Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

House Floats Law to Make Colleges That Mandated COVID Shots Pay for Vaccine Injuries

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 30, 2024

Colleges that mandated the COVID-19 vaccine would be liable for medical expenses for students who experienced adverse events from the shot, under a bill introduced Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The University Forced Vaccination Student Injury Mitigation Act of 2024 would require higher education institutions to cover medical costs for students who were — or still are — required to get a COVID-19 shot for class attendance and who experienced an injury.

The bill — introduced by Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) — stipulates colleges must cover the medical costs or risk losing all federal funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

“If you are not prepared to face the consequences, you should have never committed the act,” said Rosendale in a press release. “Colleges and universities forced students to inject themselves with an experimental vaccine knowing it was not going to prevent COVID-19 while potentially simultaneously causing life-threatening health defects like Guillain-Barré Syndrome and myocarditis.”

“It is now time,” Rosendale added, “for schools to be held accountable for their brazen disregard for students’ health and pay for the issues they are responsible for causing.”

Reps. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Bill Posey (R-Fla.) co-sponsored the bill.

Dr. Joseph Marine, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained in the press release why he supports the bill:

“COVID-19 vaccine mandates for college students were flawed policies that did not alter the course of the pandemic and were not needed to keep college campuses ‘safe.’ I had to make efforts to prevent my own high school and college-age children from receiving COVID-19 booster shots that they did not want or need.

“It seems reasonable to me that institutions that implemented such policies without a sound medical or scientific rationale should take responsibility for any proven medical harm that they caused.”

If passed, the bill would allow students to submit a formal request for reimbursement, the Washington Examiner reported.

The request would have to include a record of COVID-19 vaccination, certification from a medical provider that the vaccine caused some kind of disease and a detailed account of related medical expenses.

Diseases covered by the legislation include myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, Guillain-Barré syndrome and any other diseases that the U.S. Secretary of Education determines to be linked to COVID-19 vaccination.

After the student’s request is vetted to ensure it’s valid and contains sufficient evidence, the college would have to pay the medical costs within 30 days.

It is unclear when a vote on the bill will take place.

CHD took college mandate challenge to U.S. Supreme Court

Rutgers University was the first college or university in the U.S. to mandate the vaccines, threatening to disenroll noncompliant students in the fall 2021 semester. In August 2021, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) sued the university in an attempt to block the mandate.

The case was dismissed in January 2023. After losing on appeal in February, CHD in May asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but the court declined. Meanwhile, a month earlier, Rutgers abruptly ended the mandate.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court this summer ruled that employees in the Los Angeles Unified School District can sue the district over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate because the shots don’t prevent transmission.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges that myocarditis and pericarditis may occur after COVID-19 vaccination. And research shows that adolescents and young adults are particularly at risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis.

As of Sept. 27, there were 1,604,710 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports of injury or death following a COVID-19 vaccination.

VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before confirming the reported adverse event was caused by the vaccine. VAERS has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

Meanwhile, citing concerns about the shots’ efficacy and safety, Idaho’s Southwest District Health last week voted to no longer offer COVID-19 vaccines at all 30 locations where it provides healthcare services.

17 colleges still have COVID vaccine mandates

By late May 2021, more than 400 U.S. colleges and universities required students to be vaccinated against COVID-19, The New York Times reported.

As of Oct. 19, 17 of those institutions still have a COVID-19 vaccination requirement for students to be able to enroll or live on campus, according to No College Mandates, a “group of concerned parents, doctors, nurses, professors, students and other college stakeholders working towards the common goal of ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates.”

Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of No College Mandates, said in the press release:

“College students were never at risk of severe injury or death from any variant of the COVID-19 virus and institutions of higher education had this data well in advance of mandating COVID-19 vaccines.”

According to the CDC, age is the “strongest risk factor” for severe outcomes from COVID-19 — meaning that the older a person is, the greater their risk for severe symptoms and death.

The CDC said its National Center for Health Statistics shows that “compared with ages 18–29 years, the risk of death is 25 times higher in those ages 50–64 years, 60 times higher in those ages 65–74 years, 140 times higher in those ages 75–84 years, and 340 times higher in those ages 85+ years.”

In other words, the typical college student — ages 18-22 — isn’t usually at risk of severe disease or death from COVID-19 when compared with older age groups.

Nonetheless, Sinatra said, many colleges imposed “some of the most coercive and restrictive vaccination policies” on college students, stripping them of their “fundamental right to bodily autonomy and informed consent.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

By Jeffrey A Tucker and Debbie Lerman | Brownstone Institute | October 30, 2024

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 3 Comments

Here’s why the Israeli military only knows how to fight civilians

By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | October 31, 2024

While it may sound hyperbolic, the Israeli military is only truly prepared to commit high-tech civilian massacres and cannot confront any well-prepared foes. The Zionist regime’s history of asymmetric warfare lulled it into a false sense of security that supplemented their racist worldview, proving catastrophic for them in today’s multi-front war.

Who are the soldiers who make up the military?

In order to understand the Israeli military and how it fights, we first have to understand the society that shapes its soldiers. All Israelis are indoctrinated from a young age with a supremacist ideology through their school system and are geared toward military service from the moment they exit the womb. They believe their army to be “the most moral” on earth, while also believing in the concept of their own supremacy over others.

Any discussion on the Zionist armed forces must begin with recognizing who the Israeli public are because when every one of them finishes high school, they are required to do a 2-3-year stint of mandatory service, which is often followed by reserve service for some time. While there are the likes of the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) who do not serve due to religious reasons and liberal Israelis who often use mental health issues as an excuse, most are drafted into some section of the military.

Those soldiers who enter their mandatory years of service, who will actually experience real combat settings, will not enter direct warfare and are instead stationed at checkpoints, do crowd control, or participate in night raids that aim to arrest teenagers who do things like throw stones. This is why many young Israelis find it more mentally stimulating to join the Air Force or work on intelligence. It is not uncommon to find soldiers sitting at checkpoints, bored out of their minds and with frustrated looks. For journalists covering protests across the West Bank, the Israeli soldiers who are deployed to shoot at children/teenagers who burn tires and throw stones act as if they are playing a game of paintball.

These soldiers also quickly gain rank in the Israeli army, earning in a matter of years what most other militaries would usually only issue to their forces after 10 to 15 years of service. These are entitled individuals whose minds aren’t focused and especially over the past decades have become ill-disciplined, permitted to get away with all kinds of decisions they take on an individual basis. It is a citizens’ army, which means that they are very much part of the society as a whole.

If we look at the actions they have been able to commit during armed confrontations, especially inside the Gaza Strip, it is no wonder that they feel emboldened to take matters into their own hands at this time too. This is exemplified through the trend over the past year where their fighters have filmed themselves committing all kinds of crimes and perverted activities, posting this onto social media.

These videos that are posted gleefully on online platforms like Tiktok, where Israeli soldiers wear the underwear of Palestinian women they displaced and killed or blow up/bulldoze civilian homes, are not only reflective of a lack of discipline but also hurt the objectives of the Zionist entity too.

The following are two such cases that highlight how the soldiers damaged the Israeli army’s war efforts: 1) The instant release of information and photos/videos of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, which prevented their superiors from creating a false story about what happened and inflicting a psychological blow. 2) Israeli forces who seized the Rafah Crossing in May filmed themselves callously destroying the site and insulting the Egyptian army while committing an action that technically violated the normalization agreement between Cairo and “Tel Aviv”.

So why can the Israeli army not just clear up this problem? Well, we all saw what happened when 10 soldiers were detained over the gang-rape of a Palestinian detainee; who was being held at the Sde Teiman detention facility without any charge. This led to protests where thousands of Israelis rioted and stormed military facilities in what were dubbed the “right to rape” demonstrations. However, it wasn’t just protesters, the idea of the right of soldiers to gang-rape prisoners was expressed by members of the Israeli Knesset and received support from a large segment of the public.

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that if the Israeli high command gives the order to begin prosecuting its soldiers for posting videos of themselves burning homes in Gaza and defecating on the floors of houses or committing a litany of other disgusting actions, they would face an internal uprising against such decisions.

What is the Israeli military strategy?

Understanding that Israeli society is inextricably linked to the armed forces, it also helps to shape how we view the mindset of this military. For instance, while in most societies around the world, a civilian death is perceived as more damaging than the death of a soldier, this is precisely the opposite for Israelis. This partly comes down to the supremacist myth of Israeli superiority and also the fact that soldier deaths have not been all that common, with the exception of occasional lone-wolf attacks here and there.

The doctrine of the Israeli military is roughly congruent with that of the US’ Counterinsurgency model that emerged during the so-called “War on Terror” in the early 2000s, yet it differs in key dimensions that make it way less effective than the American military.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Israeli military enjoyed asymmetry on the battlefield, heavily relying on their air force to respond to aggression with a significant force that would complete missions and achieve tactical victories at a very low cost to military personnel. While relying on their superior military vehicles/aircraft during the years of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), the Israelis managed to inflict a defeat on the West Bank-based Resistance groups, the most significant blow being delivered during their 2002 “Operation Defensive Shield” that resulted in around 500 Palestinians being killed.

In the year 2000, the Zionist regime withdrew from South Lebanon – as the situation became costly to their forces – then in 2005, they decided to do the same in the Gaza Strip after failing to crush Hamas during a battle that took place in northern Gaza back in October of 2004.

However, as the Zionists discovered in their 2006 war on Lebanon and later in their countless wars against Gaza, they were now facing a new kind of threat that today they describe as “rocket-based terror armies.” Throughout the past nearly two decades, the Zionist military believed that it could manage the threats posed by both the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance, needing only to periodically attack in order to maintain “deterrence”.

Yet, between 2019 and 2020, the Israeli military began recalculating and released two important publications: “The Momentum Multiyear Plan” and “The Operational Concept for Victory”. In these documents, it is clear that the Israelis were seeking to adapt to their newly faced challenges. It presents a plan to integrate the developments of the technological “fourth industrial revolution” into military planning, noting that the short military operations that the Zionist armed forces had committed were not delivering the desired image of victory in the face of Iran’s ever-growing military power.

Therefore, the Israelis sought to implement a system that would link all their technological surveillance, reconnaissance, and spyware devices together. We see that in 2021, this new system begins coming into practice as the Zionists brag about their AI systems that helped them conduct the 11-day Gaza war in May of that year. The idea here was to use this system that would be eventually fully integrated to enable the Zionist entity to strike first and deliver undeniable blows resulting in strategic victory.

Then came October 7, when the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood flipped the world upside down for an overconfident Israeli military and its leadership. Suddenly, they were the side that had to muster a response to a blow that completely embarrassed them on every single level, delivered by the least powerful bastion of resistance they faced.

Understanding the Israeli strategy, it shouldn’t come as a surprise also that Hezbollah instantly began targeting the Zionist regime’s reconnaissance and spyware technology during its first phase of the war either.

If we look at their Counterinsurgency strategy in Gaza on the ground, we see that, unlike the US military, they don’t allow infantry to go through and clear buildings before tanks enter an area, instead they use armored vehicles to protect their soldiers and reduce the number of deaths. But the problem with this improvised US Counterinsurgency strategy is that in reducing soldier deaths, it also makes it nearly impossible to properly combat the fighters that they are supposed to be seeking out.

This is because the Israelis are simply too cowardly to follow a traditional Counterinsurgency strategy, attempting to perform this task without the required risk it involves. In the absence of anything to show for their ground operations, which are designed to keep their ill-prepared and ill-disciplined soldiers out of harm’s way, they began to just destroy more and more civilian infrastructure.

What has occurred before our eyes is that the Israelis have been knocked back to their armed strategies of the 1970s, where we see today that they are trying to besiege the Palestinian Resistance in northern Gaza the way they besieged the Egyptian military in 1973. Yet, in the current war inside the Gaza Strip, the Israeli ground forces aren’t prepared for the kind of strategies that were implemented during the October war.

The Israelis needed to reinstate their military dominance and were suddenly placed in the worst possible position, knowing only how to use their technology to kill from a distance, and appearing to have no coherent ground strategies, they were forced to use this rather useless army to achieve extremely difficult goals that their air force and AI tech couldn’t perform for them. In light of this understanding, genocide became the choice and the strategy.

In the past, civilian massacres weren’t simply used for the purpose of shedding blood for no reason – although the Zionist regime had no issue with this at all – the massacres that we saw periodically in Gaza were committed with the goal of inflicting real psychological blows on the Resistance and Palestinian public; in addition to sending a message to the wider region. This time, it is an uncontrolled mass slaughter campaign, allowing their racist unhinged soldiers to do whatever they choose to butcher innocent people and completely destroy the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip.

Why? The Zionist entity realized that it had no military options left and the only way to achieve a victory and rescue the image of strength they had lost was to unleash a genocide, to kill, displace, and destroy everyone and everything. Even their tactical achievements in Lebanon around a month ago are today being swept away by Hezbollah, to which they have no real answer. To their peril, it has become obvious that assassinations and booby-traps cannot achieve a strategic victory and in face-to-face combat, the Lebanese Resistance is clearly superior to them.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel has issued 9,500 administrative detention orders since 7 October 2023

MEMO | October 31, 2024

Two Palestinian institutions concerned with prisoners’ affairs said on Wednesday that Israel has increased its issue of administrative detention orders, with nearly 9,500 issued since 7 October last year.

“The huge increase in the number of administrative detainees is mainly linked to the arrest campaigns in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, with more than 11,500 arrests in all groups,” said the Palestinian Authority’s Commission of Detainees Affairs and the Prisoners’ Club civil society group in a joint statement seen by Anadolu.

“The occupation intelligence agency has recently escalated the number of transfers to administrative detention of detainees whose sentences have ended, as well as the number of administrative detention orders issued against prisoners who were released on bail and specific conditions, or without conditions.”

Administrative detention sees prisoners being held with neither charge nor trial for up to six months, renewable indefinitely.

Monitoring of administrative detainees’ has proven that the occupation regime’s military courts have formed and continue to form an essential structure for solidifying its crimes, including the crime of administrative detention, said the Palestinian institutions.

According to the latest data that they supplied, there are currently 3,398 administrative detainees among the 10,100 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 30 women and more than 90 children, one of whom is just 14 years old. “The number of administrative detainees in the occupation prisons is 33 per cent of the total number of prisoners and detainees.”

It is worth noting that the prisoner data is related only to those from the occupied West Bank. The Israeli regime does not disclose information related to prisoners in Gaza.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Genocide is embedded in US diplomacy

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | October 31, 2024

Israel is only conducting occasional atrocities that do not align with US interests, if we are to believe US rhetoric. The Israeli air strike that killed at least 20 children in Beit Lahiya was “a horrifying incident with a horrifying result,” according to US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller.

“We have reached out to the Government of Israel to ask what happened here,” Miller continued, before adding, “But step back and look at where we are in this campaign.” According to the US State Department, the kill toll in Gaza is merely a result of Israel’s relentless attack on Hamas, its leadership and its weapons. As such, the 20 children killed in Beit Lahiya – indeed all the Palestinian civilians killed – pale into insignificance when compared with Israel’s purported aim.

When questioned about the US supplying Israel with weapons, Miller responded, “It’s something that we have to be very deliberate about and take time to assess the underlying circumstances to decide whether there was any particular potential legal violation and what the implications of that would be.” Ending the war, Miller added, is the US aim.

While still supplying Israel with weapons, one might add.

Miller also said that the US is not calling for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to avoid a power vacuum that Hamas may fill again. Hamas did not come to power through a power vacuum, but through a democratic election that the West pushed for, but then adamantly refused to accept the result. If a power vacuum exists in Palestinian politics, it is the West that created it by refusing to recognise a legitimate election result and allowing the Palestinian Authority to rule without political legitimacy.

Mahmoud Abbas’s mandate ended in 2009, in case you have forgotten.

Meanwhile, at the UN Security Council, imperialism wasn’t faring much better in imparting convincing rhetoric. Speaking about starvation in Gaza, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield blamed Hamas for the lack of food, not Israel’s genocidal plan. Astonishingly, Thomas-Greenfield then proceeded to list many of Israel’s international law violations along with the expectation that Israel complies with international law. The bottom line, according to the US, is that Israel still needs to be protected, while Palestinians do not.

This was made very clear in Thomas-Greenfield’s rhetoric regarding UNRWA. Israel and the UN need dialogue, she stated, “to address the fears that led to the Knesset’s legislation.” What fears, exactly? A premeditated plan to close down UNRWA, a plan built on earlier attempts to discredit the agency as well as the Palestinian right of return, is not built on fear but is part of the settler-colonial framework that paves the way for ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion.

If there was a shard of fairness in this world, Thomas-Greenfield would not be given a platform to speak of her memory of a child dying of starvation, while the diplomats she aligns herself with do the same to Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Asking Israel to provide humanitarian aid does not stave off starvation.

It merely tells Israel that the US will do nothing but offer mild criticism from compromised international platforms, while weapons transfers continue unhindered.

Between Miller and Thomas-Greenfield, the US is merely stating what is now obvious to the rest of us: feed Palestinians, maybe, but kill them later, definitely. Genocide is embedded in US diplomacy.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

US-Israeli proposals do not include permanent ceasefire: Source

Al Mayadeen | October 31, 2024

The Israeli and US proposals regarding a deal on Gaza lack provisions for a permanent ceasefire or a complete withdrawal from the Strip, a Palestinian source told Al Mayadeen on Thursday.

Instead, the proposal entails 10 days of calm in exchange for the release of four Israeli captives, including two women, in exchange for the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian detainees, according to the approved mechanism.

The proposal also stipulates the entry of about 300 aid trucks daily into Gaza.

The source stressed that Hamas believes the US wants to exploit partial initiatives to benefit election campaigns only. Meanwhile, upcoming meetings are planned between Fatah and Hamas to resume discussions on managing the Gaza Strip and forming a special committee with mutual approval from both parties.

Netanyahu ‘buying time’ with Gaza deal negotiations: Hamas official

On Wednesday, Taher al-Nounou, a senior Hamas official told Al Mayadeen that in any negotiations, the movement’s goal is to stop the war on the Gaza Strip while “Israel” merely seeks a prisoner exchange.

Al-Nounou stressed that any potential agreement must include a permanent ceasefire, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, reconstruction of the Strip, an end to the blockade, and a captive-prisoner exchange.

According to the official, prioritizing a prisoner exchange alone would not necessarily lead to a lasting ceasefire.

The Palestinian official argued that current discussions regarding a deal are merely a waste of time, under the guise of negotiations in preparation for the coming US elections.

Al-Nounou said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim with these proposals is to “buy time”, which he sees as “part of a local or US election campaign.”

“We have no veto on listening to mediators if they have any proposals,” the Hamas official reiterated but underlined that the movement had made it clear that it opposes a temporary pause of hostilities and the resumption of the Israeli aggression on Gaza.

The Palestinian official clarified that openness to offers is distinct from agreeing to them, particularly “if they fail to meet the resistance’s four core demands,” affirming, “If we are invited to hear new proposals, we will certainly attend.”

His statements echoed those of the movement’s spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri, who confirmed on Tuesday that Hamas has responded to requests from mediators to discuss new proposals regarding a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Several meetings have already occurred on this matter, with more scheduled to follow, Abu Zuhri indicated.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Splurge On Defense Spending, Ukraine Aid: Digesting UK Labour Government’s New Budget

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 31.10.2024

UK new government is raising taxes by more than $50 billion amid a widening budget deficit, While PM Starmer last week allocated 120 million pounds to Ukraine for military spending.

UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has delivered the new Labor government’s first budget.

What’s in it?

There will be an increase of around £2.9 billion ($3.76 billion) next year in the Ministry of Defense’s budget.

The UK will give Ukraine a new £2.26 billion ($2.9 billion) military loan, Reeves announced earlier in October. The loan is to be repaid using profits on illegally frozen Russian sovereign assets.

“Ensuring the UK comfortably exceeds our NATO commitments and providing guaranteed military support to Ukraine of £3 billion [$3.8 billion] per year, for as long as it takes,” Reeves told MPs.

Boosted military spending was slammed as “an insult to all those struggling during a cost-of-living crisis and diverts funds from underfunded public services” by Peace Pledge Union campaigner Geoff Tibbs.

“This government is addicted to war and yet again money is earmarked for weapons to continue wars in Ukraine and the Middle East,” said founding member of the Stop the War Coalition Lindsey German.

What Else Is in the Budget?

  • The budget will hit taxpayers with £40 billion (~$51.8 billion) in tax rises. The amount businesses will pay on their employees’ national insurance contributions will increase from 13.8% to 15% from April 2025. The rise in taxes is the largest since former PM John Major’s government in 1993.
  • Households won’t be entitled to the Winter Fuel Payment from winter 2024/2025 (unless receiving Pension Credit/other means-tested benefits).
  • Taxes on capital gains and inheritance are to be raised. The freeze on income tax thresholds will end in 2028/29 (to be later uprated in line with inflation).
  • Fiscal rules will be tweaked to allow more space for borrowing. A broader measure of government finances, known as “public sector net financial liabilities” (PSNFL), will reportedly include student loans and other financial assets.

What Has the Office for Budget Responsibility Said?

“This budget delivers one of the largest increases in spending, tax and borrowing of any single fiscal event in history,” OBR chair Richard Hughes said.

  • The UK budget deficit was £49 billion ($63.5 billion) in 2023/24, equivalent to 1.8% of GDP. Britain’s budget deficit is projected to be £26.2 billion ($33.9 billion) in the 2025/26 financial year.
  • The budget will push up inflation and interest rates, while the pace of economic growth will peak next year at 2% before falling back to around 1.5%.
  • Average interest rates on the stock of mortgages are expected to rise from around 3.7% in 2024 to a peak of 4.5% in 2027.
  • Inflation will remain above the Bank of England’s 2% target until 2029.
  • Budget policies will increase UK borrowing by £19.6 billion ($25.4 billion) this year and by an average of £32.3 billion ($41.9 billion) over the next five years.

Both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have blamed the preceding Conservative government for all of the country’s economic woes. During the election campaign, Reeves claimed that if victorious, Labour would get the “worst economic inheritance since World War Two.” Last year, Reeves told the Financial Times : “Taxes are at a 70-year high — I don’t have plans to be a big tax-raising chancellor.”

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Texas judge: Enforcing the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism limits speech

Interim decision allows policies to remain in place for now

‘Freedom for Palestine’ protest march that drew thousands of participants on November 4, 2023 in Berlin, Germany. [Sean Gallup/Getty Images]
MEMO | October 31, 2024

A federal court in Texas ruled this week that restrictions imposed by Texas public universities on anti-Israel speech violate the First Amendment. The case, Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Houston et al v Greg Abbott et al, involves student organisations who argue that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order, known as GA-44, stifles their ability to engage in constitutionally protected criticism of Israel on campus.

The order, issued by Governor Abbott in March 2024, was framed as a measure against rising anti-Semitism in Texas universities. It mandates all higher education institutions in Texas to update their free speech policies to include a specific definition of anti-Semitism, incorporating the highly controversial, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism.

Seven of the 11 examples cited in the IHRA conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish racism. It’s widely criticised for having a chilling effect on free speech including by its founder Kenneth Stern. It lists examples of anti-Semitic acts, such as claiming that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Student groups argue that these examples restrict their ability to express criticisms of Israeli policies without facing sanctions from the university.

The plaintiffs, including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Houston and the Palestine Solidarity Committee at the University of Texas at Austin, said amendments to the speech policy were unconstitutional. They argued that the policies discriminate against their legitimate views, effectively censoring their criticisms of Israeli state policies by labelling them anti-Semitic. The plaintiffs further alleged that the policy changes chill free expression on campus, leading to self-censorship due to fear of punishment. This crackdown on speech was unconstitutional, they added.

Judge Robert Pitman, who presided over the case, noted that the IHRA definition specifically targets expressions critical of Israel, thus chilling a form of “political speech that is fundamental to the university experience.” The judge highlighted that universities, as centres of intellectual debate, are “vital spaces” where students should be able to engage in robust discussions on contentious issues, including foreign policy matters such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While the court acknowledged that universities have a responsibility to prevent genuine harassment and anti-Semitism, it found that enforcing a definition which includes political criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic oversteps constitutional boundaries. The court’s decision emphasised that the First Amendment prohibits the state from punishing viewpoints it finds disagreeable and that universities cannot impose speech restrictions based solely on anticipated discomfort or controversy.

This ruling is also a significant critique of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has faced growing scrutiny for conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Free speech advocates argue that adopting such definitions threaten to limit open discussions on Israel-Palestine issues. Civil rights organisations and free speech groups have long warned that such definitions, when codified into policy, could stifle legitimate political discourse and are particularly problematic in academic settings.

The court’s decision sends a clear signal about the constitutional risks of using the IHRA definition as a basis for regulating speech in academic settings. As Judge Pitman observed, the inclusion of specific IHRA examples within university policies likely infringes upon the First Amendment by “chilling” protected political expression critical of Israel.

The court ultimately denied the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, meaning it declined to enforce any immediate changes to the university’s policies while the case continues. Although the court recognised that the plaintiffs could have a strong First Amendment claim, it found that the specific restrictions they requested were too broad to impose right away.

This interim decision allows the policies to remain in place for now, but the court’s findings suggest that any restrictions on political speech at public universities will undergo rigorous First Amendment scrutiny. The case will continue as the plaintiffs seek a resolution, which could further clarify the limits of permissible restrictions to free speech in academic institutions across the US.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | 1 Comment

Von der Leyen advised to create ‘EU CIA’

RT | October 31, 2024

An EU report has called on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to create a “fully fledged” intelligence agency to coordinate the clandestine activity of member states. However, even proponents of the idea admit it would be costly and unpopular.

Penned by former Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and published on Wednesday, the report outlines the EU’s readiness for war, and makes a multitude of vague recommendations. Officials in Brussels are advised, for example, to cultivate a “preparedness culture,” and to “strengthen civil-military coordination frameworks.”

One of the more concrete recommendations is that the EU create “a fully-fledged intelligence cooperation service, serving all EU institutions and member states.” The agency, the report states, would collect intelligence from national-level agencies in order to “serve both strategic and operational needs of EU-level policy-planning and decision-making.”

While the proposed agency was described by Politico as a “CIA-style spy service,” the report makes no mention of it carrying out clandestine operations outside the EU’s borders, which is the CIA’s role within America’s sprawling intelligence apparatus. Instead, it suggests that the agency would “coordinate specific counter-espionage tasks” and help member states “counter threats against them posed by hostile foreign intelligence services.”

Speaking at the launch of Niinisto’s report, von der Leyen admitted that member states will probably be reluctant to allow Brussels bureaucrats to oversee their intelligence sectors. For now, she said, the EU will focus on “strengthening information sharing” instead.

Niinisto also admitted that, while researching the report, he encountered “many critical voices” from member states concerned about increasing the bloc’s budget to fund this agency.

If adopted, the report’s recommendations would mark yet another expansion of the EU’s powers. Two years ago, the bloc adopted its first common defense strategy, which authorized the creation of a 5,000-strong “rapid deployment” force. Last month, von der Leyen named former Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius as the EU’s first ever defense commissioner.

Earlier this month, Kubilius said he would work on ramping up arms production across the bloc, declaring that “we must be ready to meet Russia militarily in six to eight years.”

Kubilius has also called on the EU to pursue regime change in Moscow, and to sponsor “democratic forces” working to topple President Vladimir Putin’s government.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Georgian president refuses to back up election theft claims

RT | October 30, 2024

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili has refused to be interviewed by the prosecutor general’s office about her claims of election fraud, arguing that investigators should look for evidence themselves.

Zourabichvili has joined several pro-Western opposition parties in accusing the ruling Georgian Dream party of “stealing” Saturday’s parliamentary vote, without providing specific examples.

The Prosecution Service of Georgia subsequently launched an investigation into the alleged falsification of the election and summoned Zourabichvili to appear on Thursday and provide evidence on the matter.

“I don’t intend to go to the prosecutor,” Zourabichvili said at a press conference in Tbilisi.

“It’s not up to the president to provide the proof,” she argued, adding that NGOs, election monitors and ordinary citizens have been providing “huge amounts” of evidence of election rigging. She said that more than 1,100 complaints have been filed regarding the conduct of the election.

“In any standard investigation, it’s the investigative body’s duty to gather proof, not the other way around. I’ve never seen an investigative authority ask a president for election-related evidence,” the president wrote on X.

“What we’re witnessing is an attempt to fuel tension and fear amid frustration over stolen votes. There’s psychological pressure directed at both you and me,” she added.

Mamuka Mdinaradze, executive secretary of Georgian Dream, advised the president to cooperate with the prosecutors. “President Zourabichvili must answer what her accusations are based on,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “We are ready, as part of the investigation in the prosecutor’s office, to open any polling station to prove that the elections were held fairly.”

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said that Zourabichvili and the opposition “have no evidence of election fraud, and if they do not go to the prosecutor’s office, this will be the clearest evidence that they made false statements about the elections.”

Kobakhidze previously stated that the election was “absolutely clean, democratic and fair.”

Zurab Japaridze, leader of the Girchi – More Freedom party said the critics of the government “do not trust” the prosecutor’s office and would advise the president not to meet with them.

Official tallies showed Georgian Dream received nearly 54% of the vote, winning a convincing parliamentary majority. The French-born Zourabichvili has rejected the results, describing the election as a “Russian special operation.” Along with the opposition leaders, she has demanded a new election, organized under international supervision.

Georgian election officials complained about Zourabichvili’s rhetoric on Tuesday, urging the prosecutors to investigate “unfounded attacks” on the central election commission. They noted that international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have “positively assessed the elections” and found no significant violations. The US and the EU, however, expressed their concerns and urged the Georgian authorities to investigate the reports of irregularities.

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Will Tuesday’s Vote Counts Be Another Sham Biden-Harris Statistic?

By James Bovard – Mises Wire – October 30, 2024

If Kamala Harris wins the presidential election on Tuesday, Americans will be told that the final vote count is a sacred number that was practically handed down from Mt. Sinai engraved on a stone tablet. Any American who casts doubt on Harris’s victory will be vilified like one of those January 6, 2021 protestors sent to prison for “parading without a permit” in the US Capitol. Actually, anyone who doubted the 2020 election results was being prominently denounced as “traitors” even before the Capitol Clash.

But is there any reason to expect the final vote count in next week’s presidential election to be more honest than any other number that the Biden-Harris administration jiggered in the last four years?

Biden, Harris, and their media allies endlessly assured Americans that the national crime rate had fallen sharply since Biden took office. That statistical scam was produced by the equivalent of disregarding all the votes in California and New York. FBI crime data simply excluded many of the nation’s largest cities until a revision earlier this month revealed that violent crime had risen nationwide.

Deceitful national crime data helped cover-up the disastrous impact of open border policies. The Biden-Harris administration did backflips to avoid disclosing the true size of the surge of illegal immigrants from early 2021 onwards. Kamala Harris did zombie-like face plants in recent interviews when elbowed for honest answers.

In the same way that another surge of unverified mail-in ballots may determine the 2024 election, Biden manipulated the number of illegal aliens by using his presidential parole power to entitle more than a million people from Haiti, Venezuela, Cubans, and other countries to legally enter and stay in America on his own decree. The Biden administration even provided a vast secretive program to fly favored foreign nationals into select airports late at night where their arrival would occur under the radar.

Some states will officially count mail-in ballots that arrive well after Election Day even if the envelopes have no postmark. This is the same “late doesn’t matter” standard that Biden used to vindicate the $42 billion provided by his 2021 infrastructure law to boost broadband access in rural America—which Uncle Joe said was “not unlike what Roosevelt did with electricity.” Unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority, Biden’s broadband program has nothing to show since it delivered faster internet access to almost no one. The same default occurred with the Inflation Reduction Act’s alleged showpiece achievement—42,000 new charging stations around the nation for electric vehicles. But that program produced more presidential applause lines than EV refills. As of March, $7.5 billion in federal spending had only produced seven new charging stations nationwide.

How many votes will Harris lose on Tuesday because Americans remain outraged at the inflation that has slashed the dollar’s value by more than 20 percent since Biden took office? There would be far more popular fury if the feds had not deceived Americans about the full financial damage that Washington inflicted. The official inflation statistic doesn’t count soaring mortgage and housing costs—which is akin to excluding any state south of the Mason-Dixon Line from the national vote tally. Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, said that if the feds today used the same inflation gauges used in the 1970s, Biden’s peak inflation would have been 18 percent, twice as high as the reported number.

Tens of millions of voters will not be obliged to show any identification before voting in this election: they are presumed trustworthy regardless of zero verification. But this is the same standard that the Biden-Harris administration uses for not disclosing its most controversial policies to American citizens. People will vote next week without knowing the facts behind whistleblower allegations on Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, to Secret Service failures to prevent Trump assassination attempts, and the brazen details of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

In Washington, politicians feel entitled to applause for any grandiose promise—regardless of their failure to deliver. Similarly, politicians and election officials promising that the presidential vote count will be accurate and reflect “the will of the people” is far more important than tabulating the actual ballots. Will the unmanned ballot boxes in big cities be stuffed with bogus ballots the same way a politician jams endless balderdash into his campaign speeches? As pundit Stephen Kruiser quipped, “the clothing donation boxes that were all over my old neighborhood in Los Angeles were probably more secure than the ballot drop boxes.”

Of course, if Trump wins, then all the forces of decency must instantly shift to the other side of the barricades. Any electoral victory by Trump will be illegitimate because of politically incorrect comments made by speakers at Trump campaign rallies. As in 2017, if Trump wins, every “true patriot”—or at least every true progressive—will be honor-bound to join The Resistance™.

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | | Leave a comment

Moscow slams Washington for ‘repressive’ treatment of Russian reporters


Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. © Sputnik / Aleksei Danichev
RT | October 30, 2024

The US violated its own laws on freedom of the press by detaining a group of Russian journalists earlier this week, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday. She was commenting after an incident involving a crew of Izvestia reporters who had arrived in the US to cover the upcoming election.

The crew arrived in Washington DC late on Monday. Despite having the necessary entry permits and credentials, they were detained at the airport, stripped of their filming equipment, and interrogated, Izvestia reported.

One member of the crew, cameraman Vladimir Borovikov, said he was questioned for ten hours, then denied entry and expelled from the country after having his visa annulled. US authorities cited “administrative reasons” for his expulsion, according to Zakharova.

She claimed that the incident was a clear example of Washington’s “global campaign” against Russian media.

“We regard what happened as yet another gross violation by Washington of its obligations in the area of ensuring freedom of access to information and media pluralism,” Zakharova said in a statement published on the Foreign Ministry’s website. The action was “demonstrative” and intended to show Washington’s “readiness to use its repressive apparatus to block information that is inconvenient for them,” she added.

“Such actions are fully consistent with the logic of the global campaign against Russian media declared by the current [US] administration, which directly contradicts not only America’s international obligations, but also the provisions of its own constitution,” Zakharova stated, warning that “the tyranny of the American authorities will not remain without a proper response.”

In an interview with Sputnik Radio on Tuesday, Zakharova explained that Russian media outlets are being targeted for working as a “mirror that reflects what is really happening in the world” instead of the Western-approved narrative, especially when elections are involved.

“Everyone knows that the US elections are a circus. Accordingly, everyone wants to look at them… Our journalists went through all the procedures [but] were detained and interrogated for hours… This is their democracy in action. Where are all these journalists’ rights?”

Zakharova noted that besides other violations involving the detention of the Izvestia crew, the US authorities failed to notify the Russian Embassy in Washington about the incident. Diplomats were therefore unable to intervene in the proceedings and provide assistance.

The US has placed multiple sanctions on Russian media, with the latest introduced last month. In mid-September, Washington sanctioned RT and its parent company TV-Novosti, accusing them of “functioning as a de facto arm of [Russian] intelligence.” Following the move, US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, banned several Russian news networks. Multiple media reports also claimed that Russian media crews have repeatedly been denied access to international events.

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries