekly, with a one in 6 billion chance of so many disastrous chemical spill derailments all at once, manmade earthquakes punishing nations aligned with Russia, all are only further incriminating the bloodline controllers and their puppet minions at the highest echelons of Western power. The reason why the Ukraine war is so huge right now, carrying so much at stake, is because the entire New World Order’s one world government scheme is riding on the bloodline controllers’ defeat by Russia in Ukraine as their longtime “devil’s playground” hub gets further exposed to the global public. With all these bloodline criminals vis-à-vis the Rothschild dynasty atop this predatory food chain, busily bribing, blackmailing, and silencing facts and truthtellers through any and all means necessary, it’s to ensure that their psychopathic club of elites remains unreachable and immune from all prosecution and long overdue justice. They know more than enough criminal evidence is out there in the public domain to convict these genocidal killers for their unending crimes and they know that We the People are closing in on them. And because of this, the monstrous beasts are willing to unleash nuclear Armageddon. We are living through epic times, and though millions have already perished and perhaps billions more will follow, in this war between good and evil, we have them on the run, rushing like cockroaches for the cover of darkness. But armed and united by the truth, justice will be done. As a consequence of the covert subversive overthrow of the United States government taking place in recent years, both the complete absence of rule of law and rampant treasonous failure to uphold the US Constitution, currently has Americans and people around the world waking up in righteous anger by the thousands every single day. Our founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson bestowed fundamental rights of liberty and freedom to every citizen, granting us clear-cut legal justification and guidelines to, in his words, “abolish” the illegitimate treasonous regime occupying Washington today. Taking into account the US government’s repeated terrorist acts constituting democide against its own American citizenry as well as having committed acts of war against US closest allies like Germany via the Nord Stream sabotage, the Biden regime’s intent to destroy both America and West must be opposed immediately. A growing majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance as imposter president, more so than any previous president in US modern history during the entire 78 years of presidential poll ratings. After the US Supreme Court declined the Brunson case out of Utah last month for a second time this year, the longshot effort to hold the vast majority of Congress accountable for illegally ratifying a fraudulent, rigged 2020 election has been thwarted. All three branches of government – the executive, legislative and judiciary, have systemically failed Americans by repeatedly violating the US Constitution in clear breech of their sworn oaths to uphold and defend. All three branches have committed treason for destroying our nation through reckless, willful crimes endangering both the American as well as global population, targeted for extermination by the elites. Nuremberg 2.0 needs to immediately be invoked for mass tribunal trials of multitudes of genocidal traitors determined to impose their diabolical, exposed depopulation agenda on humanity. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the president that vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces,” reduce the power of the Federal Reserve and avert a decade long costly war in Vietnam, set the stage for the Deep State to fester and thrive ever since November 22, 1963. Every US president ever since has been a mere puppet for bloodline controllers to rape the earth and humanity in the name of the military industrial security Big Pharma complex. In this century the Khazarian mafia infested and controlled international criminal cabal manufactured their “new Pearl Harbor” 9/11, an Israeli-neocon grand Satanic blood sacrifice after the prewritten Patriot Act straight out of the dialectical “problem, reaction, solution” con-game playbook intended to strip away all Americans’ constitutional rights, a lose-lose our less freedom for less security and win-win for the Satanists, thinly disguised as collateral damage behind their fabricated war on terror against Muslim terrorists they create, train and finance as fake proxy war US enemies, supplementing their ongoing “war on drugs” to destroy African American families for the prison security complex, then when convenient again switch the revolving “enemy” back to the Russians and Chinese in Cold War #2 to drive humanity off the Armageddon cliff with today’s nuclear World War III countdown. And now along with the threat of a mushroom cloud, their enemy target today expands to a genocidal war against the entire human species with their fake pandemic/killer jab’s malevolent agenda to destroy national sovereignty via the United Nations’ World Health Organization, subversively imposing more fake or deadly health emergencies possessing an unlimited bioweapon arsenal bringing more draconian lockdowns, more killer mandates, along with their 15-minute smart cities control grid prison enslavement, planetwide mass surveillance, Chinese modeled social credit scores freezing dissidents’ bank accounts requiring digital ID approval and cashless World Bank Digital Currency, all part of their “Great Reset.” The globalists’ wet dream is our never-ending nightmare of absolute myopic control over the culled down, beaten down, traumatized, lobotomized population of jabbed, DNA altered, group hived, AI mind-controlled cyborg survivors. This is our bleak Lucifer controlled future if we remain weak, passive, defeated and ignorant. Activism is growing in a planetwide movement protesting against the Ukraine debacle along with the price inflation, smart cities and World Economic Forum’s enslavement. Legal challenges against the technocratic tyranny, the genocide, the wokist insanity. Our enemy is on notice and no doubt will be unleashing more false flags and WMDs at us, but the momentum of growing resistance and opposition is mobilizing for the long war. Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system. The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolical pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, like Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jameshfetzer.org. As a published bestselling author on Amazon of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, his A-Z sourcebook series exposes the global pedophilia scourge is available free at https://pedoempire.org/contents/. Joachim also hosts the Revolution Radio weekly broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed,” every Friday morning at 6AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!). ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/the-rothschild-deep-state-cabal-is-imploding/
    WWW.VTFOREIGNPOLICY.COM
    The Rothschild Deep State Cabal Is Imploding
    That same momentous year that kicked off the American Revolution, 1776 was also the year that ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria founded his Illuminati Order, sponsored by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as House of Rothschild patriarch in nearby Frankfurt, Germany.
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  • UN - Agenda 2030 - "Sustainable Development"

    PART 1 OF 2

    In 2015 the leaders of 193 countries signed their population up to Agenda 2030

    What is Sustainable Development (SD)?
    SD is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

    Core Principles:

    Universality (all countries committed to whole Agenda regardless of any unique factors)

    Leaving No One Behind (all people will be included; “with unprecedented need for data to ensure this principle is met”)

    Interconnectedness and Indivisibility – no pick and mix approach to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – all to be followed

    Inclusiveness – the entire population must follow

    Multi Stakeholder Partnerships – establishment seen as essential to deliver all SDG’s

    Dimensions of the Agenda (the 5Ps)
    People, Prosperity, Planet, Partnership and Peace

    Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
    Used to focus on areas necessary to achieve SD

    Each SDG has 8-12 targets & 1-4 indicators of progress

    SDG'S:

    Goal 1: End poverty
    Goal 2: End hunger
    Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives
    Goal 4: Quality education
    Goal 5: Gender equality
    Goal 6: Water/sanitation for all
    Goal 7: Affordable clean energy for all
    Goal 8: Economic growth/full + productive employment
    Goal 9: Resilient infrastructure, sustainable industrialization/innovation
    Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries
    Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient & sustainable
    Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption + production patterns
    Goal 13: Combat climate change
    Goal 14: Conserve/sustainably use oceans, seas & marine resources
    Goal 15: Promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, forests, deserts & land
    Goal 16: Promote inclusive societies, access to justice + accountable institutions
    Goal 17: Strengthen/revitalise the Global Partnership for SD

    Link
    UN - Agenda 2030 - "Sustainable Development" PART 1 OF 2 In 2015 the leaders of 193 countries signed their population up to Agenda 2030 What is Sustainable Development (SD)? SD is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” Core Principles: Universality (all countries committed to whole Agenda regardless of any unique factors) Leaving No One Behind (all people will be included; “with unprecedented need for data to ensure this principle is met”) Interconnectedness and Indivisibility – no pick and mix approach to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – all to be followed Inclusiveness – the entire population must follow Multi Stakeholder Partnerships – establishment seen as essential to deliver all SDG’s Dimensions of the Agenda (the 5Ps) People, Prosperity, Planet, Partnership and Peace Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Used to focus on areas necessary to achieve SD Each SDG has 8-12 targets & 1-4 indicators of progress SDG'S: Goal 1: End poverty Goal 2: End hunger Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives Goal 4: Quality education Goal 5: Gender equality Goal 6: Water/sanitation for all Goal 7: Affordable clean energy for all Goal 8: Economic growth/full + productive employment Goal 9: Resilient infrastructure, sustainable industrialization/innovation Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient & sustainable Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption + production patterns Goal 13: Combat climate change Goal 14: Conserve/sustainably use oceans, seas & marine resources Goal 15: Promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, forests, deserts & land Goal 16: Promote inclusive societies, access to justice + accountable institutions Goal 17: Strengthen/revitalise the Global Partnership for SD Link
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  • ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 133: Israel cuts electricity to critical Nasser Hospital patients, forces staff to evacuate
    Anna Lekas MillerFebruary 15, 2024
    Relatives of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks, mourn as they receive their bodies from the morgue of Al-Aqsa Hospital for burial in Deir El-Balah, Gaza on February 15, 2023. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images)
    Relatives of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks, mourn as they receive their bodies from the morgue of Al-Aqsa Hospital for burial in Deir El-Balah, Gaza on February 15, 2023. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images)
    Casualties:

    28,775+ Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including at least 12,000 children, and 68,552+ Palestinians have been injured.
    394+ 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.
    569 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.**
    *This figure was confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Telegram channel. Some rights groups put the death toll number at more than 36,500 when accounting for those presumed dead.

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

    Key Developments:

    A dire situation at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is unfolding, as Israel’s raid continues, forcing displaced people and medical staff to evacuate the building.
    World Health Organization (WHO) is trying to access Nasser Hospital to deliver humanitarian aid
    UNWRA: 84 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza affected by Israeli aggression
    Satellite imagery shows the construction of a wall along the border between Gaza and Egypt, raising suspicion that Palestinians might be forced to evacuate into the Sinai Desert
    Gaza Media Office: 130 journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023
    West Bank: Israeli military raids 15 homes in the town of Silat ad-Dhahr
    At least two dead in “suspected terror” shooting attack in southern Israel
    Lebanon submits a formal complaint to the UN Security Council, following Israel’s attacks in Nabatiyeh
    Russia invites Hamas and other Palestinian factions to Moscow for “inter-Palestinian” talks on Gaza, and other Middle East issues
    Germany approves the deployment of armed forces in an EU mission to thwart Houthi attacks in the Red Sea
    Biden administration meets with Jewish and Muslim community leaders to discuss rising antisemitism and Islamophobia
    Dire situation unfolds at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis

    A dire situation at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is unfolding as Israel continues its raid on the largest functioning medical facility remaining in the Gaza Strip.

    “We are forced to transfer all the patients and the wounded to the hospital’s old building,” Dr. Nahed Abu Taima, the Director of the Nasser Medical Complex told Al Jazeera.

    “Electric power was cut off from the entire medical complex,” he continued, describing how the raid is impacting the 450 patients at the hospital, many of whom are in critical condition. “Many patients in ICUs and those on oxygen supply, and also those on dialysis are left fighting for their lives.”

    Meanwhile, most medical staff has been forced to evacuate—including the Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) staff, leaving behind patients in critical condition. Israel’s incursion on the Nasser Hospital is part of a string of attacks targeting medical facilities and healthcare workers that have brought Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure to its knees, making it increasingly difficult to treat life-threatening injuries and carry out essential medical procedures.

    “After the bombing yesterday morning, our cadres reported an atmosphere of chaos, with an unknown number of dead and wounded,” Medicins Sans Frontiers wrote in a report on X, after their staff was forced to flee. According to UNRWA, 84 percent of health facilities in Gaza have now been impacted by Israeli aggression, and 70 percent of civilian infrastructure has been destroyed or severely damaged.

    “The Israeli forces set up a checkpoint for people as they left the compound, and one of our colleagues was arrested at the checkpoint,” MSF added.

    While the Israeli Army has claimed that their raid on the Nasser Hospital has lead to the arrest of “dozens of terrorists,” and could reveal hiding places of Israeli hostages, Hamas denies any presence at the hospital, emphasizing that they are not engaging in military activity near public or civilian institutions. There has been no evidence found of Israeli hostages.

    “We have repeatedly said the policy of our Palestinian resistance is and remains to distance public and civilian institutions and the health sector from any military activity.” Hamas said, in a statement.

    “We have asked the United Nations and relevant organizations on several occasions to bring an international committee to examine the hospitals and prove that Israel’s narrative is a lie. But our demands have not been heard.”

    Up until recently, there were around 10,000 displaced Palestinians sheltering in the Nasser Hospital, hoping that it would keep them safe from Israel’s bombardment. However, when the Israeli forces began their incursion a few days ago, people were forced to leave.

    Now, Israeli forces are storming the maternity unit of the besieged hospital—and so far, two women have given birth in these conditions, as dozens evacuate.

    Satellite imagery shows a border wall being constructed between Gaza and Egypt

    Those who are evacuating have almost nowhere left to turn. While Rafah, the southernmost district of the Gaza Strip is now home to more than one million displaced Palestinians, those who are sheltering there are preparing for a ground invasion—which several global leaders, including most recently those in Australia, Canada and New Zealand have all said would be “catastrophic.”

    “With the humanitarian situation in Gaza already dire, the impact on Palestinian civilians from an expanded military operation would be devastating,” Anthony Albanese, Justin Trudeau and Christopher Luxon said, in a joint statement.

    “We urge the Israeli government to go down this path,” it continues, echoing calls from countries like Spain and Ireland who have both recently applied pressure to the European Commission to review whether or not Israel is complying with human rights obligations in Gaza.

    New evidence of a border wall being constructed between Egypt and Gaza suggests that the Israeli army might be preparing to force Palestinians sheltering in Rafah to evacuate to the Sinai Desert, officially pushing them out of Gaza. It is already straining Israel’s relationship with Egypt; Egyptian officials are afraid that a massive exodus of refugees would strain the Egyptian economy in the short term, and that in the long term, Israel would not allow Palestinian refugees to return to Gaza, cementing another Nakba and obfuscating the Palestinian right of return.

    Families of hostages pressure government for a truce, Netanyahu rejects a Palestinian state

    Over in the West Bank, the Israeli military has raided more than fifteen homes in the town of Silat ad-Dhahr, arresting dozens of young men. Now, there have been at least 7,040 Palestinians detained in raids across the West Bank since October 7th, and at least 394 Palestinians killed and 4,400 injured in Israeli army fire.

    Meanwhile in Tel Aviv, families of Israeli captives are increasing pressure on the Israeli government to reach a ceasefire agreement with Hamas, accusing Netanyahu’s government of squandering an opportunity to release the remaining hostages. Dozens have started staging rallies outside of the Israeli Defense Ministry, echoing the international community’s calls for an urgent ceasefire, at least until the hostages have been released.

    However, the Israeli government is trying to avoid any possibility of a Palestinian state—and Netanyahu is quoted as saying that this would be a “huge reward” for Hamas.

    “We will in no way agree to this plan, which says Palestinians deserve a prize for the terrible massacre they carried out against us: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Reuters, following the news that the United States is working with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on a post-war timeline that would involve establishing a Palestinian state.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-133-israel-cuts-electricity-to-critical-nasser-hospital-patients-forces-staff-to-evacuate/

    https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-133-israel.html
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 133: Israel cuts electricity to critical Nasser Hospital patients, forces staff to evacuate Anna Lekas MillerFebruary 15, 2024 Relatives of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks, mourn as they receive their bodies from the morgue of Al-Aqsa Hospital for burial in Deir El-Balah, Gaza on February 15, 2023. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images) Relatives of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks, mourn as they receive their bodies from the morgue of Al-Aqsa Hospital for burial in Deir El-Balah, Gaza on February 15, 2023. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images) Casualties: 28,775+ Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including at least 12,000 children, and 68,552+ Palestinians have been injured. 394+ 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. 569 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.** *This figure was confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Telegram channel. Some rights groups put the death toll number at more than 36,500 when accounting for those presumed dead. ** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Key Developments: A dire situation at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is unfolding, as Israel’s raid continues, forcing displaced people and medical staff to evacuate the building. World Health Organization (WHO) is trying to access Nasser Hospital to deliver humanitarian aid UNWRA: 84 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza affected by Israeli aggression Satellite imagery shows the construction of a wall along the border between Gaza and Egypt, raising suspicion that Palestinians might be forced to evacuate into the Sinai Desert Gaza Media Office: 130 journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 West Bank: Israeli military raids 15 homes in the town of Silat ad-Dhahr At least two dead in “suspected terror” shooting attack in southern Israel Lebanon submits a formal complaint to the UN Security Council, following Israel’s attacks in Nabatiyeh Russia invites Hamas and other Palestinian factions to Moscow for “inter-Palestinian” talks on Gaza, and other Middle East issues Germany approves the deployment of armed forces in an EU mission to thwart Houthi attacks in the Red Sea Biden administration meets with Jewish and Muslim community leaders to discuss rising antisemitism and Islamophobia Dire situation unfolds at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis A dire situation at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is unfolding as Israel continues its raid on the largest functioning medical facility remaining in the Gaza Strip. “We are forced to transfer all the patients and the wounded to the hospital’s old building,” Dr. Nahed Abu Taima, the Director of the Nasser Medical Complex told Al Jazeera. “Electric power was cut off from the entire medical complex,” he continued, describing how the raid is impacting the 450 patients at the hospital, many of whom are in critical condition. “Many patients in ICUs and those on oxygen supply, and also those on dialysis are left fighting for their lives.” Meanwhile, most medical staff has been forced to evacuate—including the Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) staff, leaving behind patients in critical condition. Israel’s incursion on the Nasser Hospital is part of a string of attacks targeting medical facilities and healthcare workers that have brought Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure to its knees, making it increasingly difficult to treat life-threatening injuries and carry out essential medical procedures. “After the bombing yesterday morning, our cadres reported an atmosphere of chaos, with an unknown number of dead and wounded,” Medicins Sans Frontiers wrote in a report on X, after their staff was forced to flee. According to UNRWA, 84 percent of health facilities in Gaza have now been impacted by Israeli aggression, and 70 percent of civilian infrastructure has been destroyed or severely damaged. “The Israeli forces set up a checkpoint for people as they left the compound, and one of our colleagues was arrested at the checkpoint,” MSF added. While the Israeli Army has claimed that their raid on the Nasser Hospital has lead to the arrest of “dozens of terrorists,” and could reveal hiding places of Israeli hostages, Hamas denies any presence at the hospital, emphasizing that they are not engaging in military activity near public or civilian institutions. There has been no evidence found of Israeli hostages. “We have repeatedly said the policy of our Palestinian resistance is and remains to distance public and civilian institutions and the health sector from any military activity.” Hamas said, in a statement. “We have asked the United Nations and relevant organizations on several occasions to bring an international committee to examine the hospitals and prove that Israel’s narrative is a lie. But our demands have not been heard.” Up until recently, there were around 10,000 displaced Palestinians sheltering in the Nasser Hospital, hoping that it would keep them safe from Israel’s bombardment. However, when the Israeli forces began their incursion a few days ago, people were forced to leave. Now, Israeli forces are storming the maternity unit of the besieged hospital—and so far, two women have given birth in these conditions, as dozens evacuate. Satellite imagery shows a border wall being constructed between Gaza and Egypt Those who are evacuating have almost nowhere left to turn. While Rafah, the southernmost district of the Gaza Strip is now home to more than one million displaced Palestinians, those who are sheltering there are preparing for a ground invasion—which several global leaders, including most recently those in Australia, Canada and New Zealand have all said would be “catastrophic.” “With the humanitarian situation in Gaza already dire, the impact on Palestinian civilians from an expanded military operation would be devastating,” Anthony Albanese, Justin Trudeau and Christopher Luxon said, in a joint statement. “We urge the Israeli government to go down this path,” it continues, echoing calls from countries like Spain and Ireland who have both recently applied pressure to the European Commission to review whether or not Israel is complying with human rights obligations in Gaza. New evidence of a border wall being constructed between Egypt and Gaza suggests that the Israeli army might be preparing to force Palestinians sheltering in Rafah to evacuate to the Sinai Desert, officially pushing them out of Gaza. It is already straining Israel’s relationship with Egypt; Egyptian officials are afraid that a massive exodus of refugees would strain the Egyptian economy in the short term, and that in the long term, Israel would not allow Palestinian refugees to return to Gaza, cementing another Nakba and obfuscating the Palestinian right of return. Families of hostages pressure government for a truce, Netanyahu rejects a Palestinian state Over in the West Bank, the Israeli military has raided more than fifteen homes in the town of Silat ad-Dhahr, arresting dozens of young men. Now, there have been at least 7,040 Palestinians detained in raids across the West Bank since October 7th, and at least 394 Palestinians killed and 4,400 injured in Israeli army fire. Meanwhile in Tel Aviv, families of Israeli captives are increasing pressure on the Israeli government to reach a ceasefire agreement with Hamas, accusing Netanyahu’s government of squandering an opportunity to release the remaining hostages. Dozens have started staging rallies outside of the Israeli Defense Ministry, echoing the international community’s calls for an urgent ceasefire, at least until the hostages have been released. However, the Israeli government is trying to avoid any possibility of a Palestinian state—and Netanyahu is quoted as saying that this would be a “huge reward” for Hamas. “We will in no way agree to this plan, which says Palestinians deserve a prize for the terrible massacre they carried out against us: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Reuters, following the news that the United States is working with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on a post-war timeline that would involve establishing a Palestinian state. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-133-israel-cuts-electricity-to-critical-nasser-hospital-patients-forces-staff-to-evacuate/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-133-israel.html
    MONDOWEISS.NET
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 133: Israel cuts electricity to critical Nasser Hospital patients, forces staff to evacuate
    Medicins Sans Frontiers reports “an unknown number of dead and wounded” following Israel’s attack on Nasser Hospital. UNRWA says 84% of Gaza health facilities have been impacted by Israeli attacks, and 70% of civilian infrastructure has been damaged.
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  • The Pulitzer Winner Hersh Unveils Mystery on Death of Navy SEALS in Gulf of Aden | VT Foreign Policy
    February 16, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

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

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

    The Seals and the Dhow

    Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Quoting of a Former SEAL Senior Chief

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

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

    Navy Seal Who Went AWOL Killed While Fighting Russians In Bakhmut

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

    Refer a friend

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

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

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

    The Serious Problem of Sea State

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

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

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

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

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

    The Mystery on a Ballistic Missile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

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

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

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

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

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

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

    GOSPA NEWS – WARZONE

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

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

    Most popolar investigation on VT is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS

    www.gospanews.net/

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

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