Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 1

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series, written exclusively for TCW, he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here.

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023

Three years into the Covid crisis, many are now aware of the disastrous advice on which so many governments blindly acted. False predictions of spread, fearmongering propaganda, lockdowns damaging young and old, suppression of cheap treatments to make way for a dangerous, experimental vaccine . . . so much of ‘the science’ turned out to be fiction, hugely profitable for a few but harmful for billions.

These failures have brought back into focus claims that the syndrome known as HIV/Aids was – and still is – being similarly mishandled and exploited by the worlds of medical science, public health and Big Pharma. Robert Kennedy Jr documents this in detail his best-selling 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.

What few people know however is that for almost 40 years a small group of scientists has deconstructed almost every aspect of the theory that Aids is caused by a lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV. Their critique goes beyond questioning HIV as the cause of Aids. They say ‘HIV’ has never even been proved to exist. And the reason you have probably never heard of their work is that, like the doctors and scientists who challenged Covid insanities, they have been silenced at every turn.

With Covid, pressure to conform came through government-directed appeals to our higher nature through slogans such as ‘Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives’ and ‘Every vaccination gives us hope’. The implied claim was that anyone who thought differently was either an idiot or a murderer.

Similarly with Aids, advocates of the deadly virus theory sought to make those who questioned it sound as though they were lacking in compassion, irresponsible or stupid.

I was working as medical correspondent of the London Sunday Times in the 1980s when Aids suddenly became big news after American government scientists claimed to have identified a previously unknown virus as the cause of a mysterious cluster of symptoms related to severely depleted immunity. They included Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer affecting the skin and internal organs; severe candidiasis; and pneumonia caused by an out-of-control fungus. The symptoms proved resistant to treatment, and fatal in a number of cases.

The first victims were groups of gay men who were challenging long-standing homophobic attitudes in American society through what came to be known as the ‘fast-track’ gay lifestyle. This involved multiple sex partners and heavy drug use.

The partying was fun, I was later told, but it caused disease microbes to become pooled among participants such that almost every encounter carried a risk of infection. Prophylactic use of antibiotics staved off some illnesses but contributed to an underlying deterioration, and in some cases complete collapse, of the immune system.

The crisis at first met an unsympathetic response from the right-wing Reagan administration. The common histories of the victims led to dismissive descriptions of Aids as a ‘gay plague’. As numbers increased, however, outrage and anger grew. Those involved had often already suffered greatly from discriminatory attitudes and behaviour, and their efforts to end this bigotry through the Gay Lib movement looked to be under threat.

That was the context in which US biomedical researcher Robert Gallo found immediate acceptance when in 1984 he claimed to have identified a deadly virus, new to humanity, as the cause of Aids. The theory took off like wildfire and by the end of 1984 had come to be accepted by virtually everyone. The microbe Gallo said he had found became known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV.

It brought virologists, drug companies and public health experts to centre stage. Taxpayer dollars, eventually reaching hundreds of billions, were poured into Aids research and treatment through the US National Institutes of Health, in particular the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the leadership of Dr Anthony Fauci. Well-funded NGOs and activist groups sprang up with the aim of contributing to the fight against the disease.

Religious leaders warmed to the theory because it discouraged sleeping around. Politicians liked it because it put in place a new ‘enemy within’ against which they could claim to offer protection with advertising campaigns such as the UK’s ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ – a precursor of the intense propaganda inflicted on us with the advent of Covid-19.

Media people – including me, I am ashamed to say – vigorously promulgated warnings that the virus put at risk everyone and anyone who had sex. It felt good to be not just selling newspapers, but helping to sound the alert.

Young people were less readily taken in. James Delingpole has recalled how the ad campaign put a dampener on his sex life, though after the initial shock it became increasingly clear to him that the government had been overstating the case.

In fact, as the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis and other scientists were to point out, there never was a body of scientific evidence demonstrating the validity of the ‘deadly new virus’ idea. That remains the case today, despite hundreds of thousands of papers having been published over the years predicated on the HIV belief system.

Henry Bauer, a retired professor of science studies who has drawn on numerous sources in documenting The Case Against HIV, says: ‘Anyone open to looking at the actual data . . . can find an enormous amount of evidence that the diagnosis of HIV as cause of AIDS is simply wrong.’

One lasting outcome of the theory was that by ‘democratising’ Aids, with the message that the disease did not discriminate and so everyone was at risk, it prevented the feared setbacks for the Gay Lib movement. Lesbian and gay rights became firmly established in American society, and in some other parts of the world.

In many other ways, however, the global hysteria to which the theory gave rise has had disastrous consequences, some of which continue to this day.

A failed cancer drug called AZT, pulled off the shelf by American government researchers because of an apparent anti-HIV effect, killed and injured thousands. It was administered in high doses not just to people with Aids but to gay men, haemophiliacs and others thought to be HIV-infected, earning hundreds of millions of pounds for the US drug company Burroughs Wellcome and its British parent, the Wellcome Foundation (later taken over by Glaxo). American and British government institutions promoted it vigorously as the ‘gold standard’ of Aids treatment. Doctors who stepped publicly out of line were hounded out of the profession.

Although later generations of drugs can genuinely help to support a failing immune system, 40 years of research has failed to bring either a vaccine or cure for the purported ‘HIV’ infection. Taken over long periods, the drugs themselves can kill, contributing significantly to the 800 or so deaths reported annually of ‘people living with HIV’ in the UK.

The most widespread and long-lasting harm, however, has been to the countless people around the world, especially in Africa and of African descent, terrorised with a false belief that they are victims of a sexually transmitted virus which only Western medicine has the means to hold at bay. The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that more than 80million people have been infected, and that about 40million have died from HIV. Three-fifths of purported new HIV infections are said by WHO to be in the African region. African Americans are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV infection compared with the white population.

American taxpayers in particular have been burdened with the huge expense of maintaining an industry that has grown up around HIV/Aids. The US government spends more than $28billion a year on the domestic response, and expenditure globally between 2000 and 2015 totalled more than half a trillion dollars ($562.6billion), according to a University of Washington study. Yet the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a never-ending plea for more money, says the pandemic continues to take a life every minute.

In this series of articles I am going to describe the fruits of years of painstaking work by scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, collating evidence challenging almost every aspect of the ‘HIV’ theory. The essence of their case is that there is no ‘HIV’ epidemic, and there never will be a vaccine or cure, because there is no ‘HIV’.

If you find this hard to believe, I am with you entirely in the sense that it took me years to accept fully how wrong I had been in my early reporting on Aids. I documented this painful journey of discovery in my book AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, published in 1996 by Fourth Estate.

If you ask how it could be possible that for 40 years the scientific and medical worlds have failed to correct a belief in a mythological virus, the answer is more sociological than scientific.

Solidarity with the suffering of the gay community played a part – although genuine kindness, such as Louise Hay demonstrated in her early healing work with people with Aids, strongly and successfully challenged the medical view that they were certain to die. An arrogant, but ill-informed, neocolonial drive by countless NGOs to ‘do good’ in poorer parts of the world also contributed. But probably the most powerful and detrimental element in maintaining the deception was the money and influence involved, as governments went into partnership with the hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry. The resources poured into HIV/Aids created thousands of jobs, buying loyal collaboration and stifling dissent.

Highly experienced scientists who spoke out against the theory were ridiculed, defunded, gaslighted, and accused of killing people by weakening the public health message.

I experienced this pressure myself when I began to examine alternative ways of looking at Aids in the early 1990s, when I was  working as Sunday Times science correspondent. Joan Shenton of Meditel, producers of prize-winning but much criticised documentaries on the issue, alerted me to the fact that several distinguished scientists had challenged the idea that HIV could be doing all the damage attributed to it.

Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, which had serialised Michael Fumento’s 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual Aids, supported my reports on an ever-deepening scientific challenge to the theory. Over a three-year period, condemnation came from just about every quarter. The deeper the critique went, the shriller the protests became.

In 1993, with the HIV/Aids industry still pointing to Africa as proof of how millions could become infected, Neil told me to go there to find out what was happening. Over six weeks, travelling through Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, it became increasingly plain to me that the entire pandemic was an illusion arising from diseases of poverty being reclassified as ‘HIV/Aids’.

My reports to this effect proved too much for the scientific establishment, and Nature – supposedly one of the top scientific journals in the world – declared that we must be stopped. Having decided that picketing our offices would be impractical, the magazine mounted a campaign of ridicule. The UK’s Health Education Authority started an Aids journalism award specifically in my dishonour. They said it was to counter the newspaper’s dangerously misleading coverage. There was incomprehension and abuse from all three main political parties, as well as from scientific and medical chiefs.

But we also heard from many doctors, health workers, gay men, and specialists on Africa, thanking the newspaper for its challenging coverage. An ‘HIV’ diagnosis at that time could still have the power of a witch-doctor’s hex, and people who had tested positive wrote to say that our reports were like a breath of fresh air.

Andrew Neil was undeterred by the hostile bluster, while insisting the paper was ready to publish any evidence that countered the dissident case we were presenting. In 1994 he left the paper for New York, and I left too after his successor John Witherow made it plain that he did not want me to continue this line of reporting. The literary agent David Godwin had been in touch, suggesting a book on the controversy, and this took shape over the following year.

When Fourth Estate published it in 1996, however, it became an early victim of ‘cancel culture’.  The late American gay activist Larry Kramer, at first a bitter critic of Fauci but later his friend and ally, was in the UK at the time of publication to address a conference on Aids. He picked up a copy at a pre-conference gathering, tore several pages, and spat in it, telling his audience: ‘Do the same if you come across this book. They will soon stop stocking it.’ It quickly disappeared from view, subsequently topping a list of ‘Books You’re Not Supposed to Read’ in a work on political incorrectness in science.

(From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, by Tom Bethell, Regnery, 2005)

I am republishing it now, with additional material including a summary of where the science of ‘HIV’ went wrong, because the story is so redolent of the misunderstandings, mishandling and downright lies surrounding Covid-19. As with Aids, huge grants from Big Pharma and ‘philanthropic’ foundations to researchers, medical associations, consumer groups, and civil rights organisations fuelled the Covid illusions.

There is one important difference. At first I thought the Covid fearmongering was as ill-conceived as that over ‘HIV’ and Aids. It soon became clear, however, that unlike ‘HIV’ this was a genuine pathogen. A disgracefully suppressed paper by the UK’s Professor Angus Dalgleish, working with Norwegian colleagues including a biowarfare expert, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt the genetically-engineered nature of SARS-CoV-2 (see here and here).

Panic measures to try to hide its laboratory origin confirm that view. These were led by the Chinese, from whose Wuhan laboratory the virus almost certainly escaped, and by Fauci, whose NIAID had part-funded the work. Sir Jeremy Farrar, then director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust and now WHO chief scientist, also played a leading role in the cover-up.

Many are now aware of the adverse social, economic and health consequences of the Covid hysteria into which Fauci and others led us. Billions of people meekly accepted and even welcomed unprecedented lockdowns and other fearmongering measures, along with mass administration of the mRNA gene products. TCW Defending Freedom has been one of few voices constantly critical of the mishandling of Covid over the past three years, despite high-level, far-reaching efforts to silence and defund the site.

Much less widely understood is the way Aids became subject to similar mismanagement 40 years ago, with adverse consequences lasting until today.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Mike Yeadon on the toxicities deliberately designed into the Covid ‘vaccines’

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023

This is the second in a series of edited extracts of James Delingpole’s recent podcast with Dr Mike Yeadon (PhD in respiratory pharmacology, co-founded a biotech company and conducted research at Pfizer) to discuss the evil WEF, their own faith journeys, ‘Gollum-class AI’ and more. You can listen to the full podcast here.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6rSEiXDcJ2IDWR7aheYTjW

and read the first selection of extracts here. 

Before their emergency authorisation, Dr Yeadon warned the European Medicines Agency that these gene-based vaccines were not safe. Since then he has come to believe in a sinister agenda behind their determined rollout. What follows is the part of the podcast where James questions him on this. Mike explains rational drug design and how he saw obvious ‘designed-in’ toxicities in the mRNA and DNA Covid ‘vaccines’.

JAMES DELINGPOLE: How do you persuade me that these vaccines, which were, due to the miracle of modern medical science, rolled out very quickly to deal with an unprecedented, hitherto unknown viral . . . variation on a virus, possibly leaked from a biolab, that these vaccines were actually part of a global depopulation programme?

DR MICHAEL YEADON: How would I persuade you that that’s what they were for? Well, [if] you are thinking of someone like, for example, Boris Johnson [might have been], I don’t believe for a moment he was any part of the plan, but at some point, he knew something . . .

JD: Yeah. Yeah.

MY: I don’t think very many people know, even on the perpetrators’ side . . . that these injections are designed to kill people. But I bet Boris Johnson had no idea that they were designed to injure people . . .  I think very few people would have thought this will be, you know, a depopulation event. If you’re asking, ‘Mike, in a few sentences persuade me that there’s something . . .’

JD: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

MY: So, I would say, I’d point out to people that drugs, pharmaceuticals, are designed. They don’t just fall out of the sky. So unless you extract them from a plant, they’re synthetic, someone has to design them. You don’t just grab a handful of atoms and hope it does something. You do what’s called intelligent or rational drug design. You think about what you’re trying to accomplish. And, you [will] know, from hundreds or thousands of examples in the past, what kind of chemical structures would potentially allow that objective to be met. So if it’s an oral drug, you don’t pick something that’s a thousand molecular weight because high molecular weight drugs don’t tend to be absorbed.

There are some rules. About the size, about the kind of chemical structures, about the charges on them and so on. You use all of these skills and knowledge, various databases, and you try to design a molecule to do what you want. And you try to combine a synthesis of a test drug – a prototype and a test and you iterate between the two, trying to get closer and closer to the objective. Sometimes you get to select a clinical candidate and sometimes not.

I point all of that out to say that this so-called rational drug design is what I did for over 30 years. And I was reasonably good at it. You learn generalities and then some specialities and so on. So when I look at the structure of something, I can often see intent in that structure, because I put myself in the mind of the designer. What were they trying to accomplish, looking at the structure?

When I apply those rational drug design skills that I have, and I look at the vaccines, I can see three or four obvious designed-in toxicities that cannot possibly be there by accident, because people like me would have been designing them. So although people say, ‘Oh, you’ve never worked in vaccines,’ no, I didn’t. [But] these are not vaccines. You know, in no way are they typical. So if I’d had 25 years’ experience in traditional vaccines, it would be of no use, folks, because these are not like that. What they’re much more like are the kind of molecules I worked in. They are larger, these are macromolecules. I tended to work in smaller molecules, but the design principles are the same. What did you want to accomplish? What kind of structures, formulations, requirements and ‘must not haves’ would have to be there? When I look at the vaccines, I can name two of them because they’re so easy that other people can get them too. So the first is that they have a genetic code for a piece of protein that we’ve all come to know and love called spike protein, which is at least allegedly the sticking out spike bit on the surface of these floating things that look like mines, you see them on your TV and the media, those spike proteins.

JD: And we saw them at the Olympics opening ceremony before that.

MY: In 2012. It’s astonishing. You cannot miss it. If you watch that opening ceremony, there it is, a copy of coronavirus. Anyway, here’s the point, I ask people this question: what is it about your immune system that means that you play nice with yourself most of your life and your immune system doesn’t attack you, and yet under certain circumstances, your body absolutely goes to war and unleashes all weapons it’s got against something? I say it’s recognition of self.

So your immune system, when you were being developed as a foetus, all of the components of your body were being introduced to the components of your immune system, which are being formed by some, like, random selection at binding sites. And basically it was like, ‘This is James, this is James, this is James – don’t attack it.’ So by the time you were born, you had a very powerful immune system that would attack anything that wasn’t James, but which leaves James or ‘self’ alone. So when you’re injected with something that made your cells manufacture a non-self protein – because that’s what a viral protein is – guess what your immune system did to every single cell in your body that took that diabolical stuff up and made non-self protein – I’m afraid the answer is autoimmune lethal attack.

I’ve spoken to at least ten immunologists and I’ve put it to them, and they’ve gone, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I said, ‘Could I be wrong?’ No, it’s immunology 101. That’s how your immune system fundamentally plays nice with you, except when you get some circumstances, like developing cancer sometimes, you can destroy cancer cells, because they start to make different proteins than normal, and they’re recognised as non-self, and you can often kill them. It’s called immune surveillance, you do it every day, your body kills off single cell cancers, or potentially single cell cancers. Every day, your clever immune system goes, ‘That shouldn’t be here.’ They leap on it and kill it.

So if you take an injection, whatever it is a third of a ml, bang it in your shoulder, hundreds of billions of particles float around your body. Wherever they land, if they were taken up and that cell started to grind out non-self protein, I’m afraid your immune system recognises non-self is in the offing and it absolutely goes to war. And that is by design. It cannot but happen that way.

So the moment I saw it – actually, that was not the first thought, at first, I thought, ‘Oh, you’re expressing a dangerous protein, this spike protein is toxic,’ and it is. But after a little while, I thought it wouldn’t make any difference what protein it is. If it’s not you, if it’s going to trigger autoimmunity. So that’s the first thing I’ll tell you.

All of these gene-based so-called vaccines are dangerous. Please don’t take any of them. So if they tell you there’s a flying Ebola and you must take this mRNA vaccine, please do not take it. Because if it encodes a piece of the alleged Ebola, flying Ebola, it will kill you. Your immune system will recognise what you’ve just made, when you copy that instruction, it will recognise that it is not belonging to your body, and it will kill the cell that’s making it.

Now, what I’ve just told you fits perfectly with the observed pathology, because this stuff randomly landed up in various tissues. If it landed in your heart, you might get pericarditis or myocarditis. If it landed anywhere in your neurological system, you could get various neurological conditions. If it landed in the back of your eyes, you could go blind. Your pregnant uterus: miscarriage. And so on, you know, kidney failure. So, I think there’s lots of pathologies. I think there are several. But I think this one is one that always occurs. And it maps exactly on to why you’ve got just a tremendous range of anatomically different conditions. You know, why aren’t people inquisitive about that? How could . . . so, for example, if you take an overdose of paracetamol, I can assure you, you don’t end up with, I don’t know, your heart generally doesn’t stop beating. What happens is your liver is killed, because your liver converts it from a not very nice substance into a really very toxic substance. And if you take large doses, you end up, I think it’s centrilobular necrosis. It kills your liver. If you take lower doses over decades, it kills your kidneys through glomerular foot process loss, something like that. So it’s quite unusual to take a single substance that has produced 1,200 different side-effects that vary. One person would get blood clots in their brain, and someone else would lose their baby.

What I’ve just explained fits perfectly. Now, it may not be perfectly correct, but all that I have said is true. Anyone who’s had even the first introduction to immunology will recognise this self/non-self dichotomy is at the heart of how your immune system works. So that’s the first thing. That is unequivocal evidence that all four companies designed . . . conspired to produce something that your body . . . would lead your body to kill itself.

The second part is, at least in the case of the Moderna and Pfizer products, they are wrapped in what are called lipid nanoparticles. They’re quite funky. They essentially mimic the fatty outer coating of yourself. Your body is divided into tiny compartments called cells. They’re so small you need a microscope to see them. But, you know, that’s what they are. They’re like little bubbles or balloons, and they’re surrounded by a lipid bilayer – that’s its cell membrane. And it allows itself to regulate what’s inside compared with outside. So lipid nanoparticles look a bit like that. And so they just, in a stealthy fashion, go all the way around your body and slide into various cells. And if you didn’t have something like that, your body would recognise and destroy the foreign genetic information. I mean, it’s not surprising. Your genetic inheritance is the thing that you would want to preserve, right? If you’re going to have offspring, you don’t want your own genetic inheritance to be coloured by foreign DNA and RNA. And so we’ve got extraordinarily good systems designed to stop foreign DNA and RNA entering our cells.

But if you coat it in this lipid that makes it look like a cell, you probably don’t notice it, by analogy you miss it, it goes past in the corner of your eye and you don’t notice. But you might think, ‘Well, that’s not evidence of depopulation.’ Ah, but I’ve got a factoid for you, James. People who work in formulations, it’s a special area, you know, formulation, R&D [research and development] is itself a discipline. It’s difficult to know how to make the right salts of a particular drug, and people become good at this stuff over decades of formulation R&D, process R&D. These departments were as big as my department, it’s that difficult.

I happened to come across a piece of literature that was ten years old at the time of rolling out these vaccines that told us that lipid nanoparticle wrapped macromolecules – big molecules – preferentially accumulate in various organs, including the ovaries. So we knew for certain that if you wrapped the Moderna and Pfizer jabs in this stuff and then injected it into girls and women, it would accumulate in their ovaries.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that’s what it’s doing. Well, why would you do that if you were trying to produce immunity to a respiratory virus? And the answer is you wouldn’t. Would you do this if you were trying to harm their fertility? Yes, you would. Especially if you combine the two things I’ve said. Because if a girl or a woman’s ovaries expresses this non-self protein, her own immune system will destroy her ovaries. So I guessed in 2020 – and we have it in writing – that there was a risk of reduction in live babies. And I’m afraid I’ve not followed the field, because I’m not competent to do it properly. But I followed some demographers who are competent to do it, and it looks pretty awful, that between 10 per cent and 20 per cent reductions in live births everywhere – everywhere we look that there’s been intensive injections. So yeah, so on the first part, your immune system will kill you. On the second part, it will damage and potentially render you infertile. And there’s no excuse for either of those things. There were well known hazards of doing the two things they did.

If someone would like to write to me and tell me why I’m wrong, I would love to be wrong. But I’ve been saying it for three years, and no one has pointed out why I’m wrong.

To be continued . . .

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Can the WHO and the United Nations impose sanctions on your country for non-compliance?

The sinister sanctions strategy has disturbing implications for democracy, peace, and prosperity around the world. It’s time for us to defund and exit.

By Shabnam Palesa Mohamed | Children’s Health Defense Africa | July 3, 2023

Sanctions are a powerful instrument of political control and economic profit. One of the rare but critical topics relevant to the international campaign to #ExitTheWHO is whether the World Health Organisation and the United Nations can impose, influence or recommend specific sanctions. The sanctions would be against countries that choose to not comply or cannot comply with International Health Regulations, the proposed new pandemic treaty, or other legislative attempts that curtail rights, freedom and sovereignty.

The accelerating and profitable globalist march towards unprecedented levels of ‘1984’ style totalitarianism – using censorship, vaccine passports, 15 minute cities, and CBDC’s continues. It is plausible that the WHO and the UN will move to impose, influence or recommend sanctions against countries that do not want to or cannot comply with its centralised health agenda and undemocratic legislative attempts.

At last year’s World Health Assembly 75, the 47 nation African bloc voted surprisingly, against most amendments to the International Health Regulations, stating that they were broad, rushed, and can pose a threat to national sovereignty. Since then, no doubt with persuasive behind the scenes manoeuvres, some of the most disturbing amendments are being proposed by African countries. Many relate to financing for the cost intensive provisions of IHR amendments and the proposed pandemic treaty or accord. Africa cannot afford more debt slavery.

Countries that could be sanction targets for non-compliance with the WHO and the UN, include but are not limited to, those in the steadily growing BRICS initiative: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Iran and Malaysia are reported to have expressed reservations to the proposed IHR amendments at last year’s World Health Assembly 75. Russia is making decisive moves in the international arena and could possibly exit the WHO. In addition, India raised serious audit concerns on irregularities with WHO financials, including missing assets.

 

World Health Assembly, Geneva, Switzerland

What authority does the WHO have and what level of control does it want?

The ambit of the overwhelmingly privately funded WHO, contained in its extensive constitution, can be interpreted as overly broad and sweeping, and thus, unknown to non-participants, has always posed a potential threat to individual health and national sovereignty.

The WHO’s constitution states in Chapter 2 – Functions – Article 2: In order to achieve its objective, the functions of the Organization shall be: (v) generally to take all necessary action to attain the objective of the Organization. However Article 21 of the WHO’s constitution is specific about making (non-binding) regulations, limiting the WHO to just five areas.

Proposed amendments to the new pandemic treaty include a dangerous clause that would change the WHO’s role from a UN agency that shares recommendations, to a rogue agency whose elitist and secretive attempts at legislation are binding and mandatory on member states, violating fundamental human rights and freedoms. However, health freedom advocates agree that WHO has no actual authority in the law.

In effect therefore, with both IHR amendments and the proposed new treaty, the WHO is acting ultra vires in its Big Pharma driven power grab, in collusion with naïve or compromised member state delegates. Ultra vires is defined in the law as: acting beyond the scope or in excess of legal power or authority. Ultra vires acts of impunity by the WHO could accelerate a mass defund and exit of the agency.

WHO’s negotiating body on a proposed pandemic treaty

What is the basis for raising the red flag on sanctions?

Health is no longer just health, as it is defined in the WHO’s constitution. Through Covid-19, and other controversially declared pandemics, health is now a multi-billion dollar health security industry. With it, creeps in the tyranny of secrecy, surveillance, vaccine certificates, forced quarantines, and the undemocratic censorship of free speech. Given the absence of public participation, the WHO is a strategic spear for oligarchs and corporations, and given international resistance to its power grab, it may become desperate and argue or push for sanctions.

Reported in 2021: “In 2021, German Health Minister Jens Spahn called for sanctions against countries that hide information about future outbreaks. Citing the World Trade Organization’s power to sanction countries for non-compliance, Spahn said “there must be something that follows” if countries fail to live up to commitments under a new pandemic treaty that the World Health Assembly will take up in November.”

Further, it is entirely under reported that controversial “World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also urged countries to consider the idea as they take up the treaty, a legally binding tool. The treaty should “have all the incentives, or the carrots” to encourage transparency, Tedros said, appearing at a press conference with Spahn in Berlin. “But maybe exploring the sanctions may be important,” he added.”

Also reported in 2021: “Speaking at the WHA in June, Mike Ryan, WHO Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director, also spoke out in favour of the treaty, despite the fact that WHO technical staff have historically avoided taking positions on controversial policy choices before member states. “My personal view is that we need a political treaty that makes the highest-level commitment to the principles of global health security — and then we can get on with building the blocks on this foundation.”

I engaged renowned international law expert Professor Francis Boyle about the possibility of sanctions via the WHO. He had no doubt “They will pursue sanctions against countries that do not comply with their orders, coming from Geneva. Both economic and political sanctions. However, they will only have the power to pursue sanctions if we accept their authority. We cannot. We must exit the WHO.”

Can the United Nations impose or influence sanctions?

With far less public scrutiny currently than the WHO, the United Nations is also seeking exponential new powers and stronger “global governance” mechanisms to deal with what they define as international emergencies. In March 2023, the UN released a policy brief , astonishingly titled “To Think and Act for Future Generations – Our Common Agenda. Strengthening the International Response to Complex Global Shocks – An Emergency Platform

These all encompassing areas of expanded UN power include:

  • climate or environmental events;
  • environmental degradation;
  • pandemics;
  • accidental or deliberate release of biological agents;
  • disruptions in the flow of goods, people, or finance;
  • disruptions in cyberspace or “global digital connectivity;”
  • a major event in “outer space;”
  • and “unforeseen risks (‘black swan’ events)

There are several types of sanctions imposed through the United Nations:

It is plausible that the UN’s controllers realise that the world is pushing back against the WHO’s overreach, or find it irrelevant to real health. Given that sovereign nations will choose to exit the WHO, the UN decided to launch plan B and ascribe to itself even greater powers. Technically, there is no legislation to exit the United Nations within the UN Charter. Again, this is a critical issue of national sovereignty.

The United Nations Children’s Fund or UNICEF’s 2020 Annual Report highlights USD 717 million in donations from the private sector, which is 21 percent of income overall. Lucrative corporate partnerships include Unilever, Louis Vuitton, and Microsoft, while foundation partners include Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Mastercard Foundation. It also prides relationships with the World Economic Forum and the International Chamber of Commerce. National committees fundraise from individual donors and corporations at the national level, to support UNICEF globally. The UN’s programmes therefore are heavily dependant on private funding. Funding crowns influence.

UN secretary general Antonio Guterres with WHO director general Adhanom Tedros Ghebreyesus

Can the WHO and the UN collaborate on sanctions?

The WHO is an agency of the United Nations.

  • In 2015, on punishing member states who violate the IHR, as reported: “United Nations health officials said  they want to impose sanctions on countries that do not comply with public health regulations meant to avoid the spread of dangerous epidemics, such as the Ebola outbreak that killed more than 9,000 people and ravaged domestic health care systems in West Africa last year. World Health Organization Director Margaret Chan said she is investigating ways to reprimand countries that disobey the International Health Regulations (IHR) — a set of rules adopted in 2005 and mandate that countries set up epidemiological surveillance systems, fund local health care infrastructure and restrict international trade and travel to affected regions deemed unsafe to the public, among other provisions. Chan is on a panel set up by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who instructed the group to think of ways to hold countries accountable for how they manage public health crises and punish those who violate the IHR.”
  • In 2022, according to commentators in a policy article: “In order to enforce compliance, some commentators have recommended concluding the treaty at the United Nations level. However, we fear that it has been already decided with the INB (mandated by WHASS) that a treaty will be developed under the roof of WHO. They added: “To move on with the treaty, WHO therefore needs to be empowered — financially, and politically. If international pandemic response is enhanced, compliance is enhanced. In case of a declared health emergency, resources need to flow to countries in which the emergency is occurring, triggering response elements such as financing and technical support. These are especially relevant for LMICs, and could be used to encourage and enhance the timely sharing of information by states, reassuring them that they will not be subject to arbitrary trade and travel sanctions for reporting, but instead be provided with the necessary financial and technical resources they require to effectively respond to the outbreak. High-income settings may not be motivated by financial resources in the same way as their low-income counterparts. An adaptable incentive regime is therefore needed, with sanctions such as public reprimands, economic sanctions, or denial of benefits.”

Tweet CHD Africa if you agree that sanctions are possible and must be opposed internationally. Use the #StopSanctions

United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland

Sanctions are a blunt and inhumane weapon causing devastating harm

In 2000, Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN said: “However, just as we recognize the importance of sanctions as a way of compelling compliance with the will of the international community, we also recognize that sanctions remain a blunt instrument, which hurt large numbers of people who are not their primary targets. Further, sanctions need refining if they are to be seen as more than a fig leaf in the future. Hence, the recent emphasis on targeted sanctions which prevent the travel, or freeze the foreign bank accounts, of individuals or classes of individuals – the so-called ‘smart sanctions’.”

Do sanctions work? “UN targeted sanctions, which are packages of sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council, have been successful in leading to intended policy change only 10% of the times, and limited the policies they intended to change in 28% of cases, but led to a reduced life expectancy in the targeted countries by 1.2–1.4 years. Economic sanctions have also been criticised for the potential collateral damage to third states they can cause. For this reason, some authors suggest that economic sanctions should be banned, as they are having detrimental effects on health and nutrition of civilians.”

Countries themselves can and do impose dangerous sanctions. A 2022 UN security council meeting on sanctions recorded: “Unilateral sanctions, which are sanctions imposed by (groups of) states and not by the UN Security Council, are particularly controversial. Unilateral sanctions have also been criticised for being disproportionately imposed on low-income and middle-income countries by wealthier countries, for example, by the Kenyan representative in a Security Council debate on sanctions on 7 February 2022: ‘The frequency and reach of unilateral sanctions have led to a growing view that they are the weapons of the strong against the vulnerable or weak’.”

International human rights law vs sanctions and health

  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in its first article, states that ‘all human beings are |…| equal in dignity and rights’, which includes the right to health. Article 25 specifies that ‘everyone has the right to |…| health and well-being |…| including medical care’.
  • In the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 24 states that ‘state parties recognize the right of the child to |…| the highest attainable standard of health and to facilities for the treatment of illness and rehabilitation of health. State parties shall strive to ensure that no child is deprived of his or her right of access to such health care services’.
  • General Comment No.14 of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the right to health is a fundamental human right which is necessary for all other human rights to exist and be exercised.
  • “The use of sanctions designed to hurt a country’s healthcare sector is clearly incompatible with respecting citizens’ right to health. Accordingly, the general comment No. 14 of the CESCR calls on states to refrain ‘at all times’ from sanctions on medicines and medical equipment. However, sanctions on other healthcare products and, in fact, other non-healthcare products may as well interfere with the right to health, and, thus, need to be subject to scrutiny.”

WHO’s World Health Assembly 75

Freedom faces an existential threat via the WHO and the United Nations

South African Precious Matsoso, co-chair of the International Negotiating Body (INB), formed to negotiate the terms of the proposed pandemic treaty or accord, admitted openly that punitive measures have not been shown to work “anywhere” in the world. However, she said, there must be accountability measures while recognizing countries’ sovereignty. “We have to recognize that they’re sovereign, and they keep on reminding us that they are sovereign states.” It is positive to note that more states do recognise the real threat to sovereignty.

Not all states are considered equal. Smaller countries are at a distinct disadvantage in participating, negotiating and making decisions at the hierarchical WHO. Significantly, Matsoso was transparent about failures in equal participation. “A number of smaller delegations have always expressed concerns about organizations of multiple meetings, where they have to travel from afar, and not even having the capacity to participate in the negotiations,” Matsoso said. “And they have repeatedly requested that you must avoid parallel sessions.” To little avail.

Given the rapidly growing distrust in the WHO, its historical failures and harms, Covid-19 failures and harms, and the fact that it cannot maintain independence because it is a largely privately funded entity; it is plausible that the WHO and/or the UN will move to impose or influence sanctions via the World Trade Organisation, ahead of Agenda 2030. This act of aggression weaponises the WHO and/or the UN against countries that influential funders and unethical stakeholders have an interest in destabilising for power and resource control.

This sinister strategy has disturbing implications for democracy, peace, and prosperity around the world. Freedom faces an existential risk through unelected bureaucratic entities. Nations can and must protect their sovereignty by defunding and exiting WHO, and, by critically assessing the true nature, value, and risks of continued membership in the 78 year old United Nations. Not to do so, means ignoring the risks of UN peacekeepers, who are known to commit crimes with impunity, being deployed in your country to enforce UN and WHO dictates.


Shabnam Palesa Mohamed is executive director and chapter coordinator for Children’s Health Defense Africa. She is an activist, journalist, lawyer, and mediator, with over 20 years of experience in human rights work. To share information, Twitter: @ShabnamPalesaMo

Follow CHD Africa on 6 social platforms for news, action alerts, and updates:
– Telegram: t.me/CHDafrica
– Twitter: https://twitter.com/CHD_Africa
– Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/af.childrenshealthdefense/
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CHDafricachapter
– Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/ChildrensHealthDefenseAfrica
– Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@chdafrica?is_from_webapp=1

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brits lose backup energy option for winter

RT | July 3, 2023

Britain will not fall back on coal-fired power as a back-up option for generating electricity during the upcoming winter, the National Grid Electricity Systems Operator (ESO) said last week.

British coal plant operators Drax Group and EDF Energy, whose facilities were available last winter, have started to decommission their generators, according to a statement by the ESO.

The operators officially closed their coal plants at the end of March.

“Both operators have confirmed that they will not be able to make their coal units available for a further winter and have begun the decommissioning process,” a spokesperson for the National Grid said.

Uniper’s Ratcliffe coal unit is still likely to be available under a separate capacity market system over next winter, the ESO said.

Five contingency units were fired up several times during the last cold season, when Western Europe was struggling with an unprecedented energy crisis following a drop in oil and gas shipments from Russia. Sanctions against Russian energy imports have led to record high inflation across the region and a cost-of-living crisis in numerous countries.

The UK warmed up the contingency units in March when a cold snap hindered wind generation.

As part of efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions and meet its 2050 net-zero target, the UK authorities are planning to close coal-fired power plants by October 2024.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

There are plenty of reasons to boo Lindsey Graham off a stage

Let us count the ways

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | July 3, 2023

There are plenty of reasons to boo Senator Lindsey Graham.

The longtime South Carolina Republican was booed so spectacularly by a Donald Trump rally audience in his own home state on Saturday that he had to leave six minutes into his speech. He just couldn’t get a word out in a display that one CNN commentator called “far worse than I ever personally witnessed. In a word, it was a bloodbath.”

It would seem that Graham is a pariah with Trump supporters for his on-again-off-again support of the former president. He was against him before he supported his 2016 campaign (Graham was a short-lived 2016 contender himself), and has been critical of Trump’s taking of classified documents, while defending him on other charges and accusations, including the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.

It would be encouraging to hear that Graham, who has represented his state as senator since 2003 and previously as a member of the House from 1995, was excoriated, too, for his unreconstructed voracious appetite for war. That’s doubtful, but maybe, just maybe, it’s part of the browbeating he got on Saturday. But it is worth revisiting his litany of abuses in this realm anyway.

RS contributor Jack Hunter has done a lot to bring it all together over the years, but here is a taste:

In March 2022, he called for a Julius Caesar killing of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country — and the world — a great service,” Graham tweeted.

More recently during the debt ceiling crisis, he said that holding the defense spending budget to its current $850 billion would be a “gift to China” and suggested any future supplemental Ukraine aid bill could go towards filling in spending gaps.

In March, Graham suggested the U.S. should follow the foreign policy of “Reagan” and shoot down any Russian plane that got near American aircraft in international airspace. “(President Reagan) would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets.” Hunter noted why this is not only a stupid idea but a gross historical misnomer. 

But as many have been quick to point out, Graham has never seen a war that he wasn’t in favor of waging.

Also in March, Graham told an interviewer that an Israeli air strike might be the only way to knock out Iran’s nuclear program, which would all but commit the U.S. to a war with Iran, too.

In 2013 he bucked members of his own party by supporting a military strike on Syria. “I believe that if we get Syria wrong, within six months — and you can quote me on this— there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program,” Graham told an audience at the time.

“It won’t come to America on top of a missile, it’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor,” he added. Two years later  in 2015 he and comrade Sen. John McCain were pushing to send 10,000 troops back into Iraq and another 10,000 into Syria to battle ISIS.

Four years later, Graham said Trump’s failure to hit Iran hard after it downed a U.S. surveillance drone could be interpreted as a “sign of weakness.”

And who could forget all of the senator’s salivating comments about war with North Korea during the Trump administration?

Graham said we would be “hurtling toward war” with Pyongyang if we didn’t “stop” their nuclear program. “If we have to go to war to stop this, we will,” he said in November 2017. “And if there’s a war with North Korea, it’ll be because North Korea brought it on itself.”

This wasn’t the first time he said that war in Korea was inevitable. Two months earlier, reportedly recounting a conversation with the president, he said in an interview: “There is a military option: to destroy North Korea’s nuclear program and North Korea itself. He’s not going to allow — President Trump — the ability of this madman (Kim Jong Un) to have a missile that could hit America.”

“If there’s going to be a war to stop him, it will be over there,” Graham added. “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die over here — and he’s told me that to my face.”

When asked for confirmation, White House officials said “all options remain on the table” — but efforts were to continue “maximum diplomatic and economic pressure to convince North Korea to change course.”

Analysts at the time suggested Graham was projecting, and who would be surprised. It is after all, Lindsey Graham, who said this March during the 20th anniversary of the war in Iraq that the decade of bloodshed and continuing costs to Americans and the world was “worth it.”

“Here’s what I would ask people to focus on,” Graham said at the time. “Is the world better off without Saddam Hussein, and are we better off with a democracy replacing him? I’d say yes.”

Graham was booed off a stage this weekend. We’d like to think it was for his warmongering. Likely not. But it is a pleasant thought.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | | 1 Comment

Heavy Lies the Crown: POTUS Biden Totally Loses the Plot As NATO’s Narrative Implodes

By Declan Hayes | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 3, 2023

First off, hats off to young Hafez Bashar Assad, who recently aced a Master’s degree in Pure Mathematics from Russia’s prestigious Moscow State University which has, in the course of its long and glorious history, produced several Fields Medals winners. May young Hafez go on to similarly great things.

Hafez was, some years back, the subject of oceans of ire when he represented Syria in the Math Olympics, a competition I have some familiarity with, as friends of mine represented Ireland in years gone by. And though those young Irishmen went on to be awarded PhDs from the world’s most prestigious universities and land jobs with mouth-watering salaries from the world’s most prestigious companies, like young Hafez, they got nowhere at the Math Olympics because they lacked the in-depth 24/7 tutoring the United States’ Ivy League Professors give the young (generally Chinese) charges, who compete under the Yankee flag.

So well done, young Hafez and congratulations, too, to your beautiful, urbane, cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, great and gracious mother, Asma Assad, proudly hugging you after you were awarded your degree. I know of no current or former First Lady, who is in her league in terms of elegance, grace, brains or sheer good manners and your father, Syrian President Bashar Assad, certainly hit the jackpot when he landed that Damask Rose. He is a lucky and blessed man.

Moving from Moscow to Kiev, we see that former Irish President and serial grifter Mary Robinson and Swedish propagandist Greta Thunberg are on a jolly there to advise Clown Prince Zelensky on matters concerning the environment. As 20 year old Greta has only recently graduated High School, at an age when most others would be whistling through their undergraduate degrees, one wonders if this slow learner will stay as silent on NATO’s use of depleted uranium as she has been on the Nordstream terrorist attack, the greatest ecological crime of our era.

Not that I care as Greta, and Mary Robinson are, like Clown Prince Zelensky himself, media creations, all tinsel and no substance. NATO’s Zelensky regime must be really scraping the barrel if that is the best they can do.

But the bottom of the barrel is all NATO seems to have left. French dictator Macron spends his time attending Elton John 1970s’ retro concerts as France burns down around him. The best that Britain can do is to ban Nigel Farage from having a bank account and keep POW Julian Assange on ice for their American masters.

Stella Moris, Julian’s wife, was recently in Rome where, appropriately dressed, she met Pope Francis, who has also recently honoured British film-maker Ken Loach, who was recently expelled from the British Labour Party. Say what you like about Julian Assange and, irrespective as to whether the British will murder him or hand him over to the Yanks for further torture sessions, he is blessed to have such a woman standing foursquare beside him.

Although all of these singularities would have been noted in Washington, it is doubtful if they registered with Creepy Joe Biden, the Don Vittorio of the NATO organised crime gang. Don Vittorio, you may recall, is the senile Italian Mafia godfather, who appeared in The Sopranos a few seasons before fellow mafia mobster Junior also succumbed to dementia.

Although, as Biden claims Putin, in some parallel world, may be losing the war in Iraq, in this world Creepy Joe is most definitely losing the 2024 Presidential war to Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy. Although Oddslotter still has him favourite to be re-elected, Biden’s place is in the dock as a war criminal and then off to an old folks’ home to be heard from no more.

The threats that Trump and Kennedy pose are not so much personal threats to Creepy Joe as they are to the gangster system he presides over. Trump is a threat because he says what others will not say: that the United States is a predatory state that robs and loots at will. And Kennedy is a threat because he points out the threats Big Pharma’s greed pose to all Americans and Big Pharma’s spokespersons like notorious narcissist Dr. Peter Hotez, won’t even debate him on Joe Rogan’s show for over $1 million in cash.

Although neither of these challengers criticise Israel, such criticisms are inconceivable because of the nature of NATO’s gangsterism. Palestinians are little more than plastic ducks at a shooting arcade and heaven help any “anti-Semite” who might argue otherwise.

But even argument itself is now haram in NATOstan. Donald Trump, remember, was banned from social media when he was POTUS, supposedly the world’s most powerful position. Germany’s Greens, perhaps trying to reconnect to their Nazis past, have persecuted their own citizens for not being sufficiently Russophobic and AustraliaCanada and Vichy Ireland are, as part of NATO’s plans of world conquest, introducing the most draconian hate speech laws that have drawn the ire of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.

And there is the rub. Rogan, Carlson and Musk are forming the backbone of an opposition that believe in such things as free speech and free, open and honest debate and such things present an existential threat to Biden and his fellow-fraudsters.

In my earlier paeon to Asma Assad, I used an abundance of adjectives to try to give Syria’s First Lady her well-earned due. However, at days’ end, she is a wife, a mother and a woman, a wonderful adult female in other words and not a cisgender or a transgender, phrases that Biden’s handlers have shanghaied from the British and Roman Empires where Transjordan and Cisjordan were, still are and will always be divided by the Jordan River and Gaul and Cisgaul were, still are and will always be divided by the mighty Alps. You do not need Hafez Assad’s Master’s Degree in Pure Mathematics to know no such demarcations apply to sovereign womanhood and nor do you even need Greta Thunberg’s hard-earned High School diploma. What you need is a degree of honesty and common sense and, because they are attributes Creepy Joe and his whore-bonking son Hunter cashed in years ago, all of Creepy Joe’s dodgy deals are now coming home to roost.

And, just as the Alps and the Jordan divide for all time the Cis from the rest, so also in our own time do the mountains and rivers of honesty and truth divide the Creepy Joe Bidens and Mary Robinsons from the great and the good, from Stella Moris, Gonzalo Lira, Hafez and Asma Assad, all of whom affirm the words of Irish martyr Terence MacSwiney that “it is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can endure the most, who will prevail”.

And, it is because of good, great and immortal people like Asma Assad that Damascus itself has prevailed against Biden’s Beast of the Apocalypse. Let us, as we conclude, recall Mark Twain’s recollections of that eternal city: “We shall remember… Damascus, the Pearl of the East, the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten.”

And, as Eternal Damascus and her eternally gallant allies prepare to consign Biden, NATOstan’s faux Little Caesar, to the trash bin of history, let us salute not only Hafez and Asma Assad on their recent fortune but all of the great and good people of Syria, Palestine, Serbia, China and Russia who, at great cost, defied NATO and carried the banners of humanity not only for the Assange and Lira families but for all of us in the face of the butchers Biden, Macron and Zelensky sent against them. May God bless them and their protectors, the heroic men and women of the Syrian Arab Army, now and forever.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 1 Comment

Spiraling West Bank violence could spell political doom for both Israeli and Palestinian leadership

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | July 3, 2023

The latest upsurge in violence throughout the occupied West Bank signals the failure of US-led efforts to create calm. Both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli government were faced with domestic pressure to take escalatory measures against the opposing side, resulting in an Israeli military operation against Palestinian armed groups in Jenin.

Beginning with an Israeli raid on the city of Jenin, a string of violent events again ignited tensions between Palestinians and Israelis inside the occupied West Bank. In mid-June, a number of Israeli armored vehicles stormed Jenin to arrest members of the armed group known as the Jenin Brigades, when they were ambushed by local Palestinian fighters. Seven Israeli soldiers were injured by improvised explosive devices that were detonated underneath their military vehicles. This led to the deployment of Apache helicopters and a large number of Israeli ground forces, who ended up killing seven Palestinians and injuring 91.

Just one day later, two Palestinian gunmen carried out an attack near the entrance to the West Bank settlement of Eli, killing four Israeli settlers and injuring four others. The two shooters were identified as having an affiliation with the armed wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades. Both were shot and killed by Israeli forces that same day.

The increase in violence followed the decision of the Israeli government to allow its far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, to assume special powers to develop settlement expansion plans, even without the approval of the Knesset. The move sparked only light condemnation from the US government, which said that it “opposes such unilateral actions that make a two-state solution more difficult to achieve and are an obstacle to peace.”

The following night, radical Israeli settlers decided to attack Palestinian villages, in what they called “revenge” for the shooting attack against settlers earlier that day. In the Palestinian village of Turmasaya alone, around 400 armed settlers torched 30 homes and 60 cars. The attack also resulted in over 100 injuries and 1 death. Israeli settler attacks like these target any Palestinian community that they are able to penetrate, almost always with the protection of the Israeli army. One such attack, earlier this year in the village of Huwara, was even described as a “pogrom” by Israeli general Yehuda Fuchs.

The Israeli government, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was put in an embarrassing position following the events in both Jenin and the settlement of Eli. Both these situations represented a clear development in the sophistication of the West Bank armed groups, proving them capable of inflicting casualties on both Israeli soldiers and settlers in just over a 24 hour window. Already there had been calls from Israeli settler communities, in the northern West Bank, to launch an all-out military operation in order to crush the armed groups, with the above mentioned incidents only leading to further pressure being placed on the government to act.

In an Israeli security session, held to assess the situation inside the West Bank following the Eli shooting attack, it was reported that both Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, opposed the option of launching a military operation inside the occupied territory at the time. The expectation was raised on the government, at that point, to react disproportionately to such attacks, given that the Israeli coalition is held together by a number of hardliners who seek a complete annexation of the West Bank and currently live inside illegal settlements themselves.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration set up two security summits, aimed at improving cooperation between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel. The conferences were held in Jordan’s Aqaba and the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh. The goal was to have the PA’s security forces and the Israeli military work together in order to prevent further deterioration in the security situation. One of the components to creating a more stable environment was a plan to utilize a specially trained PA force that would directly confront the West Bank armed groups that have emerged over the past two years. The plan, drawn up by US security coordinator Michael Fenzel, represented political suicide for a PA that is already facing a massive backlash from Palestinians.

According to a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, roughly 80% of Palestinians want the current PA President Mahmoud Abbas to resign. During the latest string of Israeli settler attacks against defenseless Palestinian villages, locals have also gone viral calling on the PA to deploy its roughly 70,000-strong security force to protect against settler attacks. The PA only has limited areas of jurisdiction inside the West Bank and uses its forces to handle domestic Palestinian crime, in addition to protecting Israeli security interests. Under the current circumstances, a direct confrontation between PA forces and Palestinian armed groups could lead to a revolt against its rule inside the territory.

Mahmoud Abbas is currently 87 years old and there is a fear that when he passes away, there will be a power vacuum, which could result in the PA’s collapse or even a revolutionary anti-Israeli group taking over. Although the PA is currently attempting to sit on the fence, knowing that no conflict resolution dialogue has even been entertained with the Israeli side since 2014. It attempts to pretend as if there aren’t thousands of armed Palestinian fighters who are currently operating outside of the administration’s control and that it cannot do anything about Israel’s actions either. This attitude is mostly born out of a desire to remain in the good graces of their top donors, the United States and European Union. While the PA does not want to assume the role of an active protector against Israeli military and settler attacks, which the Palestinian people call on it to be, neither does it want to commit to being a direct aggressor against the armed militant groups.

Unlike the PA, the Israeli government was in the position to launch a military operation against the West Bank armed groups, so it waited and decided to carry out its attack on Sunday night. In 2002, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, during which they killed around 500 Palestinians and effectively eliminated many of the strongholds for the armed groups that were operating at the time. Israel’s army would seek to replicate the 2002 model in any large-scale operation, however, it has instead chosen to isolate Jenin in order to set back the groups, instead of attempting all out elimination. If it is to launch an all encompassing campaign, it is also likely that it will lose many soldiers and that there will be attacks from other territories, such as Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. Therefore, there will be a political price to pay for launching such an operation, which is something that Netanyahu knows and is perhaps why he ordered a more limited attack.

Instead of declaring war inside the entire West Bank, it seems that the Israeli army has decided to increase the heat on the armed groups, using tactics like drone strikes to assassinate fighters, while this current escalation is an attempt to show strength and cut back the abilities of the groups. The day after the settlers’ “revenge” attack, Israeli forces announced that they had carried out a missile strike on a car, near a checkpoint that is located in Jenin, killing three Palestinian fighters. This airstrike was significant because it was the first assassination by missile strike in the West Bank since 2005. Now, the current invasion of Jenin is the largest since 2002.

If the Palestinian armed groups are allowed to grow stronger and their influence spreads to other cities, it may be politically impossible in the future for the Israeli government not to launch a large-scale military campaign, which is likely why it has opted for the current approach. However, one interesting element to the recent military operation in Jenin, is the lack of care from Palestinians in Ramallah and other cities, only Palestinians from the refugee camps came out in large demonstrations. This reflects a massive victory of Israeli policy over the Palestinians of the West Bank, they have successfully disconnected them from the suffering of their fellow people and it seems as if life can go on as normal for people living in cities like Ramallah.

Due to the US refusal to present any pathways forward, the West Bank is heading towards even greater violence. Its roadmap for the PA is not reasonable, given that it essentially asks the Palestinian Authority to commit suicide, but on the other hand, it won’t actually punish Israel for violating its own red-lines. Washington is frequently expressing its concern over the Israeli government’s constant approval of settlement expansion plans, yet it is unwilling to take a single step toward doing anything about it and supports Israel’s military solution to a problem that Washington failed to solve. The Biden administration has the power to pressure both the PA and Israel to sit down together today, yet it refuses, offering nothing more than platitudes about peace negotiations that have essentially been dead since the late 1990s. Without any viable options for a solution on the table, there will only be more violence, even if tensions calm temporarily.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

EU could be ‘disgraced’ by confiscating frozen Russian assets – Austrian FM

RT | July 3, 2023

The EU must ensure it has a clear legal basis if it decides to confiscate frozen Russian assets and hand them over to Ukraine, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg has warned. The diplomat argued that failure to do so would significantly tarnish the bloc’s reputation.

In an interview with Austrian broadcaster ORF published on Sunday, Schallenberg stressed that any such confiscation of Russian assets “must be watertight” from a legal viewpoint. He claimed that Austria and other EU members “are countries with the rule of law,” and that they must apply that approach in international relations. According to Schallenberg, this is one of the fundamental differences between Western European nations and Russia.

“Expropriation is a massive intervention, according to law,” the Austrian minister noted. “If we do this… as states with the rule of law we must make legal decisions,” Schallenberg insisted, adding that any such step could be challenged at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Should the appropriation of Russian assets not be deemed to have a legal basis, this would be an “enormous setback, and basically a disgrace” for the EU, the official concluded.

Regarding relations with Moscow in general, the minister said that geography dictates that Russia will remain part of European history, and that attempting to ‘cancel’ the country would be wrong. Schallenberg called for communication channels to remain intact, and claimed that emotions should not guide EU policies toward Russia.

Bloomberg reported last month that EU leaders had considered plans to impose a windfall tax on profits generated by more than €200 billion ($217 billion) of frozen Russian central bank assets to aid Ukraine’s reconstruction. While the option had reportedly appeared to be the least problematic, some participants had still raised concerns over its legality, Bloomberg claimed.

In mid-June, the European Central Bank spoke out against a windfall levy, warning that it could undermine confidence in the euro as a global currency and hurt financial stability.

Back in April, the European Commission ruled that member states could not seize frozen Russian assets outright. The EU and its allies froze hundreds of billions of euros of Russian central bank holdings as well as private assets soon after Moscow launched its military campaign against Ukraine in February of 2022. Russian officials have repeatedly described any seizure of the country’s assets as theft and illegal under international law.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Israel, not Arafat, scuppered Clinton-led peace deal

MEMO | July 3, 2023

The 23-year-old mystery over who was responsible for scuppering the so-called peace deal outlined by then US President Bill Clinton has been revealed in newly-released declassified documents from the Israeli state archive. The documents show that it was the Israelis who rejected the “Clinton Parameters” which led ultimately to the breakdown of the “Peace Process”. They were uncovered by Professor Norman Finkelstein.

The US academic is the author of several major books, including Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. Finkelstein, along with many others, has long disputed the Israeli claim that the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Yasser Arafat was responsible for spoiling the deal.

In fact, casting blame on the Palestinians for failed negotiations has been a stock in trade of Israeli propaganda since the creation of the apartheid state, and it was no different in 2000 when Clinton launched his failed bid to strike a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Finkelstein recollected his own position on the matter before revealing details of the Israeli documents which exposed the intransigence of the occupation state that led to the breakdown of Clinton’s peace deal. He said that he had tried to obtain the documents for decades without any success, while speculating about their content.

The basis of a resolution between Israel and Palestine has been unambiguous since 1967, said the American professor, and are based on various UN Resolutions and international law. “However, on the core issues, the Clinton Parameters amended the international consensus such that all the concessions would have to come from the Palestinian side and none from Israel. Contrary to international law, a portion of the Palestinian West Bank, including much of East Jerusalem, would be forfeited to Israel; a portion of the Israeli settlements inside the Palestinian West Bank would be annexed to Israel; and only a token portion of Palestinian refugees would be permitted to exercise their [legitimate] right of return to Israel.”

According to Finkelstein’s account of the negotiations, the Palestinian team did not reject the Clinton Parameters but, rather, expressed in a detailed, professional memo reservations about them. The Israeli side likewise expressed reservations. In January 2001, Clinton formally announced that both sides had accepted his parameters “with some reservations.” However, when this round of negotiations collapsed at the end of January, both the Americans and Israelis blamed Arafat for the collapse.

“Clinton lied-and so did everyone else,” said Finkelstein, recounting the decade long campaign to pin the blame on Arafat. The documents from the Israeli state archive — “Response of the Government of Israel to the ideas raised by President Clinton regarding the outline of a Framework Agreement on Permanent Status” —show explicitly that Israeli reservations about the Clinton Parameters fell outside the plan that he presented.

The documents expose Israel’s refusal to concede territory to the Palestinians: “The permanent territorial arrangements would have to include annexation that exceeds the numerical territorial scope indicated by the President… The President’s ideas regarding the Old City and Har Habayit [in East Jerusalem] are different from Israel’s position… In the field of security, the Presidential ideas differ from the Israeli ones with regard to the Palestinian police and security force, the mandate of the international force and the monitoring of the non-militarisation of Palestine [etc.].”

Clinton was called upon to remove any ambiguities in his parameters over the “Right of Return of the refugees”; that is, “any entry of refugees to Israel shall be a matter of sole sovereign Israeli discretion.” Every single Israeli demand exceeded not only what the occupation state was entitled to under international law but also what was offered in the Clinton parameters.

Israel’s culpability for the breakdown of the peace process is just one of many revelations that have come to light following the release of documents from its state archives. Last week, details of how Israel poisoned Palestinian land was uncovered and before that state documents exposed massacres carried out by Israeli forces against Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

6 minutes of Lukashenko fighting the Covid agenda

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment