US Berkely Free Speech Activist Mario Savio’s Call To Arms – by Mike Whitney – 15 May 2024

Mario Savio’s Call to Arms: “Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears and Upon the Wheels”

A shocked Palestinian mother running after rescue teams as they pull out the dead body of her son from under the rubble in Nusseirat refugee camp, central Gaza.

Credit: Ali Jadallah pic.twitter.com/bp4UdOnbWf

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) May 14, 2024

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. MARIO SAVIO – “Operation of the Machine”, YouTube

No one in the anti-genocide movement is calling for a general strike, a worker’s revolt or disruptive acts of civil disobedience. What they’re asking for is a ceasefire and divestment in any company that is profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza. These are reasonable requests and entirely appropriate. The problem is that the students making these demands have set up encampments on campuses across the United States which is the first step towards a more far-reaching mobilization against US-Israeli policy in Gaza. That is why the government—acting in concert with its law enforcement assets in the states—has taken such a draconian and brutal approach to the mostly-peaceful demonstrations. They see the protests as the tip of the spear, the beginning of a populist movement that holds the moral high-ground and will eventually force politicians to oppose the present policy.

This is why the government has deployed its hordes of baton-wielding cops to the protester encampments at every opportunity. They’re trying to intimidate the protestors with a massive show-of-force and unusually harsh penalties in an attempt to crush the movement before it gets off the ground. And given the advances in surveillance technology and other repressive measures, they may succeed in that effort. We don’t know. But we do know that the protestors views on Israel’s rampage in Gaza is not that different than those of the average American. Take a look at this survey from Gallup:

Majority in U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza…

Disapproval of Israel’s military action is similar regardless of how much attention Americans are paying to the conflict…. All three major party groups in the U.S. have become less supportive of Israel’s actions in Gaza than they were in November…. Democrats’ widespread opposition to Israel’s actions underscores the difficulty of the issue for President… Biden’s approval rating for his handling of the situation in the Middle East, at 27%, is his lowest among five issues tested in the survey…. Among Democrats, 75% of respondents “disapprove of the military action Israel has taken in Gaza.” Majority in U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza, Gallup

And we see similar results in a recent AP/Norc poll:

An increasing proportion of U.S. adults believe that Israel’s military response in Gaza has “gone too far”….

Among U.S. adults polled in January, 50% said they believed that Israel’s actions in Gaza had “gone too far,… Only 31% believed that Israel’s military response has “been about right. Half of U.S. adults believe Israel has “gone too far” in Gaza war: poll, Axios

These surveys show that the pro-Palestine protestors are not a fringe element parroting some arcane leftist ideology. They are in the mainstream and their views reflect the opinions of the majority of Americans. So, why are the cops beating them with batons and dragging them off to jail? It makes no sense. These students aren’t toppling statues or burning buildings or looting department stores or attacking cops like we saw during the George Floyd riots. They’re simply expressing their opposition to a scorched-earth rampage that is morally indefensible. So why are they being persecuted? Here’s how Norman Finkelstein answers that question:

…One of the aspects of the emergence of the student movement is that ….there is more and more clarity that the allegation of antisemitism is simply a pretext for suppressing legitimate protest against Israel’s genocidal policies against the people of Gaza. I should also add that among the list of surprises is the fact that a group of Jewish billionaires—in order to suppress campus criticism of Israeli genocide—are now openly using the blackmail weapon. They are telling the universities, the Board of Trustees, and the president—that unless you repress these demonstrations, we are going to withhold our hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is without question, the most brazen assault by the private sector on academic freedom in our country’s history. And compounding that, there is now an assault by the right-wing in our country to exploiting the false claim of antisemitism to repress academic freedom on our campuses. So, it began with Jewish billionaires trying to repress dissent of Israel, and now that false claim of antisemitism is being used by the right-wing in our country to repress any critical thought on our campuses. This is not just an assault on academic freedom, but it’s also a prefiguration of a fascist movement among the right-wing and supported by the billionaire class to suppress any dissent beginning on college campuses but then eventually spreading everywhere else. Norman Finkelstein on Genocide in Gaza, Mayadeen

Tweet

This helps to explain the conundrum we discussed above, that is, why are the cops brutalizing protestors who merely reflect the views of the majority of Americans. The answer, according to Finkelstein, is that the cops are operating on behalf of special interests, in this case, the interests of “Jewish billionaires” whose Israel-oriented agenda trumps the civil rights of American students. Here’s more background from an article at The Nation:

The violence at UCLA is instructive. The pro-Israel counterprotesters were organized by a group funded by billionaire Bill Ackman and friends, including Jessica Seinfeld (wife of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld). Many of the hired protesters seem to have been Iranian monarchists—a group that tends to be pro-Israel because of the old alliance between the deposed shah of Iran and Israel.

As both the Los Angeles Times and The Forward have reported, the pro-Israel counterprotesters were extremely violent. According to the LA Times:

Four student journalists who work for the UCLA Daily Bruin were attacked shortly before 3:30 am. Wednesday by Pro-Israel counterprotesters during a campus demonstration that turned violent.

Daily Bruin news editor Catherine Hamilton, 21, told The Times she recognized one of the counterprotesters as someone who had previously verbally harassed her and taken pictures of her press badge….

As she tried to break free, Hamilton said, she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen; another student journalist was pushed to the ground and beaten and kicked for nearly a minute. The attack was first reported in the Daily Bruin. Eric Adams Is the Lying Face of the Campus Crackdown, The Nation

So, the so-called ‘counter-protestors’ were not really protestors at all. They were not even employed to promote Israel’s political position, but to harass, intimidate and brutalize the people who they see as a potential threat to Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza. These were agitators who were not engaged in expressing their own heartfelt convictions, but focused entirely on suppressing the free speech of others.

And this isn’t the only example that lends credence to Finkelstein’s claims. There is also the bizarre case of Rebecca Weiner, the details of which are seriously creepy. This is from an article at the Grayzone:

Rebecca Weiner is a Columbia U. professor who also serves as intelligence director of the NYPD. Mayor Eric Adams credits her with spying on anti-genocide student protesters and directing the militarized raid that dislodged them from campus.

The violent crackdown carried out on Columbia University students protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip was led by a member of the school’s own faculty, …

…Just a few hundred meters from the Gaza protest encampment, Weiner maintained an office at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Her SIPA bio describes her as an “Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs” who simultaneously serves as the “civilian executive in charge of the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau.”

In that role, according to SIPA, Weiner “develops policy and strategic priorities for the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau and publicly represents the NYPD in matters involving counterterrorism and intelligence.”

The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York…. Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook, The Grayzone

There are so many questions here, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Why is a “civilian executive in charge of the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau” masquerading as an adjunct professor at Columbia? And if, in fact, Weiner does “serve as a bridge between the (NYPD)Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York”, then in what capacity is she gathering information on American students who are simply exercising their constitutional rights?

The Weiner situation casts enough doubt on Tel Aviv’s relationship with Washington that there should be a thorough investigation, but that probably won’t happen. What is more likely to happen is that the collusion will deepen and become more widespread until it poses a grave threat to US national security. Are we there yet?

We don’t know, but we need to know; just as we need to know how many “Weiners” are operating in positions of authority across the country. Isn’t that a reasonable proposition?

Unfortunately, the only thing of which we can be certain of is that if Weiner had been Russian or Chinese, she would have been bundled off to Gitmo pell-mell where she would face a steady diet of bread crusts and waterboarding. That much is certain. Here’s more on the Israeli link to the violence at UCLA from The Grayzone:

The Grayzone has obtained a dossier detailing the identities of the Zionist hooligans who assaulted UCLA anti-genocide student protesters… On April 30, thirty people were injured when a mob of Zionist hooligans savagely assaulted the pro-Palestine UCLA encampment shortly before midnight…….

Los Angeles-area police have arrested droves of students protesting Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza,…. (but) to date there have been no arrests of pro-Israel goons. (The Grayzone identifies many of the people involved.)

Aaron Cohen. Cohen is an Israeli ‘counterterrorism analyst’ who embedded with police shortly before their May 2 raid … shortly before the raid, Cohen wrote on Instagram: “I just wrapped [up] a [sic] independent quiet infiltration operation for @drphil tonight into the heart of the UCLA encampment. I’m now down here with LASDs elite SRT who’s staging now and preparing to make entry onto the pro terror antisemitic encampment.”…Also present in the run-up to the attack were members of Magen Am, a Los Angeles-based Jewish private security firm founded in 2017 by Yossi Eilfort, an MMA fighter-turned-Chabad rabbi. Magen Am, which claims to employ 12 former Israeli and US soldiers, bills itself as “the only Jewish, non-profit organization licensed to provide physical, armed security services on the West Coast of the United States.”

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Eilfort admitted coordinating with UCLA on an April 28 counter-protest aimed at antagonizing the pro-Palestine encampment.... The group maintains a close working relationship with local law enforcement…. That “partnership” appears to be paying off, with Magen Am now openly boasting about its ability to influence LAPD operations….

But their links to the security state don’t end there. Magen Am’s official website boasts: “We have direct connections at the FBI and Local law enforcement, including the LAPD, Sheriff’s Department, DA’s office and the US Attorney’s office.”…

Meanwhile, at Columbia University, two former Israeli army soldiers who attacked students with toxic chemical “skunk” fluid this January, sending at least 10 anti-genocide protesters to the emergency room, have not been expelled from campus, nor have they been arrested. “There are no arrests, and the investigation is ongoing,” an NYPD spokesperson told HuffPost UCLA attackers exposed: meet the violent Zionist agitators LA police haven’t arrested, The Grayzone

What does it all mean? Why is an Israeli ‘counterterrorism analyst embedded with LAPD and what possible link does that have with anti-genocide protesters at UCLA? And why are members of a “Jewish private security firm” engaged in provocative attacks on peaceful protestors? And what in heaven’s name are the “direct connections” that this Jewish security firm has with “the FBI and Local law enforcement”?

This is not a trivial matter. What we’re seeing here is the deeply-rooted influence of a foreign country that now wields significant power within the federal and state law enforcement and Intel agencies. This is a big problem. If readers think I am overstating the importance of this issue, then please say so. But—if even half of what Grayzone is reporting is true—we are in a world of trouble. Here’s more from a Substack piece by Ken Klippenstein:

For the feds, it is all about turning protests into a national security crisis, with imagined foreign influence, sympathy for Hamas and other terrorist groups, and a threat to the government itself….

while the students continue to speak out, and so many are clearly unhappy with American policy, the federal government has wasted no time in surging resources from all across the country as it colors the students as threats to national security.

Here are just some of the federal agencies that have now become involved:

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),

Federal Protective Service (FPS) – the Department of Homeland Security law enforcement agency that protects federal buildings and other assets, and

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm….

Under the Biden’s administration’s 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a gaggle of additional agencies are called upon to take action….(including)

The FBI

In an NBC interview last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that “we do share intelligence about specific threats of violence” regarding the campus protests….

In March testimony to Congress, Wray warned that “we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.” …

On Wednesday, when asked about the campus protests, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that “the DOJ and FBI is going to continue to offer support to universities and colleges in respect to federal laws.” …

The FBI is also under pressure from Congress to crack down on the protests…The Intercept has also reported on a zoom call in which representatives Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Mike Lawler (R-NY), along with trustees from several universities, discussed what they saw as the need for FBI intervention. Attending Gaza Protests? The Feds Are Watching, Ken Klippenstein, Substack

Get the picture?

So, Federal law enforcement and the intel agencies are already involved and likely using their extraordinary surveillance powers to spy on leaders in the protest movement, infiltrate their camps (with confidential informants), and implement a dirty tricks strategy aimed at entrapping hapless protesters by encouraging illegal activity or property damage. All of this is designed to deter further “radicalization and mobilization”, which are FBI Director Wray’s buzzwords for ‘legally petitioning the government to abandon its support for the genocide in Gaza’.

All of the instruments of state coercion are now focused on a small group of principled activists who merely want to stop their government from participating in the killing of women and children in their historic homeland. And for that, they must be crushed.

It reminds me of a speech that John F. Kennedy delivered on the White House lawn in 1962 when he said:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Amen, to that.

…………………….

Prisoners of Themselves – by James Howard Kunstler – 6 May 2024

“Ok, let’s be clear. If the intelligence community led by the CIA is not the “deep state,” what is?” — Jeffrey Tucker

You realize, don’t you, that the gross misconduct of government officials from RussiaGate on down to the courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan has amounted to one continuous operation against the American people? If it were ever honestly adjudicated, many hundreds of them might go to prison, or worse. Each successive seditious and treasonous action they attempt against their arch-nemesis, Mr. Trump, only compounds their criminal liability — the Steele Dossier, CIA agent Eric Ciaramella’s 2019 impeachment prank, the Covid-19 caper, the George Floyd-BLM hustle, the 2020 election hijinks, the J-6 op and the House J-6 Committee conjured up to spin it, the present battery of farcical court cases — and yet the Golden Golem of Greatness not only remains defiantly at large, but seems to amass ever more electoral mojo.

     The epic failure of these mighty efforts, and the humiliation entailed, has lately driven this vast bureaucratic cabal — collectively styled as “the blob” — to a stage of abject desperation that looks a lot like insanity. They fear for their lives, their fortunes, their chattels, and their families, and they seem ready to wreck the republic to save themselves. They have so far pretty much wrecked American justice with their lawfare tactics — a degenerate campaign to use the vested authority of prosecutors and judges to twist and cheat the law at the cost of the law’s legitimacy. Merrick Garland, Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Marc Elias, Christopher Wray, Letitia James, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg have made law the enemy of the people.

      All this becomes more obvious each day, for instance events of the past week in Judge Aileen Cannon’s federal courtroom in Florida where the Mar-a-Lago documents case proceeds. Turns out that Special Counsel Jack Smith has deliberately messed with the evidence, which is patently felonious. Also, turns out that sometime between the “Joe Biden” inauguration and the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August, 2022, boxes of presidential documents stored by the US General Services Administration were “delivered” to Mr. Trump’s mansion without any proper accounting for what might have been in them. A set-up you suppose? Why not? After everything else the FBI and the DOJ have attempted since 2015?

     Christopher Wray in particular might have wanted some surefire probable cause to get his agents into Mar-a-Lago where, rumor has it, Mr. Trump kept his own dossier of evidence against the FBI and DOJ officials who concocted the “Crossfire Hurricane” chapter of RussiaGate. Even if you assume that Mr. Trump had multiple copies of the thing, FBI Director Wray — in position since 2017 throughout most of RussiaGate — surely wanted to see what Mr. Trump was holding if it would become necessary for current and former FBI / DOJ officials to defend themselves in court against very serious charges.

      You see the desperation, don’t you? And how stupendously amateurish these machinations have been? Planting evidence and then fiddling around with it? I’m waiting for the moment when Judge Cannon summons Jack Smith and announces to his face that she is tossing the case for prosecutorial misconduct. Will she add a criminal referral to that? How will that affect the other case (attempting to overturn the 2020 election) brought against Mr. Trump in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC federal district court? Who will prosecute it if Jack Smith can no longer function as Special Counsel? And since the case was contrived in his name — even if Eisen, McCord, Weissmann, and others are really the authors — does that case blow up, too?

     Letitia James’s real estate case under Judge Arthur Engoron was so idiotic it can’t possibly survive an ultimate appeal, and the Alvin Bragg confection under Judge Merchan is playing out like something that usually only happens in places like Honduras or Liberia. Yet the American Left, the “progressive” Democratic Party, is staking everything on it. It’s all they have left Lawfare-wise, at least for now. Which brings us to the question: Why do the non-governmental elites of this land, the managerial and thinking classes, the college presidents, the cable news producers, the corporate execs, the movie directors, the whole arts establishment. . . why do they feel compelled, for nearly a decade now, to hitch their identity and their self-respect to this fantastic train of Kafka-esque corruption, tyranny, and abuse? How did they get owned by the blob?

     We may never find out, and they may never know either, even after they snap out of the mass formation they’ve been in thrall to. But they have made themselves ridiculous — figures like Sam Harris, Stephen Colbert, and Rob Reiner — yelling about “saving our democracy” while the blob they worship systematically disassembles the US Constitution, and makes American law a global laughingstock.

     Most of my old ex-friends are riding the same ideological bus. You have to wonder: how did the likes of “Joe Biden,” Merrick Garland, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Christopher Wray, Fani Willis, Anthony Fauci, Klaus Schwab, and Bill Gates become their heroes? Did the Covid vaccines destroy their minds? Are they really avid for central bank digital money and surveillance of their every move? Do they want to be told how to live by the WHO? Things are going south fast now in our country. If these people ever cherished the idea of being free to think their own thoughts and live their own lives, it’s getting late in the game. They will end up prisoners of themselves.

……………………..

Source

The Russia–Iran–China Search for a New Global Security Order – by Pepe Escobar – 3 May 2024

• 1,100 WORDS • 

While the collective west is in the grips of an existential legitimacy crisis, the RIC is devising its own security order to protect the rest of the world from the ‘genocidals.’

The Hegemon has no idea what awaits the Exceptionalist mindset: China has started to decisively stir the civilizational cauldron without bothering about an inevitable array of sanctions coming by early 2025 and/or a possible collapse of the international financial system.

Last week, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his list of delusional US demands was welcomed in Beijing by Foreign Minister Wang Yi and President Xi Jinping as little more than an annoying gnat. Wang, on the record, stressed that Tehran was justified in defending itself against Israel’s shredding of the Vienna Convention when it attacked the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

At the UN Security Council, China now openly questions not only the state terror attack on the Nord Streams but also the US–Israel combo’s blocking of Palestinian statehood. Moreover, Beijing, just like Moscow recently, hosts Palestine’s political factions together in a conference aiming to unify their positions.

Next Tuesday, only two days before Moscow celebrates Victory Day, the end of the Great Patriotic War, Xi will land in Belgrade to remind the whole world about the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese embassy by the US, UK, and NATO.

Russia, meanwhile, provided a platform for the UNRWA – the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, which Israel has sought to defund – to explain to high representatives of BRICS-10 the cataclysmic humanitarian situation in Gaza, as described by UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

In short, serious political business is already being conducted outside of the corrupted UN system, as the United Nations disintegrates into a corporate shell with the US dictating all terms as the largest shareholder.

Yet another key example of BRICS as the new UN: Russian Security Council chairman Nikolai Patrushev met in St. Petersburg with his Chinese counterpart Chen Wenqing on the sidelines of the 12th International Security Summit, congregating over 100 nations, including the security heads of BRICS-10 members Iran, India, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as Iraq.

The SCO security show

But the key crossroads these past few days was the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) defense summit in Astana, Kazakhstan. For the first time, the new Chinese Defense Minister, Dong Jun, met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, to emphasize their comprehensive strategic partnership.

Dong, significantly, stressed the “dynamic” nature of China–Russia military interaction, while Shoigu doubled down, saying it “sets a model for interstate relations” based on mutual respect and shared strategic interests.

Addressing the full SCO assembly, Shoigu emphatically refuted the massive western propaganda drive about a Russian “threat” to NATO.

Everybody was at the SCO defense ministers’ meeting – including, at the same table, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Belarus as an observer. Minsk is eager to join the SCO.

The interlocking Russia–Iran–China strategic partnerships were totally in sync. Apart from Dong meeting Shoigu, he also met Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani, who lavishly praised Beijing’s condemnation of the Israeli terror air strike in Damascus.

What is happening now between Beijing and Tehran is a replay of what started last year between Moscow and Tehran, when a member of the Iranian delegation on a visit to Russia remarked that both parties had agreed on a mutual, high-level “anything you need” relationship.

In Astana, Dong’s support for Iran was unmistakable. Not only did he invite Ashtiani to a security conference in Beijing, mirroring the Iranian position, he also called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Shoigu, meeting with Ashtiani, provided extra context when he recalled that “the joint fight against international terrorism in Syria is a vivid example of our long-standing friendly relations.” The Russian defense minister then delivered his clincher:

The current military-political situation and threats to our states oblige us … to common approaches to building a just world order based on equality for all participants in the international community.

A new global security order

Establishing a new global security order is right at the heart of BRICS-10 planning – on par with the de-dollarization debate. All of this is anathema to the collective west, which is incapable of understanding the multifaceted, intertwined Russia, Iran, and China partnerships.

And the interaction goes on in person. Russian President Vladimir Putin will be visiting Beijing later this month. On Gaza, the Russia–Iran–China position is in complete sync: Israel is committing genocide. For the EU – and NATOstan as a whole – this is not genocide: the bloc supports Israel no matter what.

After Iran, on 13 April, changed the game in West Asia for good, without even using their finest hypersonic missiles, the key question for the Global Majority is stark: in the end, who will restrain the genocidals, and how? Diplomatic sources hint this will be discussed face-to-face by Putin and Xi.

As one Chinese scholar, with unique aplomb, remarks:

This time, the barbarians are facing a 5,000-year continuing written civilization, armed with Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Mao thought, Xi’s dual circulation strategy, Belt and Road, BRICS, renminbi digitalization, Russia and China unlimited, the world’s most powerful manufacturing industry, tech supremacy, economic powerhouse, and the backing of the Global South.

All that against a polarized Hegemon in turmoil, with its genocidal aircraft carrier in West Asia totally spinning out of control.

US threats of a “clear choice” between ending several key strands of the Russia–China strategic partnership or facing a sanctions tsunami don’t cut it in Beijing. The same applies to Washington’s wishful attempts at preventing BRICS members from ditching the US dollar.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has made it quite clear that Moscow and Beijing have nearly reached the point of abandoning the US dollar in bilateral trade. And the outright theft of Russian assets by the collective west is the ultimate red line for BRICS – and all other nations watching with horror – as a whole: this is definitely a “non-agreement capable” Empire, as Lavrov has been emphasizing since late 2021.

Yaroslav Lisovolik, founder of BRICS+ Analytics, dismisses the Hegemon’s threats against BRICS as the road map toward an alternative payment system is still in its infancy. As for Russia–China trade, the non-dollar high-speed train has already left the station.

Yet the key question remains: how will Russia–Iran–China (RIC), as BRICS leaders, SCO members, and simultaneously top three “existential threats” to the Hegemon, be able to start implementing a new global security architecture without staring down the genocidals.

…………………………………

(Republished from The Cradle)

US: How To Waste Two Trillion Dollars – by Eric Margolis – 3 May 2024

 • 600 WORDS • 

Brown University’s cost of the Afghan war project just concluded that America’s longest war cost an estimated $US 2.2 trillion dollars – that’s ‘trillion dollars.”

If we add in George W. Bush’s fake `war on terror,’ Brown’s scholars estimate that the cost rises to US $8 trillion!

Most of this huge amount was financed by loans, not through taxes. Meaning that every dollar spent must be paid for by borrowing. That means paying interest (raised by taxes) on the borrowed money – $95 billion dollars of taxpayer money that Biden just gave to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine in a desperate attempt to buy the November election.

Interestingly, the much-ballyhooed war in Afghanistan has all but vanished from the media. All the CNN generals who postured on TV about the Afghan War have fallen into silence. They were dead wrong about the war. The minute Donald Trump ended the Afghan War by cutting off the billions in US money that kept the corrupt US-backed Kabul regime alive, the war ended and the blizzard of propaganda against Taliban abated. The $2.2 trillion war abruptly became unimportant.

I was blacklisted by top newspapers and TV stations in the US, Mideast and Europe for having predicted that the Taliban resistance movement would win the conflict. I wrote that Taliban was the only legitimate mass political movement in Afghanistan. America co-opted other groups, like the heroin-dealing Tajik Northern Alliance and some anti-Taliban factions backed by Russia or Iran. The US ended up backing the Afghan heroin trade – which Taliban has completely shut down since it returned to power in Kabul.

The United States is the most over-propagandized nation on earth. Americans are barraged around the clock by government propaganda, commercial messages, internet agitprop and pro-war movies. Even the old Soviet Union was not so flooded by non-stop propaganda.

Today, we get 24/7 advertising for Ukraine, Taiwan and, of course, Israel. Women have been a particular target for the anti-Taliban propaganda – the same Taliban that were US allies in the 1980’s, as I saw. Taliban’s mountaineers are a wild and crazy bunch of warriors. Everything they believe in runs counter to the overly feminized United States.

The zeitgeist of the Afghan warriors Taliban’s credo is ‘tobacco, guns, and war.’

My columns about why war in Afghanistan was a huge mistake made me an object of hate. A former born-again evangelical prime minister of Canada actually sent his flunkies to get my 40-year old column dropped from the nation’s largest newspaper. He detested what I had to say but apparently lost no sleep over the scores of Canadian soldiers he sent to their death in Afghanistan or the millions wasted on the foolish Afghan War.

Politicians and generals who lose wars and trillions of dollars should admit their folly and resign. The media that promoted the colonial Afghan war should be rid of the propagandists infesting its ranks. Today, we see CNN, the New York Times, and Fox, the twin voices of America’s neocons, cheer-leading for the massacres in Gaza.

Instead, those newscasters who shilled for the Afghan War are now busily promoted President Biden’s wars. They and TV commentators seem to have no shame when it comes to their hugely bloody, expensive errors in Afghanistan. Nor do we find many commentators or critics who share the least guilt over carpet bombing Afghan villages by B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers.

How many Afghan civilians did we kill? The Pentagon refuses to release estimates. The Soviets are estimated to have killed two million Afghans. I believe the US has killed at least one million.

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, suddenly we are taking about real money. Part of the dangerous inflation that today bedevils America was caused by reckless government spending on Afghanistan – as well as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

…………………..

Gaza Solidarity Encampments and Cop Repression Spread Across U.S. (Internationalist Group) 30 April 2024

Texas state troopers try to break up pro-Palestinian demonstration at the University of Texas in Austin on April 24.
(Photo: Jay Janner / Austin Statesman)

Democrat Biden, Republicans Smear Protests as “Anti-Semitic”

Cops/Security Guards Off Campus!

Labor: Defend Student Protesters!

APRIL 30 – As the U.S./Israel war on the Palestinian population of Gaza reached its 200th day (April 23), almost 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in the genocidal slaughter. The horror continues to mount relentlessly: over half of all homes in the strip destroyed by bombing, “flour massacres” as Israeli troops shoot hundreds of people desperately seeking food from aid trucks, the targeted murder of humanitarian aid workers, the spectre of imminent mass starvation. Now mass graves are being uncovered at Gaza hospital sites following raids by the Zionist military. As the Democratic administration of U.S. president Joe Biden continues to supply Israel with arms to carry out the butchery, on the home front Democrats and Republicans lyingly label anti-Zionist protests “anti-Semitic.” This filthy libel reached a crescendo at an April 17 hearing in Congress interrogating Columbia University president Nemat Shafik, who thanked the inquisitors and vowed to crack down on pro-Palestinian students and faculty.

In her groveling performance before the Congressional witch-hunters, Shafik condemned chants and slogans that have drawn the Zionists’ ire, promising lawmakers that “there will be consequences” for pro-Palestinian protesters. This set off a firestorm back at Columbia. That afternoon, as she was testifying in Washington, student protesters set up a Gaza solidarity encampment occupying the New York City campus’ South Lawn, leading to split-screen TV coverage. Faculty members complained that the university president threw academic freedom under the bus, while 20 Jewish professors slammed the witch-hunters’ weaponization of anti- Semitism. That night, Shafik called on the New York City Police Department to clear out the encampment, which they did the next morning, arresting 108 participants. The students were suspended from school and barred from campus; those living in dormitories were evicted on the spot, given 15 minutes to clear out their stuff.

Statistical summary of the U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza, currently under way. 

 (Graphic by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor)

Rather than squelching protest, this vindictive repression had the opposite effect, spurring Gaza solidarity actions across the country. Within hours of the police action, a new encampment sprouted at Columbia. On Friday, April 19, tents appeared in a plaza outside the New York University business school; that night, some 150 were arrested as hundreds yelled “Let them go.” The police complained that faculty protesters were the most vocal against the cops. The following Monday, April 22, an encampment sprung up at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, where at least 60 were arrested. In the next days, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. suspended the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and closed off Harvard Yard, but students set up an encampment there anyway. Occupations spread to other area schools, including Emerson College in downtown Boston, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and a little later, at Northeastern University.

The encampments began at elite Ivy League universities and private colleges in the Northeast, but soon spread to state universities across the country, including the University of Minnesota, Ohio State, Indiana University, the University of South Carolina, University of Texas, University of Colorado and Arizona State. In all of those cases, police were called in to clear the tents and carry out mass arrests, often brutally. At UT Austin, Republican Texas governor Gregg Abbott sent baton-wielding state police, some on horseback, to break up a pro-Palestinian demonstration – not even an encampment – saying “these protesters belong in jail” and that students in “hate-filled, anti- Semitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.” On April 24, the Republican House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson staged a provocation at Columbia, telling protesters to “stop the nonsense,” and saying that if it didn’t stop, university president Shafik should be fired and the National Guard called in.

It’s not just right-wing Republicans who are smearing and repressing the Gaza solidarity camps and pro-Palestinian demonstrations. On April 21, the White House issued a statement in reference to the Columbia protests, saying “This blatant anti-Semitism [sic] is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses.” After speaking at the University of Virginia the next day, Democratic president Biden told the press “I condemn the antisemitic protests” – putting the presidential seal of approval on this disgusting slander of young people rightly indignant at the genocidal war armed and financed by his administration. The same day, New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul beat Johnson to the punch, rushing to Columbia to denounce “anti-Semitism,” seconded by New York City’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams. In Boston, liberal Democratic mayor Michelle Wu sent city police to assault the Emerson encampment (118 arrests) and liberal Democratic governor Maura Healey deployed Massachusetts state police to bust up the Gaza solidarity camp at Northeastern (102 arrests).

The brutality of the cop attack in several places horrified many. At Emory University in Atlanta, a CNN video shows a woman professor with a handbag admonishing university, city and state police to stop beating a protester when a beefy officer viciously manhandles and throws her to the ground, another piles on and a third stands watch with a semi-automatic pepper-ball gun. This wanton violence against peaceful protesters and even a faculty member passing by is hardly surprising coming from Atlanta police who each got a $500 bonus for harshly repressing the 2020 protests over the racist police murder of George Floyd; who at the height of those protests shot and killed Rayshard Brooks for falling asleep in a Wendy’s drive-thru lane; and who in December 2022 executed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita) in their war against demonstrators protesting the “Cop City” police training center.¹ What shocked liberals was this kind of repression being meted out at Emory, a top-flight university with a $60,000 tuition.

Against the Gaza Genocide, Bring Out the Power of the Working Class

Banner at the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in New York City,  April 22.
(Photo: Stefan Jeremiah / AP)

For hundreds of thousands of people across the United States – and millions worldwide – who have taken to the streets to protest the horrific slaughter in Gaza, the solidarity encampments on U.S. campuses have spurred hopes that they would mushroom into a mass movement. In New York City alone, the mayor reported more than 1,900 pro-Palestinian protests in the five months from October 7 to mid-March. Yet so far these have had no visible effect on U.S. policy, much less on the ground in Gaza. As of the end of April, some 80 encampments have been reported and over 800 arrests, climbing toward 1,000 as campus administrators look to police power to discipline academia. This is very significant, but nowhere near the scope of the 2020 mass marches that rocked U.S. cities for months protesting racist police murder, and it is politically still far from the radicalization of the student/youth revolt against the Vietnam War symbolized by the 1968 Columbia University occupation.

The reality is that the present protests have yet not gone beyond the dead-end of liberal pressure politics, seeking to turn capitalism’s universities into morally liberated zones. But the hardline Zionists in Jerusalem, together with the imperialist mass murderers in Washington who finance, arm and jointly carry out the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, will not be pressured into “changing their priorities.” They can only be stopped by a potentially stronger force, that of the working class here and internationally. It is to that force that the most serious student activists must turn. This requires a program of sharp class struggle.

Of course, new developments may change the course of events, such as a bloody eviction of an encampment. As the old saying has it, the brutality of a cop’s riot stick can quickly raise consciousness and dispel “ivory tower” illusions. Meanwhile, the Israeli military is readying what could be mass murder on an even greater scale with an offensive in Rafah in the southern end of Gaza. There, a million Palestinians are bottled up, many in makeshift shelter after fleeing their now-destroyed homes, stuck on a waterless desert amid the searing summer heat. As people watch an actual genocide taking place before their eyes, and are desperately seeking some way to take action against it, various intractable forces are interacting. You have kill-crazed Zionist militarists; U.S. imperialist rulers seeking to stave off the unraveling of their dominance and pushing the world closer to WWIII; McCarthyite witch-hunters in Washington and university authorities desperate to “restore order” to save their jobs. The result could be an explosive situation that goes beyond the campuses.

As the school year draws to an end, continued spread of protests, and of repression, could lay the basis for student strikes and walkouts across the country. This would certainly be an important development, but rather than illusions in “student power,” looking to and linking up with the power of the working class that can bring everything in society to a halt is key. These things don’t fall from the sky; revolutionaries work to bring the program of class struggle into the fight. Our comrades in Portland, Oregon have won construction workers unions to call for workers action to stop arms shipments to Israel, as Palestinian unions in Gaza urged. Building on that and putting such calls into practice, is a concrete way to strike a blow against Israeli and U.S. warmakers. In the face of repression against the student Gaza solidarity encampments, bringing out labor to defend the protesters could significantly change the balance of forces.

The key is a revolutionary program and revolutionary leadership. In the campus protests, this starts with a clear understanding that universities are part of the capitalist system, and those that administer them are servants of the capitalist ruling class. They can’t be made into “friends of the people” or allies of the oppressed. The war on Gaza is not a case of “mistaken priorities” but an expression of the barbarism of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalist, in a state of accelerating decay. Thus, it is vital to connect today’s struggles to the fight to overthrow this system through international socialist revolution.

The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY) have been present daily at solidarity protests outside Columbia University, as well as at the New School and NYU. Members of RIY and the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (CUNY) are participating in the Gaza solidarity encampment at City College. As early as last October and repeatedly since then, the Internationalist Clubs have taken the lead in protesting McCarthyite repression against defenders of the Palestinian people at Hunter College and elsewhere in CUNY.² In the face of the snowballing repression, we call to drop all charges against pro-Palestinian demonstrators and demand police and security guards off campus. And we appeal to the unions – beginning with the Professional Staff Congress representing 30,000 faculty and staff at CUNY – saying Labor: defend the students protesting genocide in Gaza!

Revolutionary Internationalist Youth at University of California, Berkeley Gaza solidarity encampment, April 22.
(Photo: Jose Carlos Fajardo / Bay Area News Group)

Across the country, the IG and RIY have been to multiple encampments in the Boston area (Emerson, MIT, Northeastern, Tufts); at Portland State University in Oregon where a building takeover is underway, to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and participated daily in the encampment at the University of California in Berkeley. Everywhere we have combined the call to link up with the power of the working class, to the program for a binational Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.

Above all this struggle is a political fight against the combined forces of the capitalist state, and its leading parties, Democrats and Republicans, which are responsible for financing, arming and jointly waging genocidal war against the Palestinians. It is not about “bearing moral witness,” “speaking truth to power” or other liberal platitudes. Against the bipartisan war party in Washington, which just voted $95 billion to wage U.S. imperialist wars, we call to build a revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggles of all the oppressed. The stakes couldn’t be higher. ■

---

1. 1. See “Under Biden and the Democrats, Racist Police Terror Rages On,” The Internationalist No. 69-70, January-May 2023; and “Atlanta’s ‘Cop City’: Sinister Center for Racist Police Repression,” Revolution No. 20, September 2023.
2. 2. See “Defend the Palestinians! Defy the Witch-Hunters!” (24 October), “Hunter College Speak-Out Defies Intimidation Campaign” (12 November) and “McCarthyite Film Ban at Hunter College Struck Down By Student/Faculty Protest” (17 March).

…………………….

Source

RFK Jr. is all over conservative media. Trump’s camp is concerned. (Politico) May 2024

POLITICO – Story by Natalie Allison, Alex Isenstadt and Brittany Gibson

RFK Jr says Biden is ‘worse’ for democracy than Trump

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s increasingly frequent appearances on conservative media platforms are beginning to raise alarms at Mar-a-Lago.

It’s another sign of the rising threat that Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate, poses to Trump.

In recent months, Kennedy has become a regular on Fox News and Newsmax, and he is now a staple on the conservative podcast circuit — being interviewed by the likes of Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly. While railing against President Joe Biden, Kennedy is actively courting an audience with the young listeners of bro podcasters and conservative-coded YouTubers that skew anti-“woke.”

That’s squarely on Trump’s turf, not Biden’s.

“It is concerning and beyond logic,” said Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager, “that there are some conservative platforms that continue to give a voice to someone that has called the NRA a terrorist group, who believes in eliminating gas powered engines, believes in a 70% tax bracket and generally subscribes to the same school of thought as Karl Marx.”

Two other senior Republicans close to Trump’s campaign and granted anonymity to speak freely similarly expressed frustration about Kennedy’s appearances on conservative airwaves.

Though Kennedy has been popular with conservative media since he initially launched his candidacy as a Democrat, his frequent appearances on Trump-aligned platforms now come as he runs as an independent candidate who could cut into Trump’s support. The former president this past weekend went on multiple tirades about Kennedy on his Truth Social site, declaring him a “Democrat ‘Plant’” and “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat.” And he said “A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE.”

Kennedy, meanwhile, is talking to millions of right-leaning voters on traditional conservative platforms. A POLITICO analysis of Kennedy’s 69 media appearances since January, as listed on his campaign’s website, found a plurality of them — nearly half — were with conservative, libertarian-leaning, or openly anti-”woke” hosts, with the remaining interviews divided between liberal, politically neutral, and spiritual or environmentalist hosts.

“They see an opening, they see a robust ecosystem on the right that they can pull votes from,” said Matt Gorman, a former communications adviser for Sen. Tim Scott’s presidential campaign, referring to Kennedy. “I think sometimes, Republicans tend to lull ourselves into believing, ‘Oh, he’s just taking votes from Biden.’ No, he’s going after everybody.”

Kennedy has also taken on championing one of Trump’s top policy issues: closing the U.S. border. That’s in addition to questioning the legitimacy of the charges brought against rioters at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, a cohort who Trump has praised and suggested he would pardon.

In a statement to POLITICO, Shapiro, one of the conservative hosts who has interviewed Kennedy, described him as a “fascinating figure” worth interviewing.

“RFK Jr is the highest polling third-party candidate since Ross Perot,” Shapiro said. “He’s a fascinating figure and I regularly interview newsworthy people across the political spectrum on my show. With that said, I’ve made clear that I support President Trump’s reelection effort, and have even co-hosted a campaign event for him.”

While polling averages show Trump with a slight lead over Biden in most swing states, Kennedy is currently averaging 8 to 10 percent of the vote in those states, drawing about evenly from both major-party candidates.

A Monmouth poll released this week shows 17 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump — sometimes referred to as “double haters” — and tend to be younger. Among voters under 35 years old, 27 percent fall into that category, the poll found, while Kennedy’s overall favorability rating has gone up by double digits among both independents and Republicans since December.

And a survey of under-30 voters conducted in April for Snapchat by SocialSphere, which is owned by Harvard pollster John Della Volpe, found that 52 percent of those young voters were at least considering a vote for Kennedy.

If Kennedy’s appearances on conservative media are frustrating to Trump’s campaign, Kennedy’s supporters are reveling in the increased attention that Trump’s broadsides against the candidate have given him.

“No one is worried that Kennedy is on Trump’s radar,” a person familiar with the Kennedy campaign said, adding it’s seen as free advertising.

One Republican strategist speaking on condition of anonymity noted that Kennedy seems to be following a strategy employed by a number of GOP candidates in recent years trying to drive up their name recognition among conservatives — not just going on conservative television channels like Fox News and Newsmax, but taking advantage of the proliferation of right-leaning podcasts and other programming.

“In a way Kennedy’s taken the tack of a B-level Republican Senate candidate,” the GOP strategist said.

…………………………..

RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

US: Boston Area Students Against Israeli Genocide: Report from the Weekend of April 26 – by Walter Smelt III – 1 May 2024

Cops on the campus of Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

When I strolled into Harvard Yard around 6:00 pm on Friday, a Shabbat service was taking place in the student encampment for Palestine. Dozens of young people were seated in a large circle on the lawn, many wearing keffiyehs, a few wearing kippahs, and at least one wearing both. A guitar player strummed and led the circle in a Yiddish song while campers nearby talked in small groups, or stared at laptops, perhaps preparing for finals. Three police SUVs were parked in sight of the camp on the centuries-old Yard, and a keffiyeh was tied around the sculpted head of the university’s namesake, John Harvard.

The encampment—or “the Liberated Zone,” as a big banner proclaimed it—now consisted of more than 40 tents. It had grown since Wednesday, when it was assembled by surprise during a noon rally on the last day of classes. Video of the moment shows students suddenly dashing onto the grass with backpacks, tarps, and bags to begin erecting tents while supporters cheer.

I had come to observe the camp and speak with Lea Kayali, a campus organizer and Palestinian American in her third year at Harvard Law School. Her family is from Jaffa and the West Bank, and the bombardment of Gaza has hit her hard. “I wake up and read the names of the dead,” she said, “the places that have been destroyed. Each headline is more gutting than the last.” Even Kayali’s cousins in the West Bank, whom she said don’t leave their houses for fear of being attacked by settlers or arrested, always remind her: “Keep eyes on Gaza.”

Though the devastation of Gaza can feel distant in the US, according to Kayali it is not. This is the point being made by student protesters at Harvard, Columbia University (where an encampment, and its police suppression, first made headlines), and other campuses across the country. Student demands include disclosure of investments in Israeli companies and others profiting from the attack on and occupation of Palestine, and divestment from those companies.

Kayali has been heartened by the enthusiasm of students new to the movement. “It’s been activating for many on campus,” she said, emphasizing the collective labor the camp requires. Students coordinate food and organize political programming, like a teach-in on the history of student activism. The camp, she said, “is an exemplar of community care, mutual aid.”

The moment the tents popped up, Kayali said, “the only sound you could hear was cheering. And this was from students who were just walking through the Yard!” Arabic students began to dance the dabke, a Palestinian folk dance, in a huge circle after the tents were raised. “Seeing a revolutionary joy that has really been absent the last seven months gave me more assurance that we can build the world we want,” she added. (When I left her, Kayali got up to help a couple of Black students practicing the steps to the dabke.)

Another inspiring moment for Kayali came Thursday during a visit to the encampment at Northeastern University, across the Charles River in Boston. There, the camp was encircled by a large ring of Boston police in riot gear, with helmets and zip tie handcuffs. But the activists stood in a smaller circle around the tents, linking arms and standing their ground. For about 20 minutes, she said, there was an intense stand-off. And then the police backed off.

Kayali’s visit to Northeastern typifies the supportive relationship among area encampments, as many student activists communicate across campuses. For instance, a speaker at a pro-Palestinian rally this week at Berklee College of Music mentioned spending time at the Emerson College encampment before it was violently broken up by police and over 100 arrests were made. That Berklee rally ended with a march to join the Northeastern encampment.

Though the police pressure on Northeastern dissipated Thursday without mass arrests, early Saturday morning the school administration followed through on their threats to break up the camp. This time, Northeastern police, the Boston police, and Massachusetts state troopers detained over 100 students, arresting those who could not or would not produce Northeastern IDs. The tents and other camp equipment were thrown into moving trucks.

I saw one of these moving trucks leaving as I entered the Northeastern campus Saturday morning around 10am. Where the camp had been was an unbroken green expanse, empty of tents and students, surrounded by metal barricades. Nearby, a group of students faced some police officers and chanted “Israel bombs, NEU pays! How many kids did you kill today?”

A Northeastern student on the scene, senior Sarah Barber, told me that Northeastern’s ties to the defense industry, particularly Raytheon, had long been a subject of debate on campus. Even when she was a freshman, there were posters in common spaces that said “Pull out of Raytheon.” In fact, in 2023 the Student Government Association voted to call on school administration to end contracts with private military companies.

Barber said she was sympathetic to the camp, but also worried that if she joined, the university might withhold her diploma. She saw many on campus who were supportive of the encampment and the Palestinian cause, but others were hostile, and tempers sometimes ran high. Barber said, “I once walked by a girl in a hijab being screamed at by people. I asked if she was okay, and she said, ‘They just started screaming at me about Gaza.’”

The administration’s excuse for breaking up the camp was that it included “professional protesters” from outside, and that antisemitic chants had been heard, including “Kill the Jews.” But as another pro-Palestinian student on the scene, Alina Caudle, pointed out, that phrase was actually yelled by a counter-protester Friday night at the camp. In video of the incident, a young man draped in an Israeli flag shouted, “Kill the Jews! Anybody on board? That’s what you chanted for!” Pro-Palestinian students can then be heard shouting him down.

I stopped by the MIT encampment on Sunday, a warm spring day. Students talked, snacked, worked on laptops, or spoke to visitors. While I was there, a couple of mothers from Lexington came to ask how they could help, and a high school student took some pictures. Seated on a lawn chair in the sun, I spoke for over an hour to Zeno (who uses just his last name), a graduate student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—Netanyahu’s alma mater.

Zeno, a former captain in the Air Force, had been active in the Black Graduate Students Association (BGSA) before October 7. He explained, “We were doing a lot of group studies on different liberation movements. My family’s Black American and my mother’s Puerto Rican—through that side there’s indigenous Taino—so being Black and indigenous, I know oppressed populations when I see them.”

Groups that Zeno organized with demonstrated for a ceasefire and held a teach-in about Black and Palestinian solidarity. MIT Graduates for Palestine began researching and publishing about MIT’s ties to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Student groups also created referenda calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to MIT’s “special relationship” with the Israeli ministry; a vote by MIT undergraduates resulted in 63% support for such a resolution, and MIT graduate students voted 70% in favor.

“One of the more concerning pieces of research,” Zeno said, “involves autonomous robotic swarms. Imagine quadcopter drones being AI-driven rather than piloted, and imagine if they could swarm together. AI built by Zionists—how dangerous would that be? Sci-fi kind of stuff.”

When the police cracked down at Columbia, MIT students quickly came together on the night of Sunday, April 21, to set up tents. Zeno said it garnered a lot of support from other students and faculty.

He explained, “It’s a hearts and minds campaign—but first hearts. When you put yourself on the line, risking arrest, risking your career, that inspires people. We get more and more courage. Someone might say, ‘I was nervous about what my lab might think of me,’ but now they’re spending the night out here. So every day we’re growing the community.”

Zeno understands the risks better than many. When the Emerson College encampment was threatened late Wednesday night, he and about ten other MIT students answered a call for support and crossed the Charles River to join the Emerson activists.

Zeno said, “The state troopers pulled up with lots of cars, zip ties, face shields, very militarized.” The MIT students were chanting when confronted by a policeman, who said they wouldn’t be arrested if they left immediately. “We didn’t reply except to start chanting ‘Free Palestine,’ at which point the cops got…agitated.”

He said his face was slammed against the wall, and then he was slammed against the hood of the police car. “I told the cop, I’m a disabled veteran, I have an autoimmune disorder that makes my fascia tight, so you have to be careful how you’re cuffing me. My arms don’t move that far up my back! But he kept trying to force them farther up.” According to Zeno, his friend, a Black Muslim, had his head banged on the ground, resulting in a concussion. Despite this and other injuries to protesters, police initially claimed the only injuries were to officers.

Just as the crackdown at Columbia begot more college encampments, though, this police violence only increased students’ solidarity. Zeno described how, as he was being cuffed with his face against the hood of the car, he was looking into the eyes of another MIT student being cuffed on the other side of the car. Laughing, he said, “She was newer to the camp, I hadn’t even talked to her yet, but we trauma-bonded.”

When I ask about how solidarity with Palestine connects to other causes, Zeno warms to his topic. He talks about white supremacy, corruption in the military, the two-party system, the working class, climate change, while a student in a colorful crocheted kipah with a Star of David necklace steps closer and starts nodding. “I see vets unhoused and people walking over them! This is a full-on dystopia and this is not how society is supposed to function. And then I come here and see people helping each other, pooling their resources, and not to add to their 401k.”

He pauses. “We could be so much better. We have the imagination to build a better society, and it’s people like this administration who can’t see it.”

His words reminded me of the Shabbat service I’d heard two days before at Harvard. Someone was unfolding the passage where the prophet Moses asks to see the face of God. They said, “Moses, after fleeing persecution, dares to ask for the unimaginable. When I think of my ancestors, I think of his courage in asking this. But the difference is, what we are asking for is not unimaginable. We are imagining it here together as one. Shabbat Shalom!”

In the background, I could see Kayali still practicing the dabke. She had been joined by a couple more people who jumped and wheeled together, the circle widening as I walked away.

…………………..

Source

The Fight Over US THAAD missiles in Korea – by Gregory Elich – 1 May 2024

Since the U.S. military brought its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to South Korea in 2017, it has met with sustained local resistance. THAAD is the centerpiece of the numerous actions the United States has undertaken to enmesh South Korea in its hostile anti-China campaign, a course that Korean peace activists are fighting to reverse.

In a unanimous decision at the end of March, South Korea’s Constitutional Court dismissed two challenges lodged by residents of Seongju County against the deployment of THAAD. [1] Since its arrival, the THAAD system has met with recurring demonstrations in the nearby village of Soseong-ri. The hope in the Yoon and Biden administrations is that the court’s decision will dishearten opponents of THAAD. In this expectation, they are already disappointed, as anti-THAAD activists responded to the court’s decision by vowing to “fight to the end.” [2]

Although protestors have regularly held rallies on the road leading to the THAAD site, swarms of Korean police cleared them away to allow free passage for U.S. military supply trucks. Opposition to THAAD has angered U.S. officials, leading the Biden administration to dispatch Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Seoul to deliver the message that it deemed the situation “unacceptable” and progress on establishing the base needed to accelerate. Austin also raised objections to protests by residents in Pohang over noise from U.S. Apache attack helicopters conducting live-fire exercises. [3] Predictably, the Yoon administration responded by prioritizing U.S. demands over the welfare of the Korean people and promised “close cooperation for normalizing routine and unfettered access to the THAAD site” and “improvement of the combined training conditions.” [4]

THAAD is billed as an anti-missile defense system consisting of an interceptor missile battery, a fire control and communications unit, and an AN/TPY-2 X-band radar. The ostensible purpose of THAAD in Seongju is to counter incoming North Korean missiles, but serious doubts exist about its efficacy in that role. In terms of coverage, THAAD’s position in Seongju puts it in range to cover the main U.S. military base in South Korea, Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, but out of range to protect Seoul, which at any rate is indefensible due to its proximity to the border. Even so, it is questionable how much utility the system offers even for Pyeongtaek. THAAD’s missiles are designed to intercept incoming ballistic missiles at an altitude of 40 to 150 kilometers. The THAAD battery would have less than three and a half minutes to detect and counter-launch against a high-altitude ballistic missile fired from the farthestpoint in North Korea. By then, the incoming missile would have fallen below the lower-end altitude range of 40 kilometers, leaving it invulnerable to interception. [5] That would be the best-case scenario, as in the event of a war, the North Koreans are not likely to be so accommodating as to launch ballistic missiles from as far away as possible.

Furthermore, the THAAD battery in Seongju is equipped with six launchers and 48 interceptor missiles. With a thirty-minute THAAD battery launcher reload time, incoming missiles would not take long to deplete THAAD’s ability to respond, even under the most accommodating circumstances.

An upgrade was recently made to integrate THAAD with Patriot PAC-3 defense to intercept ballistic missiles at a lower altitude. This enhancement is of doubtful utility, as the radar’s response would still be constrained by the short flight time of an incoming missile. For all the hype about the successful interception of Iranian missiles fired at Israel, the Patriot’s showing in a more suitable scenario was less than stellar. It had an advantage there, as Iranian and Yemeni launch sites were situated much farther away from their target than in the Korean case. Yet, out of 120 Iranian ballistic missiles, the Patriot system shot down only one. The others were intercepted primarily by U.S. warplanes. [6]

North Korea’s development of a solid-fuel hypersonic intermediate-range missile has added another unmeetable challenge for THAAD. Because of its proximity, it is doubtful that North Korea would target US forces with high-altitude ballistic missiles in case of war. Instead, it would likely rely on its long-range artillery, cruise missiles, and short-range ballistic missiles, flying well below the lower limit of THAAD’s altitude coverage.

Despite its doubtful defensive effectiveness on the Korean Peninsula, the United States attaches enormous importance to THAAD’s deployment in South Korea, which suggests an unstated motivation. A clue is provided by the stationing in Japan of two stand-alone AN/TPY-2 radars without an accompanying THAAD system. [7] In other words, it is the radar that matters to the U.S. military, and the linkage to THAAD interceptors is primarily a pretense made necessary by popular feeling in Korea.  What makes the AN/TPY-2 special is its ability to operate in two modes. In terminal mode, it feeds tracking data to the THAAD missile battery, allowing it to target an incoming ballistic missile as it descends toward its target. In forward-based mode, the THAAD missile battery is not involved, and the role of the radar is to detect a ballistic missile as it ascends from its launching pad, even from deep into China. In this mode, the radar is integrated into the U.S. missile defense system and sends tracking data to interceptor missiles stationed on U.S. territory and Pacific bases. [8] As a U.S. Army publication points out, when in forward-based mode, a field commander may use the radar system “to concurrently support both regional and strategic missile defense operations.” [9]

There are hints that preparations may already be underway to establish the conditions necessary for THAAD to operate in forward-based mode. Last year, South Korea and Japan agreed to link their radars to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii. [10] The ostensible purpose is to enhance the tracking accuracy of missiles fired from North Korea, but the concept applies equally well to Chinese missiles. It is not a stretch to imagine that if South Korean and Japanese radars have been linked to the United States, the same may be true with the THAAD’s AN/TPY-2. Certainly, if the U.S. Army switches the mode, it will not be informing South Korean authorities, so sure are the Americans that they can freely treat Korean sovereignty with contempt. Switching an AN/TPY-2 radar from one mode to the other takes only eight hours, a quick process that is opaque to outsiders. [11]

An anti-ballistic missile system can easily be overwhelmed by a full-scale enemy attack. The system’s primary purpose is to support a first-strike capability, in which the United States takes out as many of the enemy’s missiles as possible, leaving the anti-ballistic missile system to counter the few surviving missiles. In essence, that makes the radar in the THAAD system a first-strike weapon. The closer the radar is stationed to an adversary’s ballistic missile launch, the more precise the tracking provided to the U.S.-based anti-missile system. South Korea is ideally located for the AN/TPY-2, where its radar can cover much of eastern China. [12] The effect is to enlist South Korea, willingly or not, in U.S. war plans against China. When residents in Seongju argue that THAAD makes them a target, they are not mistaken.

The Yoon administration is taking integration with the U.S. missile defense system one step further in planning to spend an estimated $584 million to procure American SM-3 interceptor missiles, suitable for protecting the United States and its bases in the Pacific.[13] The SM-3 interceptors are to be deployed on South Korean Aegis destroyers, which will need to be upgraded at additional cost to handle them. [14]

Residents in Seongju are also concerned about potential health risks associated with living adjacent to the THAAD installation. Radars transmit pulses of high-frequency electromagnetic fields, and the AN/TPY-2 radar generates radio frequencies of 8.55 to 10 GHz. [15] According to the World Health Organization, radio frequency waves below 10 GHz “penetrate exposed tissues and produce heating due to energy absorption.” [16] One study observes that radars generate pulsed microwaves “in very high values of peak power compared to mean power emitted.” To evaluate risk, one must also take peak values into account. In that case study, exposure levels for 49 workers were assessed, where it was noted that “peak values are about 200 – 4000 times higher than corresponding mean values.” Although recorded mean values fell below exposure limits that could have caused thermal effects, the peak values suggested potential non-thermal impacts, and “peak power density frequently exceeded the reference level and were correlated with nervous system effects.” [17]

The AN/TPY-2 relies on a phased array antenna. The U.S. Army publication on Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations warns, “Dangerous radio frequency power levels exist on and near antennas and phased-array radars during operations. Radio frequency electromagnetic radiation may cause serious burns and internal injury. All personnel must observe radio frequency danger indications and stay outside designated keep out zones.” It adds that the keep out zone can vary according to power output “but may extend out from a radar face in excess of 10 kilometers and sweep more than 70 degrees on each side from the system bore sight.” [18] In other words, the extent of risk depends heavily on the radar’s power output and disposition.

Where the radar is aimed matters; the extent of human exposure is sharply reduced outside of the direct path of the primary beam. The U.S. Army’s AN/TPY-2 forward-based operations field manual specifies three search plans for the radar while in that mode. The “standard operations mode,” named Autonomous Search Plans, “normally provides multiple search sectors,” and in general, the larger the ballistic missile named area of interest, “the larger the search volume of the radar sector.” [19] Since China constitutes a vast area of interest, the THAAD radar in forward-based mode potentially exposes a wide range of the local population to radiation.

Shortly after THAAD was brought to South Korea, the Daegu Regional Environmental Office attempted to ascertain the environmental impact through periodic measurements; results registered at safe levels at a point in time when the THAAD system was not yet fully implemented. However, the Environmental Office noted that the radar’s power output level and vertical and horizontal angles were unknown “due to military secrecy.” [20] While the low measurements were suggestive, they were essentially meaningless without knowing what radar settings were being measured.

Since the arrival of THAAD in 2017, the local population’s concerns about possible health impacts from electromagnetic radiation had gone unanswered until June 21 last year, when the Ministry of Defense issued a press release announcing the result of its THAAD environmental impact assessment. The Ministry of Environment judged the impact as “insignificant.” [21] The press release reported that the highest measurement registered was 0.018870 watts per square meter (W/㎡), far below the limit for human exposure.

An earlier series of tests in Gimcheon City, at four locations northwest of the radar, produced a slightly higher but comparable measurement to the Seongju test, definitely within a safe limit. The tests were conducted over one year, ending in May 2023. The highest and maximum readings were registered at the farthest location, 10.2 kilometers from the radar. [22] However, as in the earlier Daegu test, nothing about how the radar operated was known.

At first glance, the Seongju test result would appear to allay concerns over the radar’s health impact. But has it? The most striking aspect of the press release is its lack of transparency. No information is provided other than a single result. The Ministry of Defense withheld information because it would be “likely to significantly harm the vital interests of the state if disclosed.” [23] It is unclear how revealing details about the test conditions, such as the radar’s angle, would pose a security risk. More likely, United States Forces Korea preferred to hide the details from public view so that the test could be conducted in a way sure to produce safe readings.

Unlike the earlier Gimcheon report, which identified the populated areas where measurements had been taken, the Seongju environmental impact assessment “was done for the entire base, including the site negotiated by the Daegu Regional Environmental Office.” [24] The phrasing suggests that no measurements were taken outside of the THAAD base, an odd choice given the concerns of nearby residents. Even within that limitation, less than thirty percent of the base was included in the assessment. [25]

Several factors can produce dramatically different results when measuring radiation. The public’s only knowledge of the Seongu test is that radiation poses no risk in an unknown set of conditions. Risk remains a mystery in other scenarios. We do not know which mode(s) the test included. It is probable that only the terminal mode was involved, aligning with the fiction that the radar’s purpose is purely defensive. Estimated ranges for the AN/TPY-2 vary but are consistently far higher when set to forward-based mode. Therefore, a test in forward mode could be expected to produce a higher electromagnetic radiation reading, as the longer the range, the higher the average power the radar has to generate. [26]

There are also the factors of angle and direction. The press release was silent on these matters, as well. In none of the measurements was it known in which direction the radar was pointed. In terminal mode, the radar would presumably point north. The forward-based mode should have the radar directed toward China in a different and much broader range of directions. Furthermore, the AN/TPY-2 can be set at any angle ranging from ten to 60 degrees. [27]Presumably, the angle would be positioned much lower in forward-based mode than in terminal mode, resulting in a more direct environmental impact on the ground.

The highest radiofrequency radiation is in the path of the radar’s main beam. Outside of that, there is a sharp drop-off, typically at levels thousands of times lower. [28] If measurements are taken outside the line of the beam, then results would be misleadingly low. Also unknown are the positions of the radar in various planned operation scenarios. What populated areas would be situated directly in line of the beam? Without that information, let alone corresponding measurements, potential risk remains unknown.

The U.S. Army conducted the Seongju test, and the South Korean Air Force, partnering with the Korea Radio Promotion Association, measured the radiation. [29] There was no outside involvement in planning or conducting the test. Lacking independent outside oversight, the U.S. military chose the test conditions based on the motivation to produce a reassuring finding. In coordination with selected third parties, the Ministry of Environment’s sole role was to review the measurements handed to them by the South Korean military.

In its recent decision, the Constitutional Court dismissed every point in the two appeals that challenged the deployment of THAAD. The petition filed by Won Buddhists charged that THAAD violated their freedom of religion by requiring them to obtain permission from the military to conduct religious activities and meetings and by restricting pilgrimages. Similarly, the petition by residents argued that security restrictions imposed on farmers required them to seek permission from the police to work their fields. To both complaints, the court ruled that restricted access to a religious site and farmland does not apply to the constitution, as a joint U.S.-Korean commission had decided to deploy THAAD in accordance with the Mutual Defense Treaty. The court summarized its point by asserting, “If the exercise of public authority has no effect on the legal status of the applicants, there is no possible violation of their fundamental rights in the first place.” It was a curious framing for the court to adopt in that it ignored the impact on residents who could no longer conduct their activities in a normal manner. In dismissing the challenges relating to health concerns and noise pollution, the court cited the Ministry of Defense’s environmental test press release in evidence. Finally, in rejecting the challenge that THAAD would make Seongju a target in times of war, the court made the specious claim that since the system is defensive, it cannot be said that it “is likely to threaten the peaceful existence of the people by subjecting them to a war of aggression.” [30] Chinese complaints about the nature of THAAD are well known in South Korea; the judges could hardly have been unaware of how deployment has been perceived in the People’s Republic of China.

Following close on the heels of the publicized environmental test result, the court’s decision surely had Washington in a jubilant mood. South Korea’s military promised to “work closely with the U.S. side to faithfully reflect the opinions of the U.S. side so that the project can proceed.” [31] They plan to expedite the steps needed to “normalize” the base and ensure its permanent emplacement.

THAAD can be considered a microcosm representing everything unsettling about the U.S.-South Korea military alliance. It is a relationship serving American geostrategic objectives in which Koreans play a subservient role, often acting against their interests. As East Asian specialist Seungsook Moon explains, “While there have been variations and changes in the U.S. relationships with host countries over time, the military relationship between the USA and South Korea has been persistently neocolonial.” Moon adds that, in “maintaining the boundary between us and them,” the South Korean state “imposes the unequal burden of hosting the missile defense system on lower-class and rural citizens” and “exacerbates class inequality by diminishing these citizens’ quality of life and human security.” [32] The costs of U.S. militarism are also offloaded onto Koreans in other ways, as well, including communities impacted by toxic pollution from active and abandoned American bases. Those living near live-fire practice exercises must endure unbearable noise levels, while crimes committed by American soldiers victimize residents near bases.

As for South Korea as a whole, the presence of U.S. bases in the context of American hyper-militarized confrontation with China and North Korea poses an ongoing danger of dragging the nation into war. Indeed, the United States is quite explicit about the role it assigns to South Korea. Shortly after taking office, in a revealing statement, President Biden declared, “When we strengthen our alliances, we amplify our power.” [33] That leaves no doubt about whose interests allied nations are expected to serve. In South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, the United States has found an ideal lackey, a true believer who eagerly prioritizes American demands over the welfare of his people. It has long been a U.S. goal for its alliance to expand beyond the Korean Peninsula. With Yoon in power, the United States had been progressing toward moving the alliance in that direction. Austin and South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik recently announced that the alliance is committed to “operate across the region with greater bilateral and multilateral political-military alignment to realize this vision of a true global comprehensive strategic Alliance…” [34]

The U.S. objective is total economic, diplomatic, and military domination of the Asia-Pacific. When Yoon met with Biden last year, he signaled his support for that policy, including the usual anti-China euphemisms. [35] Biden and Yoon have also been ramping up regional tensions with a nearly nonstop series of aggressive full-scale military exercises intended to intimidate and threaten North Korea and China. [36]

Yoon and Biden have underestimated the determination of the Korean progressive movement, which is unswayed by recent developments. If anything, the setbacks have energized them. On April 27, the seventh anniversary of the introduction of THAAD in Soseong-ri, activists held a demonstration at the site to proclaim their undying opposition, shouting, “We will be with you until the day THAAD is dismantled!” [37]

One of the speakers, student Lee Ki-eun, pointed out that THAAD’s radar is intended to defend the United States and Japan. “It is completely for foreign powers.” She added, “What is Korea? At the forefront of the confrontation with North Korea and China, the lives of our people are sacrificed for foreign powers.” Lee urged her audience: “With greater determination, with an even greater life force like a bursting prairie fire, let’s continue the anti-THAAD struggle!” [38]

The anti-THAAD battle is part of a broader movement by Korean progressives against the deepening military alliance with the United States and Yoon’s colonial mindset that sacrifices Korean sovereignty and the welfare of the Korean people on the altar of U.S. imperialism. As Ham Jae-gyu of the Unification Committee declared at the rally, “The Japanese colonial period merely passed the baton to U.S. imperialism, and subjugation by imperialism is accelerating. The United States is trampling every corner of Korea.” [39]

Notes.

[1] https://www.lawtimes.co.kr/news/197154

[2] Kwan Sik Yoon, “Anti-THAAD Group: ‘The Constitution Does Not Protect Basic Rights…We Will Fight to the End,” Yonhap, March 29, 2024.

[3] Oh Seok-min, “S. Korea, U.S. Working Closely on How to Improve THAAD Base Conditions: Seoul Ministry,” Yonhap, March 29, 2021.

[4] Press Release, “54^th Security Consultative Meeting Joint Communique,” U.S. Department of Defense, November 3, 2022.

[5] Yoon Min-sik, “THAAD, Capacity and Limitations,” Korea Herald, July 21, 2016

[6] Lauren Frias, “US Fighter Jets, Destroyers, and Patriot Missiles Shot Down Loads of Iranian Weapons to Shield Israel From an Unprecedented Attack,” Business Insider, April 15, 2024.

Vera Bergengruen, “How the U.S. Rallied to Defend Israel From Iran’s Massive Attack,” Time, April 15, 2024.

[7] “U.S. Defense Infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific: Background and Issues for Congress,” p. 39, Congressional Research Service, June 6, 2023.

[8] https://sldinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Mobile-Radar.pdf

[9] ATP 3-27.3, “Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations,” U.S. Army, October 30, 2019.

[10] Jesse Johnson, “Japan, South Korea, U.S. Begin Sharing Real-time Data on North Korean Missiles,” The Japan Times, December 19, 2023.

[11] Park Hyun, “Pentagon Document Confirms THAAD’s Eight-hour Conversion Ability,” Hankyoreh, June 3, 2015.

[12] https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/an-tpy-2.htm

[13] Eunhyuk Cha, “South Korea Approves Procurement of SM-3 for Ballistic Missile Defense,” Naval News, April 26, 2024.

[14] Younghak Lee, “South Korea to Upgrade KDX-III Batch-I Ships to Operate SM-3 and SM-6,” Naval News, November 19, 2023.

[15] “AN/TPY-2 Transportable Radar Surveillance Forward Based X-Band Transportable [FBX-T],” GlobalSecurity.org.

[16] “Electromagnetic Fields and Public Health: Radars and Human Health,” Fact Sheet N 226, World Health Organization.

[17] Christian Goiceanu, Răzvan Dănulescu1, Eugenia Dănulescu, Florin Mihai Tufescu, and Dorina Emilia Creangă, “Exposure to Microwaves Generated by Radar Equipment: Case Study and Protection Issues,” Environmental Engineering and Management Journal, April 2011, Vol. 10, No. 4, p 491-498.

[18] ATP 3-27.3, “Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations,” U.S. Army, October 30, 2019.

[19] ATP 3-27.5: “AN/TYP-2 Forward Based Mode (FBM) Radar Operations,” U.S. Army, April 16, 2012.

[20] Press Release, “성주 사드기지 소규모 환경영향평가 협의 완료,” Daegu Regional Environment Agency Environmental Assessment Division, September 4, 2017.

[21] Song Sang-ho, “S. Korea Completes Environmental Assessment of U.S. THAAD Missile Defense Base,” Yonhap, June 21, 2023.

[22] “사드기지 소규모 환경영향평가 후속조치 기술지원 결과,” Republic of Korea Ministry of Environment, undated report.

[23] https://www.peoplepower21.org/peace/1927732

[24] Press Release, “전 정부서 미룬 사드 환경영향평가 완료, 윤정부 ‘성주 사드기지 정상화’에 속도,” Republic of Korea Ministry of Defense, June 21, 2023.

[25] https://www.peoplepower21.org/peace/1927732

[26] “Radar Navigation and Maneuvering Board Manual,” National Imagery and Mapping Agency, 2001, p. 24

https://www.furuno.com/en/technology/radar/basic

[27] “Shielded from Oversight: The Disastrous US Approach to Strategic Missile Defense – Appendix 10: Sensors, Union of Concerned Scientists, p. 9.

[28] J. Kusters, “X-band Wave Radar Radiation Hazards to Personnel,” General Dynamics Applied Physical Sciences, November 26, 2019.

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/radiation-radar

[29] “Science Prevails Over Wild Rumors,” JoongAng Ilbo, June 21, 2024.

[30] “2017헌마372: 고고도미사일방어체계 배치 승인 위헌확인고고도미사일방어체계 배치,” Constitutional Court of Korea, March 28, 2024.

[31] Press Release, “전 정부서 미룬 사드 환경영향평가 완료, 윤정부 ‘성주 사드기지 정상화’에 속도,” Republic of Korea Ministry of Defense, June 21, 2023.

[32] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09670106211022884

[33] “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” The White House, February 4, 2021.

[34] Press Release, “Defense Vision of the U.S.-ROK Alliance,” U.S. Department of Defense, November 13, 2023.

[35] “Leaders’ Joint Statement in Commemoration of the 70^th Anniversary of the Alliance Between the United States of America and the Republic of Korea,” The White House, April 26, 2023.

[36] Simone Chun, “Unprecedented US War Drills and Naval Deployment Raise Fear of War in Korea,” Truthout, April 7, 2024.

[37] https://spark946.org/party/kor_en?tpf=board/view&board_code=3&code=27545

[38] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMb3eLbBve0

[39] https://worknworld.kctu.org/news/articleView.html?idxno=504477

Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute board member. He is a contributor to the collection, Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Haymarket Books, 2023). His website is https://gregoryelich.org  Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich.      

The Impotence of Antony Blinken – by Patrick Lawrence – 26 April 2024

• 1,700 WORDS • 

Antony Blinken is now in China for his second such journey as secretary of state and his third encounter with senior Chinese officials: This is our news as April marches toward May. I have to say, it is a stranger state of affairs than I can figure when the State Department and the media that clerk for it tell us in advance that America’s top diplomat is going to fail to get anything done as he sets out for the People’s Republic.

“I want to make clear that we are realistic and clear-eyed about the prospects of breakthroughs on any of these issues,” an unnamed State Department official said when briefing reporters last week on Blinken’s agenda. This is how State warns in advance that the secretary will be wasting his time and our money during his encounters in Shanghai and Beijing.

What is this if not an admission of our secretary of state’s diplomatic impotence? Or do I mean incompetence? Or both? This is the man, after all, who arrived in Israel five days after the events of last Oct. 7 to announce, “I come before you as a Jew.” Does this guy understand diplomacy or what?

The media followed the State Department’ lead, naturally, in advising us of the pointlessness of Blinken’s sojourn in China—this at both ends of the Pacific. CNBC: “Washington is realistic about its expectations on Blinken’s visit in resolving key issues.” Japan Times: “While crucial for keeping lines of communication open, the visit is unlikely to yield major breakthroughs.”

Matt Lee, the very able diplomatic correspondent at The Associated Press, got it righter than anyone in his April 22 report: The point of Blinken’s three days of talks with top Chinese officials, he reported, is to have three days of talks with top Chinese officials. “The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip might be seen by some as encouraging,” Lee wrote, “but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider.”

This is our Tony. As the record makes pitifully clear, there’s no mileage in predicting success when Blinken boards a plane for the great “out there.” This is unequivocally so in his dealings with the western end of the Pacific.

There is a long list of the topics Blinken was set to raise with Chinese officials, notable among these Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Taiwan and the South China Sea, military-to-military contacts, artificial intelligence applications, illicit drug traffic, human rights, trade: These are standards on the American menu when a U.S. official addresses Chinese counterparts. The last is especially contentious just now, given the Biden regime’s disgraceful determination to subvert those Chinese industries with which the U.S. cannot compete. With plans to block imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles already afoot, last week President Biden announced new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel. And it is now “investigating” China’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, which sounds to me like prelude to yet more measures to undermine China’s admirable economic advances.

But the premier question Blinken was to address has to do with Sino–Russian relations. As he made clear before departing, the secretary of state will more or less insist that the Chinese stop selling various industrial goods to Russia because the U.S. considers them “dual use,” meaning the Russians could use such things as semiconductors in their defense industries—so implicating China in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

Before going any further, let’s try one of those “imagine if” exercises. Imagine if Beijing sent Foreign Minister Wang to Washington to tell the Biden regime to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine as this implicates the U.S. in Ukraine’s war with Russia and this is not on because China and Russia are friends.

It is not even fun, this “imagine if,” so nonsensical is it. Any such exercise would turn Wang, an acutely skilled diplomat, into another Antony Blinken—the thought of which is nonsensical times 10.

But never mind sense and nonsense. Blinken and those who speak for him at State boldly previewed the secretary’s presentation in the days before his departure. Here is Blinken speaking to reporters last Friday:

We see China sharing machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defense industrial base that sanctions and export controls had done so much to degrade. Now, if China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.

A day later the unnamed State Department official elaborated with this:

We’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that … severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe. We’ve demonstrated our willingness to do so regarding firms from a number of countries, not just China. We will express our intent to have China curtail that support.

As tough diplomatic talk goes, it does not get much tougher. And as dumb diplomacy goes, it does not get much dumber.

For one thing, the Biden regime is demanding that China act against what we can count Beijing’s closest partner—this as leading non–Western nations are coalescing behind a joint project to create a new, let’s call it post–Western world order. I am reminded of a brilliant tweet someone wrote just after Russia began its Ukraine operation two years ago and the Biden regime sought to recruit Beijing against “Putin’s Russia,” as people such as Blinken insist on referring to the Russian Federation. “Please help us defeat Russia,” the tweet read, “so we can turn our aggression on you when we’re done.”

But precisely.

For another, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made its response to Blinken’s preposterous intentions clear even before the secretary boarded his plane (and just prior to the passage in the House last week of $60.1 billion in new aid for the Kiev regime). “It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine,” a ministry spokesperson said last week, “while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.”

I cannot think of a handier way of shutting down Antony Blinken.

One other thing while we are on this topic. Among the principles on which a post–Western global order will rest are respect for the sovereignty of all nations and noninterference into the internal affairs of others. These are two elements of civilized statecraft, as it is destined to be in the 21^st century and of which the secretary of state has absolutely no clue.

Why did Secretary Blinken bother to raise this question of Sino–Russian trade when he must have known the response as well as you and I know it. I see two immediate explanations.

One, the crooks in Kiev have already lost Washington’s proxy war with Russia—and goodness knows how much of the just-approved aid they will steal—and Blinken’s presentation in Beijing reflects mounting desperation among the policy cliques who got the U.S. into this hopeless-from-the-start conflict.

Two, and closely related to the above, when Antony Blinken goes to Beijing he does not talk to the Chinese: He talks at them and is not especially concerned about their responses. He is talking only to the American public and the China hawks on Capitol Hill, who have the White House stretching to out-hawk them at every turn.

If you need support for this latter thought, there is Blinken’s assertion Monday, when introducing the State Department’s annual human rights report, that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang Province. This charge has been highly suspect since Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s fanatically Sinophobic predecessor at State, conjured it before leaving office in 2021. And given no charge of genocide has ever been supported with evidence, what in hell was Blinken doing raising this question (1) on the eve of a diplomatic visit to Beijing during which he purported to want other things out of the Chinese, and (2) given his government’s open sponsorship of what we must now call the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza?

My mind goes back to March 2021 when I read these things. It was then, in an Anchorage hotel (named the Captain Cook) that Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s new national security adviser, made an utter disaster out of their first encounter with senior Chinese officials, Wang Yi among them. It was then and there that Blinken and Sullivan, all by themselves, tipped over Sino–U.S. relations with just the sort of shockingly ignorant display of late-imperial presumption Blinken is trying on yet again in Beijing this week.

Sino–American ties have never recovered from the encounter in Anchorage. And Blinken has learned nothing from the mess he made.

Lessons, of which several.

One and as suggested above, a creeping desperation now pervades the Biden regime’s foreign policy cliques. They do not know what to do about Russia and they do not know what to do about China.

Two and related to one, the level of incompetence evident among those directing this administration’s foreign policies is very likely unprecedented in the history of postwar American diplomacy. This now reaches the point it is a danger—most evidently in the cases of China and Russia.

Three, there is no self-awareness among these people. They are not present in their diplomatic encounters—reading, instead, from ideologically driven scripts. Again, three years into the Biden regime this is a clear danger.

Four, last, and by no means least, the Biden regime does not have a China policy. Think carefully about this: In the single most important relationship the U.S. will have to navigate in the 21^st century, those running policy are paralyzed—no map, no diplomatic design, no clear objective other than to oppose, literally, the 21st century in the name of prolonging the 20th. This is why the warmongers, the economic saboteurs, and the paranoids left over from the “Who lost China?” years remain ascendant in Washington.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does a foreign policy made of nothing but ignorance and empty bluster. It is the gravest of charges, but Antony Blinken in China makes me feel unsafe.

……………………

(Republished from Scheerpost)

The Attacks on the Palestine Movement Are Getting Stupider by the Second – by P.E. Moskowitz (The Nation) April 2024

I would never say I expected more from Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, as that would have required me to expect anything good from him. But I still found myself surprised when he referred to the Columbia University protests against Israel’s war on Gaza as a form of “pogroms.”

Nor did I expect more from The Wall Street Journal, which ran an op-ed arguing that Hamas and Hezbollah are “working with and grooming” pro-Palestine activists. Nor from Benjamin Netanyahu, who compared the campus protests to Nazi Germany. Nor from House Speaker Mike Johnson or Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt, both of whom called for the National Guard to be sent to Columbia.

Yet I have been consistently taken aback at just how ridiculous these and other claims from the media and politicians about the growing pro-Palestine movement have become recently.

Politicians and the mainstream media outlets that support them are consistently simplistic in their analyses, or flat-out wrong, or, well, stupid. But over the last few weeks, it feels like the stupidity has ramped up to a level previously unreached—a level that can no longer be described as misinterpretation or obfuscation or spin, but rather as a complete detachment from reality.

And this condition of near-psychosis appears to be spreading. It’s not just the far-right that’s responding to largely peaceful protests with extreme rhetoric and action. College administrations have sent in police in riot gear to arrest peacefully demonstrating students and faculty, suspended or expelled students, canceled graduations, and even hastily barricaded their campuses with plywood in a fashion that feels both barbaric and Wile-E.-Coyote-esque.

To understand this state of unreality, it’s important to understand that the United States and the elite media are nearly always, to some extent, in a state of unreality. We’ve known this for a while. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman outlined the process by which Americans become unwilling or unable to confront the violence endemic in American life (whether the violence of US-backed wars in other countries or the violence of corporate-backed plutocracy at home) way back in 1988.

As they argued in Manufacturing Consent, a crucial step toward enabling war is the creation of groups of worthy and unworthy victims. Chomsky and Herman were writing about Vietnam and the lack of attention paid to the millions killed in that failed war, but the same is happening today.

Since October 7, politicians and leading media outlets have made it clear, over and over again, that they consider Israeli lives to be worthier than Palestinian ones. Now, the media’s relentless focus on Columbia and other college campuses is proof in itself that it cares, and, crucially, wants us to care, more about any perceived victims of the protests in the US (even if their victimization consists of not being able to teach a class on classical music as they’d prefer), especially if they are from elite institutions, than they do about the lives of Palestinians.

This distorted reality enabled by the media—in which the supposed dangers of student organizing get significantly more coverage than the thing the protests are actually about—partially explains the unhinged reactions of the last few weeks. If one consumes only mainstream US media, one gets a very hysterical version of reality. It’s the same reason Americans think crime is going up all the time even as it falls to historic lows. Feeling constantly under threat, while ignoring people who actually are constantly under threat, is a time-honored, mass-media-enabled, American tradition.

But, in a way, the propaganda model does not give the hysterics in this case enough credit. The average Fox News watcher can perhaps be excused for their histrionic view of the world, but American senators and presidents and highly educated op-ed page writers and university administrators should know better. And, of course, they do!

This is why it might be more useful to see their delusional rhetoric as not only a form of propagandistic misdirection but also a tool of linguistic power and control. By reframing disagreement and protest and discomfort as violence, those in power get to play victim, and thus feel righteous in their use of, or support for, actual violence—whether that’s the bombardment of Gaza or the brutality inflicted on US college students.

As Sarah Schulman brilliantly argues in her 2016 book Conflict Is Not Abuse, this strategy has been used for ages by those with privilege to hide their power over, and fear of, those they oppress. We can see it in, for example, the rape accusations leveled against Black men by white women that led to lynchings.

“Sometimes, when we are upset, we pretend or convince ourselves that Conflict is actually not only Abuse, but a crime,” Schulman writes. “When we have nowhere to go but inside ourselves, and when that self that we inhabit is convinced that it cannot bear to be seen, we call the police.”

The dishonest — and ironic — push to blame campus protests on George Soros – by Philip Bump (WaPo) April 2024

There is very obviously an element of opposition to the ongoing protests on college campuses that is rooted in familiar partisan rhetoric. The political right’s hostility to college professors and insistences that students are brainwashed into holding liberal politics, for example, is a regular undercurrent to the discussion. There are real disputes at play, certainly, and a complex weave of First Amendment issues, but there are also familiar partisan disparagements and insinuations.

That includes one that is both ironic, given the context, and very misleading.

The New York Post offers the most useful distillation of the claim in the headline of a story it published on Friday: “George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests.” This claim that the students are being funded by Soros — a Holocaust survivor who is a favorite boogeyman of the right thanks to his hefty donations to leftist groups — has been picked up and echoed elsewhere, too.

By itself, this is a reflection of the idea that student activism is necessarily insincere or a function of young people being hoodwinked. Claims about Soros being the engine behind political or social movements have also been identified as being intertwined with antisemitism or explicitly antisemitic, given historical tropes about wealthy Jewish people controlling the world.

Here, then, this antisemitic framework is being deployed to undermine protests on college campuses … that have been repeatedly cast as being antisemitic.

More importantly, it’s simply not true. Or, more accurately, the connection between the protests and funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) is so tenuous as to be obviously contrived.

One might begin by asking what Soros is theoretically paying for. After all, this is just kids setting up tents on a college campus. Is the allegation that Soros is planting students at Columbia University (for example) and fronting the $68,000 tuition?

No. The New York Post article suggests other ways this largesse is apparently manifested.

“The cash from Soros and his acolytes has been critical to the Columbia protests that set off the national copycat demonstrations,” it reads, later describing the scene at Columbia: “Students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and $10 rotisserie chickens.”

The “tents from Amazon” bit is a nod to a theory floating around on right-wing social media that someone is buying all of these tents for students, as though it would be otherwise impossible for a student to buy a $20 tent on her own. Mind you, there’s no evidence that the other stuff mentioned was bought by some billionaire donor, but the New York Post has been having fun recently referring to the food as “luxurious” as it wonders “[w]ho or what organization is behind the food delivery.” Clearly no average individual could have bought Dunkin’ doughnuts.

But back to that “cash from Soros and his acolytes.” At no point does the Post article demonstrate how this purported cash has been critical, instead simply listing organizations that have been involved in the protests to some extent and tracing their funding back to OSF.

Take the group U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. It, the New York Post alleges, has a fellowship program that includes three people who have been at rallies on college campuses. In an illustration, the three are identified as “paid protesters” — suggesting that their motivation for participation is the money and not the views that led them to seek the fellowship in the first place.

“George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country,” the story hyperventilates. Eventually, it describes how.

U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights is registered with the IRS as Education for Just Peace in the Middle East (EJP). And EJP has received grants from OSF.

The largest was $300,000, given in 2018. During that fiscal year, EJP took in just over $1 million in revenue. It spent about $1.3 million, meaning it operated at a loss. In fiscal 2019, it had net assets of about $165,000 — meaning that a big chunk of that OSF grant was already spent.

EJP also received a grant from OSF for $150,000 in 2021 and a two-year grant for $250,000 in 2022. The New York Post’s suggestion (echoing one published earlier in the week by the Wall Street Journal) is that this money went to those “paid protesters.” But money is fungible. During those years, the organization also spent $2.4 million, at least $2 million of which wasn’t OSF money.

If the campus fellows identified by the New York Post are being paid the same as those who can currently apply for those positions, the total one-time cost to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights was about $10,000. Nor are the fellows identified in the article still fellows. A spokesperson for the organization confirmed in an email to The Washington Post that the individuals featured in the New York Post article were from last year’s class. In other words, they are no longer “paid” at all.

The New York Post story also accuses Students for Justice in Palestine of being “Soros-funded” and fundamentally involved in the protests. (That the protests metastasized nationally only after police raided the Columbia encampment undercuts the idea that this is driven from the top down, but so be it.) So where does the Soros money come from?

Well, the story alleges, Students for Justice in Palestine is funded by the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, or WESPAC. And WESPAC received $132,000 from the Tides Foundation at some point. And the Tides Foundation has received millions in funding from OSF over the years.

It’s true that the Tides Foundation has received more than $11 million in OSF grants since 2017. It is also true that the Tides Foundation reported $298 million in revenue … in fiscal 2017 alone. The reported grants from OSF total less that 0.3 percent of Tides’ revenue from 2017 to 2022.

Regardless, Students for Justice in Palestine denies that it receives any money from WESPAC, nor is there any public indication that it does. In a statement to The Washington Post, a representative for the group indicated that the foundation “neither funds nor influences our organization’s political activity but instead extends its legal tax-exempt status to us in order to support our mission.”

“We refuse to engage with baseless claims regarding our funding in the middle of a genocide funded, militarily supported, and politically backed by the United States,” the statement concluded.

The group Jewish Voice for Peace, also identified in the New York Post article, has received grants from OSF in recent years, both to its 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), the latter of which can engage in political advocacy. Here again, though, the issue is scale. From 2017 to 2022, the two organizations received $875,000 from OSF and, over that period, spent $19.6 million. The OSF money constituted less than 5 percent of the total spent.

All of this is very in the weeds, as we must be when assessing specific claims. Taking a step back, the allegations do not get more compelling. Soros (or, rather, the foundation he created) gave money to organizations a few years ago to influence protests that emerged in response to the six-month-old war in Gaza? Even if the money from OSF flowed directly into the $3,300 stipends of those three campus fellows, we’re meant to think, what? That although none of them attend Columbia, this is all their fault? That it’s intentional somehow?

What we’re meant to think, of course, is something simpler. That Soros is a nefarious figure bent on using his wealth to reshape the world in his image, an impulse manifested here in somehow being the engine of the protests (or, at least, somehow the doughnut donor). It’s just vague insinuations leveraging well-worn rhetoric and a preexisting visceral response to the Jewish billionaire.

There’s a term for allegations like that.

…………………

Source

Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza from the Great & Little Satan – by Ilana Mercer – 26 April 2024

• 1,500 WORDS • 

This is not a Whodunit. The serial killers are known to us, are friends of ours, are supported by us. ~ilana

The U.S. has undertaken the role of IDF deputy in advancing the genocide of Gazans. ~ilana

American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.

It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk” bromides have been disgorged.

Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’ open, even-energetic support for genocide is a defining event in the annals of American foreign-policy aberrations—repeatedly and vigorously vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against Israel’s atrocities, justifying Israel’s violations of the law, as well as, alternatively, pretending these violations had never occurred and making like the laws of man and the laws of God don’t apply to Israel.

This American failure is probably qualitatively different from blunders that went before. What the United States has approved in Gaza is the crime of all crimes, appallingly carried out in broad daylight.

Duly, the annihilation of a community and the landmass that supports it has been achieved. The arteries of supplies that sustain this Palestinian society are all but closed. The mass murder of members of the targeted group proceeds apace. Daily. Shamelessly. Before our very eyes. And as I write.

It is the case of the senile (Joe Biden) supporting the criminally insane (Israel).

To press my point: Mass graves are uncovered near the ruins of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals. Therein hundreds of Palestinians have been interred, bodies stacked, some handcuffed, others still tethered to medical tubes. The White House’s response amounts to, “Where, what, who, and how can this possibly be? Who could have done this horrible thing? Yes, we, too, want answers right away. Let’s do the forensics. Let’s ask the Israelis to look into it, shall we? See you tomorrow.”

This is not a Whodunit, you feckless, malevolent morons.

The serial killers are known to us. We know who murdered over 34,183 Palestinians and maimed an estimated 77,143. The serial killers loosed on millions of Gazans—their guns at the ready, pointed at the civilians huddled in the southern tip of the Strip—these are friends of ours.

Empowered by Empire, Israeli serial killers are not on-the-lam, running from the Law. They are free to come-and-go, to travel, to hobnob; at liberty to enjoy undeserved freedoms, as their innocent victims are confined, held captive, catacombed, awaiting death by one or another diabolical means. In fact, the serial killers of the Palestinians of Gaza are proudly paraded as freedom fighters in their country of Israel, and are backed and exculpated by the powerful in our own country, the United States of America.

Support for Israel’s offensive against Gaza’s civilians comes courtesy of our carpetbagger representatives, left and right. Israel is lavished with munitions despite the fact that the American taxpayer’s endorsement of the carnage these cause began dropping in November of 2023. By late March of 2024, a Gallop poll reported that 74 percent of Americans were keenly engaged with the topic and a majority now opposed Israel’s excesses.

Even young Evangelicals might well be rethinking their allegiances.

Exquisitely sensitive to its Christian Zionist base in America, the Jerusalem Post, honestly if opportunistically, divulged that, “Young Evangelical support for Israel has plummeted. Seven out of 10 Evangelical and born-again young Evangelicals … surveyed as far back as 2021 adhere to the postmillennial and amillennial theological views, which see the Jewish people and the state of Israel as no longer necessary in the fulfillment of God’s plan for the second coming.”

So settled in their habits, indications are that the elders of the Zionist, Christian Right have failed to read their young.

Indeed, these are austere days for American leadership and reputation. By dint of undertaking the role of IDF deputy in advancing genocide in Gaza—the United States has crossed a threshold. In Gaza, Uncle Sam has finally achieved an official or formal inversion of all cherished, universal values. It has earned the “Great Satan” appellation it was once awarded.

There is a vast power differential in the US-Israel relationship. The colossus that is the American Hegemon appears helpless before the tiny Jewish State, leading one to wonder which country deserves the Great Satan moniker and which the Little One.

On the scale of national crimes and misdemeanors, Gaza is simply indefensible. And our young sense this and are incensed by it.

For now, the degenerative process in America is being halted by students. “[F]rom Massachusetts to California,” students have gathered from far and wide demanding an accounting from their representatives for the industrial-scale mass murder being carried out in their name.

Among the protest was a Jewish sit-in dubbed the “Seder-In-The-Street to Stop Arming Israel,” on the second night of the Passover. Reports “Democracy Now!”:

“The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. ‘At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free,’ Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Democracy Now! ‘The Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”

To cover his wretchedness, a foreign country’s prime minister libeled these quintessentially American, anti-genocide campus protests—which, we hope, may swell to match those begun in Columbia University in 1968, against the Vietnam War—as antisemitic, even terroristic.

An emotionally incontinent Bibi Netanyahu called on political authority in the U.S. to sic its police on these American youngsters. This, his attack dogs, in deference to their political and paymasters—and in defiance of American First Amendment Constitutional rights of free speech and peaceable assembly—are doing.

Forgive them not; for they know not what they do.

These “antisemitism” claims-makers aim to silence and sunder dissenting free speech, one of the most cherished American (Voltairean) values, clearly not shared by our serial-killer besties. Framing loud protest against Israel as “antisemitic” is intended, very plainly, to silence opposition to the mass murder and displacement of Gazans.

The protesters across American campuses are not antisemitic. But even if they were; in America, free speech refers to the words people shout, write, tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia, even the goose-stepping and Hitler salutes they muck around with—all this is protected speech in our country. Genocide backers, stateside and abroad, may not like it; but this speech is both constitutional and licit in natural law.

Provided protesters are not engaged in acts of violence against others—then the words they emit are irrelevant. Antipathy to Jews qua Jews, if expressed—for which there is no good evidence whatsoever—amounts to a thought “crime.”

Thought crimes are the prerogative of a free people in a free country. Americans, left and right, must join libertarians in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding or expressing politically unpopular ideas.

“What next for America, after genocide-by-proxy and the murder of diplomacy”? The quest for peace. As discussed freely and openly on the HARD TRUTH Rumble podcast, both myself and Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, were buoyed by the campus protests and wish the kids Godspeed. The Kids might just deliver Gaza from the Great and Little Satan alike.

Superlatives cannot capture the plight of these poor people. What is clear is that patience is native to their character. Palestinians might appear enslaved, but they cannot be brought into submission by any Pharaoh.

Deliverance is possible for a long-suffering people.

The Fierce Urgency of Now – by Fran Shor – 26 April 2024

(Boston, MA, Emerson College Student Released From Lock Up After Tent Protest Against The Israeli War Machine – 26 April 2024)

As more campuses join the protests against Israel’s continuing engagement in war crimes in Gaza, one common thread runs through the student demands – divest from supplying the Netanyahu government and the IDF with weapons of mass destruction. What compels many of these youthful demonstrators to occupy the public spaces and offices of their universities is the complicity of college portfolios with investments in US weapon manufacturers. They know that the products of defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet and General Dynamics MK 84 – 2000 pound bombs, are slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians throughout Gaza.

They also understand that the US government, from President Biden to the Congress, is opposed to legislative efforts to hold Israel accountable to its violation of various on-the-books prohibitions for governments “engaged in gross human rights abuses” (Section 502 B of the US Foreign Assistance Act). Instead, they see the Biden Administration exploiting every loophole in any restrictions to supply Israel with unending transfers of bombs and military equipment. While countries, like Canada and numerous others, have stopped shipping weapons to Israel, the US seems oblivious to the suffering and devastation caused daily by the IDF in Gaza.

They are aware that Israeli state propaganda spreads constant disinformation about its war crimes in Gaza, from rationalizing its attacks on the staff and patients in hospitals to the murder of over 200 aid workers. They know that countless human rights agencies have condemned these kinds of war crimes in Gaza. (These same human rights agencies have also condemned the brutal killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7). In order to justify the murder of so many innocent civilians, the Netanyahu government has insisted that they have actually killed 9000 Hamas militants. However, if they read one of the recent articles in the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz from March 31, they understand this figure is reflective of what the IDF calls “kill zones” (think “free-fire zones” in the US war on Vietnam) where anything in those zones, including women and children, were legitimate targets to then be counted as Hamas militants.

They are surely aware of what Netanyahu cabinet members have said about the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank that they are just “human animals.” The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has bragged about destroying the “electricity, food, and fuel” in Gaza. One of his advisers, a former IDF General, reflective of the targeting of aid workers, including those murdered seven from World Central Kitchen, acknowledged that “in order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.” Such mass murder and wanton destruction of property in Gaza is part of a campaign of killing that one UN official has cited as “probably the highest kill ratio of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

When students see and hear about all of this, they are obviously motivated to express their moral outrage. On one hand, these expressions may not always comport with so-called civility. On the other hand, they are not prepared to remain silent and/or passive in the face of an unfolding genocide. In their adherence to Dr. King’s reference to the “fierce urgency of now,” they are committed, as Dr. King was, to disturbing the peace.

Indeed, we need to be reminded of another quote from Dr. King that was central to his famous Riverside Address (“A Time to Break Silence”) from April 4, 1967. He warned prophetically that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Beyond the horrors in Gaza and the long tragic history of the oppression of Palestinians, these student protestors are trying to save their own nation from its bloated “defense” budget (now approaching almost one trillion dollars) and death-dealing spiral. What their protest ultimately signifies is their commitment to an authentic advocacy for peace and justice abroad and at home.

Fran Shor is a Michigan-based retired teacher, author, and political activist.  

Student Protests are Part of an Endless But Positive Tug of War – by Daniel Warner – 26 April 2024

The recent presence of police on the campus of Columbia University to stop pro- Palestinian protesters is reminiscent of turbulence on the same campus in 1968. While the past and present issues of contestation at Columbia are different, the issues of free speech and student activism reflect an ongoing tension between students and universities in general. Student/administrators differences, sometimes violent, are nonetheless healthy and necessary parts of a democratic society.

The current issue between students and university administrators focuses on the Middle East crisis. Protesting students have taken up the cause of Palestinians against Israel. Over one hundred student protesters were recently arrested by New York City police on Columbia’s campus. “It’s like there’s been a military coup on campus,” a student was quoted in Le Monde. “There are cops everywhere,” she said. At Columbia, on-campus classes have been cancelled; students were urged to stay home. Police have also intervened at New York University and Yale.

The fact that Columbia’s president and other university officials have called in the police “to restore order on campus” shows the gap between the students’ actions and how the university seeks to govern. In a larger context, the current campus turmoil highlights the failure to incorporate student idealism into university policies.

Threats to security and order are superficial excuses for calling in the police. Student idealism is the problem. “Columbia’s move to send in police so quickly after these demonstrations began chills student expression, marks a significant departure from past practice, and raises questions about the university’s disparate treatment of students based on their views,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.

A similar statement by the Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors condemned Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests: “We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs.”

Chilling student expression by university administrators is part of an endless tug of war between youthful idealism and the conservative forces of law and order. University presidents, as representatives of what they perceive to be larger responsibilities, weigh student demands with their perceptions of societal interests. And the students usually lose, particularly in the current situation of academic institutions resembling bureaucratic corporations.

As eminent academic free speech expert Professor Stephen Rosow observes: “University administrations seem to view the relation of the university as a seat of knowledge to the public sphere as one of mirroring public opinion rather than leading public discussion and debate.” “They are,” he adds, “beholden to the ideological forces that stand behind donors, but their vision of the university as necessary to a robust democracy is at best in retreat.”

Student activism is part of an endemic conflict between students and authority, including university administrators, government, and society. While the conflict may manifest itself violently from time to time, it is part of a normal process. Eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds should be idealistic. The tension between the protesters and the university administrators is more than the question of the limits of freedom of speech; it’s about the freedom to think, the freedom to question, the freedom to create, the freedom to act. The incapacity of universities to incorporate student activism into their regular activities is threatened when administrators call onto campus the forces of law and order. It is indeed chilling when a campus is seen as the site of a military coup.

It is also chilling when universities are given government warnings of what the forces of law and order may do. As proof of how chilling society can be, witness Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s aggressive questioning of three university presidents about antisemitism on their campuses before a House of Representatives subcommittee. Stefanik’s political posturing sent a clear message to universities, both private and public, that the government will oversee what is happening on campuses. Stefanik and people like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are attempting to thought-police higher education.

What happens on campus is thoroughly political in terms of the freedom given to students to express their opinions. In the classroom, questioning authority by critically examining iconic texts is naturally followed outside the classroom by students questioning campus authorities and beyond. Critical questioning is what higher education is all about.

But questioning does not necessarily lead to physical confrontation One of my fondest memories of college is the evening when Lyndon Johnson announced his steps to limit the bombing of North Vietnam and his decision not to seek re-election. I called the president of the college to say we should celebrate. (He was far from an anti-war radical.) He immediately invited me and a small group over to his residence where he opened his plentiful liquor cabinet, still in pyjamas, and discussions/celebrations began. Together.

If the latest Harvard Youth Poll shows that students in the 18-24 age range have different political opinions than those older, that is to be expected. University students are different from the general society. Some call students irresponsible; I prefer to call them idealistically positive, creative, and active. The reason to study at a university is to expand the mind and personal possibilities, not to limit one’s intellect and activities.

Creative thinking is messy. Questioning authority is inherently disruptive. Both can be found on campuses as part of a natural tension between students and administrators. If campuses become war zones, it is the result of the failure of administrators to engage with their constituents on the students’ terms. Unlike the endless wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, endless critical questioning of authority through political activism is the very foundation of a democratic society.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.

US College Students Are Taking The Lead In Denouncing Israel’s Gaza Atrocities – by Phil Giraldi – 25 April 2024

Israel and its friends malign them as “antisemites”

 • 1,700 WORDS •

If you were wondering why or how the mainstream media coverage of what is taking place in Gaza is so slanted as to make it look like a real war between two well-armed and competitive adversaries instead of a massacre of civilians, wonder no longer! A leak has exposed a New York Times internal document that provides editorial guidance about words that should not be used in any article relating to Gaza or to Palestine. They include “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory,” and even “Palestine” itself. The intent is clearly to eliminate any words with negative connotations what might be applied in some fashion to Israel and to what Israel is doing, even going so far as to not include any suggestion that Palestine itself might be considered a legitimate political entity. At the same time the media is letting be heard arguments that Israelis killing Palestinians is justified as they are all “terrorists,” even the little ones who will grow up to become enemies of Israel and Jews worldwide.

To a large extent, it is the Zionists themselves that created the need to censor the language being used to describe developments between Israel and its neighbors and that is because Israel, which de facto and illegally occupies all of historic Palestine, made itself de jure “the nation state of the Jewish people” back in 2018 in spite of its Christian and Muslim citizens which, at the time, amounted to something like 20% of the population. To put it simply, a Jewish state cannot also be a democracy for all of its citizens any more that the US can be a Christian state, so it is necessary to divert attention away from that paradox. And there are other degrees of unpleasantness that spring from that necessity, including the fact that devout Jewish believers actually do follow the ten commandments, including “Thou shall not kill!” while Israel has been doing nothing but killing since its foundation as well as plenty of violations of “Thou shall not steal” and “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor!” So instead of behaving better and trying to live peaceably with its neighbors, the “Jewish state” opted instead to cultivate a partly mythical saga of victimhood referred to as the “Holocaust” and to label all of its lethal overreactions as legitimate “right to defend itself” responses. This in turn has spawned another line of defense, what has become the virtual industry which might be referred as the pursuit of “antisemitism.” And to make it really dangerous for the average American citizens who still believe that it is possible to criticize the behavior of foreign countries, the chant of “antisemitism” has been picked up wholeheartedly by the politicians and it is being turned into laws particularly at state levels to punish people who attempt to criticize Israel. National level politicians in Congress are also submitting draft laws that would apply similar restraints throughout the country so it will inevitably be goodbye the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.

The current unrest of pro-Palestinian “encampments” and “liberated zones” at 33 college campuses in the US protesting against what is clearly a genocide taking place in Gaza by calling for a ceasefire and a halt to institutional investment in Israel as well as a suspension of ties to Israeli government educational bodies. The movement is, as a consequence, being assiduously labeled a manifestation of “antisemitism” by Congress, by Joe Biden in the White House and by nearly all of the mainstream media. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responding to the unrest, is saying, inevitably, that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities” similar to Nazi rallies in the 1930s and he called for a major security crackdown on the demonstrators. And it should be observed how the reaction by the universities has been fairly consistent, i.e. to shut down Palestinians groups or speakers on campus while leaving Jewish groups supporting Israel’s actions alone, indicating clearly that this has not been an even-handed response to political unrest. The House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has made his pro-Israel sentiments very clear, spoke at Columbia University, where the movement began, on Wednesday and dismissed suggestions that the protests were legally protected free speech. He was addressing what he thought were “Jewish students” but was nevertheless heckled by demonstrators as he said the university must restore order on campus and had “failed to protect Jewish students amid concerns about antisemitism on and around campus. This is dangerous. We respect free speech, we respect diversity of ideas, but there is a way to do that in a lawful manner and that’s not what this is.”

Speaking of the Columbia University administration, Johnson asked plaintively whether “They cannot even guarantee the safety of Jewish students? They’re expected to run for their lives and stay home from class? It’s just, it’s maddening.” If the Speaker had done a little more investigating he would have learned that nearly all alleged instances of “antisemitism” on campus have been greatly exaggerated by organizations like the Anti-Definition League (ADL), whose Director Jonathan Greenblatt has been a prime rabble rouser in calling for criminal charges against all those he accuses of “hating Jews.” Neither Greenblatt nor Johnson, himself a Christian Zionist, is evidently troubled at all by the fact that Israel has slaughtered likely well upwards of 40,000 unarmed civilians, including many children. It is a death toll that includes the torture and killing of prisoners execution style, mass graves of victims and the deliberate destruction of hospitals, schools and churches. It even encompasses the removal of organs from captives and cadavers for transplant, for which product Israel has a well-known and highly developed international clientele. But such details are regarded as unproven or even as an irrelevancy to Greenblatt and Johnson, as is the reality that many American Jews possessing consciences are participating in the demonstrations. They presumably will soon be labeled as “self-hating Jews” to make the approved narrative complete.

It is difficult to ignore what a monster Israel has become under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of thugs. When Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir responded to reports that Israel has run out of jail room for its circa 10,000 Palestinian prisoners by saying the solution was to take some of them out and kill them to make more room, there was no response from Washington. Perhaps a better solution would be to free the majority of those prisoners, who are being detained without charges, since imprisoning people without due process is considered to be unacceptable in most “rule of law” civilized countries, which Israel and Joe Biden’s US consider themselves to be but manifestly are not.

So, I welcome the student rebellion against Israeli atrocities even though they have already been confronting a massive wave of oppression from the school authorities and even from alumni who are withholding donations and also forming groups that will advise prospective employers of the names of students who are regarded as anti-Israel, presumably denying them employment after graduation. The universities themselves are engaging in suspension or expulsion of the protesters, including an email sent by Princeton University to all students on Wednesday threatening that students participating in Pro-Palestinian protests like those at Columbia, Yale and other universities would be subject to “arrest and being immediately barred” from campus followed by expulsion. Meanwhile the civil authorities will be called upon to continue to arrest protesters, when necessary, using both police and the National Guard resources. It all recalls the shooting of nonviolent student demonstrators at Kent State University 54 years ago! Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a major recipient of Israel Lobby money, is advocating that demonstrators, whom he describes as “pro-Hamas criminals,” be confronted by angry citizens who ought to “take matters into [their] own hands” and directly punish the offenders.

And meanwhile the government of this fair country, which has become the full-time defender of Israel, will be bleating in unison that the demonstrators are “antisemites” and even Hamas-aligned “terrorists,” demeaning them to such an extent that anything done to them will be considered okay by the media and opinion makers. There will not be a critical word uttered about what Israel is doing apart from vague Biden-esque appeals to take some “humanitarian” steps to kill less, which are routinely ignored by Netanyahu. On the contrary, Congress and Biden are rewarding Israel for its behavior with their recent foreign aid grant of $26 billion to rearm the Jewish state, which an in-debt Washington can no longer afford even though Biden claims that the gift will “make the world safer” and be remembered as a “good day for world peace.” Ironically, part of the money is intended for “humanitarian aid” which might suggest something for the Palestinians, but as the US refuses to deal with the UN assistance agency (UNRWA) and most certainly will not work with what remains of existing formerly Hamas government in Gaza, Israel will no doubt limit and control the aid, just as it is doing now, before pocketing all of the leftover cash. How Israel treats the United States as a chattel, a source of money, weapons and unlimited political cover without providing anything at all in return apart from constant unrest and complicity in crimes against humanity is what the real tale should be all about. One can only hope that the courage of the students who have begun some pushback with their encampment at Columbia will produce some understanding among the American public of how uncritical deference to Israeli “needs” and interests has seriously corrupted the United States and might well lead to the brink of ruin for both countries.

……………………

Analysis of Iran’s Missile Attack on Israel – by Theodore A. Postol – 22 April 2024

• 2,100 WORDS • 

EXCERPT FROM AN EMAIL WRITTEN IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST FROM A FRIEND ASKING FOR HIS ASTUTE ANALYSIS OF IRAN’S DRONE AND MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL.

Theodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.

I apologize for not getting back to you sooner with answers to your questions. I have been spending time trying to find any video data from the Iranian attacks on Israel that might be informative.

I have attached three video clips derived from some of the sources I found and have put them together in a way that will hopefully be helpful to you and your colleagues.

This clip shows two long-range Iranian missiles passing through the atmosphere, impacting, and exploding in Israel. The incoming missiles are bright spots in the video because they are traveling at a high enough speed (Mach 10 to 13) to be incandescent from atmospheric heating. For now, I will only give you several important highlights, but there is a lot more that can be derived from this particular video.

The video is cut into four sections.

The first section is simply the video as it appears in real time. The time-sequence is roughly 13 seconds long. The soundtrack has four sharp sounds like “gunfire,” which are simply the sounds from the ground-explosions delayed in time due to the speed of sound being much slower than the speed of light. Note that you can see only two ground-explosions, but the sound indicates there are two additional ground-explosions that occurred outside the field-of-view of the camera.

The second section is simply the first section repeated at one third speed, so you have a better chance of observing details.

The following two sections are simply a repeat of section 1 and section 2.

There are many other videos of unengaged ballistic missiles arriving, but all of them cut off before the warheads reach the ground. This is almost certainly due to Israeli classification rules that do not allow the press to publish videos of ground-explosions.

The second video clip titled:

Damage to Israeli Air Base In April 14, 2023 Iran Attack.

This clip shows some of the ground damage at one of the two Israeli airbases that were the direct targets of these ballistic missile attacks. The first sequence shows a crater that was probably from a 200 to 400 kilogram explosive warhead. There are also photographs of lower levels of damage and smaller craters that may possibly be from drones that were not intercepted. The drones are known to have 50 kg warheads and would thereby produce much lower levels of ground damage and smaller craters.

A very interesting section of the video shows the Israelis repairing a runway, which must have been hit by a munition, requiring that the airbase to quickly fill in the crater and cover it with fast-annealing concrete.

All military airports have this capability as it is expected that runways will be attacked so as to limit the ability for the airbase to handle combat aircraft for taking off and landing.

The last 10 seconds of the video shows a ballistic missile arriving, and no interceptors in the air attempting to engage it. If you look carefully at the dark sky immediately above the building the warhead passes behind, you should be able to see one or more faint flashes in the sky. These faint flashes are indications of intense light from a ground explosion that is being reflected by particles in the sky.

The third video titled:

Israeli Drone Shootdowns on April 14, 2024 (Normal and Slo Mo-P35)240.mp4 (1.1 MB)

This video shows aircraft “gun camera” images of drones and cruise missiles that are being shot down with air-to-air missiles.

The gun camera images show cruise missiles:

1.png 2.png
and drones:
3.png
The cruise missiles travel at a speed of roughly 500 to 600 km/h while the drones travel at a much slower speed, about 220 to 250 km/h.

The videos show an extremely important fact.

All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles.

The workhorse air-to-air missile of the United States Air Force is a AIM-9x Sidewinder.

The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000.

The cost of a drone is perhaps 10,000 or $20,000, and the cost of an Iranian cruise missile is probably about $100,000.

An extremely important fact released by the Israeli government is that the cost of defending Israel from this particular Iranian attack was about $1.3 billion!

The implications of this single number are substantial.

This indicates that the cost of defending from waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary.

The actual scale of the attack is summarized according to CNN in the image below:

The clear and unambiguous evidence from all of the videos of ballistic missiles arriving over Israel show that Iron Dome interceptors were essentially not used in any attempts to engage the ballistic missiles.

The decision to not even try to engage the long-range Iranian ballistic missiles is completely sound.

The Iron Dome interceptor would have a good chance of intercepting either a cruise missile or a drone that had leaked through the very substantial aircraft implemented air-defense system.

This almost certainly means that the bulk of the $1.3 billion cost of the defense was almost certainly expended on shooting down drones and cruise missiles with fighter aircraft launching air-to-air missiles against targets.

Since there is essentially no evidence of long-range ballistic missiles being engaged by Iron Dome, it could only mean that they were not engaged at all, or there were attempts to engage them with the Arrow and David’s sling defense systems.

The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes, indicates that whatever the effects of David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective.

Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems.

An additional observation that is relevant to the situation of Israel relative to South Korea is illustrated in the two maps below:

The maps indicate that the drones and cruise missiles had to travel distances of 1300 to 1500 km from Iran to Israel, and roughly 2000 km from Yemen to Israel.

This transit requires many hours allowing for fighter aircraft to engage drones and cruise missiles. There are now reports that the US Navy provided airborne warning and control systems (AWACS, specifically, Navy E-2 Hawkeyes)) which were extremely effective in vectoring fighter aircraft to targets that they could then quickly acquire and destroy.

Such an opportunity would be much more limited in the case of similar types of mass attacks from North Korea against South Korea. AWACS will certainly be tremendously helpful in the case of defending South Korea from this type of attack, but the engagement-rate limitations of combat aircraft against very large numbers of drones and cruise missiles would make the effectiveness of this kind of combat-air defense much lower than was the case for the Israeli defense against Iran.

Another very serious problem that analysts will need to consider is that commercially available technology is now good enough for constructing cruise missiles and drones that have limited but usefull capabilities to “recognize” their targets and home on them.

On September 14, 2019 Iranian produced cruise missiles were used to attack the Abqaiq Oil Facility in Saudi Arabia. The nature of the damage to the facility indicated that the cruise missiles had an effective accuracy of perhaps a few feet, much more precise than could be achieved with GPS guidance.

I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability. The proof of this conclusion is in the satellite photograph below:

as can be seen from this satellite image produced by the company Digital Globe and paid for and released by the US government. It shows that four cruise missiles struck four oil processing tanks at Abqaiq at essentially the same point on each of the tanks. Such precision could not possibly be achieved with GPS guidance alone.

In order to convince myself that my conclusion that the optical homing could be done with nothing more than satellite data, I stimulated the homing process by taking the satellite image of a single isolated oil processing tank,

I then performed a well-known procedure called “image cross-correlation” on the original satellite images of the tanks.

The correlation “functions” that were produced by this very simple computer experiment are shown below,

And the results are projected onto an actual satellite photograph of the tanks, showing that the correlation methodology provides very high precision in identifying the central location on a tank that is to be hit.

Since the optical and computational systems needed to perform these correlations in near-real-time on a homing missile are well within the capabilities of commercial cameras and computer chips (NVidia chips are well up to the job), it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones.

The implications of this are clear.

The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented.

It is certainly possible to shoot down drones and cruise missiles with antiaircraft guns, although these systems will be of limited range and will need to be relatively close to targets they are defending.

At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability. So far, even Iron Dome has been a failure against artillery rockets, which are of quite short range and are of quite simple and inexpensive.

The Israelis claim an outrageous cost per Iron Dome interceptor of between $60,000 and $80,000 an interceptor. It seems that this claim must be untrue.

Similarly sophisticated interceptors, whether they are the Javelin antitank missile, which costs about $200,000 each or the AIM-9x air-to-air missile are tremendously more expensive.

The Israelis Iron Dome system has been to a very good first approximation completely funded by the US government. Any consideration for purchasing the system must be accompanied by proof it can work in combat and by accurate cost estimates of the different components.

Only then should any consideration be given to whether or not purchase Iron Dome.

I have a lot more I can say about these issues, but I fear I have probably already overwhelmed you with details that raise many more questions that I am not sure I can answer.

Those people who advocate buying these active defenses should be asked to provide data that shows what I have collected herein and elsewhere is not supported by the facts.

Anyone who advocates a defense approach for their country should be able to show that they have a fully reasoned argument, which includes information about the effectiveness of the strategy and its affordability.

Wishful thinking, like what has happened in Ukraine, will at best be a recipe for tremendous expenditures for little capability.

I would welcome to hear the arguments of those who want to make such purchases. I am open to learning and to obtaining data that could lead me to a different conclusion.

(Republished from Sonar21)

US Labor Union – The UAW’s Big Win at Volkswagen in Tennessee – by Bob Bussel – 23 April 2024

Persuading any Southern autoworkers to join a union had long been one of the U.S. labor movement’s most enduring challenges, despite persistent efforts by the UAW to organize this workforce.

To be sure, the UAW already has members employed by Ford and General Motors at facilities in Kentucky, Texas, Missouri and Mississippi.

However, the union had previously tried and largely failed to organize workers at foreign-owned companies, including Volkswagen and Nissan, in Southern states – where about 30% of all U.S. automotive jobs are located. It was the UAW’s third election at the same factory since 2014. The prior two ended in narrow losses.

The victory follows the UAW’s most successful strike in a generation against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, through which it won higher pay and better benefits for its members in 2023.

Volkswagen said it will await certification of the results by the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency responsible for enforcing U.S. workers’ rights to organize. As long as neither side challenges the results within five business days, the NLRB will certify them – greenlighting the start of bargaining over a contract.

The union has already scheduled another election that will occur less than a month after the Volkswagen vote. More than 5,000 workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, will have their say on whether to join the UAW in a vote that will run May 13-17, 2024.

$40 million campaign

The UAW has pledged to spend US$40 million through 2026 to expand its ranks to include more auto and electric battery workers, including many employed in the South, where the industry is quickly gaining ground.

Based on my five decades of experience as a union organizer and labor historian, I anticipate that, recent momentum aside, the UAW will face resistance from the other foreign automakers that operate in the South. The pushback is also coming from Southern politicians, many of whom have expressed concern that UAW success would undermine the region’s carefully crafted approach to economic development.

But the outcome of this first election among Volkswagen’s more than 4,300 workers in Tennessee who were eligible to vote represents an impressive first step in the union’s ambitious campaign to organize foreign-owned automakers in the South and other nonunion factories across the country. With about 73% of the workers who voted choosing to say “yes,” according to the company and additional sources, I believe that this historic victory will boost UAW organizing in the South and will likely inspire other workers seeking to unionize their workplaces.

Lauding the ‘perfect three-legged stool’

After the region’s formerly robust textile industry imploded in the 1980s and 1990s because of an influx of cheap imports, Southern business and political leaders revived the region’s manufacturing base by successfully recruiting foreign automakers.

The strategy of those leaders reflects what the Business Council of Alabama has described as the “perfect three-legged stool for economic development.” It consists of “an eager and trainable workforce with a work ethic unparalleled anywhere in the nation,” accompanied by a “low-cost and business-friendly economic climate, and the lack of labor union activity and participation.”

The prospect of a low-wage and reliable workforce has lured the likes of Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, Honda, Volkswagen and Hyundai to the South in recent decades.

Although many of those companies negotiate constructively with unions on their home turf, the lack of union membership and the protections that go with it have proved a draw for them in the United States.

Blaming unions for bad job prospects

One way automotive employers in the South have blocked unions is by portraying them as outdated institutions whose bloated contracts and rigid work rules destroy jobs by making domestic auto companies uncompetitive.

Automotive executives in the South argue the region has developed an alternative labor relations model that provides management with flexibility, offers wages and benefits superior to what local workers have earned previously and frees employees from any subordination to union directives.

Automakers with plants in the South also draw on another powerful resource in resisting the UAW: public intervention by top elected officials.

Making dire warnings

With the UAW ramping up its organizing efforts again, Southern governors are sounding alarms once more.

On the eve of the Volkswagen election in Chattanooga, six of these governors issued a joint statement denouncing the UAW as a “special interest” that would “threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” They asserted that a vote for the UAW would undermine their ability to attract auto manufacturers and “stop growth in its tracks.”

The UAW counters that union membership means workers will get predictable raises, better benefits and improved workplace policies.

Although these arguments from anti-union politicians haven’t changed much over the years, the context certainly has.

The UAW’s big wins on pay and benefits resulting from its 2023 strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have increased its clout and credibility.

Many automakers with a U.S. workforce not covered by the UAW – including Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai and other foreign transplants – responded by raising pay at their Southern plants. The union justifiably describes those raises as a “UAW bump.”

The UAW is citing these pay hikes in its outreach to workers at Tesla and other nonunion companies.

“Nonunion autoworkers are being left behind,” the UAW’s recruiting website warns. “Are you ready to stand up and win your fair share?”

The pitch continues: “It’s time for nonunion autoworkers to join the UAW and win economic justice at Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mazda, Rivian, Lucid, Volvo and beyond.”

Some Southern autoworkers, meanwhile, have been expressing concerns over scheduling, safety, two-tier wage systems and workloads that they believe a union could help resolve.

It’s also clear they’ve been emboldened by the gains they have seen UAW members make.

Revving up

The UAW’s campaign is just starting to rev up. And the timing is ideal.

A 2023 National Labor Relations Board ruling provides unions with additional leverage in this process. If management refuses to grant the union’s request for recognition, the employer would then be required to seek an NLRB representation election.

To win, unions normally need a majority of those voting. But in accordance with the new ruling, if management is found to have interfered with workers’ rights during the election process, it could then be required to bargain with the union.

The UAW says it’s waging organizing campaigns at more than two dozen other nonunion plants, including factories run by Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama, and Toyota in Troy, Missouri.

I believe that the stakes are high for all workers, not just those in the auto industry.

As D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here, a union that represents workers in a wide range of occupations, recently observed: “If you change the South, you change America.”

………………………

This is an updated version of an article published on March 8, 2024.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bob Bussel is Professor Emeritus of History and Labor Education at the University of Oregon.

Here’s Why Israel Will Lose a Shootout with Iran – by Mike Whitney – 19 April 2024

 • 1,500 WORDS • 

Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israeli military sites on April 13-14 signals a tectonic shift in the regional balance of power. While the media remains preoccupied with the number of outdated Iranian drones that were shot down during the onslaught, military analysts are far more focused on the way that Iran’s ballistic missiles cut through Israel’s vaunted air defense systems striking sites at the Nevatim and Negev Air Bases.

What the operation proved is that Israel’s “deterrents supremacy” is largely a fiction based on overly optimistic assumptions about the performance of their air defense capability. When put to the test, these systems failed to stop many of the larger and more destructive ballistic missiles from hitting their targets. This, in turn, revealed that Israel’s most heavily-defended and critically-important military sites remain overly-exposed to enemy attack.

More importantly, any future attack will not be announced days in advance nor will Iran attempt to avoid high-value targets or heavy casualties. Instead, they will use their most lethal and state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles to inflict as much death and destruction on Israel as is required to make sure that the Jewish state is unable to lift a hand against Iran in the future. In short, what Iran’s historic attack on Israel shows is that any future provocation by Israel will be met by an immediate and overwhelming response that will leave Israel battered, bloodied and broken. This is an excerpt from a recent article by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter:

Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield.

The Iranian deterrence posture has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. The US defensive posture vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea hinges on assumptions made regarding the efficacy of US ballistic missile defense capabilities. By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea. Checkmate, Scott Ritter, Substack

Keep in mind, that the Iranian government has not officially confirmed that it used its most technologically-advanced hypersonic glide vehicles in the assault. Most weapons experts, like Ritter, believe they only used their older, less advanced missiles in order to conceal the dramatic improvements to their stockpile. Even so, Iran was able to put five ballistic missiles on their target at the Nevatim Air Base and another four at the Negev Air Base, arguably two of the most heavily-protected bases in the world today. In short, Iran was able to slip by Israel’s robust radar and air defense systems and deliver a blow at the heart of the Israeli war machine using second class munitions and technology. Imagine the damage they would inflict if they felt forced to use their unstoppable hypersonic missiles. This is why it is unlikely that Netanyahu will order a direct attack on Iranian territory. The consequences for Israel would be nothing short of catastrophic. Here’s more from Ritter:

“My understanding is that Iran used 3 types of ballistic missiles. One ballistic missile uses a warhead that separates and then burst-fires a number of decoys that are specifically designed to attract Iron Dome missiles. …so, Iron Dome will fire 25 interceptors…Meanwhile smaller more maneuverable warheads burst through those interceptors and hit the Israeli air defense systems… and that appears to be the case. So, they are telling the Israelis ‘How we are going to take you out’... The next thing we see, is missiles coming in that the warheads separate from the missile body and then there is a booster engine on the warhead that drives it down into the ground blowing away any ability for radar intercept hitting the target. And what this does is clear the space, clear all the air defense. and the final thing is these heavy warheads that come off the heavy missiles that hit the runways and blew the big craters in them. This was a three-layered ballistic missile attack that was specifically designed by the Iranians to destroy Israeli air defense to clear the way to show the Israelis that we can put the big warheads on the target anywhere in Israel we want to. This was successful, and the beauty of this is, they didn’t use their best missiles…. This was just a single strike-package. …Iran can repeat this process all day long and what they’ve showed Israel is that “This is what we can do.” And I guarantee you that their are intelligence officers like me writing reports right now telling Israel, “Stop all the nonsense. We can’t win this war. It’s over, guys. We have no defense here. If Iran wants to come in, we are powerless. Stop it now.” The Missiles of April, Scott Ritter, You Tube; 6:30 minute mark

Notice the difference between ‘weapons pro’ Ritter’s analysis and the nonsense in the western media. Here’s a short blurb from a piece at the Jerusalem Post which captures the flavor of most of the articles published in the MSM since the attack:

Iran’s weekend drone and missile attack on Israel was an “embarrassing failure,” the US said, stressing that it highlighted the IDF’s defensive prowess as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet weighed reprisal actions.

“I’ve seen reporting that the Iranians meant to fail that this spectacular and embarrassing failure was all by design,” US National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby told reporters in Washington on Monday…

“Let’s be straight, given the scale of this attack, Iran’s intent was clearly to cause significant destruction and casualties,” Kirby said as he spoke of how a coalition of five armies — Israel, the US, Jordan, France, and Great Britain — repelled over 300 missiles and drone targeting the Jewish state. Iran’s attack is an ‘embarrassing failure,’ a success for Israel, says US, Jerusalem Post

If it was Iran’s intention to cause “significant destruction and casualties”, then why didn’t they bomb downtown Tel Aviv or Haifa? Wouldn’t that have made more sense? And why did Iran communicate their plans 72 hours in advance to everyone, including the United States via the Saudis? And, if the attack was such an “embarrassing failure”, then why is Israel still hesitating to strike back?

The fact is, the Israeli war cabinet has already met four times since the incident and has not yet decided how to respond. Why?

Because Iran’s deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri has told Israel in no uncertain terms that if they launch another attack on Iran, they should expect to “get hit harder, faster, and with more immediacy.” So, the flexibility Israel has enjoyed for the last two decades, of bombing and assassinating its neighbors whenever it gets the urge, is over. Just like Israel’s long streak of impunity is over. Tehran has thrown down the gauntlet and let it be known that it if Israel crosses its red lines, there’s going to be a war.

Indeed, Iran will be better prepared and will do everything in their power to overwhelm the enemy and bring this decades-long confrontation to a swift and decisive end. We’ll let Ritter have the last word:

The failure of the combined US-Israeli defense systems in the face of a concerted Iranian missile attack exposed the short-comings of the US ballistic missile defense capabilities world-wide… This means that the US and NATO forces in Europe are vulnerable to attack from advanced Russian missile technologies which match or exceed those used by Iran to attack Israel. It also means that China would most likely be able to strike and sink US navy ships in the Pacific Ocean in the event of a conflict over Taiwan…. And that North Korea could do the same to US ships and forces ashore in the vicinity of Japan and South Korea… The global strategic implications of this stunning Iranian accomplishment are game-changing... Checkmate, Scott Ritter, Substack

It would be wise for the Israeli leadership to mull over what Ritter has to say before stumbling blindly into a war they will certainly lose.

………………..

Israeli Expert disputes ‘crazy’ claim that Israel downed 99 percent of Iranian projectiles – 84%

Israeli military expert Or Fialkov said on 17 April that authorities gave false information about the rate of interception of Iranian drones and missiles during Tehran’s operation against Israel over the weekend. 

Israel had claimed on 14 April following Iran’s Operation True Promise that 99 percent of the projectiles fired during the operation were intercepted. 

“The interception percentage of the missiles is about 84 percent, a very high percentage but not comparable to the numbers that the IDF provided, which gave the feeling that there had been an absolute interception of all Iranian threats,” Fialkov told Hebrew newspaper Maariv in an interview released Wednesday. 

“When they publish crazy success rates (99 percent) and create a [false] state of perfection, it can cause complacency in the citizens as well as in the military,” the Israeli researcher added. 

He also said that an Iranian attack on settlements would have resulted in “significantly higher casualties.” 

Iran chose to target military sites instead. Following the Iranian operation, Tel Aviv admitted that the Nevatim airbase in southern Israel was damaged in the attack. Iran’s Armed Forces said the Nevatim base was the site from which Israeli jets took off to attack the Iranian consulate in Damascus. 

Tehran also targeted intelligence sites in the Jabal al-Sheikh mountains between Syria and Israeli territory, which “provided the intelligence for the Israeli airstrike on Iran’s diplomatic mission in Damascus,” Iranian army chief Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri said on Sunday. 

Authorities in Iran also said that their operation was purposefully limited and measured, and aimed to send a strong message that Tehran is capable of much more. 

Several Iranian officials have vowed a much harsher attack if Israel escalates the situation with a response. 

“This operation showed that our armed forces are ready,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a speech on 17 April, adding that Operation True Promise “brought down the glory of the Zionist regime.” 

“The slightest act of aggression” by Israel will lead to “a fierce and severe response,” he warned. 

…………….

Source

Checkmate: Iran Versus Israel – by Scott Ritter – 18 April 2024

The Iranian defeat of the US-Israeli missile defense architecture has global security consequences.

The world’s attention has, rightfully so, been focused on the fallout from Iran’s retaliatory strike against Israel on April 13-14, 2024. Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield.Defending Dixieu2019s …Bishop, Isaac C.Buy New $16.49(as of 04:31 UTC – Details)

The Iranian deterrence posture has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. The US defensive posture vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea hinges on assumptions made regarding the efficacy of US ballistic missile defense capabilities. By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea.

Israel’s ballistic missile defenses were given a supercharged boost by the deployment of an advanced AN/TPY-2 X band radar on Israeli soil. The radar, operated by the US Army’s 13^th Missile Defense Battery, is located on Har Qeren, a height which rises out of the Negev Desert near the city of Be’er Sheva. The AN/TPY-2 is a missile defense radar that can detect, track and discriminate ballistic missiles, discriminating between threats and non-threats (i.e., incoming missiles and space debris).

The AN/TPY-2 operates in two different modes. The first, known as the “forward-based mode,” detects and tracks ballistic missiles as they are launched. The second—“terminal mode”—is used to guide interceptors toward a descending missile. The AN/TPY-2 is optimized to work with the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system by guiding the THAAD missile to its target.

The US had deployed at least one, and possibly two, THAAD missile batteries to Israel at the time of the Iranian missile attack. In addition to assisting the THAAD missiles in shooting down incoming threats, the AN/TPY-2 radar data was integrated with Israeli radar data and other technical intelligence collected by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization’s (BMDO) network of early warning satellites deployed for the sole purpose of monitoring and reporting Iranian ballistic missile launches. This integrated early warning/surveillance/tracking system was tied into a multi-layered missile defense architecture which included the US THAAD and Israeli Arrow 2, Arrow 3, advanced Patriot, and David’s Sling anti-ballistic missile interceptor systems.

Adding to the capability and lethality of the US-Israeli ballistic missile defense architecture was the presence of at least two US Navy ballistic missile defense (BMD) system-capable Aegis-class destroyers equipped with the SPY-1 S band radar and SM-3/SM-6 interceptor missiles. The Navy BMD-capable ships are configured to tie into the ground-based AN/TPY-2 X band radar as well as the broader BMD system through the Command and Control, Battle management, and Communications (C2BMC) system. The combination of ground-based radars and interceptors with the US Navy BMD system provides US military commanders with theater-wide protection from hostile ballistic missile threats. This integrated system is designed to detect, acquire, and track incoming threats and, using complex computer-drive algorithms, discriminate targets and destroy them using hit-to-kill kinetic warheads (i.e., a “bullet hitting a bullet”).The Kids’ Money …McGillian, Jamie KyleBest Price: $12.99Buy New $48.14(as of 04:45 UTC – Details)

On April 13-14, 2023, this system failed. In short, the combination of US and Israeli anti-ballistic missile defense capabilities deployed in and around the Negev desert made the Israeli air bases located there the most protected locations in the world from threats posed by ballistic missiles.

And yet Iran successfully struck both locations with multiple missiles.

The global strategic implications of this stunning Iranian accomplishment are game-changing—the US has long struggled conceptually with the notion of what is referred to as “A2/AD” (anti-access/area denial) threats posed by hostile ballistic missiles. However, the US had sought to mitigate against this AA/A2 threat by overlaying theater ballistic missile defense architecture like that that had been employed in Israel. The failure of the combined US-Israeli defense systems in the face of a concerted Iranian missile attack exposed the short-comings of the US ballistic missile defense capabilities world-wide.

In short, this means that the US and NATO forces in Europe are vulnerable to attack from advanced Russian missile technologies which match or exceed those used by Iran to attack Israel. It also means that China would most likely be able to strike and sink US navy ships in the Pacific Ocean in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. And that North Korea could do the same to US ships and forces ashore in the vicinity of Japan and South Korea.

Until which time the US can develop, produce and deploy missile defense systems capable of defeating the new missile technology being deployed by nations like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, US military power projection capabilities are in a state of checkmate by America’s potential adversaries.

……………………….

(The original source of this article is Scott Ritter Extra.)

Cornel West selects Black Lives Matter promoter Melina Abdullah as running mate – by Jacob Crosse – 12 April 2024

Dr. Melina Abdullah, center, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles at the “#BLM Turns 10 People’s Justice Festival” on Saturday, July 15, 2023, at the Leimert Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]

In an appearance on the Wednesday morning edition of The Tavis Smiley Show, independent presidential candidate Cornel West revealed that his running mate will be Melina Abdullah, a tenured professor at California State University, Los Angeles, co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM), and founder of Black Lives Matter Grassroots (BLMGR).

West and Abdullah have placed their racial identity and religion front and center. In a campaign statement announcing his selection, West cited Abdullah’s “unique Black analysis,” which he claimed “helps us confront our crumbling era of empire, white supremacy, and patriarchy.”

In his interview with Smiley, West declared, “I’m running for Jesus, she’s running for Allah!” Abdullah said in the same interview that after West invited her to be his running mate, it “felt as if God was speaking to me.”

Unlike the two official ruling class parties, West, like all third-party candidates, is obligated to name a running mate before he can begin petitioning for signatures to be on the ballot in November in many states. In one of the many anti-democratic obstacles placed in front of third parties by the Democrats and Republicans, over half of US states (26), and the District of Columbia, require third-party candidates to name a running mate before petitioning for ballot access.

In choosing Abdullah, (née Reimann), West is deliberately amplifying the politics of racial division, practiced and propagated by the upper-middle class and the Democratic Party.

While presenting herself almost exclusively as a “Black woman,” Abdullah is the daughter of John Reimann, a non-practicing Jewish person born in New York in 1946.

Adbullah’s paternal grandfather, and John’s father, was Günter Reimann (born Hans Steinicke), a German-Jewish Marxist economist who fled Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler. As a teenager, Günter wrote for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Die Rote Fahne (The Red Banner), the press organ of the Spartacus League in Germany. Following the January 1919 assassinations of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the paper continued to be published by the Communist Party of Germany until Hitler came to power in 1933.

Günter died in 2005. John is still a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, with which Abdullah also has close relations. On his personal blog, Reimann advocates US funding for the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

Unlike her grandfather, Abdullah rejects a class-based analysis. Prior to founding BLM-Los Angeles, Abdullah chaired the Pan-African Studies Department at California State University. In her 2003 dissertation, titled, “Greater than the sum of her parts: A multi-axis analysis of Black women and political representation,” Abdullah advanced the “intersectional” and post-modernist framework that has served as the bedrock of Democratic Party ideology for decades.

Arguing for politics based on racialism and mysticism, Abdullah claimed:

Black women stand at the intersection of race and gender, their identity cannot be wholly defined simply by the sum total of race disadvantage and gender disadvantage; a third position of disadvantage is birthed at the intersection which cannot be divided out and attributed to either the race axis or the gender axis alone.

“Thus,” Abdullah postulated, “Black women are in the unique position of being full members of their gender group, their racial group and the group of Black women.” Ergo:

Black women representatives are uniquely qualified to serve as authentic representatives for Blacks (regardless of gender), women (regardless of race), and Black women.

Ten years after writing her dissertation, Abdullah would go on to become a leading member and organizer of the Black Lives Matter organization. From the 2013 police murder of Trayvon Martin to today, BLM leaders, including Abdullah, have repeatedly intervened in protests against police violence to sow illusions in reforming the police by “defunding” them and appealing to Democratic Party politicians. At the same time, BLM falsely presents police violence, which affects workers and poor people of all ethnicities, in purely racial terms.

By deliberately covering up the class role of police in capitalist society, Abdullah and BLM seek to block the development of a class-based movement against police violence, which is an international phenomenon.

Abdullah and the reactionary and self-centered politics that dominate BLM found expression in the scandal that engulfed the leadership of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) following the resignation of co-founder Patrisse Cullors in 2021.

In 2022, Abdullah sued BLMGNF, claiming the organization pilfered money and misused donations. This included the purchase of a $6 million mansion in Los Angeles, which served as the setting for an infamous video featuring Adbullah and fellow BLM leaders Alicia Garza and Cullors. In the video, Cullors, Garza and Abdullah dine on hors d’oeuvres and sip champagne while complaining about the hardships they endured collecting some $90 million in donations between 2020 and 2021.

In 2023, a Los Angeles judge dismissed Abdullah’s lawsuit against BLMGNF and ordered her to pay Shalomyah Bowers, an executive of the organization, over $100,000 in legal fees.

Abdullah is almost a caricature of identity politics. If one didn’t know any better, one would think her entire public persona was performance art. For years on her Twitter/X account, Adbullah, posting under the handle @DocMellyMel, has advanced reactionary Black nationalist, pro-capitalist and, frankly, racist conceptions.

A sample of some of Abdullah’s inane and racist tweets. [Photo: @DocMellyMel]

Abdullah has repeatedly tweeted in favor of “Black liberation” via the boycotting of “white corporations.” Last November, she tweeted the hashtag, “Build Black, Buy Black, Bank Black.”

Abdullah makes a practice of tweeting in favor of racial separatism despite the fact much of her family is white. In a July 6, 2019 tweet, Abdullah complained that she was “compelled to step off the sidewalk three times during my 30-minute walk so that White folks and their dogs could pass.” She continued: “Got me feeling like #gentrification is #JimCrow revisited.”

In a June 18, 2021 tweet, Abdullah wrote that “White folks don’t get to come to the #Juneteenth barbecue,” which she clarified in a later tweet was a “CELEBRATION DAY for Black people” and “PAY REPARATIONS DAY for white folks…”

During the 2020 Democratic presidential debates, Abdullah declared, “Nobody White should ever refer to the nation of Niger. Periodt. (sic)”

Just over two months ago, on February 11, Abduallah tweeted, “Why do I feel like it’s slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan?” When a user responded that “everything and everyone is racist,” Abdullah responded, “Nope. Only white people can be racist.”

Predictably, Abdullah is a fan of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a racialist falsification of American history. The project postulated, among many falsehoods, that “Black people alone” fought back against racism and slavery. In January 2023, Abdullah favorably tweeted quotes from the main author of the “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, when Jones was promoting the Hulu television adaptation of the project in Los Angeles.

Like West, Abdullah has abandoned any fight against the ongoing spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has even expressed anti-vaccine sentiments. In September 2020, she tweeted, “Who’s gonna be first in line to get the rushed, untested COVID-19 vaccine? #NotIt #PresidentialDebate2020.”

There is nothing remotely progressive, let alone left-wing, in the black nationalist and anti-Marxist campaign of West and Abdullah. Workers and youth interested in ending police violence and the genocide in Gaza must be armed with a political perspective that is aimed not at racial division, but at uniting the international working class is a mass movement against the source of police violence, war, inequality, racism and fascism—the capitalist system.

……………………….

How Iran’s ‘strategic Patience’ Switched to Serious Deterrence – by Pepe Escobar – 15 April 2024

• 1,200 WORDS • 

Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel were not conducted alone. Strategic partners Russia and China have Tehran’s back, and their role in West Asia’s conflict will only grow if the US doesn’t keep Israel in check.

A little over 48 hours before Iran’s aerial message to Israel across the skies of West Asia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed, on the record, what so far had been, at best, hush-hush diplomatic talk:

The Russian side keeps in contact with Iranian partners on the situation in the Middle East after the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria.

Ryabkov added, “We stay in constant touch [with Iran]. New in-depth discussions on the whole range of issues related to the Middle East are also expected in the near future in BRICS.”

He then sketched The Big Picture:

Connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, which are at the core of Washington’s policy, is in many ways becoming the root cause of new tragedies.

Here, concisely, we had Russia’s top diplomatic coordinator with BRICS – in the year of the multipolar organization’s Russian presidency – indirectly messaging that Russia has Iran’s back. Iran, it should be noted, just became a full-fledged BRICS+ member in January.

Iran’s aerial message this weekend confirmed this in practice: their missile guidance systems used the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system as well as the Russian GLONASS system.

This is Russia–China intel leading from behind and a graphic example of BRICS+ on the move.

Ryabkov’s “we stay in constant touch” plus the satellite navigation intel confirms the deeply interlocked cooperation between the Russia–China strategic partnership and their mutual strategic partner Iran. Based on vast experience in Ukraine, Moscow knew that the biblical psychopathic genocidal entity would keep escalating if Iran only continued to exercise “strategic patience.”

The morphing of “strategic patience” into a new strategic balance had to take some time – including high-level exchanges with the Russian side. After all, the risk remained that the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate/ambassador’s residence in Damascus could well prove to be the 2024 remix of the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

And don’t forget the Strait of Hormuz

Tehran did manage to upend the massive Western psychological operations aimed at pushing it into a strategic misstep.

Iran started with a misdirecting masterstroke. As US–Israeli fear porn went off the charts, fueled by dodgy western “intel,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made a quick sideways move, seizing an Israeli-owned container ship near the Strait of Hormuz.

That was an eminently elegant manoeuvre – reminding the collective west of Tehran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, a fact immeasurably more dangerous to the whole western economic house of cards than any limited strike on their “aircraft carrier” in West Asia. That did happen anyway.

And once again, with a degree of elegance. Unlike that ‘moral’ army specialized in killing women, children, and the elderly and bombing hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, and humanitarian convoys, the Iranian attack targeted key Israeli military sites such as the Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev and an intel center in the occupied Golan Heights – the three centers used by Tel Aviv in its strike on Iran’s Damascus consulate.

This was a highly choreographed show. Multiple early warning signs gifted Tel Aviv with plenty of time to profit from US intel and evacuate fighter jets and personnel, which was duly followed by a plethora of US military radars coordinating the defense strategy.

It was American firepower that smashed the bulk of what may have been a swarm of 185 Shahed-136 drones – using everything from ship-mounted air defense to fighter jets. The rest was shot down over Jordan by The Little King’s military – the Arab street will never forget his treachery – and then by dozens of Israeli jets.

Israel’s defenses were de facto saturated by the suicide drone-ballistic missile combo. On the ballistic missile front, several pierced the dense maze of Israel’s air defenses, with Israel officially claiming nine successful hits – interestingly enough, all of them hitting super relevant military targets.

The whole show had the budget of a mega blockbuster. For Israel – without even counting the price of US, UK, and Israeli jets – just the multi-layered interception system set it back at least $1.35 billion, according to an Israeli official. Iranian military sources tally the cost of their drone and missile salvos at only $35 million – 2.5 percent of Tel Aviv’s expenditure – made with full indigenous technology.

A new West Asian chessboard

It took only a few hours for Iran to finally metastasize strategic patience into serious deterrence, sending an extremely powerful and multi-layered message to its adversaries and masterfully changing the game across the whole West Asian chessboard.

Were the biblical psychopaths to engage in a real Hot War against Iran, there’s no chance in hell Tel Aviv can intercept hundreds of Iranian missiles – the state-of-the-art ones excluded from the current show – without an early warning mechanism spread over several days. Without the Pentagon’s umbrella of weaponry and funds, Israeli defense is unsustainable.

It will be fascinating to see what lessons Moscow will glean from this profusion of lights in the West Asian sky, its sly eyes taking in the frantic Israeli, political, and military scene as the heat continues to rise on the slowly boiling – and now screaming – frog.

As for the US, a West Asian war – one it hasn’t scripted itself – does not suit its immediate interests, as an old-school Deep State stalwart confirmed by email:

That could permanently end the area as an oil-producing region and astronomically raise the oil price to levels that will crash the world financial structure. It is conceivable that the United States banking system could similarly collapse if the oil price rises to $900 a barrel should Middle East oil be cut off or destroyed.

It’s no wonder that the Biden combo, days before the Iranian response, was frantically begging Beijing, Riyadh, and Ankara, among others, to hold Tehran back. The Iranians might have even agreed – had the UN Security Council imposed a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to calm the regional storm. Washington was mute.

The question now is whether it will remain mute. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, went straight to the point:

We have conveyed a message to America through the Swiss Embassy that American bases will become a military target if they are used in future aggressive actions of the Zionist regime. We will consider this as aggression and will act accordingly.

The US dilemma is confirmed by former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof:

We have got some 35 bases that surround Iran, and they thereby become vulnerable. They were meant to be a deterrence. Clearly, deterrence is no longer on the table here. Now they become the American’ Achilles heel’ because of their vulnerabilities to attack.

All bets are off on how the US–Israel combo will adapt to the new Iranian-crafted deterrence reality. What remains, for the historic moment, is the pregnant-with-meaning aerial show of Muslim Iran singlehandedly unleashing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, a feat feted all across the lands of Islam. And especially by the battered Arab street, subjugated by decrepit monarchies that keep doing business with Israel over the dead bodies of the Palestinians of Gaza.

…………………………….

(Republished from The Cradle)

Despite Western Insistence That Iran Failed, Iran Did What It Planned to Do In Israel – by Larry Johnson – 15 April 2024

 • 1,200 WORDS • 

Iran Firing Ballistic Missiles

Most Western analysts were popping champagne corks today proclaiming Israel’s “massive” victory over Iran’s 14 April combined drone, cruise missile and ballistic missile attack on targets in Israel. I don’t know if they are really this blind to what happened or are willing participants in a psychological operation to persuade Israel that it had a victory and does not need to escalate. Regardless, let’s deal with the facts.

Iran told the United States and several neighboring countries exactly what it was going to do. We know this thanks to an article in the Financial Times published on April 12 — 36 hours before Iran launched.

Iran has signalled to allies and western nations that it will retaliate against a suspected Israeli air strike on its Damascus consulate in a “calibrated” manner to keep an all-out regional conflict at bay, according to officials briefed on the talks.

Tehran is unlikely to target Israeli diplomatic facilities in the region, said an official briefed on talks between Iran and Oman, the Gulf state that has often facilitated back-channel diplomacy between Tehran and Washington.

US intelligence on any impending attack appears to be detailed and specific, according to the officials briefed on the situation, giving Israel a window to prepare its defences. . . .

Even a direct attack in Israeli territory would probably be “calibrated” in a manner that would show a robust response, without triggering an Israeli retaliation that would lead to Iranian assets in Lebanon and Syria being decimated, the western official said, while warning that a miscalculation is possible.

Iran’s goal was to demonstrate it could hit Israel if it wanted to, but was providing advance warning to give the Israelis time to protect personnel in order to minimize casualties. Iran was not trying to cause mass casualties.

Reuters provided confirmation today of the Financial Times reporting:

Turkish, Jordanian and Iraqi officials said on Sunday that Iran gave wide notice days before its drone and missile attack on Israel, but U.S. officials said Tehran did not warn Washington and that it was aiming to cause significant damage. . . .

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Sunday that Iran gave neighbouring countries and Israel’s ally the United States 72 hours’ notice it would launch the strikes.

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said it had spoken to both Washington and Tehran before the attack, adding it had conveyed messages as an intermediary to be sure reactions were proportionate.

“Iran said the reaction would be a response to Israel’s attack on its embassy in Damascus and that it would not go beyond this. We were aware of the possibilities. The developments were not a surprise,” said a Turkish diplomatic source.

Not surprisingly, Biden officials are vehemently denying they had advanced warning according to the Reuters report:

“That is absolutely not true,” the official said. “They did not give a notification, nor did they give any sense of … ‘these will be the targets, so evacuate them.’”

Tehran sent the United States a message only after the strikes began and the intent was to be “highly destructive” said the official, adding that Iran’s claim of a widespread warning may be an attempt to compensate for the lack of any major damage from the attack.

“We received a message from the Iranians as this was ongoing, through the Swiss. This was basically suggesting that they were finished after this, but it was still an ongoing attack. So that was (their) message to us,” the U.S. official said.

Statements from U.S. officials can no longer be accepted as accurate given their established history of lying. This is a “cover-my-ass” denial. Can you imagine the political outrage that would ensue if the Biden team copped to the fact that they had forewarning from Iran? Do you think that the Turkish and Jordanian officials did not communicate to Washington what they had been told? Of course not.

Iran’s attack in the early morning hours of Sunday was symbolic retaliation. The mullahs and IRGC commanders put Israel on notice that any further attacks on Iran, especially Iranian territory, will be answered by Iranian attacks on Israel. Iran demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated attack using three different weapon systems — drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. They did not use their most advanced, sophisticated weaponry.

The drones were used in the same way that pawns are employed in a chess match — draw out the opponent and create vulnerabilities. Israel used up over 700 Iron Dome missiles in countering Iran’s 300 plus drones. Why? You normally fire two Iron Dome missiles per target to ensure a hit. Ditto for the cruise missiles.

What we know for a fact is that most of the ballistic missiles hit their targets in Israel. Here is a video of one of the strikes. Iran demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated capabilitiy — i.e., a maneuverable warhead. Notice that the inbound Iranian missile evades the Israeli interceptor and strikes the target. Wow!!

Scott Ritter summed it up best with this Xwitter (pronounced Shitter):

The U.S. has an advanced AN/TPY-2 X-band radar stationed at Har Qeren, in the Negev desert. Its mission is to detect Iranian missile launches, and pass targeting data to Israeli Arrow and David’s Sling and U.S. THAAD ABM batteries deployed to protect sensitive Israeli sites, including Dimona and the Nevatim and Ramon air bases.

Iranian missiles struck both Nevatim and Ramon air bases. The best surveillance radar in the world, working in concert with the most sophisticated anti-missile defenses in the world, were impotent in the face of the Iranian attack.

For all those trying to spin yesterday’s events as an Israeli victory, chew on that fact: The best missile defense system in the world could not protect the sites they were tasked with protecting from attacks by Iranian missiles.

Who has deterrence supremacy? It ain’t Israel.

I agree with Scott. While Israel and its Western allies proved adept at shooting down slow moving drones, they failed when it came to defeating ballistic missiles armed with a conventional explosive warhead.

We are now in the wait-and-see mode. There are contradictory signals out of Israel. Some insist Israel’s retaliation is imminent. Others suggest there will be no retaliation. I believe Israel is under the control of some genuine crazies and will try to hit an Iranian oil facility or military installation in Iran. When they do that Iran will make good on its promise and will launch a much larger, more devastating attack on Israeli military and intelligence targets. This is a fight Israel cannot win. If it chooses to pursue this course of action it will lead to the unraveling of its military effort to defeat Hamas and rescue any hostages still alive.

I discussed the aftermath of Israel’s attack with the Judge during our regularly scheduled Monday morning chat.

(Republished from Sonar21)

Iran Breaches Anglo-Zionist Defenses in Historic Attack: A Breakdown – by Simplicius – 14 April 2024

Iran made history yesterday by launching “Operation True Promise”. In our usual style here, let’s cut through all the noise currently clogging up social networks and incisively demonstrate the facts as thoroughly as possible, while also pointing out how this was a game-changing and historic event which has brought Iran onto the world stage in a big way.

Firstly, as establishment, Iran’s stated goal for the operation was to strike back at the bases from which the Israeli consular attack was launched on April 1:

IRGC has listed its objectives for last nights missile attack: Ramon and Nevatim airbases (where attack on Iran Consulate was conducted from). Israeli Air Force intelligence HQ in Tel Aviv (where attack on Iran Consulate was planned) and degrading of Israeli air defence radars and assets.

The footage is of the Intelligence HQ getting hit. I have yet to see evidence of 99% interception. Ramon has been badly hit. Nevatim was hit by more than 7 missiles. Air Force Intelligence HQ completely leveled. Other strikes on air defence installations obviously not close to population centres and out of view but I’m sure sat intel will show extent of damage.

And another:

➖Nevatim Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine

➖Ramon Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine

➖The Israeli top-secret intelligence-spy base in Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon) in the north of the occupied Golan

It should be noted that the rest of the explosions or hits in other areas of the occupied territories are related to the confrontation of the Israeli air defense systems with the projectiles in the sky or the falling of the wreckage of the interceptor missiles or the wreckage of Iranian missiles.

Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.

This strike was unprecedented for several important reasons. Firstly, it was of course the first Iranian strike on Israeli soil directly from Iranian soil itself, rather than utilizing proxies from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. This alone was a big watershed milestone that has opened up all sorts of potentials for escalation.

Secondly, it was one of the most advanced and longest range peer-to-peer style exchanges in history. Even in Russia, where I have noted we’ve seen the first ever truly modern near-peer conflict, with unprecedented scenes never before witnessed like when highly advanced NATO Storm Shadow missiles flew to Crimea while literally in the same moments, advanced Russian Kalibrs flew past them in the opposite direction—such an exchange has never been witnessed before, as we’ve become accustomed to watching NATO pound on weaker, unarmed opponents over the last few decades. But no, last night Iran upped the ante even more. Because even in Russia, such exchanges at least happen directly over the Russian border onto its neighbor, where logistics and ISR is for obvious reasons much simpler.

But Iran did something unprecedented. They conducted the first ever modern, potentially hypersonic, assault on an enemy with SRBMs and MRBMs across a vast multi-domain space covering several countries and timezones, and potentially as much as 1200-2000km.

Additionally, Iran did all this with potentially hypersonic weapons, which peeled back another layer of sophistication that included such things as possible endoatmospheric interception attempts with Israeli Arrow-3 ABM missiles.

But let’s step back for a moment to state that Iran’s operation in general was modeled after the sophisticated paradigm set by Russia in Ukraine: it began with the launch of various types of drones, which included some Shahed-136s (Geran-2 in Russia) as well as others. We can see that from the Israeli-released footage of some of the drone interceptions:

At the 0:49 mark you can see what looks like a Shahed, though it appears similar to the jet-engine-equipped Shahed-238 variety.

After a certain pre-timed span, Iran then released cruise missiles so that they could strike roughly in a similar window as the drones. One video from last night confirmed the low-flying cruise missile presence:

It’s not known for certain, but it appears it could be the new Abu Mahdi missile which has the appropriate ~1000km range. Here’s some other possibilities:

Then, following the appropriate time interval, Iran launched the coup de grace, its vaunted ballistic missiles. Here’s Iran’s own released footage of the start of Operation True Promise, which includes the ballistic launches:

As stated, all three layers of the attack were timed to coincide, with the slowest (drones) going first, then next fastest (cruise missiles), followed by the fastest time-to-target, the ballistic missiles.

The U.S. scrambled a large coalition to shoot the threats down, which included the U.S. itself, UK flying from Cyprus, France, and, controversially, Jordan which allowed them all to also use its airspace and even partook in the shoot downs.

Dozens of images proclaimed the “successful” shoot downs of Iranian ballistic missiles, like the following:

The problem is, all of those are the ejected booster stages of two-stage rockets. There is no conclusive proof that any ballistic missiles were shot down, and in fact all the evidence points to the opposite: direct footage of the missiles penetrating the AD net and striking targets. But we’ll get to that.

Missile Types

First: what kinds of ballistic missiles did Iran use?

There are speculations and then there’s what can be dutifully confirmed.

As for the confirmed, with my own eyes from the actual longer released launch video we can see the following:

Which appears to match what is likely the Shahab-3 below:

Here’s another photo from a Shahab-3 test:

In the launch photo, the very top warhead nose cone does appear slightly shorter and may match the Sejjil rocket better. The Sejjil is in fact a much newer evolution of and upgrade to the Shahab that has both a two-stage and three-stage variety for an extremely long range of 2500km+. And some also claim it might be the Ghadr-110, but this is also an evolution and similar ‘upgrade’ of the Shahab-3 system, which likewise looks almost identical.

There are some other launch videos that appear to show possible Zolfagher or the updated Dezful systems as well.

Then there is the closest shot of the launch video, which gives us the most accurate confirmation of one of the missile types:

On the fuselage you can see what appears to be EMA written, and the same can be seen on this photo from today of a “downed missile” somewhere in Iraq:

This comes closest to confirming that missile to be an Emad from the chart above, which is one of Iran’s most advanced and can feature a MaRV (Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle) warhead. This is where it starts getting interesting, because the hits we saw in Israel appeared to potentially utilize some form of MaRV or hypersonic glide vehicle, which would mean Iran could have made history even beyond what we thought.

So let’s get there by first mentioning the other controversial claim that Iran possibly used its most advanced new hypersonic Fattah-2 system:

In none of the launch videos was this visible, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude Iran having secretly launched and tested some of the above. An Iranian academic stated the following:

“Iran has not fired its hypersonic missiles. In fact, most of the drones and missiles that were fired were older drones and missiles. They were very inexpensive and were used as decoys. So Iran spent a couple of million dollars to force the Israelis to spend $1.3 billion in anti-missile missiles, which was itself a big achievement by the Iranians. And then a number of other missiles that the Iranians fired…cut through and struck their targets,” the academic and geopolitical affairs commentator told Sputnik.

And lastly, there are some experts who believe Iran utilized its elusive hypersonic Kheybar Shekan missile, which also features a highly maneuverable MaRV.

These are two shots from last night’s launch video:

And here is a stock photo of the Kheybar nosecone and warhead:

This is where it gets most interesting, and why I’ve prefaced it so thoroughly.

In short: while Israel and the U.S. claim they shot down 100% of everything, and while it’s possible that the drone and cruise missile lures were mostly shot down—though we have no strong evidence one way or the other—we do have evidence that the ballistic missiles largely went unopposed, slicing through what’s claimed to be the densest air defense in the world. Not only Israel’s itself, comprised of a layered defense of David Slings, Arrow-3s, Patriots, and Iron Dome, but also the aforementioned allied airforces, as well as what’s now been reported to be a U.S. Arleigh Burke warship firing upwards of 70+ SM-3 missiles from the Mediterranean shore.

The hits that we saw were spectacular in one profound way: the terminal velocity of the Iranian ballistic missiles appeared stunningly fast. Let’s review some of the most exemplary videos.

Here’s by far the most revealing one, which totally refutes Israeli claims of 100% shoot downs. Note the massive swarm of air-defense missiles going up at the onset, then at the middle mark, watch as Iranian ballistics crash through the AD net totally unopposed at high speed, slamming into the ground:

As a quick aside, this next video was claimed by many to show Israeli Arrow-3 missiles shooting down Iranian ballistics in the exoatmosphere, i.e. in space:

But in reality, all it shows is the stage separation of the Arrow missiles as they climb toward the exoatmospheric zone. It does not show any actual successful interceptions, nor is there any evidence of a single ballistic missile being shot down.

But here’s where we get down to business. The next video is the most eye-opening in terms of the capabilities of these missiles. The two most important things to note are: 1) the terminal velocity right before impact and 2) note how some of the missiles strike very precisely onto the same location in groups.

First video, note the terminal speed here:

Here note the speed but also the grouping accuracy:

In particular at 0:31 above what looks like a runway on the rightside of the screen can be seen, which could indicate this to be the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert—where Arabic speaking Bedouins live, which explains the Arabic in the video.

Not all the impacts exhibit the high speed of a potentially hypersonic re-entry vehicle. For instance, this video shows perhaps somewhat slower missiles that nevertheless are easily bypassing the joint Israeli-Western AD net:

But getting back to the hypersonic question. Here’s a video showing one of Iran’s missile tests, which appears to show one of the hypersonic glide vehicle style warheads from the Ghadr missile:

A new video of the moment one of the IRGC’s ballistic missiles was hit during last year’s solar exercise near Chabahar has been released with 60 frames per second, where you can clearly see the impact of the Ghadr missile warhead for the first time. This warhead also has a very good final speed around Mach 7 and will be very strategic. The three-cone body of this cap is completely and severely melted, and you can also see the burning marks on the small parts of this cap in the first frame of entering the frame.

Photo:

The speed appears to coincide with the videos of the faster strikes, and you can see the vehicle looks like it may be glowing white-hot, which could explain the somewhat odd fact that in all the strike videos, the Iranian missiles appear ‘red’ as if they are still burning their engines. But we know most ballistic missiles like the Iskander have a burn-out phase after which the engine stops burning. Thus the red-hot nature of the strikes could potentially indicate not a burning engine, but rather the heat of the vehicle’s outer skin from hypersonic re-entry.

Further, most ballistics strike on a pretty steep or straight down decline, while many of the Iranian hits are on a shallower trajectory which could indicate a glide-style vehicle, though in the above ‘test’ it clearly shows it coming down at a 90 degree angle, so it’s likely capable of both.

That being said, it may not be an unpowered glide vehicle but one of the thrust-capable re-entry vehicles like so:

Unfortunately, we just don’t know the exact details—like construction material for instance—that would allow us to fully confirm its terminal speed. However, based on visual eye-balling, some of the strikes appear to be landing at minimum Mach 3.5-5 if not higher, which according to some, is even higher than Iskander terminal velocity.

That being said, while the Iranian MRBMs feature very complex propulsion systems, given that they are two and even three stage for extra-long range, while Russia and the U.S. lacks these because of their previous adherence to the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty, the guidance aspect of Iranian MRBMs remains a question mark. We don’t know how accurate they are, and in the end, how effective the strikes actually were in hitting their targets. That’s because beyond the general macro objective of “hitting Nevatim airbase”, for instance, we don’t know what precisely inside that giant airbase Iran may have targeted.

However, Israel did confirm the base was hit upwards of 7 times, but claims the damage was minor. In fact, they’ve now released footage showing them repairing one of the hit runways:

And some satellite photos have been released showing what appears to be possible strike damage throughout the base:

And another before and after timelapse, though unclear, shows possible damage to a hangar. Keep in mind this is the base which housed F-35s:

Could Israel be downplaying serious damage by releasing the video of a minor runway hole? For instance, they posted another video of an F-35 landing back at Nevatim base as a demonstration that the base is unharmed, but some have alleged that it is old footage:

That’s not to mention the official Israeli account tried to pass off old footage of Russian MLRS launches from Ukraine as Iranian ballistic launches last night:

Thus it’s clear that truth is no obstacle for Israel, which means we certainly cannot take their word on anything regarding last night’s operation.

Conclusion?

What can we conclude about last night? We don’t have any definitive ‘final words’ on how effective Iran’s strikes were because:

1. We don’t know Iran’s exact granular targets
2. We don’t know Iran’s exact intentions

For the second, what I mean is that many now believe Iran merely strove to provide a ‘demonstration en force’, as Will Schryver puts it. A show merely as a ‘warning’ to Israel, and to create deterrence from future Israeli escalations. In fact, Iranian officials have now warned that Iran will respond similarly to all future Israeli attacks:

They call this the New Equation. Anytime Israel attacks them, Iran now intends to strike them ‘head on’, i.e. directly from its soil as is their newly demonstrated capability.

Beyond this, Iran broke new ground in setting new milestones for missile technology and modern warfare, as stated in the outset. Iran demonstrated the capacity to bypass the most powerful and advanced anti-missile systems in the world—ones that have no built-in excuse as is the case in Ukraine. In Ukraine, the excuse is that the Patriots and other systems are manned by under-trained Ukrainians, and are not reinforced and integrated as wholly into layered Western systems as they would be in Western hands.

But last night, Iran penetrated every missile shield manned and operated by NATO itself, with all the trappings and advanced C4ISR and SIGINT capabilities inherent to the entire Western alliance; from THAAD, to Patriot, David’s Sling, Arrow-3, SM-3, Iron Dome, and even ‘C-Dome’ from Israeli corvettes—not to mention the entire complement of the West’s most advanced A2A defenses flown from F-35s, Typhoons, Eurofighters, and likely much more.

One must understand that ballistic missiles are precisely the apex predator that these most advanced Western AD systems were created to handle—and last night, they failed spectacularly in the same way the Patriots did in Desert Storm before them:

This sends a signal that Iran is now truly capable of striking any of the most high profile, high value targets of the West’s, in the entire sphere of the Middle East, within a radius of 2000-4000km. That is a significant capability that dwarfs even anything Russia or the U.S. itself is capable of in the same efficient way. Sure, Russia can send Avangards (very few, and highly expensive) and far slower long range cruise missiles, but due to the Treaty, no other country can match Iran’s cheap and immediate ballistic missile capability. The U.S. would have to send up a load of slow planes and do the traditional long range stand off attacks with slow munitions to hit targets at such distances.

As I said, the only question that remains is still of effectiveness by way of accuracy. It’s one thing to develop long range rockets via the luxury of a two-stage allowance, but there’s far more technology that goes into making such objects critically accurate—and I suspect here Iran may fall short of Russia and the U.S.’ capabilities, given that there’s a whole host of special electronics (signal boosting, EW reflecting, etc.) and guidance redundancies that are required for extreme accuracy. This is where Russia’s systems shine. Iran’s missiles have been shown to be quite accurate during tests in Iran under ideal conditions—but in highly contested EW environments, when the GPS/Beidou/Glonass signals are jammed, it could be a completely different story. Furthermore, the science behind signal retention in hypersonic plasma bubbles is quite extreme and no country has yet even proven the capability to consistently do this—but we won’t get into that for now, as I may cover that in an upcoming article focusing on the Russian Zircon.

The optics of seeing Iranian missiles flying over the Israeli Knesset surely sends chills down Israel’s spine because it states: we could have easily destroyed your Knesset, and much else, but we chose to be lenient, for now:

Who came out the winner?

There are now two chief competing ‘takes’ on the situation.

One says that Iran was ‘humiliated’ as Israel intercepted everything, and more importantly, that Iran has now blown its only advantage of surprise and strategic uncertainty/ambiguity by ‘showing its hand’ and not achieving much. They argue that Iran’s one true advantage over Israel was the threat that it could effect a mass launch of its feared ballistic missiles, wiping out huge swathes of Israel. But now that the perceived ‘damage’ from the attack was low, Iran has shown itself to be weaker than expected, which could imbue Israel with even more courage and motivation to continue striking and provoking Iran, as they might see they have nothing to fear from Iran’s long-touted missiles.

This is certainly a reasonable argument. I’m not saying it’s totally wrong—we simply don’t know for a fact because of the aforementioned reasons that:

1. We don’t actually know how much damage the strikes caused, due to Israel’s obvious lies of “100% interceptions” and disproved fakes.
2. We don’t know whether it was merely Iran’s goal to do a ‘light’ showing in the interest of ‘escalation management’. I.e. they may not have wanted to cause too much damage deliberately, simply to send a message but keep from provoking Israel to respond too aggressively.

Iran is said to have thousands of such missiles, so obviously having launched only 70+ or so is likely not indicative of a major attack tasked with actually causing serious destruction to Israeli infrastructure.

Then there’s the converse side: Iran came out the big winner by demonstrating all the previously-outlined abilities of bypassing the West’s densest AD shields.

Here’s why I think in some ways this conclusion to be the more correct in the long term.

Firstly, one of the common counterarguments is that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, which ultimately trumps anything Iran can throw at them. But in reality, now that Iran has proven the ability to penetrate Israel, Iran too can cause nuclear devastation by striking the Israeli Dimona nuclear power plant. Destroyed nuclear plants would produce far more radioactive chaos than the relatively ‘clean’ modern nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Israel is much smaller than the comparatively gigantic Iran. Iran can take many nuclear hits and survive; but a single mass nuclear event in Israel could irradiate the entire country, making it uninhabitable.

Secondly, recall the main fear of Iraqi Scarabs and Scuds back in the day: that they could contain chemical/biological warheads. Iran too could technically load its missiles with all kinds of nasty goodies of this sort: either chem-bio or even unenriched Uranium—which it has aplenty—to create a ‘dirty bomb’. Now that we know it can penetrate Israel easily, Iran could actually wipe the country out with a mass un-enriched nuclear, chemical, or biological attack with these now-proven hyper- or quasi-hypersonic ballistics. That threat alone now presents a psychological Damocles Sword that will act as asymmetrical deterrent or counter to any Israeli Samson Option threat.

Thirdly, this was Iran’s very first foray into such a direct strike. It can be argued that they gained critical data and metrics from the entire Western alliance’s defensive capabilities as well as Israeli defensive vulnerabilities. This means that there is an implied threat that any future attack of this scale could be far more effective, as Iran may now ‘calibrate’ said attack to maximize what it saw were any failings or weaknesses on its part last night. Russia has had two years of launching such strikes, and it has only been semi-recently that they’ve calibrated and finetuned the precise timings of the sophisticated multi-layered drone-ALCM-ballistic triple threat attack. Iran can improve with each iteration as well and maximize/streamline the effectiveness with each attempt.

Fourthly, there is the now-confirmed mass discrepancy of operational costs:

Israel’s defense of last night’s Iranian missile and drone attack is estimated to have costed over $1.3 billion in jet fuel, surface-to-air missile interceptors, air-to-air missiles, and other military equipment utilized by the Israeli air defense array; with an “Arrow 3” hypersonic anti-ballistic missile alone believed to cost between $5-20 million.

One unconfirmed source claimed Iran’s attack cost as little as $30M, while the number floated for the West’s interceptions is around $1B to $1.3B.

Given that the average interceptor missile is minimum from about $1M to upwards of $15-20M for the SM-6s, this total price is plausible. Given that Iran was said to have fired a total of ~350+ drones/missiles, and that the standard procedure is to fire 2 interceptors at each threat, one can clearly see the math: 350 x 2 = 700 x $1-15M.

The point is that, just as we’re in the midst of the Houthis having proven the West’s total inability to sustain defense against mass persistent drone swarms, here too Iran may have just proven an absolutely lethal inability of Israel and the West to sustain against a potential long drawn-out Iranian strike campaign; i.e. one prosecuted over the course of days or weeks, with consistent daily mass-barrages. Such a campaign would likely critically deplete the West’s ability to shoot down even the lowest scale Shahed drone threat. Just look at Ukraine—it is going through the same lesson as we speak.

Lastly, what does this mean?

One neglected consequence of this is that Iran now stands to field the ability to totally disrupt Israel’s economic way of life. If Iran were to engage in a committed campaign of mass strikes, it could totally paralyze the Israeli economy by making entire areas uninhabitable, causing mass migrations in the same way the Hamas attack led thousands of Israelis to flee.

Unlike Israel’s barbaric and savage genocide aimed primarily at civilians, last night’s Iranian attack exclusively targeted military sites. But if Iran wanted to, they could launch mass infrastructure attacks in the way Russia has now done to Ukraine’s energy grids, further compounding the economic damage. In short: Iran could mire Israel in months’ and years’ long economic malaise or outright devastation.

Don’t forget this attack was still relatively limited to Iran alone. Sure, the Houthis and even Kata’ib Hezbollah reportedly sent a few drones, but it was minor. That means in the future, should Israel choose to escalate, Iran still reserves several levels of its own escalatory advantage. If push came to shove, imagine Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran all launching full-fledged attacks on Israel in all out war. Maybe that’s what Israel wants, some would argue. After all, there are echoes of the various Arab-Israeli wars where Israel ‘triumphed’ against such large Arab coalitions. But times have changed, the calculus is slightly different now. Short of using nuclear weapons, how would Israel survive a full-scale war against Hezbollah in the north while Iran rains daily barrages of hypersonic missiles, drones, and everything in between on Israel’s industries, crippling its economy?

Of course, at that point the question of the U.S. coming to help is brought up, but, clearly desperate for an off-ramp, Biden just stated:

An Important Overlooked Point

The final aspect for consideration is to remember that all of the preceding and ensuing events could very well be part of the Israeli plan. Recall, Israel didn’t choose to blow up the Iranian embassy—a huge, unprecedented maneuver—and slaughter Iranian generals just for its health. This appeared part of a clear strategy of escalation aimed at baiting Iran into an escalatory spiral, presumably with the end goal of drawing the U.S. into a large scale war to cut down Iran once and for all.

In light of that, some experts now speculate that Iran foolishly “fell into the trap”. However, as stated earlier, Iran can be said to have wisely ‘managed’ the escalation for precisely this reason: to show its strength while not going too far in a way that would invite a wider American response—or even an Israeli one for that matter.

But I simply mention this to temper any ‘celebratory’ touts from the resistance sphere. While Iran’s strikes may inspire some chest-beating chauvinism, in reality it may very well have played into Israel’s hand. However, the U.S.’ unwillingness to support Israel into further escalation could very well deflate Netanyahu’s goals and simply leave Israel with egg on its face with Iran coming out the winner in the exchange.

We’ll have to wait and see where it leads: as of this writing, the story has changed three separate times; the last two being that Israel decided not to respond, with news now claiming that Israel not only has chosen to retaliate, but will even do so as early as tonight, perhaps within minutes or hours of this publication’s release. If that turns out to be the case, then we’ll have to see if Israel chooses its own ‘face-saving’ off-ramp ‘light touch’ attack just for damage control’s sake, or whether it truly aims to keep climbing that escalatory ladder in force. Any major action without American backing is risky: not only because it could fail, and Israeli planes could be shot down, but also because Iran could make good on its word and unleash another far more devastating attack.

Final Thoughts

Why now? Why did Israel bait Iran into such an action at this precise moment?

The clue to the answer lies in the news from several days ago that Israel totally withdrew its forces from Khan Younis:

I suspect that Israel—or Netanyahu in particular—is facing failure, after not having accomplished any of the stated objectives, and thus is desperate to create a new distraction as a vector for continuing the war in some way that could keep the world, and Israelis, from reaching the conclusion that the war has been totally lost.

Have you seen the latest bombshell from Haaretz?

https://archive.ph/Fc4nx

We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology. There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.

Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There’s no way around it. The good guys don’t always win.

The astonishing article, which jibes with the sentiments of many Israelis, goes on:

After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we’re being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country’s history – and a decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic exit.

The article concludes that the calculus has changed, and that Israelis may now never be able to return to the northern border, given the situation with Hezbollah.

Another classic line:

No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating. Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that its awakened in time.

The author then focuses his condemnation on the upcoming ‘Rafah operation’:

Rafah is the newest bluff that the mouthpieces are plying to fool us and make us think that victory is just moments away. By the time they enter Rafah, the actual event will have lost its significance. There may be an incursion, perhaps a tiny one, sometime – say in May. After that, they’ll peddle the next lie, that all we have to do is ________ (fill in the blank), and victory will be on its way. The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished.

In short: this is why Netanyahu needed an escalation. It’s to divert attention from the ongoing catastrophe of Israel’s potential defeat to Hamas, the catastrophic loss of standing of Israel’s image in the world community, the complete turning against Israel by the entire world. Rather than admit defeat and face the end of his career, as well as the coming trials and tribunals that would put Bibi in jail, he chose to take the only remaining option: to continue escalating in the hopes that a wider-scale war could wash away his sins and undo the past mistakes. Unfortunately, just like the ill-fated Zelensky, Netanyahu’s doomed plan appears destined to coincide with the U.S.’ historic decline, reaching its zenith now in this pivotal year of 2024.

At the critical moment when Israel needed the strongest possible America, they got the weakest America in its history. That is Israel’s blunder, which may be its ultimate, calamitous undoing. But Bibi will likely have no choice but to continue escalating, or at least keep a strategy of tension a constant presence in order to survive.

Only last quick postscript note is to say that the ensuing events could affect the Ukrainian aid bill, as there is now talk of ramming through an emergency Israeli aid package, in light of events, which could have Ukrainian aid attached; but we’ll have to see what happens, as there is still strong opposition among some Republicans.

……………….

Source

US Democrats Abandoned the Working Class – Ruy Teixeira (Spiked) 8 April 2024

‘Democrats see ordinary Americans as the great unwashed’

Who would vote for the Democrats now? Certainly not working-class Americans. Once the voice of the union man, the Democratic Party is now more interested in acting as a mouthpiece for the college-educated elites. These supposed progressives care more about imposing woke ideology and Net Zero penury on ordinary people, than they do about improving their lives. And yet Democrats remain baffled as to why working-class voters are turning to Donald Trump.

Ruy Teixeira, co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss all this and more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: How did the Democrats lose so much of their working-class voter base so quickly?

Ruy Teixeira: On a raw, empirical level, the Democrats are rapidly losing the support of working-class Americans. In 2020, Biden lost non-college-educated and working-class voters, which was very unusual for the Democrats until recently.

Now there’s been an even greater deterioration of working-class support for Biden and the Democrats. Trump is beating Biden by 14 points among working-class voters in the polls – that’s a 10-point increase compared with 2020. But Biden is up more than 15 points among college-educated voters. We’re seeing this kind of educational polarisation not just among white voters, but also among other racial groups.

In a pure, nose-counting sense, the Republicans have indeed replaced the Democrats as the party of the working classes. And there’s a very simple reason for this. The Democratic Party lost a lot of white working-class voters in the last half of the 20th century, because it embraced soft neoliberalism. Slowly but surely, working-class voters became less convinced that the Democrats were on their side when it came to economic issues. In fact, the Democrats began adopting what economists called the ‘compensate the losers’ strategy, which promised to transfer the benefits of neoliberal globalisation to the masses. But this never really happened.

More recently, we’ve seen the Democrats become increasingly responsive to an ever-more important part of their base. That is, the liberal, college-educated, incredibly sensitive white voter. These voters are interested in social, cultural and political issues that are utterly alien to what most working-class voters care about – be they black, white or Hispanic. It’s almost unimaginable that the Democratic Party of 30 years ago would have been on board with radical attitudes toward defunding the police, gender-affirming care, relaxed border controls and the endless hectoring about racial ‘equity’.

Back then, the Democratic Party had enough common sense, and enough anchoring in the working classes, to avoid these divisive ideas. But nowadays, the party is steered by voters from the commanding heights of cultural production. The party is particularly responsive to these voters because, quite frankly, they need their money and support.

Obviously, Democrats in competitive districts aren’t going to run on platforms like ‘defunding the police’ and providing gender-affirming care – but the party is still the party. And its image is antithetical to what a lot of working-class people are comfortable with or believe in.

These days, you could reasonably argue that the Democrats are actually anti-working-class. Of course, the party will always argue that it still pursues policies in the economic interests of the working classes. But in a lot of ways, Democrats really don’t like working people. They treat ordinary Americans as the great unwashed. In books like White Rural Rage, which are popular in Democratic circles, rural Americans are painted as xenophobic, authoritarian troglodytes opposed to everything that decent people stand for. The Democrats are meant to be the party of the working classes, and yet its members outright resent them.

O’Neill: Would you say that working-class voters turned their backs on the Democrats for cultural reasons or are the economic factors more important?

Teixeira: It’s definitely a combination of the two. There’s an old, well-known Gallup poll that asks voters which party will do the best job of keeping America prosperous and secure in the next few years. Democrats used to have a huge advantage on this issue, particularly among working-class voters. In the 70s and 80s, however, that advantage really started disappearing – and it’s never come back. To this day, Democrats are rated below the Republicans on which party can keep the country prosperous.

More recently, the Democrats have gone far beyond the popular ideals of tolerance, opposing discrimination and supporting equality of opportunity. These common-sense positions have been replaced with boutique ideas in support of ‘reverse discrimination’ and the non-existence of the gender binary. This radical push has led to the ‘culturalisation’ of important economic and political issues in the US. The climate issue is a perfect example of this.

The culture of the Democratic Party has evolved in a way that makes achieving a sensible industrial policy quite difficult. Instead of propping up competitive industries, like oil and gas, the Democrats have adopted this green-oriented approach favouring renewable energy and electric vehicles. Working-class people simply aren’t interested in this. And they especially aren’t interested when their energy bills start rising. Fundamentally, environmentalism has evolved from protecting the environment and reducing pollution into an apocalyptic crusade against global warming.

None of this makes economic sense and it doesn’t do a lot of good for the working class. But when the party culture is constructed in such a way that the highly educated and hyper-liberal have all the power, this is exactly the kind of nonsense you’re going to get. The climate, after all, is a huge issue for the elites. They don’t care if it ranks 17th on the list of priorities for ordinary, working-class people. They’re going to pursue radical climate policies anyway. It’s just one example of how cultural radicalism has completely infected the Democrats’ approach to economic issues.

Democrats have ceased asking themselves the fundamental question: ‘How are we going to make the lives of working-class people better?’ Sensing this, working Americans are looking elsewhere.

………………..

Source

The Jewish War and Peace In An Ocean of Lies – by Phil Giraldi – 11 April 2024

Does anyone in Washington care about Israel’s crimes?

 • 2,400 WORDS • 

One expects that anyone involved in politics will lie whenever they think they can get away with it to burnish one’s own image and while also distorting reality to promote policies that are being favored. Nevertheless, the record of high crimes committed by a series of presidents and their top aides since the so-called “war on terror” began has established a new low for government veracity. One would have thought that the fake intelligence fabricated by a group of Zionists in the Pentagon and White House to launch the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq would be as bad as it could possibly get, but the Joe Biden team has outdone even those unfortunately unindicted criminals by allowing itself to be maneuvered by friends in NATO and by Israel into situations that are one step short of nuclear war.

Listening to John Kirby, Lloyd Austin, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield speak suggests that a course of remedial English might be in order as they cannot articulate a sentence that is coherent, especially as they are frequently lying or being deliberately evasive. And then there is teleprompter Joe himself who can pout over the killing of 13,000 children in Palestine while also secretly sending weapons to the Israelis who are eager to slaughter still more based on the judgement that they will grow up to be “terrorists.” Joe’s idea of a exchange of views with the Israeli government is a threat to maybe do something unspecific followed by a strongly worded message from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling him to “Go to hell!”

Joe’s gang cannot confirm that the Israelis are committing war crimes linked to genocide even though the rest of the world, including a majority of Americans, watch it happening on television and are convinced regarding what is taking place. But hey, Israel is a wonderful little democracy and America’s best friend and ally in the whole wide world. Or at least that is what Congress and the White House as well as the Jewish dominated media want you to believe. In reality, Israel is a racist and sectarian state that has been a US liability since it was founded, something that Secretary of State George Marshall warned about, but Harry Truman wanted Jewish money so he could get reelected. Some things never change as we watch Biden and Trump battle for the shekels by pledging their loyalty to Israel.

The latest wrinkle on the consequences of loving Israel so much comes with what it going on with Iran, which had its Embassy Consulate General building in Damascus Syria attacked by Israeli fighter planes, killing two senior Iranian generals plus a number of other Iranians, Lebanese and Syrians. For what it’s worth, embassies and consulates are generally speaking regarded as untouchable military targets under the terms of the Vienna Convention, which sought to keep enemies talking to each other even under the most adverse circumstances. In fact, Syria last fought Israel in 1973, more than fifty years ago, and has not gone to war with the Israelis since that time while Israel has been bombing Syria regularly as well as killing Iranian officials and scientists for many years. Iran, like Syria of late, has never attacked Israel.

Iran has said it will retaliate and Israel has gone on high alert. So what does Biden do? He warned Iran to back off and ignores the fact that it was Israel that did the unprovoked attacking and started the whole business and pledges “ironclad” support for the Jewish state if Iran dares to do anything serious in response. There are also reports that Israel and the US are planning jointly their possible retaliation if Iran were to strike. General Erik Kurilla, commander of the US Central Command, is now on his way to Israel and is expected to meet Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and senior Israel Defense Forces officials to coordinate possible US responses with those of Israel. Nota bene that President Biden has flipped the right or wrong of the entire affair over to do exactly what Israel wants, i.e. hopefully have the US go to war with the Iranians. This has been Netanyahu’s intention right from the beginning and there is also a bit of blackmail thrown in for good measure with Israel threatening to start using its secret nuclear arsenal if the United States stops supplying the Jewish state with weapons. Israeli Knesset member Nissim Vaturi, a representative in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, issued the threat in an unsubtle way while discussing the probability that Iran would retaliate against Israel for bombing its embassy. He said “In the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition … we will have to use everything we have.” In other words, Israel will have no choice but to start dropping nuclear weapons on its enemies and might also attack its friends who failed to support it, a reference to the Samson Option in which a beleaguered Israel would use its nukes to “take everyone down with them.”

The timing of the embassy attack suggests that Israel is acting as it does, i.e. taking steps to shift the narrative and restore its perpetual “victimhood,” because it definitely needs a public relations boost in a world where only the US and a few other nations aligned with Washington are not yet ready to give up on Bibi and his wild plans for regional domination. The horrific killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies have been the top stories all over the world, and rightly so. The Israeli disdain for any behavior that might show weakness in the drive to remove the Palestinians from Palestine has resulted in the Jewish state’s being condemned and boycotted by much of the world with more to come.

Nevertheless, even in those countries that have made illegal pro-Palestinian expressions, demonstrations calling for a ceasefire have attracted hundreds of thousands of protesters. The governments confronting elections later this year, including the US and Germany, are under considerable pressure to respond to the popular sentiment. Indeed, it is already being mooted that President Joe Biden might well fail to be re-elected due to his kid gloves handling of Netanyahu who has assessed Biden’s weakness and has heedlessly taken US support as a given while also ignoring the warnings that are now coming out of Washington and elsewhere over the genocide taking place.

Indeed, it would be useful to speculate that the conflict in Gaza is in part being used as a smokescreen for developments with Iran and other Israeli neighbors that may prove more dangerous in the long run. Even the well-informed might be surprised to learn that even though Israel is not actually at war legally with several of its neighbors, it is nevertheless de facto at war with three countries, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. It has been exchanging fire with the Lebanese Hezbollah militias on its northern border on an almost daily basis since fighting with Hamas began in October and has sought and apparently obtained US guarantees of direct support should Hezbollah escalate its activity. In Syria, which has not in any way attacked Israel, the Israeli air and missile forces have staged numerous attacks against targets that it invariably claims to be “Iranian” even though most of the casualties are Syrians. There have been missile and bombing attacks on Syria nearly weekly since 2017, including a number of recent incidents involving both Damascus and Aleppo international airports that endangered civilian passengers and air crews.

As reported above, the most recent and most damaging attack was directed against the Iranian Consulate General, which was attached to the Iranian Embassy located in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was completely destroyed by six missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing several long-serving diplomats alongside Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi. It was also reported that Brigadier General Hossein Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and Lebanon, was among the victims as was at least one Hezbollah member. Sources in Syria confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including six Syrians. Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said afterwards that “We consider this aggression to have violated all diplomatic norms and international treaties. Benjamin Netanyahu has completely lost his mental balance due to the successive failures in Gaza and his failure to achieve his Zionist goals.” Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.

And just days before the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the Israeli military had launched massive strikes against a target in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them soldiers. The air strikes hit a weapons depot, resulting in a series of explosions that also killed six Hezbollah fighters.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) subsequently revealed that it had strengthened air defenses and called up reservists in expectation of a response either from Lebanon or directly from Iran itself. Zahedi was an important Iranian official, reportedly responsible for the IRGC’s operations in Syria and Lebanon, for Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and was thus the most senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries. His killing was the most significant death of a senior Iranian official since the murder in Baghdad of General Qassim Soleimani by the Trump Administration in January 2020. As the IRGC is a US-designated terrorist organization, Washington may have in advance approved of the Israeli action, though that was denied by the Pentagon.

Iran’s possible reprisal includes the capability to respond by directly launching missiles from its own territory rather than via any of its proxy groups, which include the militias it supports in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. Responding to that possibility, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz has warned on social media that if Tehran attacked from its territory, Israel would react and “attack in Iran.” Iran may therefore choose to respond indirectly or through a proxy, but any major reprisal would be giving Israel an excuse to elevate the conflict, which just might be the main reason for the attack on the Consulate General in the first place. It is, however, widely believed that the Iranian leadership is eager to avoid any escalation into a major or even a minor exchange that could be referred to as a war. Nevertheless, posters have gone up around Tehran in a sign of public pressure for an Iranian response. “The defeat of the Zionist regime in Gaza will continue and this regime will be close to decline and dissolution,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech to the country’s officials in Tehran. “Desperate efforts like the one they committed in Syria will not save them from defeat. Of course, they will also be slapped for that action,” he added.

Israeli Defense Minister Gallant responded to the Ayatollah, saying that Israel is “increasing preparedness” in the face of threats from all across the Middle East. Gallant said that the country’s defense establishment is “expanding our operations against Hezbollah, against other bodies that threaten us,” and reiterated that Israel “strikes our enemies all over the Middle East… We will know how to protect the citizens of Israel and we will know how to attack our enemies.”

Intelligence sources in Washington suggest that Iran will try to respond by possibly blowing up an Israeli Embassy or other building, or even by assassinating an Israeli official, but they will more likely do something indirectly through a proxy like Hezbollah or the Houthis. They could also send a more subtle message by accelerating their nuclear program, though there is a danger that that would definitely bring the US into the game, which is precisely what Israel would like to see. They want to cripple Iran but would much prefer that all the heavy lifting – and the casualties and costs – be endured by Washington. If a US intervention were to occur and there were a misstep, it could easily escalate into a regional war with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran all lined up against the US and Israel with China and Russia likely to be playing a supporting role aiding the Arabs and Iranians. And don’t forget that Israel is nuclear armed. If it gets in trouble it would see itself as a victim and would be tempted to do something very dangerous.

So it is easy to see that Israel has staged a deliberate provocation to draw Washington into its wars. It is playing with fire in an attempt to once and for all establish its dominance over all of its neighbors. Interestingly, the tone deaf Biden Administration appears to be falling into the trap set by the Israelis. Beyond the “ironclad” pledge, it also voted against a Russian and Chinese drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate General. The vote should have been a no brainer given the clear violation of international law and act of war committed by Israel in doing what it did, but the US was joined by Britain and France in casting the veto vote “no” reportedly after “Diplomats said the US told council colleagues that many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” It all means that Biden is stepping in it yet again in a situation where Netanyahu is in control and running circles around him.

……………

Cornel West chooses Black Lives Matter activist Melina Abdullah as his vp – by Brittany Gibson (Politico) 10 April 2024

Cornel West tapped university professor and prominent Black Lives Matter activist Melina Abdullah to be his running mate on his long-shot presidential bid.

Abdullah has never run for political office before and is the former chair of the Pan-African Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles.

Melina Abdullah

“I wanted to run with someone who would put a smile on the face of Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. from the grave,” West said.

He announced his pick on Wednesday’s episode of the Tavis Smiley Radio Show on KBLA radio.

West is running as an independent candidate and faces significant challenges in his campaign for the White House. West’s fundraising has lagged behind his opponents, raising less than $1 million since launching his bid last summer.

Since getting in the race, West has switched parties twice, leaving the People’s Party and the Green Party to ultimately run as an independent. The switch mandates an expensive and difficult process to get his name on the ballot in 50 states and Washington, DC. Officially choosing his vice president allows him to start collecting petition signatures to get on the ballot in about 20 states.

“Both of us want to disrupt the narrative that you have only two choices,” Abdullah said of their ticket. “We can be expansive and imaginative … we enter this really as faithful people who are not more pragmatists than we are faithful.”

Through partnerships with existing third parties, West is already on the ballot in three states. But this method was not successful in California, one of the hardest states to gain ballot access, as West lost the Peace and Freedom Party’s primary to the Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate in March.

(Party For Socialism and Liberation candidates for US President and VP)

Abdullah, who is also an organizer of grassroots and local Black Lives Matter chapters, said she “was not expecting the phone call that I got last week at all, like it was the furthest thing from my mind. And then he and his wife Annahita [Mahdavi West] asked and immediately my heart just soared.”

Black Lives Matter doesn’t endorse candidates, she said, but individuals involved with the organization may endorse her separately. Abdullah, who is also a Howard University graduate and member of the AKA sorority, said she would not step away from her work organizing with the grassroots local chapters.

West also said there wouldn’t be any political “burden” being associated Black Lives Matter, which has called for defunding the police and was alleged to be associated with property destruction at civil rights demonstrations in 2020.

As a practicing Muslim, Abdullah also spoke of the auspiciousness of her announcement on Eid, the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramandan. She talked openly about her faith, using a similar approach to West’s on the campaign trail. West is a Christian and the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary.

“I’m running for Jesus. She’s running for Allah. That’s a beautiful thing,” West said.

The announcement was a major milestone for West’s campaign but was not without issue. A technical difficulty affecting West’s audio input cut him out from their joint interview for almost 10 minutes.

Democrats were swift to criticize West’s announcement. “Despite Cornel West announcing a running mate, our view remains the same: only two candidates have a path to 270 electoral votes, President Biden and Donald Trump,” said DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni. “The stakes are high, and we know this is going to be a close election — that’s why a vote for any third party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump.”

On the morning of West’s announcement, the New York Times reported that Trump allies view third-party candidates as advantageous for Trump’s reelection chances. One ally, Scott Presler, has messaged both West and the Green Party’s Jill Stein about helping them get on the ballot on social media.

West co-campaign manager Ceyanna Dent said, “Scott Presler has not worked with the campaign in any capacity.” Though Dent added that the campaign staff was briefed on his overtures.

West was asked by Smiley about being a possible spoiler in 2024, and said, “No politician owns a vote. We stand for what we stand for. If you go with us, then come with us and change the world.”

……………………

Source

US Yellen Dispatched to Beg China for Face-Saving Slowdown – by Simplicius – 9 April 2024

SIMPLICIUS

The U.S.’ growing urgency in ‘containing’ China’s development was thrown in sharp relief this week as Janet Yellen arrived in Beijing for what turned out to be an execrable beggar’s tour. Just days prior to her arrival, she had buzzed the punditry with her historically memorable exclamation that China was now operating at “overcapacity”(!!).

What is overcapacity, you ask? It’s a new word for me, too—so let’s consult the dictionary together:

overcapacity
noun
o·​ver·​ca·​pac·​i·​ty: ō′vər-kə-ˈpa-sə-tē 
1: When an insolent upstart nation’s surging economic activity totally humiliates the reigning hegemon’s own faltering economy, causing the many expensive dentures and porcelain veneers of the ruling class gerontocracy to rattle and grate with moral outrage and jealousy.

1b: An undesirable situation causing Janet Yellen and Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio to droop like a pair of botox-sapped jowls.

Granted…my dictionary might be slightly different to yours, I have a rare edition. That said, are we on the same page? Good.

The above definition may be missing in the new official regime argot pamphlet, but it’s safe to say the inept leaders of the U.S. are down to making up creative new euphemisms for describing China’s total undressing and upending of the economic order.

But if you were skeptical about the meaning behind Yellen’s risible “overcapacity” solecism, her speech from inside of China confirms precisely what’s on the regime’s mind:

“China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity. Actions taken by the PRC today can shift world prices….”

And the bombshell:

“When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of American firms is put into question.”

Well, I’ll say.

The important distinction to note in the above statement is that for a long time the ‘cheap’ moniker used to describe Chinese goods often underhandedly referred to their quality, in the secondary definitional sense. Here, Yellen is referring to cheap as in price: the distinction is significant because it’s referential to the fact that Chinese manufacturing processes have simply far exceeded the efficiency in the West, as recently highlighted by videos of the Xiaomi e-car factory with its own native Giga Press that’s claimed to be able to pump out a car every 17 seconds.

The fact of the matter is, China is simply leaping ahead of the decrepit, deteriorating U.S. by every measure and the panicked elites have sent Yellen to beg China to “slow down” and not embarrass them on the world stage.

How is China doing this? Let’s run through a few of the most poignant ways:

[1]

First and foremost, it’s become almost a passe bromide to observe: “The U.S. funds wars, while China funds development.” But it really is true. Think about this for a moment:

The above is factual: Esquire reported that a Brown University investigation found the U.S. has spent an ineffable $14T on wars since 9/11:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a37575881/14-trillion-defense-spending-costs-of-war-project/

And yes, the current U.S. debt is a massive $34T. That means quite literally almost half of the entire current U.S. debt was blown on endless, mindless, genocidal wars in the Middle East.

The U.S. has wasted its entire blood and treasure on war. Imagine what the U.S. could have built with $14 trillion dollars? Where the U.S. could have been in relation to China for that amount? As someone else noted, the U.S. could have very well built its own “one belt and road” project for that money, connecting the world and reaping untold benefits.

China hasn’t spent a cent on war, and puts everything right back into economic development and wellbeing for its own people.

China is winning lion’s share of construction projects in Africa

Chinese companies accounted for 31% of African infrastructure contracts valued at US$50 million or more in 2022, compared with 12% for Western firms, according to a new study.

It is worth to be noted that in the 1990s, about eight out of 10 contracts to build infrastructure in Africa were won by Western companies.

The illustrative statistics for this are endless:

What makes this historic malappropriation of American funds most tragic is that none of it came at the benefit of American people. The entire operation was carried out by an ethnic cabal within the U.S. government with loyalties only to Israel, and no one else. I’m speaking of course of the PNAC clan, who masterminded the entire breadth of the 21st century wars which have engulfed America in wretched shame and misery, irreversibly gutting the country and squandering its global standing. These wars had nothing whatsoever to do with America’s national interests or security, and have done naught but make Americans less safe and the entire world more dangerous and unstable.

China doesn’t have this problem: there is no inimical ‘out’ group parasitizing their country’s leadership, literally assassinating (JFK) and blackmailing their presidents (Clinton). China is therefore able to focus on the interests of its own people.

And yes, for those wondering, it’s now fairly proven that Lewinsky was a Mossad honeytrap used to blackmail Clinton in assenting to various Israeli demands vis-a-vis the Oslo Accords, Wye River Memorandum, etc.

The fact is, Israel is a destructive parasite sucking the lifeblood out of America, causing the host to wage unnecessary wars on its behalf which have utterly removed every advantageous and competitive edge the country might have had over its Chinese ‘rival’.

[2]

As a corollary of the above, beyond just the simple kinetic nature of the profligately wasteful wars, America wastes an exorbitant amount of money just on maintenance and upkeep of its global hegemony. The reason is, it costs a lot of ‘enforcement’ money to strongarm vassals who hate you into compliance.

China doesn’t form vassals, it forms partners. That means it spends comparatively far less spreading its influence because that influence has compounding abilities owing to the fair bilateral nature of China’s arrangements. The U.S. has to spend comparatively inordinate amounts of blood and treasure to maintain the same level of ‘influence’ because that ‘influence’ is totally artificial, confected out of a poisonous mixture of fear, strong-arming tactics, economic terrorism that leads to blowback which hurts the U.S. economy, etc. In short, it is mafia tactics versus real business partnerships.

One big difference between China and the U.S. is that China is open to sharing the earth, willing to co-prosper with the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. is unwilling to abdicate its global domination:

The above was highlighted by Graham Allison, coiner of the Thucydides Trap idiom in relation to U.S./China. The Thucydides Trap, as some may know, describes a situation where an emerging power begins to displace the incumbent global power, and how historically this almost always leads to major war. To popularize the theory apropos U.S./China, Graham Allison used the historical example of the Peloponnesian war, where a cagey Sparta was forced to take on the rising power of Athens.

Allison was recently invited by President Xi to a forum for U.S. business leaders where Xi told him directly:

Contrast President Xi’s magnanimous statements with those of the seething, guilt-wracked, bloodthirstily conniving Western ‘executives’. In fact, Xi called for more exchanges between China and the U.S. in order to entwine the two countries in mutual understanding, to avoid the Thucydides Trap:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3jY_Xrvp0xg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

This is the enduring image of what global leadership truly looks like, and the principles it embodies.

Meanwhile, when one thinks of America’s progressive decline, the one enduring image that comes to mind is of a bitterly frightened but dangerous, beady-eyed cornered rodent, conspiring on how to inflict damage and suffering onto the world in order to mask its own downfall.

[3]

The U.S. government does a grave disservice to its own development by cooking all of its economic books. Every country does it at times to some degree—and going by U.S.’ notoriously frequent accusations of China in this regard, one would think China to be the most flagrant violator—but in fact, no one does this more than the current U.S. regime.

The recent “jobs” report touted as a major victory by the Biden administration was a disgraceful travesty. The admin touted major jobs figures:

But it turned out every job was either part time, a federal job, or went to illegals:

In reality, the U.S. economy is in atrocious shape with sky-high inflation.

Here’s Jesse Watters revealing that:

“The Fed chair just confessed that #Bidenomics is just a migrant job fair. There is actually a million less American citizens working today than there were in 2020.”

Biden created 5 million migrant jobs! So don’t be fooled by his propaganda that’s spewed by the liberal machine. YOU DONT MATTER!

The data is cooked even more when comparing to China’s economic situation. As the following Tweeter explains:

While Chinese INCOMES are below American INCOMES, Chinese have much higher NET WORTH than Americans. How? They own apartments at a much higher rate and with a lot more equity than Americans. The MEAN and MEDIAN insight is even more beautiful. This graphic here is pretty much the only thing you need to understand about the difference between the economies of China and United States. But you really need to understand it and you need to have a deep understanding of what it means.

U.S. home ownership is on a precipitous decline toward the low ~60s%, while China now has over 90% home ownership rate:

[4.]

The above naturally springs the question of how China is able to do these things while the U.S. cannot. One of the answers comes by way of this fascinating explainer which shows that, contrary to the West’s depiction of China as some kind of rigidly authoritarian system, forward-looking President Xi is actually utilizing very cutting edge economic experimentation models to keep the Chinese economy as innovative, limber, and supple as possible.

In short, a deep study of thousands of official documents shows a huge upswing in language promoting economic experimentation in the directives issued under Xi’s government.

This is further compounded by the most important point of all: that under President Xi, China has embarked on a meticulous plan of curbing financialization and speculation of the ‘Western model’ in its economy. This is where it starts getting important so buckle up.

A good breakdown of that is given here by Chinese academic Thomas Hon Wing Polin, who pulls from this recent article:

https://www.rt.com/business/594432-financialization-death-empires/

The article gives a brief history of financialization, from the Genoese bankers to modern times, observing the historical cycles that have precipitated America’s current deterioration:

Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.

In describing the cycle of financialization and its connection to the death of empires, the article notes about Britain:

For example, the incumbent hegemon at the time, Great Britain, was the country hardest hit by the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period of malaise that saw Britain’s industrial growth decelerate and its economic standing diminished. Arrighi identifies this as the ‘signal crisis’ – the point in the cycle where productive vigor is lost and financialization sets in.

And yet, as Arrighi quotes David Landes’ 1969 book ‘The Unbound Prometheus,’ “as if by magic, the wheel turned.” In the last years of the century, business suddenly improved and profits rose. “Confidence returned—not the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not prevailed since…the early 1870s….In all of western Europe, these years live on in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle époque.” Everything seemed right again.

However, there is nothing magical about the sudden restoration of profits, Arrighi explains. What happened is that “as its industrial supremacy waned, its finance triumphed and its services as shipper, trader, insurance broker and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable than ever.”

In short: as an empire dies, loses its industrial and manufacturing capacity, finance takes over, pumping up huge bubbles of phony speculative money that gives the brief appearance of economic prosperity—for a time. This is what’s currently happening in the U.S., as it drowns in its self-created agony of debt, misery, corruption, and global destabilization.

One thing to note—if you’ll allow me this not-so-brief aside—is that the entire Western system is based on the actual institutionalized economic sabotage and subversion of the developing world. Books like the following go into some of it:

The rise of the underground economy: The book reveals how the United States’ underground economy evolved parallel to its legitimate economy, exploiting loopholes and leveraging secrecy jurisdictions to facilitate illegal activities such as drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.

The “dark” side of globalization: Mills challenges the prevailing narrative of globalization as a force for progress, highlighting how it has facilitated the expansion of illicit networks across borders and allowed criminal enterprises to flourish.

The complicity of financial institutions: The author examines the role played by major financial institutions in enabling money laundering and illicit transactions. He underlines the need for stronger regulations and accountability to prevent banks from becoming facilitators of underground activities.

I challenge you to read notes on the National Memorandum 200, if you haven’t heard of it before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Study_Memorandum_200

Incidentally, John Michael Greer just penned a new column (thanks to whoever shouted out this blog in the comments!) about the neologism he coined: Lenocracy, which derives from the Latin “leno” for pimp; i.e. a government run by pimps, or pimpocracy.

His definition of pimps in this case is that of middlemen who are the classic rent-seeking leaches—or rentier class—which extract economic rent without adding any value to the economy—all Michael Hudson territory, for those in the know.

Bear with me, I promise this will all tie together into an overall picture of China.

JMG characterizes the ‘pimps’ as basically all the unelected, bureaucratic, red-tape-weaving, blood-sucking monetary vultures killing growth and livelihoods by each taking their nibbles in turn from the carcass of the working class, exacting some small transactional charge at every step of routine business in Western nations, particularly the U.S. This has served to suffocate the average small business or entrepreneurship in general, not counting the big ticket venture capitalists who are mostly offshoots of global financial and investment firms. This is part and parcel to the lethal ‘financialization’ of the country that has spelled doom for its future.

Now, getting back to Thomas Hon Wing Polin’s precis, and how it relates to this. He notes:

It is noteworthy that the CPC leadership recently launched a major drive to build China into a “financial great power,” with a financial system “based on the real economy.” That would be the antithesis to Anglo-American-style economic financialization.

He pulls from the following article:

https://archive.is/316HN

Read that last part: “…set pure profit-making aside.”

Pay attention to this big kicker:

Beijing is powering ahead with the epic project.

“China’s 461-trillion-yuan (US$63.7 trillion) financial industry and its regulatory regime will be heavily prioritised in a broad economic reshuffle engendered by the country’s top leadership, with the sector remoulded to serve national objectives like sustainable growth and advancement in the global tech race.

Are you beginning to get it yet? If not, here’s the crowning finial:

Specifically, it vowed to rein in Wall Street-style practices seen as unsustainable and crisis-prone, and move toward functionality as an overriding value for the financial system rather than profitability.

It also mandated that Chinese financial institutions have “higher efficiency” than their peers in the capitalist world and provide inclusive, accessible services in the pursuit of common prosperity.

“Like it or not, banks and other institutions on the supply side should expect top-down directives and overhauls cued by the CFC,” said Zhu Tian, a professor with the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).

And there it is. In essence: China is creating a revolution, striking out a new path of finance which steers away from the wild excesses of the West into a bold new direction. Finance to benefit the real economy, the common man, the people. This is what the fig leaf of Rothschild-pushed ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is meant to be, or better yet: pretends to be.

It’s hard not to wax poetic on these developments, because they are truly groundbreaking. China is paving a new path forward for the entire world. The Chinese banking industry is now by far the largest on earth and President Xi has wisely put his foot down with a bold edict: we will not follow the path of destruction chosen by the West, but rather will set our own new path.

This is an iconoclastic, paradigm-breaking revolution which ends six centuries of Old Nobility world finance dominion, traced from the Spanish-Crown-allied Genoese bankers, to the Dutch then English banking system which now continues to enslave the world, and is referred to by a variety of names in the dissident sphere: from Hydra, to Leviathan, to Cthulu, to simply: the Cabal.

All those 600 years are going up in smoke with China’s repudiation of the ‘old standards’, which privilege predatory, deceptive, extractive terms and practices meant to benefit only the Old Nobility elite class. China’s system is true stakeholder finance: the government will forcibly bend the bankers to its will, making sure that finance serves the common good and the people first, rather than speculation, financialization, capitalization, and all the other wicked inventions of the Western Old Nobility class.

It begins like so:

“…bringing greed is good era to an end.”

The big one:

“Government has called for banks to abandon a Western-style ethos and adopt an outlook in line with broader economic priorities.”

It’s a revolution in the making.

But if you’re thinking my dramatic flights above verge a touch on hyperbole or idealism, you could be right. I, of course, still proceed with caution; we can’t be sure that China will succeed in its grand demolishment of the age-old paradigm. But all signals point to early success thus far, and more importantly, it’s clear that China has a leader that fundamentally understands these things at the most rooted level. Western leaders not only are incapable of even grasping the complexities involved of reining in capital, they are unable to do so for the mere fact that they’re totally bought and paid for by the representatives of that very capital class. The cabal of Capital is so deeply and institutionally entrenched in Western governmental systems that it’s simply impossible to imagine them being able to see ‘the forest for the trees’ from within the forest itself.

By the way, in light of the above, here’s the West’s truly desperate, pathetically envious, face-saving attempt to tarnish and mischaracterize China’s new direction:

As well as:

https://www.rt.com/business/595434-us-eu-china-economies/

The above is particularly astounding in its admissions. Read carefully:

Market-based US and European economies are struggling to survive against China’s “very effective” alternative economic model, a top US trade representative has warned, according to Euractiv.

Katherine Tai told a briefing in Brussels on Thursday that Beijing’s “non-market” policies will cause severe economic and political damage, unless they are tackled through appropriate “countermeasures.” Tai’s remarks came as the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) kicked off in Leuven, Belgium.

“I think what we see in terms of the challenge that we have from China is… the ability for our firms to be able to survive in competition with a very effective economic system,” Tai said in response to a question from Euractiv.

In short: China isn’t playing fair—they’re actually privileging their people and economy over financial speculation, and this is causing their firms to outcompete ours!

But what she’s really talking about gets to the essence of the difference in the two systems:

The trade official described China as a system “that we’ve articulated as being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing against and surviving.”

These are code words: what she means by “market based” is free market capitalism, while China uses more of a centrally-planned directive system, as outlined earlier. Recall just recently I posted complaints from Western officials that their companies are not able to compete with Russian defense manufacturers due to their ‘unfairly’ efficient ‘central planning’ style.

Here too, what they mean is that the Chinese government creates directives that spurn ‘market logics’ and are aimed at direct improvements to the lives of ordinary citizens. In the West there’s no such thing: all market decisions are based merely on the totally detached financial firms’ speculations and are exclusively at the behest of a tiny claque of finance and banking elite at the top of the pyramid.

You see, the U.S. is threatened because it knows it can never compete with China fairly, by squelching or containing its own gluttonous financial elite—so that leaves only one avenue for keeping up: sabotage and war.

This is the real reason the U.S. is desperate to stoke a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by various provocations, including weapons shipments. Just like the U.S. used Ukraine as the battering ram to bleed and weaken Russia economically, disconnecting it from Europe, U.S. hopes to use Taiwan as the Ukraine against China. It would love to foment a bloody war that would leave China battered and economically set back to give the failing and greed-suffocated U.S. economy some breathing room.

But it’s unlikely to work—China is too sagacious to take the bait and fall for the trap. It will patiently wait things out, allowing the U.S. to drown in its own endless poison and treachery.

No, there will be no Thucydides Trap—it’s already too late for that. The Trap worked for Sparta because it was still at its peak and able to thwart Athens. The U.S. is in terminal decline and would lose a war against China, which is why they hope to stage a proxy war instead, cowardly using Taiwan as the battering ram. But China can read these desperate motives with the clarity of finely glazed porcelain.

…………………………

Source

Israel’s Killing of Aid Workers Is No Accident. It’s Part of the Plan to Destroy Gaza – by Jonathan Cook – 9 April 2024

 • 3,100 WORDS • 

The isolation of Gaza is almost complete. The laws of war have been torn up and the enclave is now completely at Israel’s mercy

After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.

Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.

With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.

But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.

Tweet

Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.

In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.

Not this time.

‘This has to stop’

Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”

Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.

When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were “indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?

Tweet

Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”

The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.

A salutary equation indeed.

British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.

But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.

Israel’s playbook

British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.

But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.

Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.

They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.

Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.

Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.

Gaza isolated

But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Israel needed to take firmer action.

The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.

This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the occupied territories to protect its volunteers. Meanwhile, Israel formally banned the ISM from accessing the occupied territories.

Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.

Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.

The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.

With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.

The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.

The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.

Western complicity

That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.

Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.

The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.

The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.

Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.

And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.

This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.

Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.

Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.

The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.

WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.

Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.

Subscribe to New Columns

Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.

Life and death lottery

Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.

The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.

Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.

Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.

According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.

Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.

Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.

An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.

Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”

That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.

Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.

Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”

This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.

Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.

If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.

Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.

Reporting stifled

Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.

Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.

That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.

Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.

Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.

What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.

But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.

The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.

The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.

His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.

Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.

Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.

Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.

Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.

Rulebook torn up

And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.

Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.

Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.

Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.

Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.

Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.

Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.

Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.

The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.

The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.

Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.

Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.

The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.

…………………….

(Republished from Middle East Eye)

Israel’s Brutal, Chaotic War – by Alastair Crooke – 8 April 2024

Norms, Conventions and Laws of Conduct Are Being Erased

 • 1,900 WORDS • 

We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula used by Israel often in the past to intimidate adversaries; this is different.

Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian Consulate: “We are very clear that we want to start a war with Iran and Hezbollah. Do you still not understand?”

“Israel wants to drag Iran into a full-scale war in order to be able to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities”, though these facilities are beyond American and Israeli reach, buried beneath mountains.

Cohen, and of course, Israel’s military leadership, will know that; but Israel nonetheless is locking itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat. Iran’s nuclear facilities are safe from Israeli assault. The destruction of civilian Iranian infrastructure, which is out in the open, may kill many, but will not, per se, collapse the Iranian state.

Trita Parsi places Israel’s objective in attacking the Iranian Consulate in Damascus in a different context:

“An important aspect of Israel’s conduct – and Biden’s acquiescence to it – is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare.

Even during wartime, embassies are off-limits [yet] Israel just bombed an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.

Bombing hospitals is a war crime, [yet] Israel has bombed EVERY hospital in Gaza. It has even assassinated doctors and patients inside hospitals.

The ICJ obligated Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel actively prevents aid from coming in.

Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Israel has deliberately created a famine in Gaza.

Indiscriminate bombings are illegal under international humanitarian law. Biden himself admits that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”.

The list goes on and on … However, Israel’s breach of Vienna Convention immunity accorded to diplomatic premises – plus the stature of those killed – is highly significant. It is a major signal: Israel wants war – but with U.S. support, of course.

Israel’s aim, firstly, is to destroy the norms, conventions and laws of warfare; to create geo-political anarchy in which anything goes, and by which, with the White House frustrated, yet acquiescing to each norm of conduct obtrusively trodden underfoot, allows Netanyahu to grip the U.S. bridle and lead the White House horse to water – towards his regional End of Times ‘Great Victory’; a necessarily brutal war – beyond existing red lines and devoid of limits.

As symbolically significant as the Damascus attack is that the U.S., France and Britain – after a brief ‘hat tip’ to the Vienna Convention – refused to condemn the levelling of the Iranian Consulate, thus placing the shadow of doubt over the Vienna Convention’s immunity for diplomatic premises.

Implicitly, this refusal to condemn will be widely understood as a soft condoning of Israel’s first tentative step towards war with Hizbullah and Iran.

This Israeli chaotic ‘Biblical’ nihilism, however, bears no relationship in purely rational terms to Netanyahu’s aspiration for a ‘Great Victory’. The reality is that Israel has lost its deterrence. It won’t return; the deep anger across the Islamic world generated by Israel through its massacres in Gaza during the last six months precludes it.

Yet, there is a second, adjunct reason why Israel is set on deliberately flouting humanitarian law and norms: Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham reports in +972 Magazine in great depth how Israel has developed a AI machine (called ‘Lavender’) to generate kill lists in Gaza – with almost no human verification; only a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” to make sure the AI target is male (as no females are known to belong to the Resistance’s military).

The blatant extra-legality behind the Gaza ‘kill list’ methodology, as reported by Abraham’s various sources, can only be immunised and sheltered through normalising them as but one amongst a general pattern of illegalities – and in effect, claiming sovereign exceptionalism:

“[T]he Israeli army systematically attacks the targeted individual whilst in their homes — usually at night whilst the whole family is present — rather than during the course of military activity … Additional automated systems, including one, [callously] called “Where’s Daddy?” were used – specifically to track targets when they had entered their family’s residences… However, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all”.

“The result is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions”.

“”We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives when they were in a military building … or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation – as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”.

“In addition … when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs) which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”.

“… The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians … in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander – the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.

“Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call)”.

So, there it is – no wonder Israel might seek to camouflage the details within a normalised general array of transgressions against humanitarian law: “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy”.

It is not difficult to speculate what the ICJ might determine …

Does anyone imagine that this flawed Lavender AI machine would not be asked to churn out its kill lists, were Israel to decide to surge into Lebanon? (Another reason for normalising the procedures first in Gaza).

The key point made in the +972 Magazine report (with multiple sourcing) is that the IDF were not focussed on pin-point elimination of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades (as claimed):

“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low”, said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants:

“I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — high-rises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction”.

This report makes clear nonsense of Israel’s claims to have dismantled 19 out of 24 Hamas Battalions: One source, critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy, points out the obvious flaw: “It’s a vague boundary”; How to tell a Hamas fighter from any other Gazan civilian male?

“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”, said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs”.

Just last week, War Cabinet member and Minister Ron Dermer, was delegated to travel to Washington to plead that the IDF success in dismantling 19 Hamas battalions justified an incursion into Rafah to dismantle the 4 to 5 battalions that Israel claims still remain in Rafah.

What is clear is that AI was a key Israeli tool to its Gaza ‘Victory’. Israel was going to sell a ‘smoke and mirrors story’ based on ‘Lavender’.

By contrast, Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have a very different outlook: they switched to a new way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a civilisational meaning – a path to metaphysical victory (and quite possibly a kind of military victory), if not in their lifetimes, then for the Palestinian People, thereafter. This constitutes the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand.

Israel wants to be feared, believing this will restore its deterrence. Amira Hass writes that regardless of any revulsion for this government and its members: “The vast majority [of Israelis] still believe that war is the solution”. And Mairav Zonszein writing in Foreign Policy, notes that “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society”:

“The focus on Netanyahu is a convenient distraction from the fact that the war in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s war—and the problem isn’t only Netanyahu; it’s the Israeli electorate … A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority of the Jewish public also thinks that the [IDF] is using adequate or even too little force in Gaza … Putting all the blame on the prime minister misses the point. It disregards the fact that Israelis have long advanced, enabled, or come to terms with their country’s system of military occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians”.

Yet neither Israel, nor the U.S., has a comprehensive strategy for this mooted war. Israel’s approach is all tactical – claiming to have degraded Hamas; turning Gaza into a humanitarian hellscape and setting the scene for the “decisive plan” devised by Bezalel Smotrich for the Palestinians. Amira Hass again:

“Either agree to an inferior status, emigrate and be uprooted ostensibly voluntarily, or face defeat and death in a war. This is the plan now being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank – with most Israelis serving as active and enthusiastic accomplices, or passively acquiescing in its realisation ”.

The U.S. ‘vision’ is also tactical (and far removed from reality) – Imagining the transformation of Gaza into a ‘Vichy collaborator’ statelet; imagining that political pressure by the French in Lebanon will force Hizbullah’s retreat from its ancestral lands in south Lebanon; and imagining that the Biden White House is able to achieve politically through pressure what Israel cannot do militarily.

The paradox is that, with Israel and the U.S. being dependent on an ‘image’ that has been confused with reality, this too works to Iran’s and the Resistance Front’s advantage. (As the old adage goes, ‘do not disturb an adversary who is making mistakes’).

……………………

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Gaza: The Death of Amr – by Chris Hedges – 3 April 2024

Over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza. Amr Abdallah was one of them.

 • 1,500 WORDS • 

Amr Abdallah

On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza.

“It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the straight path — the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked Your anger or of those who are astray.”

It was dark. They made their way back to their tents. Their old life was gone — their village, Al-Qarara, their house — built with the money Amr’s father saved during the 30 years he worked in the Persian Gulf — their orchards, their school, the local mosque and the town’s cultural museum with artifacts dating from 4,000 B.C.

Blasted into rubble.

The ruins of Amr’s home

Amr, who was 17, would have graduated from high school this year. The schools were closed in November. He would have gone to college, perhaps to be an engineer like his father, who was a prominent community leader. Amr was a gifted student. Now he lived in a tent in a designated “safe area” that, as he and his family already knew, was not safe. It was shelled sporadically by the Israelis.

It was cold and rainy. The family huddled together to keep warm. Hunger wrapped itself around them like a coil.

“When you say ‘Amr’ it’s like you’re talking about the moon,” his uncle, Abdulbaset Abdallah, who lives in New Jersey, tells me. “He was the special one, handsome, brilliant, and kind.”

Amr in Gaza

The Israeli attacks began in northern Gaza. Then they spread south. On the morning of Friday, Dec. 1, Israeli drones dropped leaflets over Amr’s village.

“To the inhabitants of al-Qarara, Khirbet al-Khuza’a, Absan and Bani Soheila,” the leaflets read. “You must evacuate immediately and go to shelters in the Rafah area. The city of Khan Yunis is a dangerous combat zone. You have been warned. Signed by the Israeli Defense Army.”

One of the leaflets dropped over Amr’s village

Families in Gaza live together. Whole generations. This is why dozens of family members are killed in a single air strike. Amr grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins.

The villagers panicked. Some began to pack. Some refused to leave.

One of Amr’s uncles was adamant. He would stay behind while the family would go to the “safe area.” His son was a physician at Nasser Hospital. Amr’s cousin left the hospital to plead with his father to leave. Moments after he and his father fled, their street was bombed.

Amr and his family moved in with relatives in Khan Yunis. A few days later more leaflets were dropped. Everyone was told to go to Rafah.

Amr’s family, now joined by relatives from Khan Yunis, fled to Rafah.

Rafah was a nightmare. Desperate Palestinians were living in the open air and on streets. There was little food or water. The family slept in their car. It was cold and rainy. They did not have blankets. They looked desperately for a tent. There were no tents. They found an old sheet of plastic, which they attached to the back of the car to make a protected area. There were no bathrooms. People relieved themselves on the side of the road. The stench was overpowering.

They had been displaced twice in the span of a week.

Amr’s father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, fell sick. The family took him to the European Hospital near Khan Yunis. The doctor told him he was ill because he was not eating enough.

“We can’t handle your case,” the doctor told him. “There are more critical cases.”

“He had a beautiful house,” Abdallah says of his older brother. “Now he is homeless. He knew everyone in his hometown. Now he lives on the street with crowds of strangers. No one has enough to eat. There is no clean water. There are no proper facilities or bathrooms.”

The family decided to move again to al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian area” by Israel. They would at least be in open land, some of which belonged to their family. The coastal area, filled with dunes, now holds some 380,000 displaced Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of international humanitarian aid to al-Mawasi, little of which arrived. Water has to be trucked in. There is no electricity.

Israeli warplanes hit a residential compound in al-Mawasi in January where medical teams and their families from the International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestinians were housed. Several were injured. An Israeli tank fired on a house in al-Mawasi where staff from Médecins Sans Frontières and their families were sheltering in February, killing two and injuring six.

Amr’s family set up two makeshift tents with palm tree leaves and sheets of plastic. Israeli drones circled overhead night and day.

On the day before he was killed, Amr managed to get a phone connection — telecommunications are often cut — to speak to his sister in Canada.

“Please get us out of here,” he pleaded.

The Egyptian firm Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, provided travel permits for Gazans to enter Egypt for $350, before the Israeli assault. Since the genocide began, the firm has raised the price to $5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child. It has sometimes charged as much as $10,000 for a travel permit.

Hala has offices in Cairo and Rafah. Once the money is paid — Hala only accepts U.S. dollars — the name of the applicant is submitted to Egyptian authorities. It can take weeks to get a permit. It would cost around $25,000 to get Amr’s family out of Gaza, double that if they included his widowed aunt and three cousins. This was not a sum Amr’s relatives abroad could raise quickly. They set up a GoFundMe page here. They are still trying to collect enough money.

Once Palestinians get to Egypt, the permits expire within a month. Most of the Palestinian refugees in Egypt survive on money sent to them from abroad.

Amr awoke in the dark. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. He joined his family in the morning prayer. The Fajr. It was 5 a.m.

Muslims fast in the day during the month of Ramadan. They eat and drink once the sun goes down and shortly before dawn. But food was now in very short supply. A little olive oil. The spice za’atar. It was not much.

They went back to their tents after prayers. Amr was in the tent with his aunt and three cousins. A shell exploded near the tent. Shrapnel tore apart his aunt’s leg and critically injured his cousins. Amr frantically tried to help them. A second shell exploded. Shrapnel ripped through Amr’s stomach and exited from his back.

Amr stood up. He walked out of the tent. He collapsed. Older cousins ran towards him. They had enough gas in their car — fuel is in very short supply — to drive Amr to Nasser Hospital, three miles away.

“Amr, are you okay?” his cousins asked.

“Yes,” he moaned.

“Amr, are you awake?” they asked after a few minutes

“Yes,” he whispered.

They lifted him from the car. They carried him into the overcrowded corridors of the hospital. They set him down.

He was dead.

Amr in death

They carried Amr’s body back to the car. They drove to the family’s encampment.

Amr’s uncle shows me a video of Amr’s mother keening over his corpse.

“My son, my son, my beloved son,” she laments in the video, her left hand tenderly stroking his face. “I don’t know what I will do without you.”

They buried Amr in a makeshift grave.

Amr’s Burial

Later that night the Israelis shelled again. Several Palestinians were wounded and killed.

The empty tent, occupied the day before by Amr’s family, was obliterated.

………………………….

(Republished from Scheerpost)

US Election 2024 – RFKjr Supported By ‘Young Turk’ Radical Liberal Cenk Uygur – by Gabriel Hays (Fox) 5 April 2024

#News#RFKjr Wins Radical Liberal Support – Prominent independent pundit stuns co-host by saying he’s considering RFK Jr. for president – by Gabriel Hays (Fox) During a recent episode of political web show “The Young Turks,” co-host Cenk Uygur admitted that he is considering voting for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slamming President Biden and the Democratic Party for being anti-democracy.

Prior to his announcement, Uygur discussed why he agreed with the candidate’s recent headline-grabbing claims insisting that it could be argued that Biden is a “much worse” threat to democracy than former President Trump.

Kennedy claimed that the Biden administration is “worse” than Trump because it has pushed social media companies to censor certain opinions, especially during the pandemic, among other reasons.

Uygur supported this notion, though he claimed Biden and the DNC were anti-Democratic for reasons different than Kennedy gave, saying that Biden and his party members “love to rig” elections.

“He’s right to be concerned about Biden being a threat to democracy himself, maybe not for the reasons that he’s stating, but Biden did, you know, support anti-Democratic movements within the primary,” Uygur said.

He continued, “The Democratic Party canceled the election in Florida. They tried to keep out every candidate in North Carolina, Tennessee, et cetera. So, they love to rig elections.”

Slamming the media, he added, “Yes, I used the word rigged, OK? So, you can go cry about it if you’re mainstream media. How about you do your job and talk about how they canceled an election in Florida in the primary and just declared Biden the winner.”

Uygur also claimed that the “establishment in a of lot ways has killed democracy long before Donald Trump tried to,” explaining that this has happened through wealthy donors influencing most of the policy in America.” He also slammed both major parties for using “fear” to get votes.

He was critical of Kennedy, too, accusing him of trying to pander to both Republicans and Democrats in his campaign, but went on to say he’s currently considering voting for the independent.

Uygur declared, “The most surprising thing is, for the first time today, I’m now considering RFK, Jr.”

Co-host Ana Kasparian appeared stunned by the announcement, exclaiming, “What?!” on air.

Uygur attempted to explain it to her, granting that the candidate is “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs on vaccines. And on several other things where he believes in conspiratorial theories that I don’t believe in at all.”

“So why on God’s green Earth would I consider RFK, Jr.?” he asked, and then said, “But I thought about it, Ana, and Trump I would never support in a million years, Biden is now funding a genocide and is an awful choice, has been corrupt his whole life. A totally — you’re never going to get anything but corruption from Joe Biden.”

His main rationale was that he doesn’t believe Kennedy would be worse than Biden on major issues.

“So am I positive RFK Jr. would be worse?” Uygur asked, adding, “He would probably — on health and science, definitely he would be worse… But on everything else, like anti-establishment, money out of politics… I’m not positive RFK Jr. would be worse than Biden.”

…………………………

RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

Russia Finally Says ‘Nyet’ to Continued DPRK Sanctions Enforcement – by Joseph D. Terwilliger – 4 April 2024

Last week, a United Nations Security Council resolution to extend the mandate for the UN Panel of Experts on DPRK sanctions was vetoed by the Russian Federation, effectively disbanding the primary enforcement mechanism for the nine rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on the DPRK since 2006, in response to their repeated nuclear and ICBM tests.

On October 9^th, 2006, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) conducted their first successful test of a nuclear weapon.  In response to this, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed resolution 1718, condemning the DPRK for the test, and imposing a harsh regime of sanctions on the regime.  Subsequent to a second test on May 25, 2009, they unanimously passed resolution 1874, which tightened the sanctions regime significantly and established a “Panel of Experts” to “gather, examine and analyze information…regarding the implementation of the measures imposed”, for an initial period of one year.  As more and more sanctions resolutions were passed in response to further nuclear and ICBM tests, the mandate for this Panel of Experts was unanimously extended each year until last week.

Leading up to the vote, China and Russia had proposed a compromise to extend the mandate of the Panel of Experts for one year, conditional on adding a sunset clause to the sanctions regime, as the Chinese delegate said “Sanctions should not be set in stone or be indefinite”.  The Russian delegate argued that the situation in Korea had changed enormously since 2006, and that continuing the sanctions in the name of preventing the DPRK from becoming a nuclear power was “losing its relevance” and was “detached from reality”.

It is rather ironic that the United States and its allies have been criticizing the Russia veto of an otherwise unanimous Security Council resolution as destabilizing, given that the US routinely uses its own veto power, as most followers of this site are well aware.  This Russian application of its veto power has been described as a crisis for the “broader functioning of the UN Security Council and the post World War II international order”, even though it is completely obvious that we would have used our veto against any Russian or Chinese resolution to relax or discontinue the sanctions regime.

The sanctions imposed on the DPRK obviously did not have the desired effect of deterring them from becoming a nuclear power.  It is fair to ask why they failed to achieve the desired outcome, and whether continuing sanctions are likely to alter that reality.  When I accompanied retired NBA superstar Dennis Rodman to North Korea, Kim Jong Un personally explained his logic to us.  He remarked that Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi had given up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in 2003, in exchange for sanctions relief and security guarantees that weren’t worth the paper they were written on.  As soon as the opportunity presented itself, in Spring 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joyfully bragged that we had killed Qaddafi.

Furthermore, Saddam Hussein had allowed weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency into his country, and they failed to find evidence of WMD programs (as there were none), and yet despite this, the US launched a war of regime change in 2003, which subsequently led to the death of Saddam Hussein.  He concluded his argument by pointing out the fact that although Pakistan harbored America’s number one enemy, Osama bin Laden, the US never attempted a war of regime change there.  In his mind the main difference was obvious – Pakistan was a nuclear power.

Given that the United States government has never been subtle about its desire for regime change in North Korea, and has refused to take first use of nuclear weapons by the United States off the table in the event of war with the DPRK, Kim Jong Un’s rationale is quite compelling.  I certainly had no counterargument.

One must remember that the number one goal for the North Korean regime is their own survival, and Kim Jong Un’s strategic decisions (like those of any other political leader) should be evaluated in that context – obviously his priority is to stay alive and keep his job!  With that in mind, the continued pursuit of a nuclear deterrent seems like the most rational option.  Of course he wants a better life for his people, and relief from economic sanctions, but not at the cost of risking the regime’s collapse.

It is important to clarify that long before the DPRK developed its nuclear program, the US had already nuclearized the peninsula.  Although Paragraph 13 (d) of the Korean War Armistice Agreement forbade the introduction of any new weapons into Korea, in 1958, the Eisenhower administration deployed nuclear weapons to South Korea, in clear violation of this agreement.

This was not an isolated incident either, as the US has a long history of breaking negotiated deals with rival nations.  In 1994, Bill Clinton negotiated the “Agreed Framework” in which the DPRK would shut down their graphite-moderated nuclear reactors, to be replaced with light water reactors (LWRs) to be provided by the US, with supplies of heavy oil being provided to them to provide energy in the interim.  George W. Bush then slow-walked providing the LWRs and stopped the shipments of fuel oil, leading the DPRK to restart the reactors to supply energy to their people.

Bush then made the aforementioned WMD deal with Qaddafi, which the Obama administration failed to honor.  Obama then negotiated the JCPOA deal with Iran, which Trump backed out of.  Trump then opened dialogue with the DPRK, but the Biden administration quickly returned to “strategic patience” (i.e. giving them the silent treatment).

No wonder they feel the need for a nuclear deterrent when our policy changes so dramatically every four years, making any negotiations effectively pointless.  As Kim Jong Un told us, the DPRK policy is always consistent, but the US changes all the time, adding that if they don’t like what is happening, they just wait four years.  After we brought a team of NBA players to Pyongyang in 2014, he further remarked that in doing so, we were the first Americans who ever kept their word.  No wonder they don’t trust any security guarantees the US has offered them.

Sanctions have been referred to as war by other means (with apologies to Clausewitz), and the US now has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.  The most comprehensive sanctions are currently imposed against Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, with sanctions against China growing at an alarming rate.  At the same time, the Chinese Yuan is being used increasingly for international trade instead of the US dollar as a result of sanctions prohibiting many countries from using the US financial system.

The height of the sanctions absurdity was best illustrated when the DPRK was alleged to have sold ammunition to Russia in early 2024.   In response to this allegation, the US complained to Russia that they were violating sanctions against the DPRK, and the US complained to the DPRK that they were violating sanctions against Russia.  Does the United States expect other countries to just starve to death under sanctions regimes because we said so?

Is it perhaps more rational to imagine that our overuse of economic sanctions will inevitably create trading blocs and alliances among the countries subjected to them?  Iran, Russia, China, and the DPRK have plenty of reasons to dislike one another.  China and Russia have had a complex hostile relationship for centuries, with Chairman Mao seeking a better relationship with the US partially because he feared a Soviet invasion.  Both China and Russia repeatedly voted in favor of all the sanctions imposed on the DPRK since 2006, because they did not want a nuclear North Korea in their backyard. Iran and Russia have a long history of tensions, as do Iran and China.  And Iran and DPRK have only worked together in a partnership of convenience for the last 35 years because of their shared status as pariahs in the eyes of the USA.

Despite the historical tensions between Iran, Russia, China, and DPRK, the sanctions regime has forced these countries into an alliance and trading bloc of convenience, and the US has nobody to blame but themselves.  It should surprise nobody that China and Russia want to get the UN out of the DPRK sanctions business.  That Russia finally vetoed the continuing mandate for the Panel of Experts should come as no surprise – the only surprise is that it took them 18 years to get there.

……………………….

Source

Joseph D. Terwilliger is Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University

Corporate Profiteering Destroyed the Baltimore Bridge – by Sonali Kolhatkar – 1 April 2024

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has sent shock waves throughout the United States. The bridge was not built to withstand a direct hit from a container ship as large as the Dali, which brought down the structure within minutes after its engine failed and it became an uncontrollable force drifting toward the bridge.

The incident is a symbol of how unfettered capitalism has resulted in safety concerns becoming secondary to profits.

The Dali, operated by shipping giant Maersk, was carrying more than 800 tons of corrosive and flammable materials. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg likened the 95,000-ton ship to an aircraft carrier and the New York Times explained that “When the bridge was built, cargo ships were not the size they are today.” In fact, such ships have grown steadily in size over the past few decades. One economist told the Times that shipping companies “did what they thought was most efficient for themselves—make the ships big—and they didn’t pay much attention at all to the rest of the world.” This in turn has forced nations to expand waterways to accommodate the behemoths, often at the expense of the public.

Some 90 percent of all traded goods that are shipped from one part of the world to the other are transported by water. As corporate appetites for profits have increased, so has globalized trade. And, safety concerns have taken a back seat, as per an investigation published by Jacobin.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor investigated a complaint against Maersk and concluded that the company had violated the Seaman’s Protection Act by retaliating against a whistleblower employee. At stake was the fact that, as per the Labor Department, “Reporting Policy requires seamen to report safety concerns to the company and allow it time to abate the conditions before reporting to the [U.S. Coast Guard] or other regulatory agencies.” In other words, Maersk, which is one of the world’s top shipping companies, tried to protect itself from government regulators.

A similar scenario of compromising safety in service of profits has unfolded at Boeing, one of the world’s top airplane manufacturers. After an Alaska Airlines flight in January 2024 was forced to make an emergency landing when the Boeing 737 Max plane lost a panel mid-flight, the New York Times published a bizarrely headlined story: “Boeing Faces Tricky Balance Between Safety and Financial Performance.” The story points out a conundrum for Boeing’s executives: “Should they emphasize safety or financial performance?”

The Times explained that, for years the company “put too much emphasis on increasing profits and enriching shareholders with dividends and share buybacks, and not enough on investing in engineering and safety.”

It’s worth stating the obvious: An unsafe aircraft is not an aircraft, it’s a death trap. And yet, within a capitalist framework, everything boils down to a cost-benefit analysis. If the cost of safety for companies like Boeing or Maersk outweighs the financial benefits, it’s simply not worth it for executives and shareholders. While the Alaska Airlines flight thankfully did not result in any deaths this time, hundreds of people on board 737s in 2018 and 2019were not so lucky. Workers at Boeing factories in Washington and South Carolina where aircraft are assembled are required to work at breakneck speed and compromise on safety in the interest of churning out planes as fast as possible.

Who pays the price for such corporate hubris? Vulnerable workers and the public. In the case of the Baltimore bridge accident, all 22 workers on board the Dali were of Indian origin and their quick thinking in notifying authorities that the ship lost power helped ensure that casualties were minimized. As of this writing, they remain trapped on board the ship with one worker having been treated at a hospital for minor injuries. [Ship’s Master appears to be from Ukraine.]

Meanwhile, the six people who are presumed dead and two who were rescued from the frigid waters were all immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America, working on the bridge as part of a construction crew.

These are the same sort of people who suffer racist attacks and ridicule from white supremacist forces in the U.S. A right-wing outlet posted a virulently racist cartoon of the Dali’s crew on social media. And only weeks earlier, Georgia’s unhinged ultraconservative Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address about a white woman who “was killed by an illegal,” in an attempt to whip up anti-immigrant frenzy. [Nursing student kidnapped, beaten, raped, stabbed to death by repeat criminal released by authorities and able to gleefully terrorize US women. ]

Greene appeared utterly unconcerned about the fact that construction workers in the U.S. hail disproportionately from Latin American immigrant communities and many die from work-related injuries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022, “Foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 63.5 percent (792) of total Hispanic or Latino worker fatalities (1,248).”

Taxpayers also pay the price for corporate profiteering at the expense of safety. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is apparently footing the bill for the massive cleanup operation from the Baltimore bridge accident. And, President Biden announced that the federal government would “pay the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge.” Meanwhile, Grace Ocean Private, the Singapore-based company that owns the Dali, is expected to invoke a centuries-old maritime law to limit its liability—the same law that the owners of the RMS Titanic used to limit theirs.

In the case of Boeing, the state of Washington in 2013 gave the company the largest ever tax break in the state’s history in exchange for housing its factory and spurring the creation of jobs. The cost to taxpayers was nearly $9 billion. And, because Washington’s governor failed to make job retention a condition for the massive tax break, Boeing then had it both ways when it cut its labor costs by slashing about 15 percent of its workforce in the state a few years later. Washington eventually eliminated the tax break but Boeing still reaps tens of millions of dollars in other state-level incentives tied to aerospace manufacturing.

It’s critically important to contextualize accidents that are the result of corporations putting profits over safety and people. These incidents are not isolated or unpredictable. They are the cost of doing business—a cost that the rest of us pay for in money and lives.

Russia Prison – Wall Street Journal Activist/Reporter Gershkovich (Politico) 29 March 2024

Inside the WSJ’s ‘Very Intense’ Effort to Free Evan Gershkovich

“Until he’s out, not enough has been done by anyone,” says WSJ publisher Almar Latour.

POLITICO illustration/Photo by Getty Images

By RYAN LIZZA

03/29/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Ryan Lizza is a Playbook Co-Author and the Chief Washington Correspondent for POLITICO

Ayear ago today Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent, was meeting with a source at a steakhouse when FSB agents arrested him and charged him with espionage, an allegation he and the Journal said was absurd. The U.S. government agreed. In less than two weeks, the State Department declared that Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained,” an official status that commits the Biden administration to work for his release.

Almar Latour is the publisher of the Journal and the CEO of Dow Jones. One responsibility he did not expect when he took this job in 2020 was assisting in a hostage negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Latour has played a key role in the legal and diplomatic effort to free Gershkovich. He has worked with the Biden administration, foreign governments and through private channels to figure out what exactly Putin wants to secure the 32-year-old journalist’s freedom.

I spoke with Latour on this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive to learn the inside story of this effort. We discussed how the shadow of basketball star Brittney Griner’s detainment in Russia is influencing talks to bring Evan home; what Gershkovich’s detention means for Paul Whelan, the only other American considered by the U.S. to be wrongfully detained in Russia.; why a Russian hitman who is serving a life sentence in Germany for murder may be the key to unlocking a deal with Putin; and how the 2024 election may affect Gershkovich’s fate.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity with help from Deep Dive Senior Producer Alex Keeney and Producer Kara Tabor.https://player.simplecast.com/6ac87e9b-0698-43e8-9cb0-a38a78a562b8?dark=false 

What is the current status of the U.S. government’s efforts to bring Evan home and how has this played out over the past year?

Without speaking for the administration in any form, I would characterize it as a very intense effort. There are people dedicated to situations like these in the State Department. The Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs is a unit within the State Department that concentrates on cases like these, not necessarily around press freedom, but around Americans who are wrongfully detained.

There are many senior administration officials who have commented — the president, of course, has commented on the case. There is just a lot of activity from the White House and the State Department. What has been very impressive is how people have coalesced around this cause and how so many people are giving it their all.

That said, the outcome is sort of binary: He’s either free or he’s not. And so if the question is, “Has enough been done?” Well, we’ll know that when he walks free.

There are many senior administration officials who have commented — President Joe Biden, of course, has commented on the case. | Carolyn Kaster/AP

One of the eye-opening pieces of reporting the Journal published this week was about a complex prisoner swap to secure Evan’s freedom that involved both the Russian and German governments. According to the Journal’s reporting, the exchange involved Alexei Navalny before he died and a Russian assassin, Vadim Krasikov, who is in prison in Germany. Can you tell us anything about what happened there?

In the past year, there have been many forays into the realm of trying to free Evan. And there are different channels for that. First, there is the publicity around Evan that keeps him in the news and that helps with making sure that his release is a priority with the administration.

Then, there’s the official diplomacy that takes place that, in my view, would include signals that the president or the White House might send publicly. But also, a lot that happens behind the scenes bilaterally [or] on a multilateral basis.

And then there is what I would call “private diplomacy.” We have retained a law firm that has, among its many specialties, hostage affairs. So [we’re] creating additional channels to find a solution because you never know in cases like these where the eventual solution is going to come from. And so it’s important for us at the Wall Street Journal as an institution, but also, I think, for the administration, to have all these paths work simultaneously.

If that sounds complicated, it is because it is. And I think some of the reporting that you’ve read that I can’t comment on blow-by-blow reflects, at a minimum, that these cases and potential solutions often happen in very muddled terrain and in very blurry circumstances, where there just are a lot of variables.

Obviously, you’re not going to say anything that would jeopardize Evan in any way. But do you feel like the German government has been a good partner in this effort? Do you feel like the German government has understood how important this case is to the Biden administration? Or would you like them to do more?

We want everybody to do more until he’s out. Until he’s out, not enough has been done by anyone, and that goes for all of us. But we’re confident that at some point, he will be released.

I think on the specific Germany question, on this private diplomacy path, we have met a lot of people from a lot of different countries. We have traveled with Evan’s parents to different spots, including very publicly to Davos recently where they had a chance to meet with world leaders. And so, without commenting specifically on the Germans, we’ve had a chance for the parents to meet with world leaders, or for our lawyers to meet with world leaders, in addition to whatever the U.S. administration does on that front. And I think wherever and whenever we’ve done that, when faced with the parents, I’ve seen some senior figures on the world stage realize how much pain this causes for one family.

In addition, I think there is a realization that this case reverberates beyond one individual; that the wrongful incarceration of a journalist has wider implications, very negative implications for press freedom. So I do think that we’ve seen that awareness take hold with world leaders, in Western Europe, and around the world, and certainly also in the U.S.

I wanted to ask you about one of the stranger parts of this effort, and that is Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, where he asked about releasing Evan. What did you and the Journal learn from that exchange? Did Tucker reach out to the Journal at all, or did he just raise Evan’s case to Putin on his own initiative?

I can’t speak to whom Tucker may have reached out to or not. There was, I think, a public awareness and certainly an awareness in this building that he was going to have that interview. And I think, at least I was under the impression, that the topic might come up. At least to me, there wasn’t a direct request or any notification of that sort, nor were we seeking that per se. We were more focused on Putin’s response.

What did you make of it?

It reinforced the notion that this was something very deliberate and that there was some forethought; that there was no surprise to this question and the answer didn’t seem so spontaneous.

Evan Gershkovich (right) is escorted from court in Moscow, Russia on Jan. 26, 2024. | Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

He was weirdly honest about it, sort of like there was no B.S. about what was really going on with Evan. Or am I reading that incorrectly?

“Honest” is not a word that I would use in a sentence containing “Vladimir Putin.” I think you could see, at that moment, the transactional nature. So, it was a naked portrayal of the motivation, in my view.

Did it spin things forward? Not that I can tell.

So in a weird way, did it give you a little bit more optimism like, “Okay, this guy’s just looking for a deal, and we’ve got to find the deal that will satisfy him.”

Hostage-taking, you know, works like this to begin with.

You knew that already.

This is the whole game, right? We take somebody and we want a ransom or a trade or something in return.

So by this point, nobody on the Russian side is pretending that that’s not what this is about?

I can’t speak to specifically what the Russians have said or not said, but what I can say is that I would dismiss any sort of portrayal that this is anything other than seeking a trade. It comes on the back of another trade that has been made involving Brittney Griner. There’s very little that is truthful that comes out of the Kremlin these days. So even quasi-frank comments have to be seen in that transactional light.

Where were you when you learned that Evan had been arrested?

I was in South Africa. There was a period that preceded that moment where I got a phone call from my head of HR and head of security saying that, “We may have some difficult news and there might be a very difficult situation. A reporter in Russia did not show up at their appointed time.”

And that was really a moment because we have, like many major news organizations, a very strict security protocol where if you go out on something sensitive or you find yourself in a danger zone, there’s a significant amount of planning that happens. And there are appointed times when you check in; and depending on the situation, there might be some tracking. But when somebody doesn’t show up — which was the very first moment of this saga for me — that was alarming.

Putin ‘ready to talk’ about release of US prisoner Evan GershkovichShare

And initially, I suppose you didn’t know why Evan had missed his check-in?

No. And you hope for the best, of course. But a little bit later, it became clear that a second checkpoint had been missed. And Evan did not show up at his apartment — this is some hours later — and so it went from a suspicion that something had gone wrong to an ever-stronger suspicion that something had gone wrong.

And there were also, at that point, some rumors that had reached me indirectly that he might have been arrested. Some hours later, there was a confirmation of some sort that that had happened. And then for me, the next morning, very early morning on the East Coast, the FSB put out a statement.

The FSB statement was the first official word, right?

That was the first official word with context as to what this was and that contained this espionage lie immediately. And when you hear in a hostage situation that somebody has been taken, maybe at first your instinct is, “Let’s address this in the quiet. Let’s have the conversations that we need to have with the authorities in this case, maybe with an embassy or with the right team.”

But this got tossed out into the open right away. There was never really a chance to have that conversation, which is very different than some other cases. But here I think it shows the deliberate nature of what has happened. It got very deliberately pushed out into the world with a very clear message from the Russian Federation.

Let me ask you about two quick things. One, were there signs of the deteriorating situation for journalists in Russia? Was Evan picking up on that? Was your newsroom?

And second, the story that the Journal published this past Wednesday was an amazing piece of journalism, and I assume you’re very intimately aware of all the details. One thing it says is that Putin was looking for a new pawn at this point in time. And I’m just curious if that was something that was on anyone’s radar back then or if it’s just something we all realized in hindsight.

When you read that somebody has been falsely accused of something, you understand that there is some motivation to drive that, whether that is defaming the Western press or something else altogether.

But I think, at that moment a year ago, we were institutionally aware that the circumstances in Russia — and also in some other places around the world — were just more difficult for reporters. And when people are sent out into the field, it’s with their consent, with an elaborate discussion with security. And so we had been monitoring it. Did we know that there was a methodical approach to hostage-taking [by the Russian government] as it looks today? It’s easy to say with hindsight. But the situation did not seem accidental.

Almar Latour has worked with the Biden administration, foreign governments and through private channels to figure out what exactly President Vladimir Putin wants to secure Gershkovich’s freedom. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

The other wrongfully detained American in the Russian system is Paul Whelan. How much do the people like yourself, who are advocating on Evan’s behalf, coordinate with your counterparts who are advocating on Paul Whelan’s behalf?

You know, first off, my heart goes out to Paul and Paul’s family and they’ve been at this for way too long — five years. We want him to be released and we think it’s incredibly important. Our task here is to focus on our colleague. The government is focusing on a broader set of hostage situations. I do think that with the spotlight that we’ve deliberately put on Evan, there’s been, over the past year, a greater awareness of the hostage situations that exist in Russia and even elsewhere. And so in that sense, the Evan situation, when we talk about it implicitly, of course, pertains to Paul as well as to Alsu [Kurmasheva], who recently got apprehended there for what seems like bogus reasons.

Sadly, the court recently extended Evan’s imprisonment by three more months. What’s your reading of how the 2024 presidential campaign and political situation in the United States may or may not play into these efforts to get Evan back?

We have had bipartisan support for Evan’s release, and that has been very consistent throughout.

I think the extension that was made clear this week — through June 30th — has the air of sounding official, but all these things are really arbitrary and in parallel with the official legal system, could be decided separately if the Kremlin wanted to speed things up or slow things down.

So I mainly look at these extensions as the language of the Kremlin and whether they have what they want or not. So this means that at least for the next few months, theoretically, they don’t yet have what they want.

Gershkovich stands in a defendants’ cage at a hearing in Moscow on Sept. 19, 2023. | Dmitry Serebryakov/AP

What did you learn from previous efforts to get wrongfully detained Americans out of Russia? For example, Brittney Griner, who was swapped for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout?

So, a very different situation… But two decades ago, we did have a situation that did not end well when [Wall Street Journal correspondent] Daniel Pearl was taken hostage [in Pakistan]. And so there is an acute awareness institutionally here that you have to take these situations incredibly seriously. I think that was one lesson: that there’s no guarantee for the outcome necessarily, so you have to give it your all.

And I think that led to a very speedy organization around this where we set up various teams, a comms team, a legal team in the U.S., a legal team in Russia and a lot of other different channels.

Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday. Sign up for the newsletter.

On the Griner case, one conclusion was that putting a spotlight on a situation like this helps. It helps with the prioritization. I think that has been a dominant theme for the past year: to make sure that having that voice, having that spotlight, helps this case. And then I think the transactional nature of the Griner case — having a major arms dealer traded against a basketball player of renown — that shows the crass nature of a situation like this.

So I think those lessons and a few other things quite quickly found their way into our bloodstream as we tried to get organized around this.

I think having the realization that you need to stay in close contact with the family, with the government, and bring to bear anyone you know who might influence the situation — so bring in all your resources — those are all lessons, at least in hindsight, that I think we picked up or we found out along the way.

I want to ask you one last question, and that is to explain to listeners who haven’t been following this case, one, why should they care about this? And two, what can people do if they care about Evan and want to help?

This case is important because it pertains to one man’s freedom, and that matters. Evan is a journalist and he was just doing his job. He was arrested for doing his job. And when that can happen and nobody says anything about it, that has a tremendous negative impact on society, on free press.

His arrest, in my view, was a direct attempt to suppress press freedom, to send a signal that you are not safe as a journalist in Russia. If we let that go by unnoticed, if we don’t say anything about it, if we don’t fight for Evan’s release, that signals to Russia that this is okay behavior. That makes any chance for reliable information to get to Russia even more difficult.

But I believe it can also be contagious. And that this may give other dictators, strongmen, the idea that, “Hey, there’s another way to deal with press that you don’t like,” and that is just by arresting them or by taking harsher measures.

And so what can you do about this? At first, I think, have this awareness and follow the case. I think it does matter to talk about it to your friends, to talk about press freedom to people you know, to talk to your elected officials about it.

I often get this question like, does it really matter? But if you wear that [Free Evan] pin, every little bit helps to support that thesis that free press is a good thing and that society needs that more than ever. And so, in fighting for Evan’s release, I think we can all make a statement for him, but also for society at large.

…………………

Source

May Day 2024: For International Workers Action Against The Genocidal U.S./Israel War on Gaza!

All Out in Solidarity with the Palestinian People! (Internationalist Group)

Labor activists of S.I. Cobas, the CALP (Autonomous Collective of Port Workers) and other “rank-and-file” unions blockade the port of Genova, Italy on February 23-24, preventing loading/unloading of an Israeli Zim Line ship.  (Photo: S.I. Cobas)

With the barbaric war on Gaza now in its sixth month, it is utterly clear that this is an actual genocide, targeting the entire Palestinian Arab population of what has been termed the world’s largest open-air prison. After over 40,000 killed,¹ the destruction of more than half of all homes in the densely populated enclave, the bombing of schools and universities and attacks on hospitals, now more than one million people face the spectre of imminent starvation.² It is also clear that this is a joint U.S./Israeli war, as all the heavy bombs and all the warplanes from which they are dropped are supplied by the Pentagon, while Washington funnels billions in U.S. aid to Israel annually. Millions have marched worldwide to denounce the slaughter and calling for a ceasefire, to no avail. Every appeal to the Zionist/imperialist warmongers has come to naught.

What’s desperately needed is the mobilization of power that can bring the slaughter to a halt, the power of the working class, in the United States and around the world. This coming May 1, the workers day, should become a day of militant international workers action – including strikes and labor-led mass mobilization – to stop the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. It should be followed up with labor action worldwide to shut down all flights and shipping to and from Israel so long as the Zionist war on Gaza continues. Workers should demand: stop the bombing, stop the massacres, Israeli military and settlers get the hell out of Gaza and all the Occupied Territories NOW!

This is what genocide looks like. Residents of Gaza City gather at site of destroyed building, March 2024  (Photo: Agence France-Presse)

Last October, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) in Gaza and more than two dozen Palestinian unions and professional associations issued an urgent appeal to labor internationally to refuse to build or transport arms for and to Israel. In the U.S., over 200 union bodies have since passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire – but with no action beyond joining “peace” marches. In some cases, notably the AFL-CIO, these appeals are actually support for Israel, denouncing Palestinians for starting the war, not demanding that Israel get out of Gaza and calling for release of all Israeli hostages and nothing about the over 9,000 Palestinians being held hostage in Israeli jails (plus another 4,000 workers from Gaza who were in Israel when the war began and are now being held in military camps).³

The League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, have called from the outset to “Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!” (The Internationalist, 10 October 2023), “For Workers Action Against Zionist Terror” and “against the shipment of arms to Israel and Ukraine,” where the U.S. and its NATO allies are waging an imperialist proxy war against Russia. We have underlined that, so far, calls for labor solidarity have been mainly on paper, and what port shutdowns there have been were mostly called by community groups rather than the unions, as long-time maritime labor activist Jack Heyman pointed out in his recent article reiterating the call “Dock Workers: Block Military Cargo to Israel” (The Internationalist, 15 February).

Motion calling for ILWU Local 10 to stop work on May 1 in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against genocidal war on Gaza. 

Last week, Heyman and others put forward a resolution for International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area to stop work on May Day, the international workers day, “calling for international workers action in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people, in opposition to the genocidal Israel/U.S. war on Gaza and to stop the flow of arms to that war.” The motion also urged the rest of the union and dock workers internationally to join in taking May Day Palestinian solidarity actions.

Now the Palestinian General Federation of Labor, Gaza has issued a May Day appeal to unions in the United States calling to do just that. The PGFTU statement says frankly that “we have encountered shocking silence and neglect by the international labor movement.” It spells this out:

“The international labor movement … retreated to verbal positions without taking measures on the ground or pressuring the decision-makers to stop this war of extermination, limiting union activities to conferences and statements and not delving deeply into the need to guarantee humanitarian aid, or influencing international public opinion to expose the truth about Zionist crimes and the practices of the allied countries that continue to support Israel.”  

(Click here or on image below for the full text of the PGFTU, Gaza appeal.)

In response to the PGFTU’s urgent appeal to unions and trade-unionists in the U.S. and internationally “to be our voice and advocate inside and outside America,” the League for the Fourth International urges labor militants around the world to mobilize workers’ power in hard-hitting labor-led actions on May 1 in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war. Such actions can and should include not only focusing May Day marches on Palestine solidarity and organizing workers aid to Gaza, but blocking arms shipments and carrying out labor boycotts of flights and shipping to and from Israel, and wherever possible, strike action and shutting down production. Such actions should demand an immediate stop to the bombing, forced population transfers and any restrictions on emergency aid to Gaza; an end to all aid to Israel, and for Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza and all the Occupied Territories.

In the U.S., it is crucial to fight for the workers and oppressed to break with the Democrats, who are financing, advising, arming and jointly waging war on the Palestinians in Gaza together with the Israeli government of hardline Zionists and outright fascists; and to oust the class-collaborationist labor bureaucracy, which for decades has chained the unions to the bosses’ parties. A prime example of this is the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which in response to clamor from the ranks, particularly in the Detroit area with its large Arab American population, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then turned around and endorsed “Genocide Joe” Biden for president! For their part, the Teamster tops are currently flirting with Donald Trump, who said of the war in Gaza that he would tell Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to “finish it up and do it quickly” (Haaretz, 17 March).

The contours of effective solidarity action with the Palestinian people vary from country to country. In Germany, labor action against the genocidal war must necessarily oppose not only the ferociously pro-Zionist Social Democrat/Free Democrat/Green government (which has banned many pro-Palestinian protests) and the equally rabidly pro-Israel right-wing “opposition” but also the Left Party, as all the parliamentary parties explicitly support “Israel’s right to self-defense,” the formula justifying the mass murder in Gaza. In Italy, where fascists lead a far-right-wing government, organizing effective labor solidarity will require united action by the normally fractious “rank-and-file” unions and bringing out key industrial sectors in a direct challenge to the “mainstream” confederations, which despite talk of a ceasefire are solidly pro-Israel.

Everywhere, the opportunist left seeks to build a “broad antiwar movement,” typically centered on calls for a ceasefire, in order to include dissident liberal or “progressive” elements from the bourgeois and reformist parties, who don’t necessarily oppose the war on Gaza but only its “excesses.” Rather than such “popular-front” coalitions pushing impotent pressure politics, what’s urgently needed is independent, militant class struggle against all the capitalist and governing social-democratic parties, which are all cogs in the imperialist system, and therefore, one way or another, complicit in the genocide being carried out in Gaza. Classless appeals for “peace” are a diversion in the face of implacable U.S. and Israeli mass murderers, who can only be stopped by international socialist revolution.

Activists of Class Struggle Workers Portland (above at 11 November 2023 Palestine labor solidarity rally) call to defend Gaza, defeat U.S./Israel war on Palestinians. Four Portland area unions have passed motions demanding an end to Israeli bombing of Gaza, for Israel out of West Bank and Gaza and to end to U.S. arming and funding. (Internationalist photo)

Highlighting the urgency of this independent class-struggle policy are resolutions that have been passed by four unions – Iron Workers Local 29, IUPAT (Painters) Local 10, IBEW (electrical workers) Local 48 and AFT (education) Local 111 – in the Portland, Oregon area of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Rather than calling for a ceasefire, which would leave the Israeli in control of Gaza and which plays into the hands of the Biden administration that is now toying with the word, the resolutions, introduced by supporters of Class Struggle Workers – Portland, call for labor action to stop the shipment of arms to Israel, for “the immediate end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, for Israel to vacate Gaza and the West Bank, and to end all arming or funding to it now” (click here or on reproductions below to read resolutions on the web site of Class Struggle Workers – Portland).

Above all the fight to halt the genocidal U.S./Israel war against the Palestinian people requires a political fight against the capitalist parties. This was addressed by the Portland Painters, who in a 2016 resolution called to break with all the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party. The call in that resolution for the national union to repudiate its endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate should be a beacon to worker militants today as unions in the U.S. join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then endorse war criminal Democrat Biden who is responsible for arming, financing and directing the genocidal war.

August 2016 Resolution of International Union of Painters and
Allied Trades (IUPAT) Local 10 for a Class-Struggle Workers Party
(Excerpt)

“Whereas across the country, from Oakland to Baltimore, police under Democratic mayors regularly murder black men and women with impunity, and

“Whereas the 2016 presidential election offers us the “choice” between a raving, bigoted clown and a career representative of Wall Street, and …

“Whereas Democrats and Republicans are and have always been strike-breaking, war-making parties of the bosses, and

“Whereas so long as the labor movement supports one or another party of the bosses, we will be playing a losing game, therefore be it

“Resolved that IUPAT Local 10 does not support the Democrats, Republicans, or any bosses’ parties or politicians, and

“Resolved that we call on the International Union to repudiate its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, and

“Resolved that we call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party, and build a class-struggle workers party.

The embattled Palestinian Arabs have been subjected to “ethnic cleansing” for more than three-quarters of a century, following subjugation by the British imperialists and the Ottoman Empire – and now to outright genocide by the Zionist state of Israel and its U.S. patrons. It will take a revolution to put an end to this oppression, a revolution that can only be successful by splitting and exploding Israeli society from within. This requires intransigent, internationalist class struggle, throughout the entire region. As the League for the Fourth International has emphasized since the beginning of that war, and long before that, the bottom line is that defenders of the oppressed and opponents of imperialism must stand foursquare with the Palestinian people against the Zionist oppressors and their state, and that the only solution that promises a just and equitable future to the two peoples inhabiting this tiny land is for an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state, in a socialist federation of the Middle East.

All out for militant international workers action on May Day in solidarity with the Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war! ■

(28 March 2024 NYC Protest Versus Biden Fundraiser)

…………………………

1. 1. Includes 7,000+ missing under rubble of collapsed buildings. Euro-Med Monitor, Infographic, The Israeli Genocide in the Gaza Strip, 7 October 2023 – 14 March 2024.
2. 2. Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Famine Review Committee: Gaza Strip, March 2024.
3. 3. “9,077 ‘Security’ Inmates Are Held In Prisons Inside Israel,” HaMoked, March 2024.

Source

The Crucifixion of Julian Assange – by Chris Hedges – 27 March 2024

• 1,400 WORDS • 

British courts for five years have dragged out Julian Assange’s show trial. He continues to be denied due process as his physical and mental health deteriorates. This is the point.

Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.

The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically?

If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years.

The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.

No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.

The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty, offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal is rejected.

It is hard to see how the U.S. can refuse the two-judge panel, composed of Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, which issued on Tuesday a 66-page judgment accompanied by a three-page court order and a four-page media briefing.

The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021.

If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.

Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.

Julian took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police, who were permitted by the Embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London.

The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege.

The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses. The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes..

Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S when he was sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition, despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police.

Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial, although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions after he obtained asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a fine.

Finally, Julian did not, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, leak the documents. He published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Three of the nine legal grounds were accepted by the judges as potential points for appeal. The other six were denied. The two-judge panel also rejected the request by Julian’s lawyers to present new evidence.

Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that the then-director of the CIA Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian. Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S. attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal cover for an assassination. The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings underway in Spain against UC Global.

The CIA is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices. The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7 files.

Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as “another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of 2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for their political opinions. The judges also dismissed the arguments made by Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a free trial and protections against punishment without law respectively.

The U.S. largely built its arguments from the affidavits of the U.S. prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”

Ben Watson, King’s Counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence.

The U.S. and the U.K Secretary of State were urged by the judges to offer the British court assurances on these three points by April 16.

If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed.

If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene again on May 20 to decide if the appeal can go forward.

The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government crimes. Use Julian’s slow motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates.

This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.

……………………….

(Republished from Scheerpost)

The Nuland – Budanov – Tajik – Crocus Connection – by Pepe Escobar – 26 March 2024

• 1,700 WORDS • 

The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes

Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

………………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Terrorist Attack in Moscow — Who Did It? – by Larry Johnson – 22 March 2024

• 800 WORDS • 

On the “Usual Suspects” list we have Ukraine and we have ISIS (Islamic State). A good case can be made for both. I am posting three videos — some of it is repetitive — that discusses the attack and the very odd behavior of the Biden Administration. Let’s go through the chronology of events.

On March 7 US Embassy Moscow issued the following alert:

The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.

What you need to understand is that this warning was not issued at the discretion of the embassy. This was approved in Washington, DC at Main State and would have required some intelligence that was deemed somewhat specific and “credible.” When I was doing this job at State Counter Terrorism in 1990, this was in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan, 103. It was widely believed in the public that state department, and the CIA had information in advance about the terrorist bombing of that plane, and warned our person out not to get on board. That was not true but it did raise the issue of when, and how to warn the public about a potential threat. We came up with a system that required specific and credible intelligence. The more specific and credible the intelligence, the less need to warn the public. Consider, for example, that if we knew a terrorist attack was going to be carried out on Friday at a public concert hall by a particular group, we would be able to alert appropriate authorities and take precautions to intercept the attack without alarming the public.

On the other hand, if the information was not in great detail, but did come from a credible source, then we would take the time to put together a public warning. That is what happened when the US Embassy Moscow issued the warning on 7 March. They had information they thought was credible, but not terribly specific. This raises a key question — did the United States warn Russian authorities? Normally, when I was doing the job, we would share the information with the appropriate government and law enforcement authorities, in order to try to prevent the attack. Based on public comments by Maria Zakharova and Dimitri Medvedev, following the March 7, warning, and following today’s attack, it appears that the United States did not share any of its information with Russia. I would note there is a Wall Street Journal report tonight, stating that the United States did warn, but Russian authorities insist that they were not provided with an Intel heads up.

What makes the entire situation so bizarre and questionable in terms of what the United States knew, and when it knew it, is that the State Department issued a statement within two hours of the bombing — remember, we still did not know how many attackers, what kind of weapons, how many casualties, and whether or not, they were hostages — declaring that Ukraine was not responsible for this attack. How did State Department know that? It’s strongly suggests that the United States had intelligence, which did not share with Moscow.

Then we have this very unusual X message (formerly Twitter) that was posted at 3:30 AM this morning, 22 March, by OSINTdefender (which I think of has a CIA front for spreading messages the CIA wants out there):

Members of U.S. National Security Council and the White House have reportedly started to become Increasingly Frustrated by “Unauthorized Brazen Actions” taken by Ukraine against Russia, including their recent Campaign of Long-Range Drone Strikes having Targeted at least 25 Oil Refineries, Terminals, Depots and Storage Facilities across Western Russia; with some Biden Administration Officials believing these Strikes will cause a Spike in Global Oil Prices as well as Significant Escalation and Retaliation against Ukraine like was seen during tonight’s Large-Scale Missile Attack.

Do you think that is just a happy coincidence that the Biden White House is bemoaning Ukraine taking “unauthorized brazen actions” on the same day there is a massive terrorist attack in Moscow? I don’t believe in coincidence. I think the Biden ministration was trying to get out ahead of an attack that they knew was coming.

Some claims have emerged late in the day with ISIS, allegedly, taking credit for the attack. What makes that interesting is that we have evidence that some members of ISIS have been fighting in Ukraine against Russia, so this does not necessarily exonerate, either Ukraine or the United States.

Anyway, I deal with these issues from different perspectives in the following videos:

Here’s the Judge and Ray:

And Nima:

(Republished from Sonar21)

Is TikTok a Weapon Against American Hegemony? – by Hugo DIONÍSIO – 20 March 2024

 • 3,400 WORDS • 

TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s monopoly by competing furiously with its platforms, it also steals their space, which was previously shielded, as the White House believed.

In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory; after an election with a very high turnout (with a lower abstention rate than is usually the case in the West); an even higher approval rating for the current president of the Russian Federation; the contradiction between the real information, witnessed and verified by countless international observers, and the information broadcast on the White House-dominated communication spectrum, forces us to put into perspective an entire information battle taking place in the virtual universe.

When we see news that this or that Silicon Valley platform is leaving Russia, in the light of the war waged on TikTok by the U.S. plutocracy, we can only consider that this departure is fortunate for the country and its people. Had the Russian authorities not made the necessary efforts to build a sovereign digital ecosystem, leaving the country to the propaganda of California, would we be talking about the same results? I have my doubts!

A Rutgers study with the NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), on the alignment of TikTok with the geopolitical perspectives of the Communist Party of China, analyzes the information conveyed by the Chinese platform in comparison with Instagram, using, of course, the latter as a control reference.

Subsequently, they draw the conclusion that there is an alignment by saying that, comparing the number of posts between the two platforms, the “pernicious” TikTok and the “transparent” Instagram, posts about Uighurs are 1 (on TikTok) to 11 (on Instagram); about Tibet 1 to 38, Tiananmen 1 to 82 and “democracy in Hong Kong” 1 to 180. The study says that these are “sensitive” topics for the Chinese government. Not for a moment does it question the veracity of such sensitive information for “Communist China”.

A concrete example is the war in Ukraine subject, which pits NATO against the Russian Federation, where posts have a ratio of 5 (TikTok) to 8 (Instagram) when it comes to the “support Ukraine” movement, or the genocide in Gaza, where the ratio is 2 to 6 when it comes to “supporting Israel”. The study does little to analyze the metrics in reverse, i.e. in relation to hashtags that are in opposition to Washington’s interests. But what is truly conclusive is the total disparity between what is mentioned more or less on each of the platforms. The same accusation that is leveled at TikTok regarding sensitive topics for the Chinese government, could also be leveled at the U.S. administration when it comes to topics that run counter to its propaganda, on Silicon Valley platforms. Rutgers doesn’t deal with that, much less the algorithmic biases that justify the disparity in the treatment of certain topics. We know why they exist. And that reason doesn’t work in the White House’s favor, quite the opposite.

If an analysis of the hashtags, which are supposedly in China’s universe of interests, already shows us that what is in China’s interest is diametrically disinterested in Washington’s, there is one issue in particular that is much more sensitive than the rest, and that is the Palestinian cause. For every 3 posts of “support for Palestine” on TikTok, we only have 1 on Instagram. This tells us, in my opinion, more about the U.S. than about China. Considering that the Chinese government is known for not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and considering that it maintains important trade relations with Israel, this gap between TikTok and Instagram is indicative, above all, of the concerns of the United States.

And here we have a brief indication of the real driving force behind the anti-TikTok wave that has been sweeping the Capitol. The truth is that the American-Jewish community has been the most active in anti-TikTok lobbying. An article on www.jewishreviewofbooks.com, with the title “Israel’s TikTok problem” says in so many words that “protecting Americans from TikTok’s political influence will be a gain for the relationship between Israel and its most important ally”. Words for what?

The big concern is the space given by TikTok to pro-Palestinian groups and ideas they call “antisemitic”, knowing how exacerbated the antisemitic sensitivities of Zionists are. The warning in this article is extremely serious, pointing to the serious problems this elite has with democracy itself. In addition to mentioning, as a negative factor, the demographic weight that countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia or Pakistan have in TikTok, influencing the algorithm – this democracy thing has a lot to say about it – the whole article appeals to the attention of the American ruling class to the fact that a generational confrontation between the young and the old is at stake. What really worries them is that younger people are far more “pro-Palestinian” than “pro-Israeli”. The culprit? It’s TikTok! Why is that? Because it prevents them from effectively spreading their propaganda.

This reality is even acknowledged in the article, when it criticizes the TikTok administration for not accepting a paid advertisement that dramatized the issue of the return of kidnapped Israeli citizens. At the same time, it is the website www.vox.com that reports on the fact that the Israeli foreign ministry spent 1.5 million dollars on propaganda on Youtube, X and the mainstream media about the lie – already confirmed – of the 40 beheaded babies. This is really TikTok’s main sin. Rather than spreading low-quality information or information aligned with Chinese pretensions, the platform is not controlled to the liking of Washington or Tel Aviv.

As if to make my point about democracy and the problems the White House has with it – well reported in its handling of the Russian elections and the choices made by the Russian people – the American Pew Research Center, in an analysis of the importance of social media for democracy, tells us that only in three countries does more than half the population say that social media is bad for democracy: the Netherlands, France and the United States. It’s ironic that the country that has the most social networks and controls them the most – contrary to what it assumes – is precisely the one in which the most people say that social networks are bad for democracy: in this case, the USA, with 64% of responses in the negative. Symptomatic, given the exposure to White House manipulation. Perhaps the American and European people don’t sleep that much.

What does this have to do with all the “Russiagate” propaganda, the anti-Trump “fakenews”, or the recent TikTok affair? In my opinion, everything! Above all, it’s a problem of dealing with an undeniable fact: the opening up of social networks to the world puts the White House’s pretensions in an unfavorable demographic position, dissolving the propaganda that Washington manufactures to denigrate governments that don’t obey it into a huge global majority. As such, platforms that don’t obey its dictates, deleting posts or users that contradict Western propaganda, must be banned. There is no shortage of articles such as the one on www.nbcnews.com, stating that “critics are renewing calls for TikTok to be banned, claiming it has an anti-Israel bias”. A whole unipolar model is at stake.

So, the U.S. problem with TikTok is simple. TikTok represents a digital counterpoint, on a par with the counterpoints that already exist in the real world. Until very recently, the virtual world was seen as a kind of heavenly paradise – like a neoliberal Garden of Eden – totally controlled by the U.S. power clique. Until, one day, some countries began to find solutions that favored the creation of their own digital ecosystems.

The fateful and strategic decision was made by the People’s Republic of China when it rejected a Google and Facebook “without manual brakes”, which did not operate according to the procedures that the White House had defined for its territory, but according to its own. Huawei, Tik-Tok, Weechat, Aliexpress and other top digital platforms are “children” of this decision, which is referred to in the West as “the great Firewall of China”. And the most cartoonish thing about this is that the existence of the “great firewall of China” is, above all, the responsibility of the aggressive and intrusive American foreign policy. If there is any truth to the Rutgers study, it is that the American anti-Chinese agenda has been partly responsible for the generational problems that the U.S. now encounters among its population and which concern relations between its American territory and its arm in the Middle East.

And this reading can be partially confirmed in a Quinnipiac University poll from October 17, 2023, which says that voters aged 18-34 (39%) disapprove of sending arms to Israel to fight Hamas, those aged 35-49 (35%), while those over 50 (only 17%) disapprove. In other words, there is a clear generational divide (50% difference), confirmed by the fact that TikTok’s metrics show an equal number of views over the last 30 days for videos with the hashtag “I support Palestine” and “I support Israel”. Something that doesn’t happen on Silicon Valley platforms.

In response to China’s intention not to be dependent on an ecosystem dominated by Washington, attacks have poured in. “There is no freedom in China”; “there is so much dictatorship in China that not even Google is the same”. Symptomatically, both China and Russia demonstrated early on that they wanted to develop their own digital environment, anticipating, as independently as they did wisely, the risks associated with large-scale access to the minds of their peoples. Through the back door, the White House’s attitude has proved both countries right. Today, it is the White House that wants to protect its vital virtual space.

You may or may not agree with the limitations that the PRC demanded of the search engine at the time, and whose unwillingness to accept them led to the blocking of these applications. Today, we realize that for Alphabet and Meta it wasn’t a question of agreeing to apply “limits”, but of who defined them and ordered them to be applied. Quite simply – and paradoxically – it was up to Uncle Sam to apply limitations, and the Chinese state itself did not have the power to apply them on its territory. Conversely, by applying them here more than ever, Uncle Sam is accusing the PRC of wanting to impose a “digital autocracy”.

Thus, on the material level, with the inauguration of the multipolar world, the growing autonomy of nations such as Iran, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, it wasn’t long before the “threat” of multipolarity began to be felt on the digital level too. In my opinion, the imposition of the “great firewall of China” was an important step in this process.

The first symptom of this success was Huawei, which challenged the dictatorship of communication technologies, until then monopolized by the U.S. Above all, Huawei meant access to the most advanced technologies of the future for a country considered “lesser” by the Anglo-Saxon supremacist elite and their wannabes. Stemming this development has become one of the main tasks of the U.S., of its “contain China” enterprise. An obvious sign of this success is that U.S. discourse is moving from the level of “containing China” to the more acute level of “countering China”, which seems to indicate a recognition of failure. It is no longer a question of “containing”, but of contradicting, annulling, counter-attacking, “countering” what has not been contained.

The result of these choices is that anyone who reads the bill H.R. 7521 (Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act) or the report issued by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which served as the basis for the bill, can see from the U.S.’s own words what China’s main concerns were at the time of the attempt by Google and Facebook to enter its territory without limits. All the risks that are pointed out to TikTok, many of which have already been pointed out to Huawei, are known practices by the U.S. against countries that do not guard their virtual space as they should and as the protection of their sovereignty and the interests of their peoples would demand.

This is what the Energy and Commerce Committee report says right at the start: “Foreign adversaries have used access to data (…) to disrupt Americans’ daily lives, conduct espionage activities, and push disinformation and propaganda campaigns in an attempt to undermine our democracy and gain global influence and control.”

Symptomatically, we have to take this “control” and “national interest” thing very seriously. According to the data provided by the report itself, TikTok is in 150 countries and serves 1 billion people, including 170 million Americans. And this is a real drama for Washington. How can you control the minds of a people when half of them follow a platform you don’t control? How do you manipulate the minds of 170 million Americans when the technology that could be used to manipulate them is in China? How can you collect the data of 170 million people, aggregating it into profiles and predicting their behavior, so that you can push them in the desired directions, when that data is stored in China? If Israel is in danger, then so are the dollar and hegemony.

Meanwhile, the triggering of the panic button is also related to the effect that Tik-Tok has as a disruptor of the virtual, monopolistic environment created in Silycon Valey. The CIA, through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has created an entire virtual ecosystem, transporting every one of its people’s minds into it. This ecosystem, controlled throughout the West only by the security agencies at Washington’s service, wanted a certain degree of invulnerability. In order to be perfect, the flow of data had to be closed and watertight, so that the algorithms could not be infected and, with it, the “harmonious” functioning of the system of “surveillance capitalism”, as Shoshana Zuboff rightly called it, could not be disrupted.

It is this ecosystem, through which U.S. security agencies monitor all the digital information of the world’s peoples in real time, predicting and producing behavior, promoting and demoting parties, governments and public figures, accelerating or delaying agendas, that is at stake. Above all, with TikTok, the Washington regime’s concern exceeds the Trump administration’s anxiety levels with Huawei. Badly or well, with Huawei it was about the more structural, more architectural technological aspects. With TikTok, what’s at stake is the very central nervous system of the internet. China now has privileged access to the neuronal network and the central nervous system of a body, which the U.S. had created in order to dominate the world.

With the virtual monopoly deeply affected, on its own territory, the U.S. is choosing to shoot itself in the foot, as it did when it decided to load Russia with endless sanctions. With this action on TikTok, the U.S. is sending out another serious warning to countries that hold capital and investments in the West. At any moment, a change in the law, a geopolitical pretext or a false accusation could justify confiscation.

To position TikTok in the firing line, the U.S. is once again looking in the mirror. In the preamble, the bill, H.R. 7521, refers to the Chinese National Security Law, published in 2017, clearly distorting both its content and its territorial scope. Referring to what we know to be Article 7 of that law – through the report of the Energy and Commerce Committee – they state that there is a risk that Tik-Tok will be called upon to share international personal data with the Chinese government, since, as they claim, all organizations, public or private, have to collaborate with the efforts of the Chinese intelligence services. This is at least partly true. The text of Article 7 of the PRC’s National Security Law reads: “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with the law, and protect the secrets of national intelligence work of which they are aware.”

What the text of the proposal doesn’t mention is what’s in the next article of China’s National Security Law. After all, Article 8 of the same law requires “respecting and protecting human rights, protecting the rights and interests of individuals and organizations”. In other words, contrary to what the U.S. Congress says, this aid is conditional on compliance with the law and the rights of citizens and organizations, and is not a discretionary, authoritarian or autocratic power.

But the main distortion introduced in the energy and trade committee’s report is the territorial interpretation of the Chinese National Security Law. Article 7 of the PRC National Security Law is to be read within the framework of the Chinese constitution, i.e. cooperation is limited to persons and organizations of Chinese nationality, in relation to actions carried out on Chinese territory.

And it is precisely in China that Bytedance maintains its fundamental technological base. That really is the biggest obstacle for the U.S. Contrary to what the promoters of the proposal to “protect Americans from foreign adversaries – the Controlled Applications Act” say, this is not about the fear that their 170 million Americans will be monitored. After all, realistically, we all know from practice and theory that China has a doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. No matter how much they talk about the Chinese “Data Protection” Law of 2020, arguing that it provides for the use of personal and organizational data to prevent and anticipate risks to national security, none of this is groundbreaking or an exception these days in any country that cares about protecting its people. Monitoring all the people, as the U.S. does, is completely unjustified.

What really worries the American plutocratic and gerontocratic regime is monopoly. An empire is made up of monopolies, and to be an empire it’s not enough to be big, you have to monopolize. And in order to build and maintain a hegemonic empire, it is essential to monopolize the structural sectors of the economy. And this is the real problem. TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s monopoly by competing furiously with these platforms, it also steals their space, which was previously shielded, as the White House believed.

To protect what’s left of the monopoly, how about choosing someone who feels sentimentally connected to it? The choice fell on the illustrious New Delhi-born congressman of Indian descent, Raja Krishnamoorthi. What is certain is that Raja has everything to do with anti-Chinese things, such as his responsibilities on the “U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party”. The Democratic intention is obvious, a way of turning something political into a personal agenda that seeks confrontation and direct provocation.

Thus, we are witnessing yet another act of desperation, the effect of which will be to increase the already established mistrust of the seriousness with which the West views its own “free and open market” ideology. At the head of a sector inaugurated by the U.S. itself, surpassing them at their own game, Titok and China are thus demonstrating that the days of exclusivity and restricted access to the best the world has to offer are long gone. Just as Russia had already shown that the time for excesses around its territory was over.

So, thinking about empires and monopolies – with reference to a resolution recently passed in the European Parliament that aims to “decolonize, de-imperialize and re-federalize Russia” – this TikTok issue once again demonstrates the existence of a disintegration movement. TikTok is to the virtual world as BRICS is to de-dollarization in the material world. Both are inexorable processes that threaten to accelerate the “de-imperialization” of the West.

TikTok’s relationship with Israel is premonitory. The defeat imposed by TikTok on the Zionist narrative is not unrelated to Israel’s role in securing the petrodollar, hegemony and its defeat by the multipolar world. TikTok puts everything at risk!

………………………………….

Hugo Dionísio is a Lawyer, researcher and geopolitics’ analyst. He is the owner of Canal-factual.wordpress.com Blog and co-founder of MultipolarTv, a Youtube Channel targeted to geopolitical analysis. He develops activity as Human Rights and Social rights activist as board member of the Portuguese Democratic Lawyers Association. He is also a researcher at the Portuguese Workers Trade Union Confederation (CGTP-IN).

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Joe Biden’s Parting Gift to America Will be Christian Fascism – by Chris Hedges – 17 March 2024

• 1,500 WORDS • 

Onward Christian Fascism – by Mr. Fish

The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.

Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.

The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”

Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.

Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”

The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.

Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.

Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.

The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:

[C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.

But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.

The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.

Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.

He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant.

Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.

“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”

The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.

The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.

There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.

Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.

The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.

Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.

They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?

………………………………

(Republished from Scheerpost)

Israel – Enemy POW Torture Videos Make Jewish State Overlords Proud – by Jonathan Ofir (MondoWeis) 6 March 2024

‘We are the masters of the house’: Israeli channels air snuff videos featuring systematic torture of Palestinians

Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.

BY JONATHAN OFIR 

Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage. 

The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism. 

As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.   

The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.

‘The feeling is one of pride’

“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.

The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together. 

We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor. 

“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be…what happened on October 7 will never return.” 

In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells. 

“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”

“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling. 

“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse. 

While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”

Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”). 

“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.” 

Torture, in other words. 

It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”

 The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%. 

This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.

…………………

Source

US Presidential Primary – Tens of Thousands of Massachusetts Voters ‘No Preference’ for ‘Genocide Joe’ – by Lila Hempel-Edgers – 5 March 2024

Massachusetts voters who picked ‘no preference’ hope to send a message to “Genocide Joe” Biden – by Lila Hempel-Edgers

Supporters of the Vote No Preference campaign gathered at Andala Coffee House, a Middle Eastern restaurant, to watch the numbers roll in on Super Tuesday in hopes that enough “no preference” ballots were cast to send a message to President Biden.

Garnering 83 percent of the vote, Biden won a decisive victory in Massachusetts over author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who were also on the Democratic ballot. As results continued to come in Tuesday, “no preference” was winning an even bigger slice of the vote than either Williamson or Phillips, in an indication of dissatisfaction with the president among liberal voters.
Around 9:30 p.m., the crowd cheered for over 11,000 ballots cast for no preference. “Not bad for a five day turnaround,” said Sara Halawa, one of the campaign’s organizers. By 10:45 p.m., the group had garnered over 27,000 votes, and they felt the momentum.

“It looks like it’s going to be something like 50,000 or 60,000 [votes] based on how things are going,” Nathan Foster, 27, of Medford, said at around 10:30 p.m., long after Biden was declared the winner. “This is so many votes for no preference, I’m really happy and satisfied with it.”

Omar Siddiqi, a 41-year old resident of Brighton, said the numbers exceeded his expectations.

“We had no clue that we were going to do this, even a week ago,” said Siddiqi. “So I think, given the speed with which this came together, this is exceeding expectations. We would have been happy with 10,000 votes.”

Aly Madan, a 32-year-old from Roxbury, who started the Vote No Preference instagram page for Massachusetts last Wednesday, was also pleased.

“At first I thought ‘I’ll get like 100 of my friends to do this, maybe a thousand.’ Now, we have hundreds of volunteers and thousands of phone calls and texts being made,” said Madan. “I’m just so excited that people are engaged and are aligned and are doing what they can.”

The Massachusetts Vote No Preference effort mirrored a similar movement in Michigan, the Uncommitted Campaign, that amassed over 101,000 “uncommitted” votes during the state’s Democratic Primary last Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

Many Democratic voters are angry at Biden’s support for Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas that has led to the deaths of 30,000 Palestinians living in Gaza since October.

“When we saw what happened in Michigan last Tuesday, we realized we absolutely have to mobilize here in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday,” said Halawa. “And in the days that followed, we reached out to all of the different people we knew that cared about this, and a coalition came together.”

Over 300 volunteers spent the past three days advising thousands of Massachusetts voters, through phone calls, protests, and over 220,000 text messages, to vote “no preference.” The group gathered in front of several major polling sites across the state on Tuesday morning to suggest people cast their vote in protest of President Biden on their Democratic ballots.

“Over the last four days, we’ve had hundreds of volunteers working with us,” said Cicia Lee, a 31-year-old resident of Jamaica Plain who helped mobilize the coalition.

Some attendees at Tuesday night’s watch party were hopeful that their campaign might motivate Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Merrie Najimy, a Watertown resident and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said that ending the genocide is completely within the the president’s control.

“In the 80s, Ronald Reagan picked up the phone and called Menachem Begin, who was then the prime minister of Israel, and told him to stop the bombing of Southern Lebanon. In 20 minutes, it was over,” said Najimi. “If Biden is saying he doesn’t have that power, then why would we elect him?”

………………….

Source

Israeli tanks have deliberately run over dozens of Palestinian civilians alive (Euro-Med Monitor) 4 March 2024

Palestinian territory– The Israeli army’s repeated killings of Palestinian civilians by deliberately running them over alive with military vehicles was vehemently denounced by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on Sunday, as was the widespread destruction of civilian property. These crimes are part of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the rights group said, ongoing since 7 October 2023.

Euro-Med Monitor documented the Israeli army’s killing of a Palestinian man who was deliberately run over in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February after he was arrested. The man was subjected to harsh interrogation by members of the Israeli army, who bound his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the bottom to the top of his body.

The incident occurred on the main Salah al-Din Street in the Zaytoun neighbourhood, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the Euro-Med Monitor team. Israeli soldiers restrained the victim’s hands before they crushed him, and tramped on his body from the legs up, confirming that he was alive during the incident. To guarantee thorough and complete crushing, the victim was placed on asphalt rather than in an adjacent sandy area.

The victim’s mutilated body and the surrounding area bear obvious signs that a military bulldozer or tank was present. It appears that the victim was purposefully stripped of his clothes, as he was seen wearing only his underpants at the time of his death.

The ramming operation occurred before the Israeli army withdrew to the outskirts of the Zaytoun neighbourhood two days ago, as evidenced by the condition of the entrails and other body parts, which had not yet decomposed when the case was documented.

Another documented incident took place on 23 January, when an Israeli tank ran over members of the Ghannam family while they were sleeping in a shelter caravan in the Taiba Towers area of Khan Younis. As a result, a man and his eldest daughter were killed, and his remaining three children and wife were injured. Amina, his 13-year-old daughter, confirmed that her father and older sister were killed when an Israeli tank unexpectedly and repeatedly ran over the caravan, where the family had been sleeping. While her mother and two other siblings survived the attack, Amina experienced extreme pressure in her eyes, nearly losing her sight.

Euro-Med Monitor also documented Israeli tanks and bulldozers running over and crushing displaced people inside their tents in Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan Hospital courtyard on 16 December 2023. Several people were killed during the incident, including individuals who were initially injured and did not ultimately survive. The corpses of those who had been previously buried in the courtyard were also crushed in the 16 December incident, stated the rights group.

More recently, a Palestinian family survived a 20 February running attack after Israeli tracks ran over their tent on the shore of the Khan Yunis Sea. A female civilian said that she was shocked by the tank suddenly running over her tent.

In addition, Euro-Med Monitor has documented numerous incidents of Israeli army tanks destroying civilian property, particularly cars, during Israel’s ground incursions into different parts of the Gaza Strip. Most of these tank attacks have targeted vehicles parked in the streets without any military affiliation, indicating the Israeli army’s deliberate and systematic destruction of Palestinian property.

Euro-Med Monitor affirmed that all of these violations are part of a larger Israeli effort to dehumanise every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip, in order to justifiy and normalise the crimes being committed against them. Crushing civilians with tanks is just one of the many cruel ways the Israeli army murders Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, disregarding their humanity, suffering, and dignity. These practices reflect the desire of Israel’s government and military to collectively punish the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating, intimidating, and/or harming them physically and psychologically. These crimes come alongside a public incitement campaign by Israeli officials, media figures, and settlers calling for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, and are also a result of the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators—evident by the absence of any meaningful action being taken to hold them accountable by any party or at any level.

The human rights organisation warned that the Israeli army has escalated its premeditated murders, extrajudicial executions, and judicial killings against Palestinian civilians since 7 October through direct targeting with snipers, drones, and running operations in various regions of the Gaza Strip. According to Euro-Med Monitor, these actions amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute Basic Law of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

There is no justification for the Israeli army to commit these serious crimes, Euro-Med Monitor confirmed. Even its claim that some of the aforementioned acts were directed towards Palestinian fighters does not release Israel from criminal responsibility, seeing as international law protects both civilians and fighters who have given up or lost all means of defense, with the Rome Statute classifying their killing or wounding as war crimes. The Israeli army’s deliberate and widespread destruction of Palestinian property, carried out in an irresponsible manner and without military necessity, also qualifies as a war crime under the Rome Statute.

In parallel to taking all necessary steps to ensure Israel’s accountability for the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people, Euro-Med Monitor reiterated its call for the international community to immediately implement its international obligations to stop the genocide that Israel has been committing against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for roughly five months now.

In light of the fact that the ICC has not yet taken any action or filed any charges in relation to the investigations it is supposed to be carrying out into the situation in the Gaza Strip, Euro-Med Monitor expressed deep concern about the ICC Prosecutor’s performance regarding the genocide taking place there. Genocide is one of the most serious international crimes, with catastrophic consequences for civilians. The Court has not said anything about the crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, even in the face of a plethora of evidence presented by Israeli officials and soldiers themselves, as well as warnings and documentary reports from international organisations, the United Nations and its experts, and the governments of many other nations. The ICC’s last update on the situation in Palestine was posted on 17 November 17 on its official website. This raises serious questions and concerns about its independence and integrity, as well as the extent to which it can perform its duties without becoming politicised or impacted by standards of duality and selective justice.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for the formation of an independent international investigation committee specialising in Israel’s ongoing military attack on the Gaza Strip. It also urged the international community to enable the work of a separate independent international investigation committee concerned with the Occupied Palestinian Territory, formed in 2021, to carry out its work by ensuring its access to the Strip and opening the necessary investigations into all crimes and violations committed against Palestinians there, including the deliberate killing and extrajudicial execution of civilians.

The rights group also demanded that the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions visit the Gaza Strip as soon as feasible to look into the illegal killings that fall under the purview of his substantive mandate.

………………….

Source

Joe Biden knowingly and purposely blew up the US southern border in 2021 — don’t believe his blame game now – by Rich Lowry (NYPost)

Opinion by Rich Lowry

President Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20, 2021.

Weeks later, Feb. 2, he issued the executive order that began the unraveling at the border in earnest. 

The border crisis isn’t something that happened to Biden.

It’s not a product of circumstances or understandable policy mistakes made under duress.

No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency. 

It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year priority.

The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2 executive order. 

By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office. 

The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations and memoranda.

The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic and political problems in Central America instead.

It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things. 

No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency. 

It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year priority.

The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2 executive order. 

By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office. 

The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations and memoranda.

The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic and political problems in Central America instead.

It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things. 

And it put on the chopping block numerous Trump policies that had helped establish order at the border, from Trump’s expansion of expedited removal, to his termination of a parole program for Central American minors, to his memorandum urging the relevant departments to work toward ending “catch and release.”

Most important, it targeted two of the pillars of Trump’s success at the border: the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as Remain in Mexico, and the safe-third-country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that allowed us to divert asylum-seekers to Central American countries other than their own to make asylum claims. 

Joe Biden: The most unfit incumbent president up for re-election since FDR

After a few fits and starts thanks to legal challenges, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas indeed ended Remain in Mexico.

Although he’s now attempting to portray himself to sympathetic journalists as an innocent bystander to Biden’s border policy, he killed the policy knowing exactly what he was doing. 

“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence and perspectives presented by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the program and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have determined that MPP should be terminated,” he said in an Oct. 2021 memo.

He acknowledged, by the way, the policy “likely contributed to reduced migratory flows.” 

For his part, Secretary of State Antony Blinken moved expeditiously.

On Feb. 6, 2021, he announced the end of the asylum agreements. 

And just like that, the carefully crafted suite of Trump polices that had given us control of the border were demolished. 

It didn’t require esoteric knowledge of border policy to realize how this would play out.

During the transition, Trump officials warned of a catastrophe if Biden followed through on his promises, and in April 2021, The Washington Post ran a piece headlined “At the border, a widely predicted crisis that caught Biden off guard.”

Now the Feb. 2 memo feels almost like an artifact from another era, as the open-borders orthodoxy begins to show cracks.

The White House sent Biden to visit the border and is considering measures to curtail illegal immigration and calling on sanctuary cities to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Mayor Eric Adams criticizes aspects of his city’s sanctuary regime. 

The executive order, though, is a stark reminder the current chaos is the product of deliberate policy.

It’s all there in black and white, a prelude to a disaster that has roiled the country and could well play an outsize role in Biden losing the presidency.

Twitter: @RichLowry

Moon Shot – Capitalist Private Craft Falls On Side Helplessly – 28 Feb 2024

Moon Shot – Capitalist Private Craft Falls On Side Helplessly – 28 Feb 2024 (9:18 min) Audio Mp3

Latest privately-owned Moon mission ends abruptly after botched landing

The first privately-owned mission to the surface of the Moon ended prematurely Tuesday as a result of a botched landing that has resulted on the spacecraft ending up lying on its side, unable to use its solar panels to recharge its batteries, and with several antennae pointing in the wrong direction. The lander, named Odysseus, continued collecting data until power failed.

(The Odysseus lunar lander can be seen Thursday in this image taken as it lands the south pole region of the Moon. The toppled lunar lander is still beaming back pictures of the moon, as its nears the final hours of its life.© Intuitive Machines via AP)

Much is being made in the corporate media about the fact that this is the first-ever Moon landing with a profit-making private corporation in control. The New York Times gushed that that the landing would “inaugurate a more revolutionary era” of more “economical” spaceflight. The Washington Post called it “a significant step toward NASA’s plan to eventually return astronauts” to the Moon. The Wall Street Journal asserted that the landing was a “milestone” for the space industry.

And NASA Administrator Bill Nelson set the tone for the nationalism and jingoism surrounding the event. “Today for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company—an American company—launched and led the voyage up there.”

(Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, describes how it is believed the company’s Odysseus spacecraft landed on the surface of the moon, during a news conference in Houston on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. [AP Photo/NASA])

In reality the landing was something of an exercise in reinventing the wheel. As the media and politicians themselves admit, there were landings that were far more technically challenging achieved more than half a century ago, both the famous landings of Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17, and the numerous Soviet Luna landers, which achieved the first soft landing on the Moon in 1966 and the first robotic sample return in 1970.

Odysseus, in contrast, is quite limited. The spacecraft was built and launched by Intuitive Machines, an aerospace company co-founded by Stephen Altemus, Tim Crain and Iranian-American billionaire Kam Ghaffarian, and which focuses on lunar orbits and landings. It was a test bed for six experimental systems and was only slated to last nine or ten days on the lunar surface, according to Crain, which was based on how long the lander’s solar panels were to be exposed to the Sun. There was no backup power for the lander and its instruments to operate or survive the two-week-long lunar night.

Moreover, reports that have come out since the launch indicate that the probe may have been doomed from the start. Odysseus, the primary component of mission IM-1, was launched on February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and descended to the Moon’s surface seven days later. The day after the launch, the company’s header of navigation, Mike Hansen, told Reuters that the lander’s laser-powered range finder wasn’t functional because Intuitive Machine’s engineers failed to unlock a safety switch during pre-flight checks. The range finder measures the time from when a light pulse is emitted from a laser to when the reflected light is detected, and is critical for measuring the craft’s distance from the Moon as it is landing. Range finders are a standard component of the vast majority of all modern landing systems.

The problem was only discovered while the spacecraft was en route to the Moon, and no software on board was able to unlock the switch remotely. As a result, the company was forced to use NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, one of the instruments launched as a technology demonstration, to measure the craft’s distance from the Moon as it was landing.

It’s currently unclear how much data was transmitted back to Earth from Odysseus. Intuitive Machines has been careful to say that “flight controllers intend to collect data” until the lander dies, but has so far provided essentially no information on the amount or quality of the data received. The most concrete bit of information revealed is that two of the lander’s antennae are pointed at the Moon, and the bandwidth between Odysseus and its controllers is much lower than expected.

The fact that the solution partially worked is a credit to the engineers and technicians who developed and operated NASA’s lidar system. Odysseus would have crash-landed otherwise. That the craft landed on its side is likely due to measurement errors caused by using the system in a way that it was never designed for. Intuitive Machines estimates that Odysseus touched down on the Moon at about twice the expected velocity, likely a major factor in why it ultimately tipped over.

The fact that a secondary system had to be relied on at all came from cost-cutting measures by Intuitive Machines. Hansen admitted in his interview with Reuters, “There were certainly things we could’ve done to test it and actually fire it. They would’ve been very time-consuming and very costly.” He continued: “So that was a risk as a company that we acknowledged and took that risk.”

Market pressures no doubt played a significant role. Stock of Intuitive Machines is traded on the NASDAQ and its value had been trending downwards since the company merged with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. and then went public in 2023. The company’s stock spiked after rumors emerged of some sort of collaboration with SpaceX, but almost immediately tanked. Stockholders were no doubt urging a successful launch as soon as possible in order to boost share values. In that regard, the mission was a success. The value of the company more than doubled in the lead-up to the launch and remains about 50 percent higher than it was at the beginning of the month, despite sharp falloffs after the company reported the poor landing.

That is not to say that the Apollo or Luna projects were themselves flawless. They suffered numerous setbacks, including the tragic loss of the Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee in a fire during a launch rehearsal. But they were genuinely new developments in humanity’s ability to develop technology and scientific methods to understand the world in which we live. The space race itself was started by the launch of Sputnik 1, a product of the progressive impulse provided the conquest of power by the working class in Russia in October 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, and Sputnik was achieved in spite of the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union.

Now, space flight is either subordinated wholly to militarism, private profit, or both. That so many companies are taking part is not a reflection of the strength of American capitalism, but of its terminal decline. Space travel is an inherently international endeavor, requiring infrastructure around the world to be successful. It cannot be done in any truly progressive manner on the basis of rival corporations, no matter how much money a figure like Elon Musk may have.

This was again proven by the explosion of the Astrobotic Technology lander in January shortly after its launch, the crash of the Japanese company ispace’s lunar lander in 2023, and the crash of Beresheet in 2019, a lunar lander developed privately by the Israeli company SpaceIL. And because the International Space Station is incapable of turning a profit, it is slated to be de-orbited and destroyed by 2030.

The drive by American capitalism to assert dominance in all aspects of geopolitics, which increasingly includes outer space, also plays a major role. Since the 1970s, Japan and India, professed allies of the US, and China, one of the main targets of imperialism, have all landed on the Moon. China launched its own space station, the Tiangong, in 2021, and several other countries have launched their own communications (and spy) satellites and sent missions to Mars. And if another country can send rockets to the Moon or Mars, so the thinking of think tanks and military minds goes, they can launch those same rockets at the US.

Real mastery of space travel will only be achieved when the resources of Earth are marshalled in a globally planned and scientifically coordinated manner. Capitalism has demonstrated time and time again it is incapable of doing this to deal with terrestrial problems—war, pandemics, climate change, social inequality—and it is no surprise that spaceflight is increasingly difficult. Like all the challenges facing modern humans, the issues are fundamentally political and will only be resolved when socialism finally buries capitalism.

…………………………..

One Hour of Communist Music – The Moon (1:00:22 min) Audio Mp3

UPS Mass Layoff: Why the Teamsters Should Have Struck UPS – by Eve Ottenberg – 23 Feb 2024

Last summer, 340,000 Teamsters were ready to strike UPS, but the union settled instead. One could argue it made a mistake. “We’ve changed the game,” the Teamsters announced at the time, because they got some of the life-and-death air-conditioning they demanded in UPS trucks, higher wages, more jobs, part-time rewards, equal pay and a MLK Day holiday among other supposedly “great” wins. But ah, what a difference six months makes. Because at the end of January, UPS announced it would eliminate 12,000 full and part-time managerial jobs to help get $1 billion in cost savings. Why? Because revenue shrank.

UPS hastened to assure the Teamsters that all was well: these luckless workers were not in the union. Though a part-time manager probably doesn’t earn big bucks, getting rid of 12,000 of them helps corporate savings add up. Indeed, given the long-time, anti-union ploy of classifying as many workers as possible as “management,” one wonders how many of these poor part-time managers really should have been in the union. And one also wonders on whom the next round of cuts will fall. Because clearly there will be one, maybe several.

This mass layoff was entirely predictable, bodes poorly for the future for unionized workers, and should have been vigorously addressed and negotiated with more than the sentence on separation of employment: “Upon discharge the Employer shall pay all money due to the employee during the first (1^st) payroll department working day,” or that “No bargaining unit employee currently performing work in the payroll department will be laid off or suffer a loss of their current payroll type position as a result of this section.” Another mention of circumstances that might involve a reduction of jobs is “If a technological change creates new work that replaces, enhances or modifies bargaining unit work, bargaining unit employees will perform that new or modified work.” Also “Driver-facing sensors will not be used for any purpose during any phase of a disciplinary process or be the sole basis for disqualifying a driver during the thirty (30) day period.” Regarding employees about to be fired, the contract says they should be kept on until their grievance procedure is finished. It also states that workers who won’t cross a picket line can’t be fired, specifies other instances in which they may not be fired, and those – a positive drug test – in which they may and lays out methods to increase hiring. These are the sorts of job termination and expansion issues that the contract addresses in legalese. They are standard boilerplate and indicate that the union did not specifically address mass job cuts. It probably should have.

But Teamster general president Sean O’Brien was strike-averse and eager to cut a deal. Even critical a/c in the trucks got short shrift, with only one third of UPS vehicles to have it installed over the five-year agreement. What do the drivers in the other two-thirds of the trucks do in sweltering summer heat? Hope they don’t collapse and die of heat prostration, I guess, the way Estaban Chavez, Jr. did in 2022, expiring in his truck from heat stroke. Meanwhile, part-timers continue living out of their cars as they work multiple jobs, because the two-tier wage structure was not ended.

So management got its cake and ate it too. First, with the contract it happily shelled out to snag more flexibility with work schedules. Then, half a year later, unhappy with having paid extra, it fires 12,000 “management” employees. All while UPS ceo Carol Tome pulled down $27 million in 2022. With hindsight, Teamster leadership looks a bit foolish, because rank and file workers were ready to strike and that, not stellar union negotiating skills, is what won employees some of their goals. As Truthout wrote July 26: “Any significant gains won by the Teamsters against a reluctant employer will have come about because rank-and-file workers showed the company they were prepared to strike.”

But worker solidarity was, not to put too fine a point on it, betrayed. “Many of the younger radicals,” Joe Allen wrote in CounterPunch February 1, “that got jobs on some of the most socially isolating shifts at Big Brown, were left confused and in some cases very demoralized by their experience.” These were the activists from Democratic Socialists of America, who had flocked to UPS, getting hired there in expectation of a strike. To make matters worse, O’Brien very publicly hobnobbed with Donald “Tax Cuts for the Rich” Trump at Mar-A-Lago and met with other far-right politicos. Allen blames Teamsters for a Democratic Union for “cleaning up O’Brien’s previous image as a thug, with the broad left media, including Labor Notes, Jacobin and In These Times.”

UPS director of financial and strategy communications, Brian Hughes, was quoted in the Louisville Courier Journal February 2 that this round of layoffs amounts to “less than three percent of the UPS workforce and does not impact union-represented roles.” The ceo, meanwhile, has pointed out that full-time drivers earn $170,000 on average, thanks to the new contract. To repeat, though UPS has not announced which jobs specifically will vanish, company brass was at pains to emphasize that union workers are not affected. Translation: we’re tossing employees into the unemployment line, but we don’t want the union to notice.

And yet, the Courier Journal noted, “UPS reported nearly $2.5 billion in profit for the fourth quarter, according to USA Today. However, the fourth-quarter 2023 consolidated revenues of $24. 9 billion were a 7.8 decrease from fourth quarter revenue numbers in 2022.” Management can’t have that, oh no! Earnings must rise each year, relative to the last, or else UPS will cut jobs to make up the difference. “UPS is shooting for 2024 revenues in the range between approximately $92 and $94.5 billion. However, these numbers would still fall far short of the company’s historic 2022 earnings of $100.3 billion.” As Tome announced back then, “Our results in 2022 demonstrate our strategy is working.” So I guess one must conclude that if UPS doesn’t repeat its 2022 high this year, and it probably won’t, more layoffs will come next year. Fun times.

In fact, future lay-offs are a near certainly, as UPS struggles to match its 2022 revenue bonanza. One wonders about union negotiations with regard to job security, because that, as these latest firings show, is a big issue at UPS, a company that ditches thousands of workers because its revenue fell short of $100 billion. True, the contract won “the creation of 75,000 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions,” according to the Teamster’s press release on the contract, but nothing specifically appears to address protections against job cuts. This is always a dicey contract demand, because management doesn’t want to lose its grip on the absolute power to fire, but if these 12,000 lay-offs are an omen, maybe the Teamsters should have addressed it.

In these times, with companies more focused than ever on investor profits, stock buybacks, top brass compensation and stock dividends, it is wise for unions to be proactive about job security. Even if it means going out on strike. After all, strikes work. Why else did the railroad industry turn to president Joe “Phony Lunch Bucket” Biden to break a trainman strike, the focus of which for workers was job conditions? Precarity is a job condition, like overwork or being on call multiple days in a row. It is arguably the condition that enables all other on-the-job abuses. Remember, Biden was only too happy to sweep all workplace condition demands off the table for railroad employees. But he couldn’t do so for UPS, because there’s no federal involvement in the company. Turns out he didn’t need to, because the union decided not to press the issue.

Unions ignore precarity and working conditions at their peril. Teamsters head O’Brien’s laser focus on pay to the exclusion, say, of getting a/c in ALL the trucks speaks volumes about union leadership’s lack of touch with day-to-day labor. If O’Brien had to drive an un-air-conditioned vehicle for days on end in 100-plus degree weather, air-conditioning would have been a non-negotiable demand. If he lived in terror of losing his job, like some unfortunate part-time “manager,” you can bet precarity would have been an issue too. A genuinely good contract would have addressed these matters.

Meanwhile, over at the United Auto Workers, leader Shawn Fain led a successful strike and guess what? Contrary to management predictions, the sky didn’t fall in – even though one worker demand was the right to strike over plant closures and one key achievement was saving jobs at a factory in Belvedere, Illinois, previously slated for closure. This is a worthy union goal, and the UAW proved it attainable. Maybe next time, after who knows how many rounds of layoffs, the Teamsters will pursue it, too.

…………………..

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website.

Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery – by Craig Murray – 21 Feb 2024

---

Reporting on Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has become a vocation that has now stretched over five years. From the very first hearing, when Justice Snow called Assange “a narcissist” before Julian had said anything whatsoever other than to confirm his name, to the last, when Judge Swift had simply in 2.5 pages of glib double-spaced A4 dismissed a tightly worded 152-page appeal from some of the best lawyers on earth, it has been a travesty and charade marked by undisguised institutional hostility.

We were now on last orders in the last chance saloon, as we waited outside the Royal Courts of Justice for the appeal for a right of final appeal.

The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of gray and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power.

Court number 5 had been allocated for this hearing. It is one of the smallest courts in the building. Its largest dimension is its height. It is very high, and lit by heavy mock medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap from the gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of despair, below them you peer through the weak light to make out the participants.

A huge tiered walnut dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out, at one side housing journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoner or prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in medieval style is in fact a Blair era introduction to the so-called process of law.

Rather incongruously, the clerks’ tier was replete with computer hardware, with one of the two clerks operating behind three different computer monitors and various bulky desktop computers, with heavy cables twisting in all directions like sea kraits making love. The computer system seems to bring the court into the 1980’s, and the clerk behind it looked uncannily like a member of a synthesiser group of that era, right down to the upwards pointing haircut.

In period keeping, this computer feed to an overflow room did not really work, which led to a number of halts in proceedings.

All the walls are lined with high bookcases housing thousands of leather bound volumes of old cases. The stone floor peeks out for one yard between the judicial dais and the storied wooden pews, with six tiers of increasingly narrow seating. The barristers occupied the first tier and their instructing solicitors the second, with their respective clients on the third. Up to ten people per line could squeeze in, with no barriers on the bench between opposing parties, so the Assange family was squashed up against the CIA, State Department and UK Home Office representatives.

That left three tiers for media and public, about thirty people. There was however a wooden gallery above which housed perhaps twenty more. With little fuss and with genuine helpfulness and politeness, the court staff – who from the Clerk of Court down were magnificent – had sorted out the hundreds of those trying to get in, and we had the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, we had 16 Members of the European Parliament, we had MPs from several states, we had NGOs including Reporter Without Borders, we had the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and we had, (checks notes) me, all inside the Court.

I should say this was achieved despite the extreme of official unhelpfulness from the Ministry of Justice, who had refused official admission and recognition to all of the above, including the United Nations. It was pulled together by the police, court staff and the magnificent Assange volunteers led by Jamie. I should also acknowledge Jim, who with others spared me the queue all night in the street I had undertaken at the International Court of Justice, by volunteering to do it for me.

This sketch captures the tiny non-judicial portion of the court brilliantly. Paranoid and irrational regulations prevent publications of photos or screenshots.

Twitter

The acoustics of the court are simply terrible. We are all behind the barristers as they stood addressing the judges, and their voices were at the same time muffled yet echoing from the bare stone walls.

I did not enter with a great deal of hope. As I have explained in How the Establishment Functions, judges do not have to be told what decision is expected by the Establishment. They inhabit the same social milieu as ministers, belong to the same institutions, attend the same schools, go to the same functions. The United States’ appeal against the original blocking of Assange’s extradition was granted by a Lord Chief Justice who is the former room-mate, and still best friend, of the minister who organised the removal of Julian from the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The blocking of Assange’s appeal was done by Judge Swift, a judge who used to represent the security services, and said they were his favourite clients. In the subsequent Graham Phillips case, where Mr Phillips was suing the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for sanctions being imposed upon him without any legal case made against him, Swift actually met FCDO officials – one of the parties to the case – and discussed matters relating to it privately with them before giving judgment. He did not tell the defence he had done this. They found out, and Swift was forced to recuse himself.

Personally I am surprised Swift is not in jail, let alone still a High Court judge. But then what do I know of justice?

The Establishment politico-legal nexus was on even more flagrant display today. Presiding was Dame Victoria Sharp, whose brother Richard had arranged an £800,000 loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and immediately been appointed Chairman of the BBC, (the UK’s state propaganda organ). Assisting her was Justice Jeremy Johnson, another former barrister representing MI6.

By an amazing coincidence, Justice Johnson had been brought in seamlessly to replace his fellow ex-MI6 hiree Justice Swift and find for the FCDO in the Graham Phillips case!

And here these two were now to judge Julian!

What a lovely, cosy club is the Establishment! How ordered and predictable! We must bow down in awe at its majesty and near divine operation. Or go to jail.

Well, Julian is in jail, and we stood ready for his final shot for an appeal. We all stood up and Dame Victoria took her place. In the murky permanent twilight of the courtroom, her face was illuminated from below by the comparatively bright light of a computer monitor. It gave her a grey, spectral appearance, and the texture and colour of her hair merged into the judicial wig seamlessly. She seems to hover over us as a disturbingly ethereal presence.

Her colleague, Justice Johnson, for some reason was positioned as far to her right as physically possible. When they wished to confer he had to get up and walk. The lighting arrangements did not appear to cater for his presence at all, and at times he merged into the wall behind him.

Dame Victoria opened by stating that the court had given Julian permission to attend in person or to follow on video, but he was too unwell to do either. After that disturbing news, Edward Fitzgerald KC rose to open the case for the defence to be allowed an appeal.

There is a crumpled magnificence about Mr Fitzgerald. He speaks with great authority and a moral certainty that compels belief. At the same time he appears so large and well-meaning, so absent of vanity or pretence, that it is like watching Paddington Bear in a legal gown. He is a walking caricature of Edward Fitzgerald. Barrister’s wigs have tight rolls of horsehair stuck to a mesh that stretches over the head. In Mr Fitzgerald’s case, the mesh has to be stretched so far to cover his enormous brain, that the rolls are pulled apart, and dot his head like hair curlers on a landlady.

Fitzgerald opened with a brief headline summary of what the defence would argue, in identifying legal errors by Judge Swift and Magistrate Baraitser, that meant an appeal was viable and should be heard.

Firstly, extradition for a political offence was explicitly excluded under the UK/US Extradition Treaty which was the basis for the proposed extradition. The charge of espionage was a pure political offence, recognised as such by all legal authorities, and Wikileaks’ publications had been to a political end, and even resulted in political change, so were protected speech.

Baraitser and Swift were wrong to argue that the Extradition Treaty was not incorporated in UK domestic law and therefore “not justiciable”, because extradition against its terms engaged Article V of the European Convention on Human Rights on Abuse of Process and Article X on Freedom of Speech.

The Wikileaks revelations had revealed serious state illegality by the government of the United States, up to and including war crimes. It was therefore protected speech.

Article III and Article VII of the ECHR were also engaged because in 2010 Assange could not possibly have predicted a prosecution under the Espionage Act, as this had never been done before despite a long history in the USA of reporters publishing classified information in national security journalism. The “offence” was therefore unforeseeable. Assange was being “Prosecuted for engaging in the normal journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information”.

The possible punishment in the United States was entirely disproportionate, with a total possible jail sentence of 175 years for those “offences” charged so far.

Assange faced discrimination on grounds of nationality, which would make extradition unlawful. US authorities had declared he would not be entitled to First Amendment protection in the United States because he is not a US citizen.

There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7 publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be invoked.

The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to authorities who could not be trusted not to take extrajudicial action against him.

Finally, the Home Secretary had failed to take into account all these due factors in approving the extradition.

Fitzgerald then moved into the unfolding of each of these arguments, opening with the fact that the US/UK Extradition Treaty specifically excludes extradition for political offences, at Article IV.

Fitzgerald said that espionage was the “quintessential” political offence, acknowledged as such in every textbook and precedent. The court did have jurisdiction over this point because ignoring the provisions of the treaty rendered the court liable to accusations of abuse of process. He noticed that neither Swift nor Baraitser had made any judgment on whether or not the offences charged were political, relying on the argument the treaty did not apply anyway.

But the entire extradition depended on the treaty. It was made under the treaty. “You cannot rely on the treaty, and then refute it”.

This point brought the first overt reaction from the judges, as they looked at each other to wordlessly communicate what they had made of it. It was a point of which they had felt the force.

Fitzgerald continued that when the 2003 Extradition Act, on which the Treaty depended, had been presented to Parliament, ministers had assured parliament that people would not be extradited for political offences. Baraitser and Swift had said that the 2003 Act had deliberately not had a clause forbidding extradition for political offences. Fitzgerald said you could not draw that inference from an absence. There was nothing in the text permitting extradition for political offences. It was silent on the point.

Nothing in the Act precluded the court from determining that an extradition contrary to the terms of the treaty under which the extradition was taking place, would be a breach of process. In the United States, there had been cases where extradition to the UK under the treaty had been prevented by the courts because of the ‘no political extradition’ clause. That must apply at both ends.

Of the UK’s 158 extradition treaties, 156 contained a ban on extradition for political offences. This was plainly systematic and entrenched policy. It could not be meaningless in all these treaties. Furthermore this was the opposite of a novel argument. There were a great many authoritative cases, stretching back centuries, in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Australia and many other countries in which no political extradition was firmly established jurisprudence. It could not suddenly be “not justiciable”.

It was not only justiciable, it had been very extensively adjudicated.

All of the offences charged were as “espionage” except for one. That “hacking” charge, of helping Chelsea Manning in receiving classified documents, even if it were true, was plainly a similar allegation of a form of espionage activity.

The indictment describes Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”. That was plainly an accusation of espionage. This is self-evidently a politically motivated prosecution for a political offence.

Julian Assange is a person in political conflict with the view of the United States, who seeks to affect the policies and operations of the US government.

Section 87 of the Extradition Act 2003 provides that a court must interpret it in the light of the defendant’s human rights as enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights. This definitely brings in the jurisdiction of the court. It means all the issues raised must be viewed through the prism of the ECHR and from not other angle.

To depend on the treaty yet ignore its terms is abuse of process and contrary to the ECHR. The obligation in UK law to respect the terms of the extradition treaty with the USA while administering an extradition under it, was comparable to the obligation courts had found to follw the Modern Slavery Convention and Refugee Convention.

Mark Summers KC then arose to continue the case for Assange. A dark and pugnacious character, he could be well cast as Heathcliff. Summers is as blunt and direct as Fitzgerald is courteous. His points are not so much hammered home, as piledriven.

This persecution, Summers began, was “intended to prohibit and punish the exposure of state level crime”. The extradition hearing had heard unchallenged evidence of this from many witnesses. The speech in question was thus protected speech. This extradition was not only contrary to the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2007, it was also plainly contrary to Section 81 of the Extradition Act of 2003.

This prosecution was motivated by a desire to punish and suppress political opinion, contrary to the Act. It could be shown plainly to be a political prosecution. It had not been brought until years after the proposed offence; the initiation of the charges had been motivated by the International Criminal Court stating that they were usking the Wikileaks publications as evidence of war crimes. That had been immedately followed by US government denunciation of Wikileaks and Assange, by the designation as a non-state hostile intelligence acency, and even by the official plot to kidnap, poison, rendition or assassinate Assange. That had all been sanctioned by President Trump.

This prosecution therefore plainly bore all of the hallmarks of political persecution.

The magistrates’ court had head unchallenged evidence that the Wikileaks material from Chelsea Manning contained evidence of assassination, rendition, torture, dark prisons and drone killings by the United States. The leaked material had in fact been relied on with success in legal actions in many foreign courts and in Strasbourg itself.

The disclsures were political because the avowed intention was to affect political change. Indeed they had caused political change, for example in the Rules of Engagement for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and in ending drone killings in Pakistan. Assange had been highly politically acclaimed at the time of the publications. He had been invtied to address both the EU and the UN.

The US government had made no response to any of the extensive evidence of United States state level criminality given in the hearing. Yet Judge Baraitser had totally ignored all of it in her ruling. She had not referred to United States criminality at all.

At this point Judge Sharp interrupted to ask where they would find references to these acts of criminality in the evidence, and Summers gave some very terse pointers, through clenched teeth.

Summers continued that in law it is axiomatic that the exposure of state level criminality is a political act. This was protected speech. There were an enormous number of cases across many jurisdictions which indicate this. The criminality presented in this appeal was tolerated and even approved by the very highest levels of the United States government. Publication of this evidence by mr Assange, absent any financial motive for him to do so, was the very definition of a political act. He was involved, beyond dispute, in opposition to the machinery of government of the United States.

This extradition had to be barred under Section 81 of the Extradition Act because its entire purpose was to silence those political opinions. Again, there were numerous cases on record of how courts should deal under the European Convention with states reacting to people who had revealed official criminality. in the judgment being appealed Judge Baraitser did not address the protected nature of soeech exposing state criminality at all. That was plainly an error in law.

Baraitser had also been in error of fact in stating that it was “Purely conjecture and speculation” that the revelation of US war crimes had led to the prosecution. This ignored almost all of the evidence before the court.

The court had been given evidence of United States interference with judicial procedure over US war crimes in Spain, Poland, Germany and Italy. The United States had insultated its own officials from ICC jurisdiction. It had actively threatened both the institutions and employees of the ICC and of boides of other states. All of this had been explained in detail in expert evidence and had been unchallenged. All of it had been ignored by Baraitser.

Following the publication of the Manning material, there had been six years of non-prosecution of Assange. WHy was there a prosecution after six years? What had changed?

Following the declaration by the International Criminal COurt that it would use Wikileaks material to investigate US government officials for war crimes, US officials described Assange as “a political actor”. This period saw the origin of the phrase “non state hostile intelligence agency”. Assange had been accused of “working with Russia” and “trying to take down the USA”.

Baraitser had acknowledged hostility from the CIA but stated that “the CIA does not speak on behalf of the US administration”.

It was important to note that it was after the Baraitser judgment that Yahoo News had published its investigation into the US government plot against Assange.

The court had heard of CIA action against Assange from Protected Witness No.2, but that had only gone to unlawful surveillance at the Ecuadorean Embassy and elsewhere. He did not know of the kidnap and kill plot. This was very real, and it was chilling. Indeed, the prosecution and extradition request was only initiated in order to provide a framework for the rendition attempt.

Political persecution was also apparent in the highly selective prosecution of the appellant. Numerous newspapers had also published the exact same information, as had other websites. Yet only Assange was being prosecuted.Baraitser had simply ignored numerous facts which were key to the case, and therefore her judgment was plainly wrong.

The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that, under Article 7 of the Convention, a prosecution must be forseeable, for the act committed to be criminal. This prosecution failed the forseeability test because no journalist had ever before been prosecuted under the US Espionage Act. Baraitser was obliged to rule on this but instead had simply said it would be a matter for the US court.

Publication of leaks was routine. National security journalism is a thing. It was a well established aspect of the profession in the USA. Encouraging those in possession of classified material to reveal it is routine journalistic practice. Whistleblowers had been frequently published. But no publisher or journalist had ever been prosecuted for obtaining or publishing classified state material.

Baraitser had heard much unchallenged evidence on this point. A prosecution which has never happened before is not forseeable.

At this point, Judge Johnson intervened to ask whether the publication of so many unredacted names of informants had not also been unprecedented, and this may have been expected to trigger an unprecedented response?

Summers replied there had been other examples of publication of names. At this point, the court broke up for lunch.

It had been a strong start to the case by the defence. The judges had appeared to pay increasing attention as the case went on, and at times seemed surprised by some of the assertions made. The first substantive question, coming just on the lunch break, was however plainly intended to be hostile to Assange.

I am publishing this update at this stage. We are a quarter of the way in. I shall be continuing to write.

……………………

Source

UK: Julian Assange’s Final Appeal – by Chris Hedges – 18 Feb 2024

 • 2,600 WORDS •

Julian Assange will make his final appeal this week to the British courts to avoid extradition. If he is extradited it is the death of investigations into the inner workings of power by the press.

LONDON — If Julian Assange is denied permission to appeal his extradition to the United States before a panel of two judges at the High Court in London this week, he will have no recourse left within the British legal system. His lawyers can ask the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is far from certain that the British court will agree. It may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.

Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.

Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.

Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized. And that is the point, one understood by The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País and The Guardian, who issued a joint letter calling on the U.S. to drop the charges against him.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other federal lawmakers voted on Thursday for the United States and Britain to end Julian’s incarceration, noting that it stemmed from him “doing his job as a journalist” to reveal “evidence of misconduct by the U.S.”

The legal case against Julian, which I have covered from the beginning and will cover again in London this week, has a bizarre Alice-in-Wonderland quality, where judges and lawyers speak in solemn tones about law and justice while making a mockery of the most basic tenants of civil liberties and jurisprudence.

How can hearings go forward when the Spanish security firm at the Ecuadorian Embassy, UC Global, where Julian sought refuge for seven years, provided videotaped surveillance of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege? This alone should have seen the case thrown out of court.

How can the Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno violate international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permit London Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian Embassy — sovereign territory of Ecuador — to carry Julian to a waiting police van?

Why did the courts accept the prosecution’s charge that Julian is not a legitimate journalist?

Why did the United States and Britain ignore Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses?

How is the case against Julian allowed to go ahead after the key witness for the United States, Sigurdur Thordarson – a convicted fraudster and pedophile – admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian?

How can Julian, an Australian citizen, be charged under the U.S. Espionage Act when he did not engage in espionage and wasn’t based in the U.S when he received the leaked documents?

Why are the British courts permitting Julian to be extradited to the U.S. when the CIA — in addition to putting Julian under 24-hour video and digital surveillance while in the Ecuadorian Embassy — considered kidnapping and assassinating him, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London with involvement by the Metropolitan Police?

How can Julian be condemned as a publisher when he did not, as Daniel Ellsberg did, obtain and leak the classified documents he published?

Why is the U.S. government not charging the publisher of The New York Times or The Guardian with espionage for publishing the same leaked material in partnership with WikiLeaks?

Why is Julian being held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial for nearly five years when his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy? Normally this would entail a fine.

Why was he denied bail after he was sent to HM Prison Belmarsh?

If Julian is extradited, his judicial lynching will get worse. His defense will be stymied by U.S. anti-terrorism laws, including the Espionage Act and Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). He will continue being blocked from speaking to the public — except on a rare occasion — and being released on bail. He will be tried in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where most espionage cases have been won by the U.S. government. That the jury pool is largely drawn from those who work for or have friends and relatives who work for the CIA, and other national security agencies that are headquartered not far from the court, no doubt contributes to this string of court decisions.

The British courts, from the inception, have made the case notoriously difficult to cover, severely limiting seats in the courtroom, providing video links that have been faulty, and in the case of the hearing this week, prohibiting anyone outside of England and Wales, including journalists who had previously covered the hearings, from accessing a link to what are supposed to be public proceedings.

As usual, we are not informed about schedules or timetables. Will the court render a decision at the end of the two-day hearing on Feb. 20 and Feb. 21? Or will it wait weeks, even months, to render a ruling as it has previously? Will it permit the ECtHR to hear the case or immediately railroad Julian to the U.S.? I have my doubts about the High Court passing the case to the ECtHR, given that the parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe, which created the ECtHR, along with their Commissioner for Human Rights, oppose Julian’s “detention, extradition and prosecution” because it represents “a dangerous precedent for journalists.” Will the court honor Julian’s request to be present in the hearing, or will he be forced to remain in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh in Thamesmead, south east London, as has also happened before? No one is able to tell us.

Julian was saved from extradition in January 2021 when District Judge Vanessa Baraitser at Westminster Magistrates’ Court refused to authorize the extradition request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk” Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would endure in the U.S. prison system. But this was a slim thread. The judge accepted all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith. She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised Julian would be treated well.

The U.S. government claimed in the diplomatic note that its assurances “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to SAMs. They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

It sounds reassuring. But it is part of the cynical judicial pantomime that characterizes Julian’s persecution.

No one is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. ADX Florence is also not the only supermax prison in the U.S. where Julian can be imprisoned. He could be placed in one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities in a Communications Management Unit (CMU). CMUs are highly restrictive units that replicate the near total isolation imposed by SAMs. The “assurances” are not legally binding. All come with escape clauses.

Should Julian do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX” he will, the court conceded, be subject to these harsher forms of control. If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,” the ruling reads. And even if that were not the case, it would take Julian 10 to 15 years to appeal his sentence up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would be more than enough time to destroy him psychologically and physically. Amnesty International said the “assurances are not worth the paper they are written on.”

Julian’s lawyers will attempt to convince two High Court judges to grant him permission to appeal a number of the arguments against extradition which Judge Baraitser dismissed in January 2021. His lawyers, if the appeal is granted, will argue that prosecuting Julian for his journalistic activity represents a “grave violation” of his right to free speech; that Julian is being prosecuted for his political opinions, something which the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty does not allow; that Julian is charged with “pure political offenses” and the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty prohibits extradition under such circumstances; that Julian should not be extradited to face prosecution where the Espionage Act “is being extended in an unprecedented and unforeseeable way”; that the charges could be amended resulting in Julian facing the death penalty; and that Julian will not receive a fair trial in the U.S. They are also asking for the right to introduce new evidence about CIA plans to kidnap and assassinate Julian.

If the High Court grants Julian permission to appeal, a further hearing will be scheduled during which time he will argue his appeal grounds. If the High Court refuses to grant Julian permission to appeal, the only option left is to appeal to the ECtHR. If he is unable to take his case to the ECtHR he will be extradiated to the U.S.

The decision to seek Julian’s extradition, contemplated by Barack Obama’s administration, was pursued by Donald Trump’s administration following WikiLeaks’ publication of the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the CIA’s cyberwarfare programs, including those designed to monitor and take control of cars, smart TVs, web browsers and the operating systems of most smart phones.

The Democratic Party leadership became as bloodthirsty as the Republicans following WikiLeaks’ publishing of tens of thousands of emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials, including those of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman during the 2016 presidential election.

The Podesta emails exposed that Clinton and other members of Obama’s administration knew that Saudi Arabia and Qatar — which had both donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation — were major funders of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. They revealed transcripts of three private talks Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs — for which she was paid $675,000 — a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. Clinton was seen in the emails telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign promises of financial reform. They exposed the Clinton campaign’s self-described “Pied Piper” strategy which used their press contacts to influence Republican primaries by “elevating” what they called “more extreme candidates,” to ensure Trump or Ted Cruz won their party’s nomination. They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. The emails also exposed Clinton as one of the architects of the war and destruction of Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained secret. But if they do, they can’t call themselves journalists.

The Democratic leadership, which attempted to blame Russia for its election loss to Trump — in what became known as Russiagate — charged that the Podesta emails and the DNC leaks were obtained by Russian government hackers, although an investigation headed by Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, “did not develop sufficient admissible evidence that WikiLeaks knew of — or even was willfully blind to” any alleged hacking by the Russian state.

Julian is persecuted because he provided the public with the most important information about U.S. government crimes and mendacity since the release of the Pentagon Papers. Like all great journalists, he was nonpartisan. His target was power.

He made public the killing of nearly 700 civilians who had approached too closely to U.S. convoys and checkpoints, including pregnant women, the blind and deaf, and at least 30 children.

He made public the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians and the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 to 89, at Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

He showed us that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords.

He exposed that Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA backed the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime.

He revealed that the United States secretly launched missile, bomb and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians.

No other contemporary journalist has come close to matching his revelations.

Julian is the first. We are next.

………………………..

(Republished from Scheerpost)

US Fatal Flaws Undermine America’s Defense Industrial Base – by Brian Berletic – 15 Feb 2024

The first-ever US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) confirms what many analysts have concluded in regard to the unsustainable nature of Washington’s global-spanning foreign policy objectives and its defense industrial base’s (DIB) inability to achieve them.

The report lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US DIB including a lack of surge capacity, inadequate workforce, off-shore downstream suppliers, as well as insufficient “demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.

In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because they were not profitable.

For example, the report attempts to explain why many companies across the US DIB lack advanced manufacturing capabilities, claiming:

Many elements of the traditional DIB have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital investment.

In other words, while adopting advanced manufacturing technologies would fulfill the purpose of the US Department of Defense, it is not profitable for private industry to do so.

Despite virtually all the problems the report identifies stemming from private industry’s disproportionate influence over the US DIB, the report never identifies private industry itself as a problem.

If private industry and its prioritization of profits is the central problem inhibiting the DIB from fulfilling its purpose, the obvious solution is nationalizing the DIB by replacing private industry with state-owned enterprises. This allows the government to prioritize purpose over profits. Yet in the United States and across Europe, the so-called “military industrial complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the government and national interests, but rather the government and national interests are subordinated to it.

US Defense Industrial Strategy Built on a Flawed Premise 

Beyond private industry’s hold on the US DIB, the very premise the NDIS is built on is fundamentally flawed, deeply rooted in private industry’s profit-driven prioritization.

The report claims:

The purpose of this National Defense Industrial Strategy is to drive development of an industrial ecosystem that provides a sustained competitive advantage to the United States over its adversaries.

The notion of the United States perpetually expanding its wealth and power across the globe, unrivaled by its so-called “adversaries” is unrealistic.

China alone has a population 4-5 times greater than the US. China’s population is, in fact, larger than that of the G7 combined. China has a larger industrial base, economy, and education system than the US. China’s education system not only produces millions more graduates each year in essential fields like science, technology, and engineering than the US, the proportion of such graduates is higher in China than in the US.

China alone possesses the means to maintain a competitive advantage over the United States now and well into the foreseeable future. The US, attempting to draw up a strategy to maintain an advantage over China (not to mention over the rest of the world) regardless of these realities, borders on delusion.

Yet for 60 pages, US policymakers attempt to lay out a strategy to do just that.

Not Just China, But Also Russia 

While China is repeatedly mentioned as America’s “pacing challenge,” the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is perhaps the most acute example of a shifting balance of global power.

Despite a combined population, GDP, and military budget many times greater than Russia’s, the collective West is incapable of matching Russian production of even relatively simple munitions like artillery shells, let alone more complex systems like tanks, aircraft, and precision-guided missiles.

While the US and its allies appear to have every conceivable advantage over Russia on paper, the collective West has organized itself as a profit-driven rather than purpose-driven society.

In Russia, the defense industry exists to serve national security. While one might believe this goes without saying, across the collective West, the defense industry, like all other industries in the West, exists solely to maximize profits.

To best serve national security, the defense industry is required to maintain substantial surge capacity – meaning additional, unused factory space, machines, and labor on standby if and when large surges in production are required in relatively short periods of time. Across the West, in order to maximize profits, surge capacity has been ruthlessly slashed, deemed economically inefficient. Only rare exceptions exist, such as US 155 mm artillery shell production.

While the West’s defense industry remains the most profitable on Earth, its ability to actually churn out arms and ammunition in the quantities and quality required for large-scale conflict is clearly compromised by its maximization of profits.

The result is evident today as the West struggles to expand production of arms and ammunition for its Ukrainian proxies.

The NDIS report would note:

Prior to the invasion, weapon procurements for some of the in-demand systems were driven by annual training requirements and ongoing combat operations. This modest demand, along with recent market dynamics, drove companies to divest excess capacity due to cost. This meant that any increased production requirements would require an increase in workforce hours in existing facilities—commonly referred to as “surge” capacity. These, in turn, were limited further by similar down-stream considerations of workforce, facility, and supply chain limitations.

Costs are most certainly a consideration across any defense industry, but costs cannot be the primary consideration.

A central element of Russia’s defense industry is Rostec, a massive state-owned enterprise under which hundreds of companies related to national industrial needs including defense are organized. Rostec is profitable. However, the industrial concerns organized under Rostec serve purposes related to Russia’s national interests first and foremost, be it national health, infrastructure or security.

Because Russia’s defense industry is purpose-driven, it produced military equipment because it was necessary, not because it was profitable. As a result, Russia possessed huge stockpiles of ammunition and equipment ahead of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. In addition to this, Russia maintained large amounts of surge capacity enabling production rates of everything from artillery shells to armored vehicles to expand quickly over the past 2 years.

Only relatively recently have Western analysts acknowledged this.

The New York Times in its September 2023 article, “Russia Overcomes Sanctions to Expand Missile Production, Officials Say,” admits Russian arms production of not only missiles, but also armored vehicles and artillery shells have exceeded prewar levels. The article estimates that Russia is producing at least seven times more ammunition than the US and its Western allies combined.

Despite this, Western analysts now claim Russian production will “plateau” as the limits of surge capacity are reached and new facilities and sources of raw materials are required.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in a February 2024 article titled, “Russian Military Objectives and Capacity in Ukraine Through 2024,” regarding ammunition production would claim:

…the Russian MoD does not believe it can significantly raise production in subsequent years, unless new factories are set up and raw material extraction is invested in with a lead time beyond five years.

But because Russia’s industrial base is purpose-driven rather than profit-driven, additional facilities are already being built despite the longer-term economic inefficiency of doing so.

US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a November 2023 article titled, “Satellite Images Suggest Russia Is Ramping Up Production Capacity For Its War Against Ukraine,” reported that Russia was not only expanding production at existing facilities but was also developing new factories producing warplanes, combat helicopters, military drones, and guided munitions.

US “Solutions” Fall Far Short

The 2023 NDIS cites the expansion of 155 mm artillery shell production as a demonstration of the US DIB’s ability to “scale rapidly.”

The report claims:

In response, the DoD has invested in expanding existing production facilities in Scranton, Pennsylvania and broke ground on a new production facility in Mesquite, Texas to respond to the higher demand signal. In addition to these investments made in December 2022, the U.S. Army awarded contracts worth $1.5 billion in September 2023* to meet its goal of delivering more than 80,000 projectiles per month by the end of FY2025.

However, this was only possible because the US Army owns the facilities producing artillery shells. Increased rates of shell production were made possible through existing surge capacity deliberately set up by the US Army years before the Russian SMO began. This foresight in planning, unfortunately for the United States, is a rare exception to the rule and cannot be applied across the rest of US and European arms production.

The West’s profit-driven policies have created problems for the US DIB well downstream of production lines for arms and ammunition. This includes America’s decades of off-shoring production to maximize profits by taking advantage of cheaper labor overseas. Many raw materials and components used across the US DIB today come from overseas including from “adversarial” nations.

The NDIS report lamented:

Over the last decade, the DoD has struggled to curtail adversarial sourcing and burnish the integrity of defense supply chains. Despite these efforts, dependence on adversarial sources of supply has grown. DoD continues to lack a comprehensive effort for mitigating supply chain risk. 

Profit-driven policies have also hurt the workforce. Decades of off-shoring US manufacturing saw America transition to a primarily service-based economy. This was reflected across education as well, where vocational skills were not only neglected, they were stigmatized.

The NDIS report would explain that:

The labor market lacks the required number of skilled workers to meet defense production demand while driving innovation at all levels. This shortfall is becoming exacerbated as baby boomers retire, and younger generations show less interest in manufacturing and engineering careers.

Beyond this problem, profit-driven policies have made education in the United States inaccessible. The desire to profit from providing education has usurped the actual purpose of providing education in the first place – the creation of human resources required to run a functioning, prosperous society. Degrees and training courses in the United States require loans that can take a lifetime to pay off.

A lack of interest in skilled labor and the inaccessibility of education in the United States has resulted in a skewed workforce relative to the rest of the world. The number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates in the US, for example, is comparable to Russia despite Russia having less than half the total population of the US. In 2016 there were 568,000 STEM graduates in the US for Russia’s 561,000, according to Forbes. China produced over 4.7 million graduates that same year.

US economic fundamentals altogether have created a skewed society and correspondingly skewed DIB that is struggling to match that of nations smaller in terms of population and GDP. But even if the US did address these fundamental problems, the fact remains that China alone, saying nothing of the BRIC alliance it is a part of, has both solid fundamentals and simply possesses a larger population, economy, and industrial base.

The premise upon which US foreign policy is based is unrealistic. The fundamentals of US economic power are fatally flawed.

The very notion of the US maintaining a competitive edge over the rest of the world is only realistic if the rest of the world is suffering from significant internal and/or regional instability.

This is precisely why the US has invested so heavily over the decades in political interference, political capture, and even regional conflict around the globe. However, the disparity between the US and the rest of the world in terms of economic power, industrial strength, and military might be diminishing faster than the US can impose its “international order” upon it.

A reemerging Russia alone has exceeded the US in terms of military industrial production. China is surpassing the United States across a much wider multitude of metrics. As long as the US pursues unsustainable policies based on an unrealistic premise, it will not only find itself surpassed by a growing number of nations, it will find itself isolated and unstable.

The difference between nations the US calls “adversaries” and the US itself, is the difference between a farmer who cultivates his land in a sustainable, purposeful way, and a predator who mindlessly consumes all in its path until there is nothing left to consume, thus jeopardizing its own self-preservation.

At a time between now and then, more rational circles of interest may displace those currently driving US economic and foreign policies, and transform the US into a nation pursuing power proportional to its means and invested in working together with the other nations of the world, rather than attempting to impose itself upon them.

…………………

Source

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Tags: China, Defense industry, International politics, Military defense, Russia, USA

Missile and Bomb Strike warfare: An American fetish and a global scourge – by James A. Russell (Responsible Statecraft) 24 Jan 2024

A common thread through recent history is that ‘hellfire from above’ doesn’t really work

It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry in response to recent press reports suggesting that the Biden administration is gearing up for a “sustained bombing campaign” against the Houthis in Yemen. Unsurprisingly, the initial coalition strikes against the Houthis apparently did not destroy the Houthi arsenal being launched at commercial vessels in the Red Sea.

As was the case in the great jihadi hunt across Southwest Asia stretching over nearly a quarter century, the United States today finds itself at war in a conflict with no defined political objective and a clearly unachievable military objective against an enemy that is nested in a complex political and strategic circumstance that is completely unfamiliar to the United States. Sound familiar?

It is also a war with no apparent timeline in which the application of force is linked to ill-defined benchmarks, suggesting that we could launch our bombs and missiles indefinitely or until we run out of ammunition — to no strategic purpose.

Have we learned nothing from our follies of the last 25 years in which we proved incapable of clearly relating ends, ways, and means in making decisions on when and under what circumstances to use force?

For those states that can afford them, standoff weapons and bombs have become the preferred method of policing the international system. Yet it’s hard to remember any of these strikes having any sort of lasting positive impact once the headlines and videos faded. Strangely, these tools of war maintain a hold on government and the popular imagination as some sort of “decisive” action that curiously demonstrates strength, commitment, and resolve.

The reality is that strike warfare — long range strikes by planes and missiles — has rarely achieved its advertised political and strategic consequence. Yet it remains a dangerous, drug-like chimera to countries like the United States desperately searching for some sort of easy, low-cost way of maintaining global influence, control, and primacy in a chaotic world. Like all drugs, the initial rush feels great, but the long-range addiction is, in the end, far more destructive, dangerous, and difficult (if not impossible) to kick.

We tell ourselves that the state/bad guy on the receiving end (in this case the Houthis) will feel the wrath of our (duly proportionate) strikes and reconsider continuing their attacks.

Yet, of course, the Houthis in public pronouncements seem to have welcomed the chance to start shooting directly at the United States. Moreover, we have limited knowledge of the Houthi anti-ship weapon arsenal in its entirety, let alone the political motivations that surround their own use of force. The truth is we have no knowledge or understanding of whether and under what circumstances the Houthis will cease fire, but blithely assume that our missiles and bombs will make them behave.

The history of America’s fetish

Open-ended military strikes regrettably have become an ill-considered American fetish. We told ourselves the same thing in December 1998, in the three-day fusillade against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox, when Washington wanted to stress its disapproval of Saddam Hussein’s recalcitrance toward UN weapons inspectors. And, of course, Desert Fox was really just the exclamation point on a campaign of long-range strikes during the 1990s that sought to control the Iraqi dictator’s non-existent WMD programs.

My favorite strike of the 1990s was the 1996 cruise missile strike to warn Saddam off attacking the Kurds in northern Iraq. He did not. But the strategic consequences of those strikes went unrecognized at the time, and they had little to do with Saddam. Following those strikes, the U.S. took on the role of protecting the Kurds and tacitly endorsed their dream of statehood — a decision that today continues to shape the region in ways that may or may not support our interests. In the end, the era of the 1990s culminating in Desert Fox proved to be little else but the bridge to the next phase of the U.S. war on Iraq.

We told ourselves the same thing in the opening phases of the shock and awe campaign of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as we blasted away in our creative targeting against Saddam’s armies under the rubric of “shock and awe” and “effects-based operations.” Sure enough, Saddam’s armies indeed melted away from our initial bombing and our advancing armies, only to regroup and morph into something much more dangerous and deadly that is still shaping the landscape of the Middle East today.

We told ourselves that same thing in Afghanistan, as we unleashed a fusillade of strikes called in by CIA jawbreaker teams that sent the Taliban scurrying over the border into Pakistan in 2001 to rest and refit. Once they had done that, they slipped back across the border to resume the war — a conflict they would eventually win 20 years later — forcing the United States to retreat and leaving the Taliban in control of the country.

We told ourselves the same thing in Libya in 2011, when we believed that a few well-placed missiles and bombs would enable a peaceful transition of power from Qadafi to someone more amenable to, well, us. Of course, as was the case in Iraq, the strikes were only the opening round in an ongoing struggle for political power and authority that continues to this day.

As was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the second-order effects of the strikes in Libya ended up being of far greater strategic consequences than was anticipated at the time. The current Biden national security team, which engineered these strikes, obviously learned nothing from the experience.

We’ve told ourselves the same thing in the global war on terror, where we have sent our robots and special forces hunting for sought-after “high value targets” all over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. We have surely rained death and destruction on these enemies (and killed lots of innocent people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time) with our Hellfire missiles, but did we win any of these wars?

Yet we remain addicted 

Despite these uncertain results and even colossal failures, we remain addicted to strike warfare, telling ourselves that we can police the politics on the ground by dropping bombs from on high. The reality is, of course, different. Targeting people and property with high explosives tends to make them angry and fight harder. Just ask the Houthis, who have endured years of U.S.-sponsored and supported airstrikes by the Saudis and others in the Yemeni civil war. Obviously, the Houthis were not bombed into submission.

Therein lies the strategic dilemma for the West, which has invested billions in the strike, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities designed to blow things up at long range with little advertised collateral damage. The revolution in military affairs (and billions of taxpayer dollars) indeed delivered the strike complex — much to the delight of political leaders, who saw in it a low-cost substitute for sending armies to the four corners of the globe to police local political disputes. As described above, this is largely a myth.

The Houthis have indicated they’ll stop shooting when the Gaza War ends. Perhaps Secretary Blinken should stop by Sana’a on his next trip to the region for consultations. Even more importantly, maybe the Biden Administration should listen to the Houthis and others and take decisive steps to end the war in Gaza instead of becoming enmeshed in the conflict’s wider fires to no strategic purpose.

Surrounded by the wreckage around the world wrought by strikes stretching back over half a century, you’d think that it was time for us to get into the rehab center and confront our addiction, yet this latest round of strikes tells us that our habit depressingly remains as strong as ever.

……………………………………

James A. Russell

James Russell is an associate professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. The views expressed here are his own.

The Anti-Defamation League: Israel’s Attack Dog in the US – by JAMES BAMFORD (The Nation) 31 January 2024

At about $60 a square foot, the 44-story skyscraper at 605 Third Avenue is one of the priciest office buildings in Manhattan. And standing at the plate-glass window of his 73,000-square-foot headquarters Jonathan Greenblatt knows the value of projecting an image of wealth and power. On the street far below the director of the Anti-Defamation League are his targets: Americans who need to be educated and informed as to the growing dangers of antisemitism throughout the country, whether in schools, at work, or in the community.

And for Greenblatt, the best way to get that message out is by working closely with the friendly mainstream press, who typically accept the ADL’s data and press releases at face value. After all, the ADL—founded in 1913 in the wake of the controversial murder conviction of Leo Frank, who was later lynched by a Georgia mob in 1915—has been around a long time, and has always had very close relations with Congress, the White House, and the rest of the Washington establishment.

On January 9, for example, a few weeks after a large pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York City, Greenblatt released a report listing over 3,000 antisemitic incidents committed in the three months since the war in Gaza began. “U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Skyrocketed 360% in Aftermath of Attack in Israel,” warned the ADL press release. “The American Jewish community is facing a threat level that’s now unprecedented in modern history,” said Greenblatt. “It’s shocking.” As expected, the ADL report drew media coverage around the country. “Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. surged after October 7 Hamas attack, advocacy group says,” ran an NBC News headline. Similar titles headed stories by The Hill, Axios, CNN, and many other sources.

But much of the report was hype. Rather than attacks against Jews due to their religious or ethnic identity, many of the cited “incidents” were actions directed against Israel to protest the conduct of its war in Gaza—incidents the ADL would later admit made up nearly half of the total. “Overall, a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization [ADL] had focused on in previous years,” noted Arno Rosenfeld in The Forward. Many of the incidents were simply protests by civil rights organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

Earlier this month, a number of former ADL staffers confided to Jewish Currents “that in the past months, Greenblatt has redirected the ADL’s day-to-day work to target pro-Palestine activism rather than focusing on antisemitism in American life, a shift they say seriously undermines the organization’s credibility.” Another was quoted saying that Greenblatt is “waging war on pro-Palestinian activists,” while a third asserted that “there are a lot of people of all political stripes at ADL who believe what Jonathan is doing is reprehensible.” According to the magazine, Greenblatt has even battled against the ADL’s own civil rights office over legislation targeting criticism of Israel, “choosing repeatedly to privilege Israel advocacy over the protection of civil liberties.”

Even before the war in Gaza, there had been concern by many progressive organizations about the legitimacy of the ADL’s alarmist claims regarding antisemitism. In 2020, more than 100 such groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Movement for Black Lives, signed a “#DropTheADL” open letter requesting that members of the progressive community not partner with the ADL. The organization, it said, “has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence.”

The problem is that The New York Times, PBS, and other mainstream outlets that reach millions are constantly and uncritically promoting the ADL and amplifying the group’s questionable charges. At the same time, they regularly fail to inform their readers, viewers, and listeners either about the organization’s current shift towards silencing Israel’s critics or its long history of deception, lying, and corruption—including covert operations and illegal spying on innocent Americans. A greater awareness of this history—and of the ADL’s ongoing attempts to silence critics of the war in Gaza via slanderous and often untrue charges—might suggest that, instead of simply repeating those charges, a less-credulous media might want to examine the group’s long-standing (but carefully hidden) links to the Israeli government. And whether the ADL’s spying and covert operations are really all in the past.

For much of its history, the ADL has operated in the United States as if it were a hostile intelligence organization—which, in essence, it was. The organization’s spymaster was Irwin Suall, who from the 1960s to 1997 ran his nationwide network of agents and informants from the ADL’s New York City headquarters. As millions of dollars in donations flowed into the “civil rights” organization, tens of thousands of dollars flowed out to Suall’s clandestine operatives in the field, actively engaged in violating the civil rights of thousands of Americans. Among his agents was Roy Bullock, a beefy San Franciscan with the codename “Cal” who posed as a small-time art dealer in the Castro District and spied undercover in the US for the ADL. To hide the ADL’s involvement, Bullock’s payments were laundered through a Beverly Hills attorney who, Bullock would later tell authorities, never missed a payment in more than three decades. Bullock said he would submit his reports to the ADL’s executive director in San Francisco, Richard Hirschhaut, now the regional director of the American Jewish Committee for Los Angeles.

A July 1992 internal ADL memo from Suall praised Bullock as “our number one investigator.” It would eventually be discovered his network of spies secretly collected information on more than 12,000 individuals and more than 950 American religious, labor, peace, and human rights groups. His targets included the NAACP, the Rainbow Coalition, ACLU, ACT UP, the American Indian Movement, Greenpeace, the Northern California Ecumenical Council, the United Farm Workers, reporters from the Los Angeles Times and KQED public television, and at least eight Jewish peace groups, as well as an assortment of pro-Palestinian organizations. A key target was the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Working clandestinely with Bullock was Thomas Gerard, a detective with the San Francisco Police Department’s Intelligence Unit, and a three-year veteran of the CIA. Gerard would illegally supply Bullock with confidential data from police and FBI computer files about Americans, many of them pro-Palestinian activists, that were targets of the ADL. Eventually, investigators would discover that Gerard kept files on 7,011 people.

Bullock and Gerard also targeted Americans on behalf of the apartheid government of South Africa—an extremely close ally of Israel at the time. Bullock and Gerard would meet clandestinely with agents from the brutal and notorious Bureau of State Security (BOSS), including one using the name “Humphries,” in the Travelodge motel in San Francisco’s Fisherman Wharf area. “Humphries said he was interested in acquiring information on anti-apartheid activities in the United States,” Bullock later confessed to the FBI agents, as well as “any sexual impropriety” they could dig up on the well-known anti-apartheid activist Bishop Desmond Tutu. Even details about members of Congress—including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ron Dellums, a powerful critic of the South African government—were passed on by the ADL agents to BOSS.

The ADL’s spying operations began to unravel in October 1992, when Detective Gerard was brought into the FBI’s San Francisco office for questioning. Shortly thereafter, to avoid arrest, he fled to Palawan, a remote jungle island in the Philippines that had no extradition treaty with the United States. At the time, I was the Washington investigative producer for ABC News, and after discovering where Gerard was hiding, I flew to Palawan along with a colleague, James Walker. When we arrived, Gerard agreed to an interview, in which he admitted knowing Bullock but denied giving him the confidential police files, even though Bullock had already confessed to the FBI and many of the documents were recovered.

We also interviewed David Gurvits, the ADL’s former operative in Los Angeles, who told us that he informed authorities that his job was to collect information—some of it illegal—and to maintain files on thousands and thousands of people. “Other codenames for other investigators included Flipper, Chi-1, Chi-3, Chi-2,” he told us. “Flipper,” it turns out, was the codename for an ADL operative who worked out of the organization’s Atlanta office. Chi-1, 2, and 3 worked out of the ADL’s Chicago office. Gurvits told investigators with the San Francisco Police Department that the ADL kept records on any Arab-American who had “anti-Israel leanings” or wrote a letter to a newspaper expressing such feelings. Just as today, criticism of Israel—not antisemitism—was the ADL’s true concern.

The investigation also clearly showed how closely the ADL and its spying operation collaborated with the Israeli government and its intelligence organizations. According to court documents, “Bullock and/or Hirschhault admitted that ADL or its agents gave information to the Government of Israel.” Also, Suall “had met with the Israeli intelligence officials in Israel.” And in an interview with the FBI, a former employee of the Los Angeles ADL office “provided confirmation of direct, regular contacts between employees of the ADL and Israeli officials.” Bullock, according to the reports, “also testified to the FBI that the ADL paid for Gerard to fly to Israel,” likely to also meet with senior Israeli intelligence, military and political officials. Palestinians and Arab-Americans in the United States were the main targets of the spying.

And it turns out the ADL had been spying in the US and passing the data to the Israeli government for a very long time. “[T]he Anti-Defamation League for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda,” said a 1961 internal ADL document. “Our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli Government. All data have been made available to both countries with full knowledge to each that we were the source.” It would seem, therefore, that ADL’s intelligence gathering activities against American citizens have long been well known to Washington.

Exposing this secret and long-standing collaboration between the ADL and Israel, with the US fully on board, would have been deeply embarrassing to both countries. Israel, therefore, may have attempted to quickly shut it down. According to a secret March 29, 1993, FBI memorandum, “SFPD [The San Francisco Police Department] has received information from a reliable source that two persons, described as ‘Israeli generals,’ are in, or are about to travel to, Washington, D.C., in regard to captioned matters [i.e., the ADL case]. The purpose of their travel is to try to visit the attorney general, to press for an end to the FBI’s investigations concerning [redacted] and [redacted] [likely Bullock and Gerard]. According to the SDPD, the FBI’s investigation of these matters are causing a great deal of interference in the U.S. activities of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), and so Israel is seeking to intercede on the ADL’s behalf.”

The FBI quickly dropped the case and washed its hands of it—as it does with virtually all cases involving Israel. That left prosecution to the San Francisco district attorney’s office which, armed with a search warrant, carried out a surprise raid on the ADL’s San Francisco office on April 8, 1993. Local television stations aired video of investigators lugging out evidence boxes full of files. But in the end, the DA’s office also wanted to drop the political hot potato. Thus, the DA agreed to forgo prosecution of the ADL and Bullock in exchange for a pledge not to engage in improper information gathering activities—i.e., spying—in California. And a payment of up to $75,000 to fight hate crimes, which is what they were supposed to have been doing all along. Because the FBI refused to provided documents in his case, Gerard was allowed to plead no contest to the lesser charge of illegal access to a police computer system. He was sentenced to three-years of probation, 45 days on the sheriff’s work crew, and a $2,500 fine.

With barely a slap on the wrist, and a wink from Washington, the ADL continued as if nothing had happened, even continuing to employ its star spy Bullock. At the time the spying was exposed, the head of the organization was Greenblatt’s immediate predecessor, Abraham Foxman—known in the community as the “Jewish pope” because of his power, having served as president for 28 years until his retirement in 2015. The ADL board did not dump Foxman after the embarrassing spy scandal; instead, the organization greatly rewarded him: in addition to being kept on for another decade, he received a $1.5 million retirement package above and beyond his salary. And at his retirement party, then–Vice President Joe Biden—who received more pro-Israel cash than any other member of Congress—sang “Happy Birthday” to Foxman. All of which sent a clear message to Greenblatt that no matter what his organization does, Washington will happily close its eyes. The ADL’s priority today remains—as it has for decades—going after Americans who are simply opposed to Israel’s endless occupation and oppression of Palestinians. The group’s preferred targets are students, professors, activists, and demonstrators—rather than antisemites, especially those on the far right. But the group’s reckless bullying ought to also act as a wake-up call to the media to take a closer look at the ADL’s long history of corruption, spying, and covert links to Israel before blindly publishing the next breathless handout.

………………

Source

One Hour of Hebrew Communist Music (1:01:05 min) Audio Mp3

One Hour of Yiddish Communist Music (1:00:35 min) Audio Mp3

The Birth of the Zionist State – A Marxist Analysis (Workers Vanguard)

https://archive.ph/rEq21

How Yemen’s ‘asabiyya’ is reshaping geopolitics – by Pepe Escobar – 25 Jan 2024

How Yemen’s ‘asabiyya’ is reshaping geopolitics

The Arabic word Asabiyya, or ‘social solidarity,’ is a soundbite in the west, but taken very seriously by the globe’s new contenders China, Russia, and Iran. It is Yemen, however, that is mainstreaming the idea, by sacrificing everything for the world’s collective morality in a bid to end the genocide in Gaza.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

When there is a general change of conditions,

It is as if the entire creation had changed

and the whole world been altered,

as if it were a new and repeated creation,

a world brought into existence anew. 

— Ibn Khaldun 

Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance forces have made it very clear, right from the start, that they set up a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb and the southern Red Sea only against Israeli-owned or destined shipping vessels. Their single objective was and remains to stop the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli biblical psychopathy. 

As a response to a morally-based call to end a human genocide, the United States, masters of the Global War Of Terror (italics mine), predictably re-designated Yemen’s Houthis as a “terrorist organization,” launched a serial bombardment of underground Ansarallah military installations (assuming US intel know where they are), and cobbled together a mini-coalition of the willing that includes its UK, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, and Bahraini vassals.   

Without missing a beat, Yemen’s Parliament declared the US and UK governments “Global Terrorist Networks.”

Now let’s talk strategy. 

With a single move, the Yemeni resistance seized the strategic advantage by de facto controlling a key geoeconomic bottleneck: the Bab el-Mandeb. Hence, they can inflict serious trouble on sectors of global supply chains, trade, and finance. 

And Ansarallah has the potential to double down — if need be. Persian Gulf traders, off the record, have confirmed insistent chatter that Yemen may consider imposing a so-called Al-Aqsa Triangle — aptly named after the 7 October Palestinian resistance operation aimed at destroying the Israeli military’s Gaza Division and taking captives as leverage in a sweeping prisoner swap deal. 

Such a move would mean selectively blocking not only the Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea route to the Suez Canal, but also the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil and gas deliveries to Israel from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – although the top oil suppliers to Israel are in fact Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. 

These Yemenis are afraid of nothing. Were they able to impose the triangle – in this case only with direct Iranian involvement — that would represent the US-assassinated Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s Grand Design on cosmic steroids. This plan holds the realistic potential of finally bringing down the pyramid of hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives — and consequently, the whole western financial system. 

And yet, even as Yemen controls the Red Sea and Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, Al-Aqsa Triangle remains just a working hypothesis. 

Welcome to the Hegemon’s blockade

With a simple, clear strategy, the Houthis perfectly understood that the deeper they draw the strategy-deprived Americans into the West Asian geopolitical swamp, in a sort of “undeclared war” mode, the more they’re able to inflict serious pain on the global economy, which the Global South will blame on the Hegemon.   

Today, Red Sea shipping traffic has plunged in half, compared to the summer of 2023; supply chains are wobbly; ships carrying food are forced to circumnavigate Africa (and risk delivering cargo after its expiry date); predictably, inflation across the vast EU agricultural sphere (worth €70 billion) is rising fast. 

Yet, never underestimate a cornered Empire. 

Western-based insurance giants perfectly understood the rules of Ansarallah’s limited blockade: Russian and Chinese ships, for instance, have free passage in the Red Sea. Global insurers have only refused to cover US, UK, and Israeli ships — exactly as the Yemenis intended. 

So the US, predictably, changed the narrative into a big, fat lie: ‘Ansarallah is attacking the whole global economy.’ 

Washington turbo-charged sanctions (not a big deal as the Yemeni resistance uses Islamic financing); increased the bombing, and in the name of sacrosanct “freedom of navigation” – always applied selectively — placed its bets on the “international community,” including leaders of the Global South, begging for mercy, as in please keep the shipping lanes open. The goal of the new, reframed American deceit is to elbow the Global South into ditching its support for Ansarallah’s strategy. 

Pay attention to this crucial US sleight of hand: Because, from now on, in a new perverse twist of Operation Genocide Protection, it is Washington that will be blockading the Red Sea for the entire world. Washington itself, mind you, will be spared: US shipping depends on Pacific trade routes, not West Asian ones. This will ratchet up the pain on Asian customers and especially on Europe’s economy – which already took the heavies blows from Ukraine-associated Russian energy sanctions.

As Michael Hudson has interpreted it,  there is a strong possibility that the neocons in charge of US foreign policy actually want (italics mine) to have Yemen and Iran implement the Al-Aqsa Triangle: “It will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that (…) will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.”

That, in fact, is the classic Empire of Chaos modus operandi.   

Calling attention to “our people in Gaza”

There is no solid evidence the Pentagon has the slightest clue about what its Tomahawks are hitting in Yemen. Even several hundred missiles won’t change a thing. Ansarallah, which has already endured eight years of nonstop US-UK-Saudi-Emirati firepower — and basically won — will not relent today over a few missile strikes.

Even the proverbial “unnamed officials” informed the New York Times that “locating the Houthi targets has proven more difficult than expected,” essentially because of lousy US intel on Yemeni “air defense, command centers, ammunition depots, and drone and missile storage and production facilities.” 

It’s quite enlightening to listen to how Yemeni Prime Minister Abdulaziz bin Saleh Habtoor frames Ansarallah’s Israel-blockade initiative decision as “based on humanitarian, religious and moral aspects”. He refers, crucially, to “our people in Gaza.” And the overall vision, he reminds us, “stems from the vision of the Axis of Resistance.”

It is a reference smart onlookers will recognize as General Soleimani’s ever-lasting legacy. 

With a keen historical sense — from the creation of Israel to the Suez crisis and the Vietnam war — the Yemeni prime minister recalls how “Alexander the Great reached the shores of Aden and Socotra island but was defeated (…) Invaders tried to occupy the capital of the historical state of Shebah and failed (…) How many countries throughout history have tried to occupy the west coast of Yemen and failed? Including Britain.”

It’s absolutely impossible for the west and even the Global Majority to understand the Yemeni mindset without learning a few facts from the Angel of History. 

So let’s go back to the 14^th century universal history master Ibn Khaldun — the author of The Muqaddimah. 

Ibn Khaldun cracks the Ansarallah Code 

Ibn Khaldun’s family was a contemporary to the rise of the Arab Empire, on the move alongside the first armies of Islam in the 7^th century, from the austere beauty of the Hadramawti valleys in what is now southern Yemen all the way to the Euphrates.

Ibn Khaldun, crucially, was a precursor of Kant, who offered the brilliant insight that “geography lies at the basis of history.” And he read the 12^th century Andalusian philosophy master Averroes – as well as other writers exposed to Plato’s works and understood how the latter referred to the moral strength of “the first people” in the Timaeus, in 360 B.C.

Yes, this boils down to “moral strength” — for the west, a mere soundbite; for the east, an essential philosophy. Ibn Khaldun grasped how civilization began and was constantly renewed by people with natural goodness and energy; people who understood and respected the natural world, who lived light, united by blood or brought together by a shared revolutionary idea or religious drive.

Ibn Khaldun defined asabiyya as this force that binds people together. 

Like so many words in Arabic, asabiyya exhibits a range of diverse, loosely connected meanings. Arguably, the most relevant is esprit de corps, team spirit, and tribal solidarity – just as Ansarallah exhibits. 

As Ibn Khaldun demonstrates, when the power of asabiyya is fully harnessed, reaching way beyond the tribe, it becomes more powerful than the sum of its individual parts, and can become a catalyst to reshape history; to make or break Empires; to encourage civilizations; or force them to collapse. 

We are definitely living an asabiyya moment, brought about by the Yemeni resistance’s moral strength.   

Solid as a rock

Ansarallah innately understood the threat of eschatological Zionism — which happens to mirror the Christian Crusades a millennium ago. And they are virtually the only ones, in practical terms, trying to stop it. 

Now, as an extra bonus, they are exposing the plutocratic Hegemon, once again, as bombers of Yemen, the poorest Arab nation-state, where at least half the population remains “food-insecure.”    

But Ansarallah is not heavy-weapons-free like the Pashtun mujahideen who humiliated NATO in Afghanistan. 

Their anti-ship cruise missiles include the Sayyad and the Quds Z-O (range up to 800 km) and the Al Mandab 2 (range up to 300 km). 

Their anti-ship ballistic missiles include the Tankil (range of up to 500 km); the Asef (range of up to 450 km); and the Al-Bahr Al-Ahmar (range of up to 200 km). That covers the southern part of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but not, for instance, the islands of the Socotra archipelago. 

Accounting for roughly one-third of the country’s population, Yemen’s Houthis, who form the backbone of the Ansarallah resistance, do have their own internal agenda: gaining fair representation in governance (they launched Yemen’s Arab Spring); protecting their Zaydi (neither Shia nor Sunni) faith; fighting for the autonomy of the Saada governorate; and working for the revival of the Zaydi Imamate, which was up and running before the 1962 revolution.

Now, they are making their mark on The Big Picture. It’s no wonder Ansarallah fiercely fights the Hegemon’s vassal Arabs – especially those who signed a deal to normalize relations with Israel under the Trump administration.

The Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen, with the Hegemon “leading from behind,” was a quagmire that cost Riyadh at least $6 billion a month for seven years. It ended with a wobbly 2022 truce in a de facto Ansarallah victory. A signed peace agreement, it should be noted, has been disallowed by the US, despite Saudi efforts to seal a deal.

Now, Ansarallah is turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down with not just a few missiles and drones but also oceans of craftiness and strategic acumen. To invoke Chinese wisdom, picture a single rock changing the course of a stream, which then changes the course of a mighty river. 

Epigones of Diogenes can always remark, half in jest, that the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership may have contributed with their own well-placed rocks in this path to a more equitable order. That’s the beauty of it: we may not be able to see these rocks, only the effects they cause. What we do see, though, is the Yemeni resistance, solid as a rock. 

The record shows the Hegemon, once again, reverting to auto-pilot mode: Bomb, Bomb, Bomb. And in this particular case, to bomb is to redirect the narrative from a genocide committed in real time by Israel, the Empire’s aircraft carrier in West Asia. 

Still, Ansarallah can always increase the pressure by sticking firmly to its narrative and, driven by the power of asabiyya, deliver to the Hegemon a second Afghanistan, compared to which Iraq and Syria will look like a weekend at Disneyland. 

……………………..

US Warmongers – The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse – by Chris Hedges – 21 Jan 2024

• 2,800 WORDS • 

Blood Brothers – by Mr. Fish

Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.

Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.

“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one. We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”

The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”

While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.”

He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza.

Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.

And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank.

When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.

Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.

Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military.

While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.

In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”

Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:

At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.

He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.

An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:

A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”

[….]

A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”

Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.

[….]

McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.

Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.

In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”

McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu.

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times , where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor , and NPR . He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

…………………………

https://archive.ph/jXuO7

(Republished from Scheerpost)

The U.S. Navy Is Unprepared for a Prolonged War with Yemen – by Larry Johnson – 19 Dec 2023

• 1,200 WORDS • 

Aegis Missile Defense System

It looks like the United States, along with 9 allies — Great Britain, Italy, Bahrain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain — are on the verge of entangling itself in a new Middle East quagmire as an international armada assembles in the international waters around Yemen. The mission? Stop Yemen from threatening cargo and oil tankers headed to Israel.

Tiny Yemen has surprised the West with its tenacity and ferocity in attacking ships trying to ferry containers and fuel to Israel. Yes, this is a violation of international law and the West is fully justified in trying to thwart Yemen. On paper it would appear that Yemen is outnumbered and seriously outgunned. A sure loser? Not so fast. The U.S. Navy, which constitutes the majority of the fleet sailing against Yemen, has some real vulnerabilities that will limit its actions.

Before explaining the risks, you must understand that the U.S. Navy is configured currently as a “Forward-Based Navy” and is not an “Expeditionary Navy.” Anthony Cowden, writing for the Center for International Maritime Security in September, examined this issue in his article, REBALANCE THE FLEET TOWARD BEING A TRULY EXPEDITIONARY NAVY.

Today we have a forward-based navy, not an expeditionary navy. This distinction is important for remaining competitive against modern threats and guiding force design.

Due to the unique geographical position of the U.S., the Navy has the luxury of defending the nation’s interests “over there.” Since World War II, it developed and maintained a navy that was able to project power overseas; to reconstitute its combat power while still at sea or at least far from national shores; and continuously maintain proximity to competitors. This expeditionary character minimized the dependence of the fleet on shore-based and homeland-based infrastructure to sustain operations, allowing the fleet to be more logistically self-sufficient at sea.

However, late in the Cold War, the U.S. Navy started to diminish its expeditionary capability, and became more reliant on allied and friendly bases. A key development was subtle but consequential – the vertical launch system (VLS) for the surface fleet’s primary anti-air, anti-submarine, and land-attack weapons. While a very capable system, reloading VLS at sea was problematic and soon abandoned. While an aircraft carrier can be rearmed at sea, surface warships cannot, which constrains the ability of carrier strike groups to sustain forward operations without taking frequent trips back to fixed infrastructure. The Navy is revisiting the issue of reloading VLS at sea, and those efforts should be reinforced.

The next step the Navy took away from an expeditionary capability was in the 1990s, when it decommissioned most of the submarine tenders (AS), all of the repair ships (AR), and destroyer tenders (AD), and moved away from Sailor-manned Shore Intermediate Maintenance Centers (SIMA). Not only did this eliminate the ability to conduct intermediate maintenance “over there,” but it destroyed the progression of apprentice-to-journeyman-to-master technician that made the U.S. Navy Sailor one of the premier maintenance resources in the military world. Combat search and rescue, salvage, and battle damage repair are other areas in which the U.S. Navy no longer has sufficient capability for sustaining expeditionary operations.

So what? Each U.S. destroyer carries an estimated 90 missiles (perhaps a few more). Their primary mission is to protect the U.S. aircraft carrier they are shielding. What happens when Yemen fires 100 drones/rockets/missiles at a U.S. carrier? The U.S. destroyer, or multiple destroyers will fire their missiles to defeat the threat. Great. Mission accomplished! Only one little problem, as described in the preceding quote — the U.S. Navy got rid of the ship tenders, i.e. those vessels capable of resupplying destroyers with new missiles to replace the expended rounds. In order to reload, that destroyer must sail to the nearest friendly port where the U.S. has stockpiled missiles for resupply.

Got the picture? If the destroyer must sail away then the U.S. carrier must follow. It cannot just sit out in the ocean without its defensive screen of ships. The staying power of a U.S. fleet in a combat zone, like Yemen, is a function of how many missiles the Yemenis fire at the U.S. ships.

But the problems do not stop there. Each of the Aegis missiles, as I noted in my previous post, cost at least $500,000 dollars. A retired U.S. DOD official told me today that the actual cost is $2 million dollars. If Yemen opts to use drone swarms to saturate the battle space around a carrier, then the United States will firing very expensive missiles to destroy relatively inexpensive drones. This brings up another critical vulnerability — the U.S. only has a limited supply of these air defense missiles and does not have the industrial capability in place and operating to produce new ones rapidly to make up the deficit.

Getting the picture now? The U.S. Navy may find itself having to sail away without finishing the job of eliminating the drone/missile threat from Yemen. How do you think that will play in the rest of the world? The mighty Super Power having to retreat to rearm because it could not sustain intense combat operations. This is not classified information. It is published all over the internet. If I can figure this out then I am certain that U.S. adversaries, not just Yemen, realize they have a way to give the U.S. a very bloody nose in terms of damaged prestige.

What happens if Yemen is able to sink one or two U.S. Navy ships? Then the shit really hits the fan. The United States does not have a magical supply of missiles squirreled away to deal with this contingency. The U.S. ships would have to sail away to rearm after picking up the survivors from a sundered ship.

Then there is the problem of finding the mobile missile platforms in Yemen. Remember the problems the United States had in Iraq in 1991 trying to find and destroy SCUD missile launch systems? While ISR systems are better today, there is still no guarantee of being able to locate and destroy in a timely manner. The Yemenis have more than 8 years experience dealing with U.S. ISR and U.S. drone attacks. On November 9th the Yemenis shot down a MQ-9 Reaper drone. That baby costs a little more than $30 million dollars.

Here is the bottomline. The United States flotilla, along with its allies, can do some damage to Yemen but are unlikely to achieve a decisive victory. Yemen, for its part, can inflict some serious damage to some of the ships — maybe even sink one or two — and by doing so, score a moral victory that will fuel doubts about America’s naval capabilities and staying power. Perhaps this explains why the U.S. has been so slow to respond to the attacks launched by Yemen.

…………………….

(Republished from Sonar21)

Canadian COVID Dictatorship Advocate Dies Suddenly At 33 – RIP Ian Vandaelle – 5 Dec 2023

Canadian Journalist, Who Pushed Vaccine Mandates and Concentration Camps, Dead at 33
SLAY News ^ | Frank Bergman – December 13, 2023 – 8:15 am

A controversial Canadian corporate media journalist has died at just 33 years old, according to reports.

Ian Vandaelle has died after being hospitalized and “declared neurologically dead,” his family revealed.

Vandaelle was a business journalist who worked as a reporter and editor at the Financial Post.

He was also previously a producer at BNN Bloomberg for over a decade.

However, he was known to many on social media for his pro-Covid vaccine posts on Twitter/X.

Vandaelle advocated for vaccine passports and mandates and called for the firing of anyone who refused the injections.

He also suggested that unvaccinated people should be arrested and taken away to concentration camps.

Stephanie Hughes, Vandaelle’s partner, revealed that he died on December 5, 2023.

“I haven’t been on Twitter for a while because my partner, @IanVandaelle, has been in the hospital since Nov. 18,” she said in a post on X.

“It’s with a heavy heart today that I say he was declared neurologically deceased this week and taken off life support this morning.

“He was 33 years old.”

Vandaelle had taken to social media multiple times to advocate for incentives to encourage Covid vaccination.

He also demanded the implementation of vaccine passports and the termination of those who refused the jab.

In one social media post, Vandaelle stated:

“I, for one, advocate we bring the carrot and the stick. Incentivize getting the vaccine however we like – ice cream, lotteries, literally whatever, I don’t care – and require vaccination to do non-essential things.

“Wanna go to a bar to watch the game? Passport.”

In another post, he urged the Toronto Police to terminate members who declined the jab, saying:

“Take the jab or resign; anything else is moral and ethical cowardice.

“You take an oath to protect citizens?

“You get vaxxed. Shameful that we have to say this.”

As indicated by various social media posts before his hospitalization, Vandaelle seemed in good health and actively engaged in work.

The cause of Vandaelle’s sudden fatal condition has not been made public.

……………………

RFKjr – The Real Anthony Fauci – Sample (4:52 min) Audio Mp3

RFKjr – The Real Anthony Fauci – Long Excerpt (38:03 min) Audio Mp3

Source

https://archive.ph/13bLf