By Susan Dunham

The battlefield is still warm, following Canada’s war on the unvaccinated. The mandates have let up, and both sides stumble back into something that looks like the old normal — except that there is a fresh and present injury done to the people we tried to break. And no one wants to talk about it.

Only weeks ago, it was the admitted goal of our own leaders to make life unlivable for the unvaccinated. And as a deputized collective, we force-multiplied that pain, taking the fight into our families, friendships, and workplaces. Today, we face the hard truth that none of it was justified — and, in doing that, uncover a precious lesson.

It was a quick slide from righteousness to cruelty, and however much we might blame our leaders for the push, we’re accountable for stepping into the trap despite better judgement.

We knew that waning immunity put vast numbers of the fully vaccinated on par with the shrinking minority of unvaccinated, yet we marked them for special persecution. We said they hadn’t “done the right thing” by turning their bodies over to state care — even though we knew that principled opposition to such a thing is priceless in any circumstance. And we truly let ourselves believe that going into another ineffectual lockdown would be their fault, not the fault of toxic policy.

And so it was by the wilful ignorance of science, civics, and politics that we squeezed the unvaccinated to the degree that we did.

We invented a new rubric for the good citizen and — failing to be one ourselves — took pleasure in scapegoating anyone who didn’t measure up. After months of engineered lockdowns, having someone to blame and to burn simply felt good.

So we cannot hold our heads high, as if believing we had logic, love, or truth on our side while we viciously wished death upon the unvaccinated. The best we can do is sit in the awareness of our rabid inhumanity for having cast so many aside.

Most of us who pilloried the noncompliant did it because it seemed like certain victory, like the unvaccinated would never make it through unbroken. Indeed, the promised new normal looked unbeatable, so we sided with it and made punching bags out of the holdouts.

But betting against them has been a scathing embarrassment for many of us who’ve now learned that the mandates only had the power we gave them. It was not through quiet compliance that we avoided endless domination by pharmaceutical companies and medical checkpoints at every doorway. It was thanks to the people we tried to tear down.

So for those of us not among the hopeless few that pray for the return of mandates, we might find some inner gratitude for the unvaccinated. We took the bait by hating them, but their perseverance bought us the time to see we were wrong.

It seems right now like the mandates will return, but this time there’s hope that more of us will see them for what they are: a rising authoritarianism that has no concern for our wellbeing. If there’s an enemy, it’s the confidence game of state power and the transparent attempt to tear us apart. Heeding that looks like our best shot at redemption.

Follow Susan on Instagram for my latest articles and shareable excerpts.
IG: @susankaydunham

Originally featured: https://susandunham.medium.com/what-we-learned-from-hating-the-unvaccinated-fc428fa0732c

This article appeared in the maybury.ca

I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest. They are literally camped out below my bedroom window. My new neighbours moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay. I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada. Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters. I have a perfect view down Kent Street – the absolute ground zero of the convoy. In the morning, I see some protesters emerge from their trucks to stretch their legs, but mostly throughout the day they remain in their cabs honking their horns. At night I see small groups huddled in quiet conversations in their new found companionship. There is no honking at night. What I haven’t noticed, not even once, are reporters from any of Canada’s news agencies walking among the trucks to find out who these people are. So last night, I decided to do just that – I introduced myself to my new neighbours.

At 10pm I started my walk along – and in – Kent Street. I felt nervous. Would these people shout at me? My clothes, my demeanour, even the way I walk screamed that I’m an outsider. All the trucks were aglow in the late evening mist, idling to maintain warmth, but all with ominously dark interiors. Standing in the middle of the convoy, I felt completely alone as though these giant monsters weren’t piloted by people but were instead autonomous transformer robots from some science fiction universe that had gone into recharging mode for the night. As I moved along I started to notice smatterings of people grouped together between the cabs sharing cigarettes or enjoying light laughs. I kept quiet and moved on. Nearby, I spotted a heavy duty pickup truck, and seeing the silhouette of a person in the driver’s seat, I waved.  A young man, probably in his mid 20s, rolled down the window, said hello and I introduced myself. His girlfriend was reclined against the passenger side door with a pillow to proper her up as she watched a movie on her phone. I could easily tell it’s been an uncomfortable few nights. I asked how they felt and I told them I lived across the street. Immediate surprise washed over the young man’s face. He said, “You must hate us. But no one honks past 6pm!” That’s true. As someone who lives right on top of the convoy, there is no noise at night. I said, “No, I don’t hate anyone, but I wanted to find out about you.” The two were from Sudbury Ontario, having arrived on Friday with the bulk of the truckers. I ask what they hoped to achieve, and what they wanted. The young woman in the passenger seat moved forward, excited to share. They said that they didn’t want a country that forced people to get medical treatments such as vaccines. There was no hint of conspiracy theories in their conversation with me, not a hint of racist overtones or hateful demagoguery. I didn’t ask them if they had taken the vaccine, but they were adamant that they were not anti-vaxers.

The next man I ran into was standing in front of the big trucks at the head of the intersection. Past middle age and slightly rotund, he had a face that suggests a lifetime of working outdoors. I introduced myself and he told me we was from Cochrane, Ontario. He also proudly pointed out that he was the block captain who helped maintain order. I thought, oh no, he might be the one person keeping a lid on things; is it all that precarious? I delicately asked how hard his job was to keep the peace but I quickly learned that’s not really what he did. He organized the garbage collection among the cabs, put together snow removal crews to shovel the sidewalks and clear the snow that accumulates on the road. He even has a salting crew for the sidewalks. He proudly bellowed in an irrepressible laugh “We’re taking care of the roads and sidewalks better than the city.” I waved goodbye and continued to the next block.

My next encounter was with a man dressed in dark blue shop-floor coveralls. A wiry man of upper middle age, he seemed taciturn and stood a bit separated from the small crowd that formed behind his cab for a late night smoke. He hailed from the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. He owned his own rig, but he only drove truck occasionally, his main job being a self-employed heavy duty mechanic. He closed his shop to drive to Ottawa, because he said, “I don’t want my new granddaughter to live in a country that would strip the livelihood from someone for not getting vaccinated.” He introduced me to the group beside us. A younger crowd, I can remember their bearded faces, from Athabasca, Alberta, and Swift Current Saskatchewan. The weather had warmed, and it began to rain slightly, but they too were excited to tell me why they came to Ottawa. They felt that they needed to stand up to a government that doesn’t understand what their lives are like. To be honest, I don’t know what their lives are like either – a group of young men who work outside all day with tools that they don’t even own. Vaccine mandates are a bridge too far for them. But again, not a hint of anti-vax conspiracy theories or deranged ideology.

I made my way back through the trucks, my next stop leading me to a man of East Indian descent in conversation with a young man from Sylvan Lake, Alberta. They told me how they were following the news of O’Toole’s departure from the Conservative leadership and that they didn’t like how in government so much power has pooled into so few hands.

The rain began to get harder; I moved quickly through the intersection to the next block. This time I waved at a driver in one of the big rigs. Through the rain it was hard to see him, but he introduced himself, an older man, he had driven up from New Brunswick to lend his support. Just behind him some young men from Gaspésie, Quebec introduced themselves to me in their best English. At that time people started to notice me – this man from Ottawa who lives across the street – just having honest conversations with the convoy. Many felt a deep sense of abuse by a powerful government and that no one thinks they matter.

Behind the crowd from Gaspésie sat a stretch van, the kind you often see associated with industrial cleaners. I could see the shadow of a man leaning out from the back as he placed a small charcoal BBQ on the sidewalk next to his vehicle. He introduced himself and told me he was from one of the reservations on Manitoulin Island. Here I was in conversation with an Indigenous man who was fiercely proud to be part of the convoy. He showed me his medicine wheel and he pointed to its colours, red, black, white, and yellow. He said there is a message of healing in there for all the human races, that we can come together because we are all human. He said, “If you ever find yourself on Manitoulin Island, come to my reserve, I would love to show you my community.” I realized that I was witnessing something profound; I don’t know how to fully express it.

As the night wore on and the rain turned to snow, those conversations repeated themselves. The man from Newfoundland with his bullmastiff, a young couple from British Columbia, the group from Winnipeg that together form what they call “Manitoba Corner ” all of them with similar stories. At Manitoba Corner a boisterous heavily tattooed man spoke to me from the cab of his dually pickup truck – a man who had a look that would have fit right in on the set of some motorcycle movie – pointed out that there are no symbols of hate in the convoy. He said, “Yes there was some clown with a Nazi flag on the weekend, and we don’t know where he’s from, but I’ll tell you what, if we see anyone with a Nazi flag or a Confederate flag, we’ll kick his fucking teeth in. No one’s a Nazi here.” Manitoba Corner all gave a shout out to that.

As I finally made my way back home, after talking to dozens of truckers into the night, I realized I met someone from every province except PEI. They all have a deep love for this country. They believe in it. They believe in Canadians. These are the people that Canada relies on to build its infrastructure, deliver its goods, and fill the ranks of its military in times of war. The overwhelming concern they have is that the vaccine mandates are creating an untouchable class of Canadians. They didn’t make high-falutin arguments from Plato’s Republic, Locke’s treatises, or Bagehot’s interpretation of Westminster parliamentary systems. Instead, they see their government willing to push a class of people outside the boundaries of society, deny them a livelihood, and deny them full membership in the most welcoming country in the world; and they said enough. Last night I learned my new neighbours are not a monstrous faceless occupying mob. They are our moral conscience reminding us – with every blow of their horns – what we should have never forgotten: We are not a country that makes an untouchable class out of our citizens.

January 29, 2022

The convoy that descended upon Ottawa January 29, 2022 was absolutely electric. So many beautiful faces, so much love, so many hugs. The horns honking non-stop and the air was vibrating.

Give it a listen:

How fear of admitting error in trusting China’s coronavirus propaganda is driving Western societies into a doom spiral

BYMICHAEL P. SENGER

Comment: a great synopsis. A must read

“Lockdowns” the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have  never before been  used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?

Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO, an organization that once devoted itself to fighting disease and which has sadly become a tool of Chinese foreign policy, promulgated lockdowns into global  policy through a series of  press conferences  that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.

The world has been fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that transforms the world into China. But if the national security community has noticed this bizarre development, they haven’t said so. Instead, their preoccupation has remained largely unchanged since February 2020. Insiders have confirmed that by spring 2020 the national security community was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was a supervirus leaked from the Wuhan lab, explaining why many  supported lockdowns. Yet the key pieces of information that gave rise to the lab leak theory were the  videos of Wuhan residents suddenly falling dead, the  contrived tale of heroic whistleblower Li Wenliang, and Xi Jinping’s apparent success locking down Wuhan, the city with the lab in it.

One national security official after another has claimed to know the virus came from the Wuhan lab, even as the underlying intelligence information has changed little. If these officials are as confident as they claim to be, great !It does not change the fact that Covid’s average infection fatality rate (IFR) across all age groups is under 0.24%. It’s long past time to address the more concerning question to which the rest of the public has long since moved on: why governments across the world have copied and continue to copy China’s anti-democratic, totalitarian measures in response to COVID-19.

One by one, governments of the world imported China’s totalitarian lockdown measures. Neil Ferguson, whose series of alarmist, wildly inaccurate models fueled lockdowns around the world, recalled how China’s example had inspired him:

I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March … It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could … If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.

In the U.K. Government’s official Coronavirus Action Plan from March 3, 2020, discussing social distancing, school closures, and rapid COVID test and vaccine development, nearly every source the U.K. government cited was from China. All the measures outlined in New Zealand’s official COVID-19 Elimination Strategy document—“physical distancing” “widespread testing” “surveillance”—were adopted from China based on the reported success of the CCP’s Wuhan lockdown. The New Zealand Department of Health deleted this document from their website one day after it received widespread attention on Twitter, after having been posted there for over a year.

In Germany, the federal government commissioned a confidential strategy  paper “based on the scientific findings of expert teams from the University of Bonn/University of Nottingham Ningbo China” containing a “catalog of measures” to be implemented by Germany’s CDC, later obtained upon FOIA request by Germany’s independent Corona Committee. The strategy paper outlined, in detail, the steps to implement lockdowns, mass testing, and quarantine facilities, among other draconian measures. The paper specifically suggested “appeals to the public spirit” including two words that would soon become a worldwide propaganda slogan during the COVID-19 crisis: “together apart.”

Of the 210 pages of FOIAed emails that led to the publication of the German strategy paper, 118 pages were  blacked out entirely. The emails contain frequent discussion of China, but nearly all of these references are redacted. The stated reason: “May have adverse effects on international relations.”

One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed. The Dutch government knowingly took a course of action that would cause health damage—let alone economic damage—six times worse for the Dutch people, out of a concern for optics.

Based on WHO guidance, citing Chinese journal articles, doctors around the world began putting patients on ventilators enmasse, killing thousands before a grassroots  campaign stopped the practice. Based on the WHO’s guidance on COVID-19 testing, again citing Chinese journal articles, labs used, and continue to use, PCR cycle thresholds from 37 to 40, and sometimes as high as 45. At these cycle threshold levels, approximately 85% to 90% of cases are  false positives, as confirmed by The New York Times.

The WHO’s PCR guidance was paired with new international ICD-10 codes for COVID deaths to make COVID-19 quite possibly the deadliest accounting fraud of all time. According to this coding guidance, if a decedent had either tested positive or been in contact with anyone who had, within several weeks prior to their death, then the death should be classified as a COVID-19 death. The result was a terrifying number of supposed “COVID-19 deaths” that bore little relation to the number of “excess deaths” in a given year, even in states and countries that employed few lockdown measures. This absurd number of “COVID-19 deaths” has been used to rationalize any manner of devastation caused by governments’ response to COVID-19—from bankruptcies and mental health crises to deaths from lockdowns themselves.

What’s transpired since has been a predictable spiral into the abyss, aided and abetted at virtually every stage by a media apparatus that has perpetuated the fraudulent lockdown narrative. The Chinese government has financial stakes in almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments. Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP’s narrative, and ultimately advocate for the global adoption of the CCP’s policies. Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact nearly every bit of information that has come from China with regard to the virus has been a lie.

Articles from March 10, 2020, illustrate how media outlets adopted China’s narrative in unison. “How China Slowed Coronavirus: Lockdowns, Surveillance, Enforcers,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “Those containment efforts do appear to have been successful, with the number of new cases slowing to a trickle in recent weeks,” CNN  admired. “Xi asserts victory on first trip to Wuhan since outbreak … China’s epidemic statistics suggest that its efforts have been effective,”  trumpeted The Washington Post. “The World Health Organization has praised Beijing’s response … ‘This epidemic can be pushed back,’ Dr. Tedros said, ‘but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government,’” The New York Times repeated.

For journalists, indulging the fiction that China controlled the virus appears to have begun as a little white lie—a little something in exchange for all those goodwill  seminars and ad placements. It was silly, of course, but what harm could that do?

The snowball effect of this little white lie, that China had controlled the virus, was soon apparent in journalists’ own writing. One after another, they fell victim to their own collective propaganda. Global media outlets legitimized a ludicrous narrative in which the CCP’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated domestic cases from all of China, but not before the virus had spread everywhere outside China, where governments now had no choice but to adopt the CCP’s lockdown policies. Within months, they’d begun to sound like foaming-at-the-mouth communists, their every word dripping with illiberalism as they implored the world to emulate China.

“The U.S. has absolutely no control over the coronavirus. China is on top of the tiniest risks,” The Washington Post gushed. “The verdict is in,” Politico ruled, “China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.” “U.S. Says Virus Can’t Be Controlled. China Aims to Prove It Wrong,” The New York Times admired. “China beat the coronavirus with science and strong public health measures, not just with authoritarianism,” the Conversation lectured. “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom,” The New York Times suggested. “China eradicated COVID-19 within months. Why won’t America learn from them?” Salon whined.

It’s hard to think of many things worse than marching the world toward totalitarianism out of embarrassment for failing to prevent the world’s march toward totalitarianism. But sadly, embarrassment and denial appear to be the primary motivations of world leaders today. From the courts to intelligence agencies to the media and politicians, it all amounts to a collective shirking of responsibility for determining whether lockdown policies have been implemented on fraudulent pretenses, and whether those policies actually work.

Everything since “15 days to slow the spread”—from the fear propaganda to the masks to the school closures and vaccine passes—has been a cover-up of the catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and denial of the insanity of trusting scientists and billionaires who treat information from China as real. Millions surely suspect the lockdown fraud but feel some subtle aversion to saying so. They don’t want to seem radical or unwoke, or they think it’s someone else’s job. Many refuse to speak up for fear of the backlash against science, the professional class, and China, which couldn’t be more misguided, because nothing can be worse for science and the professional class long-term than letting this fraud continue. But among those who really do believe China’s COVID-19 narrative, or merely pretend to, all the authoritarian methods that supposedly contributed to China’s “success”—including censoring, canceling, and firing those who disagree—are on the table. The vast majority of professionals simply lack the courage to speak up publicly against a fanatical minority armed with these illiberal powers in their crusade for “Zero COVID.”

The truth is that even as scientists and politicians support lockdown mandates, few really believe in them. This can be said with certainty based on their own actions. It’s hard to find scientists and politicians who haven’t been caught breaking their own COVID rules. But none of them, even heads of state, feel they have the power to speak up against lockdown measures without inconveniencing their careers. And anyway, these policymakers seem to think, these rules must not be a very big deal, given how easily they can break them.

The public was led to believe that lockdowns were grounded in rigorous “science,” and that by following them, they were “following science,” when in fact the only analysis had been “China claimed they eliminated the virus this way, so we can too.” The metrics preferred by media outlets have shifted constantly—from mortality to hospitalizations to “cases”—to rationalize public anxiety. With few exceptions, this failure to “crush” the virus has been attributed, absurdly, to lockdowns’ leniency, rather than to their evidently fraudulent scientific origins.

At the heart of the lockdown madness was the collective fantasy of controlling a common respiratory pathogen—a feat the epidemiology profession had agreed was impossible and self-destructive just months prior. When China’s fraudulent data was left out of the mix, it was abundantly clear that no country was ever able to “control” COVID-19. Instead, the virus appeared to resurge in “waves” despite the use of these socially and economically suicidal measures.

The truth is that the origin of lockdown “science” cannot be factually discussed without the Chinese government looking very bad—something media investors are reluctant to allow. It’s even harder to explain phenomena like the fake videos of residents dropping dead during Wuhan’s lockdown, which went viral all over global websites blocked in China, without implying some degree of foul play by the CCP. So instead, overcompensating for Beijing, media outlets portrayed China as not only a responsible international stakeholder, but an admirable one whose example should be followed.

Unfortunately, for the millions of workers and small business owners whose life’s work has been destroyed; the millions of children who have been robbed of years of education and terrorized into believing they’re vectors for disease; the hundreds of millions in the developing world whose governments can’t feed them with debt; and the parents who don’t want to raise their children in a world where long-cherished rights can be indefinitely tossed aside, none of these explanations and motivations are remotely adequate.

The flip side of the phony lockdown and masking “success” narratives is a widespread government and media-inspired terror of the virus that is wildly out of proportion to the relatively moderate health risks it poses. According to the most widely cited study on COVID-19’s IFR by age, the average IFR for those under 40 years old is around 0.01%. But in surveys conducted regularly by the University of Southern California, on average, Americans under 40 have consistently estimated their chance of dying if they contract the virus to be around 10%, a 1,000-fold overestimation.

Likewise, in October 2020, the WHO’s peer-reviewed bulletin showed COVID-19’s overall IFR across all age groups to be about 0.23%. John Ioannidis, the world’s most-cited physician, believes the IFR to be lower and published his own peer-reviewed study showing the overall IFR to be about 0.15%. But in a  poll conducted by the Menzies Research Centre, by June 2021 Australians on average estimated their chance of dying if they contracted the virus to be 38%, an overestimation of more than 160-fold.

For the public to be so egregiously misinformed about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible. Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own government’s decision to employ drastic lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.” The policies thus create a feedback loop in which the measures themselves sow the fear that makes citizens to believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 is hundreds of times greater than it really is, which in turn causes them to support more lockdown measures.

Not that journalists and scientists are alone in this regard. Far from it. Every step of the way, the international synchronization of lockdown mandates has given a cosmopolitan veneer to policies that are inherently unscientific, unprecedented, ineffective, totalitarian, brutal, and dumb. The components of the lockdown fraud are so glaringly obvious, and its mechanics and methods so overtly Orwellian, it’s hard not to conclude that illiberalism became something of a global fad in 2020. Nowhere has this illiberal fad manifested itself more visibly than in the high courts.

The United States Supreme Court and its followers have used Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 case in which a man was fined $5 (about $150 today) for refusing a smallpox vaccine, as the precedent justifying all the draconian measures to which Americans have been subject over the past 18 months. A single paragraph written by Chief Justice John Roberts in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Gavin Newsom is essentially all the Supreme Court has written about COVID-19 mandates:

The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement. Our Constitution principally entrusts the ‘safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘to guard and protect.’  Citing Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905).

Roberts’ opinion is problematic in several respects. First, Jacobson has been overruled many times, not least because it was subsequently used to justify eugenics; its resurrection has been compared to “resurrecting Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, or Korematsu”—Supreme Court cases referred to as “anticanon” owing to not only their lack of intellectual rigor but to the unimaginable human tragedies they precipitated. Rather than applying strict or rational basis scrutiny, the Supreme Court appears to have exerted precisely zero effort to determine if COVID mandates actually advance their purported goal of reducing viral transmission. Roberts waves off this responsibility with one sentence: “The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter.”

Roberts asserts that “medical and scientific” actions of “politically accountable officials” should not be second-guessed by an “unelected federal judiciary”—apparently forgetting that not only are health officials unelected, but “second guessing” the actions of officials is the sole purpose of judicial review. Courts are meant to uphold rights in spite of the whims of officials, precisely because political accountability is a lengthy and imperfect process. 

Third, whereas the fine at issue in Jacobson was $5, COVID lockdown policies have cost the United States upward of $16 trillion. But with that one paragraph in South Bay, Roberts set a superprecedent, signaling that U.S. courts should essentially never interfere in deciding what orders are constitutional during a “pandemic.” The Supreme Court and its international counterparts simply declined to review virtually any challenges to COVID-19 mandates, effectively suspending all legal accountability as the lockdowns unfolded. One of the greatest suspensions of civil liberties in American history was occurring, and the U.S. Supreme Court simply abdicated its duty out of deference to wolves cloaked in the sheepskin of science.

Whether out of diffidence, indifference, complacency, laziness, or simply the same spell of groupthink that bewitched much of the population, the Supreme Court and its international counterparts appear to believe it is not their job to determine whether the pretense of COVID-19 restrictions as “science” is fraudulent. Perhaps these courts don’t think lockdown policies are a very big deal, or that if there were anything untoward about them, intelligence agencies would say so. Unfortunately, intelligence agencies appear to think it’s not their job, either.

Having absorbed disinformation into policy, the formidable machinery of Western institutions has, perversely, helped promulgate a totalitarian hygiene regime around the world, and turned against those standing up for western values that politicians appear too spineless to defend. Police brutality is on the rise as law-enforcement personnel face protesters rightfully angry at the ongoing suspension of human rights through policies rationalized only by the exaggerated fears the policies themselves create, and which therefore have no endpoint. Whether COVID cases go up, down, or sideways, the solution offered by lockdown scientists and public health officials—the WHO being only the worst offender—is always the same: Be more like China. Every policy they’ve imported has been as deeply illiberal as it is ineffective, and many are disturbingly willing to suggest permanent changes to our civilization rather than admit error.

As the experiments of Stanley Milgram proved, people can be convinced to commit atrocities when ordered to do so by scientific authorities. From journalists and judges to politicians and common professionals, the public has granted health officials one exception after another to their most fundamental rights, and they’ve been misled every step of the way. Whether out of gullibility, face-saving incompetence, or something worse, they’ve brought the world to a frightening place.

For political watchers, it’s been baffling to watch leaders muddle through the most inexplicable geopolitical debacle since the Thirty Years’ War. It is equally terrifying to know that a policy catastrophe of this scale is possible in the 21st century. But judging by his regime’s activities and the story of how all this began, at least one world leader was well aware of this potential.

For Xi Jinping, lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: that stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class is nothing more than conformity with easily subvertible norms and institutions passed down by prior generations. As lockdown policies grind on into their 18th month, it’s increasingly difficult to disagree with him.

This article first appeared on Tablet

By Kate Wand

Comment: The very beings who got obscenely rich by ignoring decades of warnings about climate change, and raping the planet for their own gains, want you to believe they finally care; that only they are creative and intelligent enough to do anything about it, the crisis they rah-rah’d over.

Be sure, they do not give a second thought about anything that would benefit people or planet. And if they do, it’s only about and for themselves and their own benefit. They hate the rest of humanity because they are devoid of humanity. They have put themselves above you, and believe only they are smarter than God.

“Covid” was their stepping stone – to see how long they can frighten people into one place, limit movement, limit assembly, erase religious freedoms and family ties, and become our own prison wardens. They know that those who indeed bought into the fear that played out day and night over the “news”, will now turn their sights on each other for the air each one of us breathes. Life will become a commodity unattainable.

Please watch. It’s 17 minutes you will not regret to have spent.

I see these signs on shuttered storefront windows, and homes alike.  I hear people, friends and family alike, say that small business owners, people living on the streets, others going hungry and distressed, will “get over it” because “we’re all in this together”.  Words said without any feeling or insight to what “get over it” means to the other.  The sheer and blatant destruction on this is scale seems to be worth it in the long run, even if that ‘long run’ is a year or two, or unknowingly longer, from now.

Well….

I’m not “in this together” with anyone who thinks a child as young as 5 years old can harm or kill their grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, and school teachers with laughter, hugs, kisses, play through touching (i.e. tag, play wrestling) and essentially breathing.  Those who believe healthy children and adults alike can cause the elderly or other healthy individuals to become gravely ill, are completely ignoring the fact that our natural immune systems are robust from since our birth up until today.  To think that we are deadly disease carriers, cannot fight off illness, and pass on an illness we may or may not have, is to believe we are walking death traps, timebombs waiting to wipe out an entire country.

We are being led off a cliff by government and media alike.  When and how did it come to the point where obscure and unheard of ‘medical experts’ and ‘top doctors’ have been given the authority to pontificate who can do what, when, where, for how long, and with whom?  When did we begin to put our unshakable trust and faith in the political body and talking heads, who have lied and obfuscated truths in the not so distant past?  They allow and advocate censorship of those who go against the narrative.  We wait to hear these people talking at us, frightening us into submission with their modelling and case numbers of the day, and what could possibly happen in 2 weeks time if we don’t obey the guidelines laid out.  At the same time over 10,000 real physicians seeing real patients, with real degrees, real number of years practicing in their field, and world renowned experts to be considered ‘right wing’, ‘Nazis’, ‘conspiracy theorists’, ‘medical hacks’, essentially people sentencing their populations to their doom.  It is quite a feat of political and journalistic gymnastics being performed. 

I’m not “in this together” with anyone who can’t see or hear the double speak:  ‘do your part, stay apart’, ‘stay home to save lives’, ‘stand together by standing apart’, all the beyond Orwellian speak,  pumped out with images accompanying them in order to keep a population docile, frightened and compliant.

Signs up on school entrance windows that read “KEEP PHYSICAL DISTANCE” and “AVOID CLOSE COMMUNICAITON AT ALL TIMES” seems pretty terrifying to a small child.  Is this the message we are relaying to the kids – no talking, no playful pushing and shoving, no whispering or laughing, no more being a kid otherwise you’ll die and take whoever you love with you? Schools are supposed to be an open invitation to learning, being, believing, socialising and growing. Children need their peers to relate to, talk to, be friends with, to explore imaginations with, to draw and build with, to build self-esteem and develop life long social skills with such as cooperation, problem solving and autonomy.

And yet we are moving towards an online/digital schooling and society that is completely incompatible with humans as social beings.  We are intrinsically social.  Children need to hear their teachers voices complete with nuances in their voice and face, signals such as smiling, direct eye contact and praise.  These signals build confidence and encourage kids to move forward, become and stay engaged, and strive to be and do better. Without them, a generation of dumbed down, unimaginative individuals are being created.  We are putting up a wall in front of these children that will be impossible for them to climb over. 

This is not to say that homeschooling or online schooling is not right or good; but it is not for every child.  Even those who are homeschooled attend co-op courses their parents cannot teach (French, Maths, English, Sciences, etc).  They sign up for extra-curricular activities to be part of something bigger than their books, computers, home, siblings and parents.  There are teachers who say ‘this is awesome, I love teaching from home’, but they are not thinking beyond themselves; they are ignoring children and their needs.

As adults, we also need their peers to bounce ideas off of, let off steam, to feel part of the organization. The only thing that seems to connect us is facetime on a screen, and if the video is actually turned on.  New hires cannot be properly trained remotely, no matter what devices and aides are put into place and provided.  There is always the need to know one is doing the right thing by physically being with people, talking it out.  Absence of others builds suspicions of colleagues, instead of building trusting relationships so there is no fear of judgement and reprisals.

Minor ailments such as dermatological issues can be easily diagnosed online. A picture can and in most cases will do, and if the resolution is good enough, it can be diagnosed online.  But major ailments and issues like a lump in the breast or near the spine, diabetes and cholesterol management, catching issues that can lead to cancers, hearing loss, etc. are in need of hands on practice.   Dental issues and treatments such as root canals, cavities, thrush, and infections in the teeth and gums that travel into the ear and/or down the throat… these cannot be diagnosed online with a quick 15 minute call, billed at $75.  Cancelled surgeries where the backlog will now take up to 3.5 years to clear.  What if you’re long gone by the time you’re next in the queue?  What if that backlog takes longer than 3.5 years – because it’s just an estimated time?  What if you had to pull your own tooth out due to the excruciating pain you’d been dealing with for 2 weeks, 2 months, the entire year?  Medical practitioners, even during the “Spanish” flu, yellow fever, Ebola and leprosy, were all looked at in person… when did medical and dental practitioners become so afraid to do their jobs?  When did PPE become part of all staff in a doctor’s offices?  Before March 2020, I do not recall my own doctor wearing a mask, donning gloves when listening to my heart, looking at my tonsils or into my ear, and sanitizing hands, pen, keyboard, the doorknob, constantly before and after I left. 

I have heard the argument ‘the intentions are good’ too many times with respects to wearing a mask.  The argument is “the mask protects you from me if, in case, I’m sick”…. because we are asymptomatic.  Wait.. What?!  Now healthy people may be contagious because we are told that we can potentially be disease carriers, symptoms or not?!  If you are ‘asymptomatic’, it means no symptoms, which means you have nothing to pass on.  And when did anyone ever go out when they were sick?  I don’t ever recall having the energy to leave my bed when/if I were sick.  But to slap on a mask because I might be contagious of something i maight or might not have?! Really? But to breathe back CO2 is more harmful and can cause indeed infections in the lungs, and incubate viruses that your body is in the process of fighting off, not to mention the plastic microfibers breathed in, is ok and a protection?!   Masks keep the germs, minor and major, trapped in the nose and throat and have the potential to be disastrous to the health on all levels, not to mention environmentally. And yet people exercise, run or ride a bike, kids playing, people talking to another with them on.  There are now conclusive studies on how masks and ‘social distancing’ do not work, yet the mainstream media and our politicians – who are quick to discredit renowned experts – ignore this.  So the control through guilt and coercion continues.  People, children in particular, are afraid to remove their mask, they are afraid to get too close to others; passerby’s hug the walls or cross the street if they don’t see mask on the other persons face.  The psychological ramifications will be astounding – all because we are guilted through ‘good intentions’.  We are already seeing the ramifications of these measures today.

Then there’s the gene-editing inoculation touted as a vaccine, which is not by any stretch a ‘vaccine’, not even in the scientific sense of a vaccine.  The FDA (as defunct as they are) with its over 1700 employees who will not approve these emergency use authorised concoctions – so the emergency authorisation will continue. People are lining up to ‘get the jab’ to ‘protect others’ because ‘it’s the right thing to do’, when even the manufacturers have clearly claimed their injections do not protect from transmission, does not protect from contracting it again, does not even cure the illness, and in the same breath claim 95% efficacy.  Efficacy of what? Compliance? The pharma profits that are now at $19.3 billion in less than a year?  Government kickbacks?  This is an injection that has not been tested on animals, not gone through rigorous trials and safety precautions by the pharmaceutical companies.  The same pharmaceutical companies who have been mired in lawsuit after lawsuit for decades, who make such unbelievable bold claims, and suddenly everyone develops ‘good intentions’ to become lab rats, mice and ferrets.  A little over a year ago these same people could not be bothered to get the flu shot to protect others, let alone themselves (which it does not even do that, otherwise they wouldn’t be taking it year after year, and the flu would be eradicated)!  This coercion by guilt from our so-called leaders is criminal. 

An entire population has been imprisoned to certain degrees – the now normalized term foisted upon a supposedly free population:  “lockdown”.  We are asked to be a prisoner, keep our families imprisoned and be personal prison wardens.  Be sure, lockdown is a prison term to control the unruly prison population.  Let that sink in for a minute.  Since when did both healthy and sick people become unruly prison populations that need to be brought under control?  What is most disturbing is that there are a large section of society who believe in ‘lockdowns’ work! Just another few months will work, or essentially until these leaders deem we are no longer the unruly prisoner. Governmental ‘Stay at home orders’, ‘lockdowns’ are control measures, and words like ‘safe’ and devices such as ‘masks’ are meant to cause distrust in our fellow citizens; to snitch on our neighbours and friends, remove us from our terminally ill or elderly loved ones, forget about the trivial things such as funerals, birthday parties, dinners… everything!  All that is allowed is one hour of exercise, go into work (at an office, if absolutely necessary, otherwise at home or “remote”), go out for groceries and nothing else, to control our movement in almost every facet of our lives….Indeed if this is not prison, I do not know what is.  All this to contain or even wipe out a virus that even the corrupt WHO has claimed is no more dangerous than influenza?  No virus, not even the common cold (a corona virus) or the flu have been eradicated, and these kill or have killed exponentially more people than this new old virus!  If ‘lockdowns’ indeed worked, we would be back in school, work, attending parties/weddings/funerals alike, having lunch/brunch/dinner/coffee with whom and how many people we wanted, attending religious services and functions, etc. from June 2020.  I write this at the end of May 2021, almost one year since.  At first we were told it would take 2 weeks to “flatten the curve”.  How many weeks are in 2 weeks?  The Canadian government has gone to lengths to perpetuate this ‘pandemic’ and had even brought forth a bill to suspend elections during a pandemic as it was deemed irresponsible.  Our government does not care about its population – I dare say it actually hates us.  It wants us to quiet and compliant, pay our taxes for services that are essentially shut down.  One does not question where are taxes are going . Let me be frank – they are a paycheque for those who are content with keeping you imprisoned and increasing their own paycheque by 20% at least.

Any imam, priest, pastor, rabbi, monk, or any other religious or scholarly figure, who believes in shutting down houses of worship to prevent the spread of asymptomatic disease and infection through congregation and listening to sermons, has lost their belief in God. One can argue that close contact is the crux of the issue. I say the crux of the issue is keeping people away from each other, from talking to one another and figure out this is really part of the breakdown of social society and religious freedom and practice and traditions.  All faiths teach us that were an illness to reach us, this is what was intended; that it is an expiation of sin, and we, as God’s creation, will pull through, stronger for it, if God wills it.  And were death to come to collect our souls, we cannot hide from it – not under our beds, in our closets, nowhere… even if we hold our breath so the angel of death doesn’t find us.  Where are these words of wisdom today?  They are truly absent.  All of our religious leaders and figures are compliant for fear of getting caught practicing their right to religion. Some have gone to lengths and have equated this man made situation to the plague.  It would be a joke were it not so devastatingly serious.

With all this said, it has become clear to me those who seem to be in charge of this disastrous ‘event’ want us to be content with being dumb, lazy and out of physical and mental shape, religiously devoid of any direction, on the brink of poverty and dependent on government for handouts, addicted to their mind numbing/genetically altering drugs and other pharmaceuticals to get through it all.  And good news, if the current drugs don’t work, more damaging, mind and body numbing drugs and concoctions will be forth coming.… all to keep us “in this together”.

A last thought I will leave you with:  were this virus so deadly, why is there a recovery rate of above 99%?  It defies the clinical name we have all but erased from our minds:  SARS2 – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, and ‘2’ because it is a variant from SARS1 (2003), H1N1 – another variant from SARS1, MERS – another variant of SARS1… etc.  We need to quit being afraid and start thinking, critically, instead of following what our incompetent criminal politicians are demanding of us.  If we are in anything together, it is to free ourselves, our neighbours, our minds from this control that is taking place all under the guise of a deadly virus that is not.  To perpetuate the dictates of sociopaths, we need to believe their lies, be mired in guilt and thus coercion of masking and distancing mandates, to be injected with unproven ineffective inoculations, all to make a chosen few others richer? 

“We Are All In This Together”?  No thanks.  Count me out.

Vote could herald a new dawn in the Middle East

By Vanessa Beeley

Comment: for those who still believe in Dr. Bashar al-Assad being a “monster”, “dictator” or whatever else is said to smear and tarnish him, please talk to the Syrian people. Were he so terrible, so ruthless to use chemical weapons against Syrians, would he have been considered and now voted in? How many times can the MSM claim “electoral fraud” and the like before people start awakening from their amnesia? We have been hearing this for as long as I personally can recall. Besides, people who think they know what’s better/best for another nation’s people, need to understand it is none of anyone’s business who the people vote for, dislike/like, or how they should be in their own nations. Once we start dictating what the other people should do, think or say, we essentially remove their human rights at being a sovereign people.

On the 27th May 2021, Syria changed history. President Bashar Al Assad was re-elected with an overwhelming majority that even outshone his popularity in the 2014 elections.

This was about Syrians sending a message to the West. A message that defied ten years of externally orchestrated war, US/UK/EU economic barbarism and an unprecedented colonial media war that has been fought from the upper echelons of the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Channel 4 etc, yet has failed, dismally,  to suppress or deny the Syrian people’s support for their President.

These elections were never just about the re-election of President Assad. These elections were about Syria and the Syrian people. A sovereign nation that has resisted one of the most punishing hybrid wars ever witnessed in our time. Literally every weapon in the globalist war manuals has been thrown at these resilient people. I have seen their exhaustion, their poverty, their misery first hand for many years now but last night everything was thrown aside in their defiant determination to show the West that they are unbowed, unbeaten by these sadistic tactics.

The Syrian people came together, from all sects, from all walks of life and they partied, they danced on the remnants of Western credibility and they declared the West irrelevant.

Let us not forget that in 2012, war-hawk Hillary Clinton told the world that “Assad’s days are numbered”, Clinton also advocated a No Fly Zone in Syria in 2015, whilst admitting that such measures would bring about greater bloodshed and “would kill a lot of Syrians”. The “Assad must go” mantra is now trampled under foot by the Syrian people. World leaders who participated in the dirty war against Syria have fallen by the wayside while Assad remains, perhaps more popular than ever before.

One former Guardian journalist with integrity, Jonathan Steele, wrote in 2012:

Most Syrians back President Assad but you’d never know from Western media” 

Charlie Skelton is another Guardian journalist who maintained the journalistic principles that have since been sacrificed at the altar of regime change narratives, wrote in 2012 [emphasis added]:

They’re [US/UK regimes] selling the idea of military intervention and regime change, and the mainstream news is hungry to buy. Many of the “activists” and spokespeople representing the Syrian opposition are closely (and in many cases financially) interlinked with the US and London – the very people who would be doing the intervening. Which means information and statistics from these sources isn’t necessarily pure news – it’s a sales pitch, a PR campaign. […] But it’s never too late to ask questions, to scrutinise sources.Asking questions doesn’t make you a cheerleader for Assad – that’s a false argument. It just makes you less susceptible to spin. The good news is, there’s a sceptic born every minute.”

In 2016, acclaimed journalist, John Rosenthal, gave a scathing portrayal of the universal censorship applied to any contradiction of the overarching “regime change” narratives. “The world has played with fire in Syria” he told Brics Post and he also said:

Once Washington and its European allies had established the terms of the politically “correct” narrative of the Syrian crisis, facts that failed to jibe with that narrative were unwanted and anyone who tried to report them was inevitably attacked as “pro-Assad”.”

Rosenthal describes the “stifling of debate and the homogenization of the media as regards hot-button foreign policy issues” that came to the fore under Obama’s administration, as unprecedented regarding Syria when compared to Iraq or Libya where journalistic integrity came under less attack. Rosenthal explains it thus:

I suppose it is because the Syrian “playbook”, so to speak, so closely resembled the Libyan one that the screws had to be turned even tighter.”

The West will argue that Assad winning a landslide victory, 13,540,860 votes or 95.1% is a “rigged election” because that is the only come-back they have left, aside from their rebranding of a former Al Qaeda operative as viable opposition to the Syrian presidency that has maintained stability in a country torn apart by Western regimes and their proxy mercenary forces. The number of eligible voters was 18 million, turn-out was an estimated 78%.

THE CORPORATE MEDIA SPIN

The Guardian “Middle East correspondent”, Bethan McKernan, predictably spins the inevitable result as “civil war, raging poverty, but Assad is guaranteed to win Syria’s fake election”.

Of course, McKernan is not in Syria. Very few of the globalist media cartel have set foot inside Syria during the ten year onslaught against the Syrian people – unless they have entered illegally into areas controlled by the armed groups and been escorted by Nusra Front or affiliates as they produce their misinformation barrage designed to manufacture consent for another endless quagmire of criminally unnecessary war.

McKernan’s bitterness reflects the mood in the globalist camp:

Seven years later, after the regime’s Russian and Iranian allies intervened and turned the tide of the war, most of Syria is now back under Assad’s grip. On Wednesday, his citizens will return to the polling booths for a sham democratic display designed to give the president a veneer of legitimacy both at home and abroad.”

Syria and her allies have beaten back the regime change movement on every front and on Wednesday the Syrian people demonstrated the self-determination that the West would steal from them by force. The “sham democracy” resides in the West where the same corrupted media led a campaign to smear and discredit Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps the last hope for an anti-war party in a country overrun by craven attack-dog Blairites and Conservative neocolonialism.

We don’t have a genuine two party system in the UK, we have an undeclared coalition of Zionist-influenced carpet baggers intent on waging an obscene hybrid war against their own people while plundering global resources from nations weakened by their military adventurism and economic savagery.

Look closer to home Ms McKernan and do your own people a service of providing real journalism,  instead of joining the throngs of misinformationists that have de facto killed the Syrian people with their misrepresentation of facts on the ground for ten bloody years.

If McKernan had spent time in Syria, she would know that people on the streets liberally criticise government measures without retribution as she claims in her Imperialist-narrative-protectionist article. I have regularly published interviews where Syrian people complain about electricity, water, bread, inflation, the rising cost of food – but invariably those interviews end with “God bless the President”.

As many Syrians will tell me, their lives are unendurably difficult but the President is a red line they don’t cross however tough their predicament. Their faith in the ability of the President to resolve their daily difficulties is still intact and every Syrian will tell you that it is the US alliance that is responsible for their hardship and poverty and that sanctions are impeding the Syrian reconstruction and return to the stability and security they enjoyed prior to 2011.

Of course, McKernan does not highlight the injustice of sanctions or the UK/US role in the “civil war” and “raging poverty” – she toes the establishment line and sells the narrative that enables the misery she ostensibly condemns. This is not journalism, this is criminal confirmation of bias.

McKernan talks about areas of Syria where the Syrian government “grip is more tenuous”, what she fails to explain to The Guardian readership is that areas of the north-west and north-east are still under the occupation of US/UK allied proxies which include Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Syrian Democratic Forces or YPG Kurdish contras.

The Kurdish forces are dominated by the PKK, formerly declared a terrorist organisation by the US before they were converted into a “useful” ally when Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, launched the partitioning of Syria plan B. Journalists like McKernan and The Guardian have misled the British public throughout the duration of the war against Syria, a war their own regime has been extensively invested in.

Western media must be made as irrelevant as their state’s expansionist and supremacist foreign policies. No UK/US-led neocolonialist war would have ever got off the ground unless the media were on hand to swing public opinion in favour of yet another faux “humanitarian” intervention that is destined to devastate target nations and to reduce sovereign countries to failed states.

THE PERPETUAL WAR MACHINE HAS BEEN STOPPED IN ITS TRACKS

The superior US alliance-supplied military equipment of the ISIS, Al Qaeda-linked armed groups, the vast resources of the Imperialist media machine, the harnessing of UN agencies to further criminalise the Syrian government, the political and diplomatic coercive measures, the economic blockade, the burning of crops, criminal theft and occupation of resources, the attempts to isolate Syria and to demonise the Syrian President – all these measures have failed and the scenes on the streets of every town and city across Syria are evidence of this failure.

People in the West must be asking themselves why their globalist regimes have endless resources, multi-billion budgets, when it comes to waging war against a country that is no threat to “national security” or sustaining a “war against terror” when the terror brand they nominate as the new bogeyman is de facto their proxy on the ground, ethnically cleansing the people of the target nation, in this case Syria.

The US alliance fought this war to allegedly “contain ISIS”, to prevent Iranian expansion of influence in the region thus protecting Israel’s “security”, to weaken the ties between Syria and Russia (a particular grudge of the British), to derail China’s Silk Road initiative which had Syria at its center, to destroy Hezbollah and the Resistance against the Zionist savage settler-occupation and terrorism throughout the Middle East and to impose a medieval Islamist regime upon the Syrian people that would serve US/UK interests while catapulting a progressive nation back into the dark ages of religious intolerance and sectarianism.

Every single element of their destructive policy has failed and ISIS is expanding under the protectionism of the US occupation forces exposing the fallacy of any need for their military footprint in Syria and Iraq.

Iran is expanding its influence because it is arming and aiding the military organisations that are fighting the US-spawned terrorism branded as ISIS. Russia’s ties with Syria are stronger than ever before and Syria is home to a developing Russian military outpost that challenges US hegemony in the region. China is building strong trade links with Syria and its neighbours that will edge the US out of any post-war reconstruction contracts, denying the US Coalition its customary exploitation of the wars it started in countries it destroyed.

Hezbollah is stronger and more militarily prepared than ever before in history. The Palestinian Resistance is united and empowered by Iranian and Syrian military hardware and support. The Zionist entity is hemorrhaging citizens and credibility after its “super power” facade was destroyed by the Resistance in Gaza and the Occupied territories. The US Coalition Middle East project is disintegrating and Syria is rising from the ashes of this implosion with its sovereignty a beacon for the future and for the people who refused to be divided to the point of no return.

This is only the beginning of the end of Imperialism in the Middle East. We are living through historic times and Syria is leading the way.

UNIFICATION OF SYRIAN PEOPLE BEHIND THEIR SECULAR GOVERNMENT IS THE TURNING POINT

Leading up to the elections, I visited areas previously under the control of the Western-sponsored armed groups, led, in many instances, by Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.

In these areas I saw the same outpouring of support for the President as I saw in what are always described as “loyalist enclaves” by the colonial media outlets.

The Syrian government Amnesty and Reconciliation campaigns have been largely successful in the regions I visited to the north of Damascus City. Reintegration of Syrians who were persuaded to take up arms against their neighbours has been a controversial move on behalf of a beleaguered government but it has succeeded.

We must ask if any Western regime would follow such policies if their own population turned against them violently and with heavy duty weapons supplied by hostile states.

EU governments tried very hard to prevent diaspora Syrians from voting in the elections. Germany banned voting at the Syrian embassy in an attempt to turn back the tide of support for President Assad. Syrians gathered to protest this violation of their democratic rights – rendering the West’s demands to impose their distorted version of “democracy” in Syria, farcical.

Bashar Al Assad and his wife, Asma, voted in Douma, the town at the center of the “chemical weapons” controversy, in April 2018, that has exposed the corruption at the heavily US/UK-influenced Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that effectively lied in its final report, omitting crucial evidence from former senior inspectors who denied any chemical attack had taken place, in an attempt to retrospectively justify US/UK/FR war crimes – the bombing of Damascus and surrounding countryside before the OPCW inspectors had even started their investigation. The message was clear – the West’s opinion and falsified condemnation has no bearing on Syrian lives.

Areas of North-East Syria also came out in support of President Assad despite the restrictions imposed upon them by the US Occupation forces and their Kurdish contras. Syrian support for their country and their sovereignty was irrepressible.

THE IRRELEVANT WEST LEFT BEHIND BY AN EMERGING RESISTANCE BLOC

In an interview with Afshin Rattansi of RT Going Underground, the Political and Media Advisor to the Presidency, Dr Bouthain Shaaban emphasised the irrelevance of the self-appointed “international community” or, in other words, the Imperialist bloc dominated by the US and the UK.

Dr. Shaaban explained that the Western sponsored terrorism and the Zionist aggression were not going to inhibit Syrians practicing their constitutional rights. Countries that were invited to observe the elections were from the non-aligned bloc excluding all those nations who have contributed to the devastation in Syria. This is another message for the western political elite – their power is dwindling and with it, their global influence is in decline.

Diplomacy is dead in the West.

Ambassadors have been reduced to nothing more than talking heads for power, there are no longer any checks and balances from senior diplomats who once held sway over their government policy. These days we see juvenile reactions from gravitas-deficient representatives of UK and US bi-partisan war parties.

We in the West are represented by ambitious careerist popinjays who will run PR campaigns for sadistic regime foreign policy without a second thought for the peoples affected. It is up to us to reverse the trend and to demand that those who lead us to wars we don’t want and who kill people we identify with, in our names, are stopped. Not just this time but for always. We owe it to Syria.

I asked former UK Ambassador to Syria and Bahrain, Peter Ford, for a statement, this is what he wrote:

“The most significant thing is that the elections were held at all. With three foreign armies occupying part of their soil (Turkey, the US and Israel), with the West waging savage economic war on them to turn them against their President, with years of indescribable suffering at the hands of Western-backed militants behind them, the Syrian people delivered a resounding verdict in favour of stability as represented by the holding of elections on schedule.

The high turnout, the participation of Syrians in parts of the diaspora, and the popular rallies all underlined the message of the people to the West: leave us in peace, stop persecuting us.

Let us be honest. There are no circumstances in which these elections could have been held under impartial international supervision. The example of the OPCW whistleblowers is there to teach us that Western-dominated institutions cannot possibly be impartial. No UN observers who valued their careers or the safety of their families could have conceivably testified to the fairness of an election which gave victory to President Assad. This is the real fraud, corruption of faith in the integrity of institutional institutions which have been weaponised by Western powers.

The election has delivered a rebuff to those who thought that occupation and sanctions would make the people rise up against the government. How much longer before Western governments and their media mouthpieces like the BBC realise that their regime change by stealth policy is not going to work?”

The Syrian people have sent a powerful message and we must hear it. Long live truly free Syria.

This article first appeared on Off Guardian

By Nick Corbishley

“Malcom X once called the media “the most powerful entity on the earth.” They have, he said, “the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of masses”.

Comment: The above quote from Malcolm X is pretty much relevant in all facets of life. Be it the oppression and savagery unleashed upon Palestinians to the Amazon rainforests to the felon pharmaceutical companies. But it’s always amazing that the exhaustive lengths the media will go to to suppress, all for a bit of money, you would think the people reading or listening to the media (social, written, or other) would become the wiser. Alas, it is tragic when the people do not learn. Please take time to read the article linked below. It is well worth time spent.

Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. The 15-page article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by frontline doctors on all continents to get ivermectin approved as a Covid-19 treatment, as well as the tireless efforts by reporters, media outlets and social media companies to thwart them.

Because of ivermectin, Capuzzo says, there are “hundreds of thousands, actually millions, of people around the world, from Uttar Pradesh in India to Peru to Brazil, who are living and not dying.” Yet media outlets have done all they can to “debunk” the notion that ivermectin may serve as an effective, easily accessible and affordable treatment for Covid-19. They have parroted the arguments laid out by health regulators around the world that there just isn’t enough evidence to justify its use.

For his part, Capuzzo, as a reporter, “saw with [his] own eyes the other side [of the story]” that has gone unreported, of the many patients in the US whose lives have been saved by ivermectin and of five of the doctors that have led the battle to save lives around the world, Paul Marik, Umberto Meduri, José Iglesias, Pierre Kory and Joe Varon. These are all highly decorated doctors. Through their leadership of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, they have already enhanced our treatment of Covid-19 by discovering and promoting the use of Corticoid steroids against the virus. But their calls for ivermectin to also be used have met with a wall of resistance from healthcare regulators and a wall of silence from media outlets.

“I really wish the world could see both sides,” Capuzzo laments. But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the other side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably refuse to publish it.

That may explain why Capuzzo, a six-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books Close to Shore and Murder Room, ended up publishing his article on ivermectin in Mountain Home, a monthly local magazine for the of the Pennsylvania mountains and New York Finger Lakes region, of which Capuzzo’s wife is the editor. It’s also the reason why I decided to dedicate today’s post to Capuzzo’s article. Put simply, as many people as possible –particularly journalists — need to read his story.

As Capuzzo himself says, “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world.”

Total News Blackout

On December 8 2020, FLCCC member Dr Pierre Kory gave nine minutes of impassioned testimony to the US Homeland Security Committee Meeting on the potent anti-viral, anti-inflammatory benefits of ivermectin. A total of 9 million people (myself included) saw the video on YouTube before it was taken down by YouTube’s owner, Google. As Capuzzo exhaustively lays out, both traditional and social media have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep people in the dark about ivermectin. So effective has this been that even in some of the countries that have benefited most from its use (such as Mexico and Argentina) many people are completely unaware of its existence. And this is no surprise given how little information is actually seeping out into the public arena.

A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain. Reporters who trumpeted the COVID-19 terror in India and Brazil didn’t report that Ivermectin was crushing the P-1 variant in the Brazilian rain forest and killing COVID-19 and all variants in India. That Ivermectin was saving tens of thousands of lives in South America wasn’t news, but mocking the continent’s peasants for taking horse paste was. Journalists denied the world knowledge of the most effective life-saving therapies in the pandemic, Kory said, especially among the elderly, people of color, and the poor, while wringing their hands at the tragedy of their disparate rates of death.

Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory “for twenty minutes in which I recounted all of the existing trials evidence (over fifteen randomized and multiple observational trials) all showing dramatic benefits of Ivermectin,” he said. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO. To describe the real evidence in any detail would put the AP and public health agencies in the difficult position of explaining how the lives of thousands of poor people in developing countries don’t count in these matters.

Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.) On January 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin, causing Facebook to take down that post and removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries.

In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet.

“I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…” As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Kory’s biggest voice was silenced.

“The Most Powerful Entity on Earth”

Malcom X once called the media “the most powerful entity on the earth.” They have, he said, “the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of masses”. Today, that power is now infused with the power of the world’s biggest tech and social media companies. Together social and traditional media have the power to make a medicine that has saved possibly millions of lives during the current pandemic disappear from the conversation. When it is covered, it’s almost always in a negative light. Some media organizations, including the NY Times, have even prefaced mention of the word “ivermectin” — a medicine that has done so much good over its 40-year lifespan that its creators were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 — with the word “controversial.”

Undeterred, many front-line doctors have tried to persuade their respective health regulators of the unparalleled efficacy and safety of ivermectin as a covid treatment. They include Dr. Tess Lawrie, a prominent independent medical researcher who, as Capuzzo reports, evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs for the WHO and the National Health Service to set international clinical practice guidelines:

“[She] read all twenty-seven of the Ivermectin studies Kory cited. The resulting evidence is consistent and unequivocal,” she announced, and sent a rapid meta-analysis, an epidemiolocal statistical multi-study review considered the highest form of medical evidence, to the director of the NHS, members of parliament, and a video to Prime Minister Boris Johnson with “the good news… that we now have solid evidence of an effective treatment for COVID-19…” and Ivermectin should immediately “be adopted globally and systematically for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.”

Ignored by British leaders and media, Lawrie convened the day-long streaming BIRD conference—British Ivermectin Recommendation Development—with more than sixty researchers and doctors from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Belgium, Argentina, South Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, Australia, and Japan. They evaluated the drug using the full “evidence-to-decision framework” that is “the gold standard tool for developing clinical practice guidelines” used by the WHO, and reached the conclusion that Ivermectin should blanket the world.

“Most of all you can trust me because I am also a medical doctor, first and foremost,” Lawrie told the prime minster, “with a moral duty to help people, to do no harm, and to save lives. Please may we start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back.

Ivermectin’s benefits were also corroborated by Dr. Andrew Hill, a renowned University of Liverpool pharmacologist and independent medical researcher, and the senior World Health Organization/UNITAID investigator of potential treatments for COVID-19. Hill’s team of twenty-three researchers in twenty-three countries had reported that, after nine months of looking for a COVID-19 treatment and finding nothing but failures like Remdesivir— “we kissed a lot of frogs”— Ivermectin was the only thing that worked against COVID-19, and its safety and efficacy were astonishing—“blindingly positive,” Hill said, and “transformative.” Ivermectin, the WHO researcher concluded, reduced COVID-19 mortality by 81 percent.

Why All the Foot Dragging?

Yet most health regulators and governments continue to drag their feet. More evidence is needed, they say. All the while, doctors in most countries around the world have no early outpatient medicines to draw upon in their struggle against the worst pandemic in century. Drawing on his own experience, Capuzzo describes the absence of treatments for COVID-19 as a global crisis:

When my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital, where there is only a single elective approved treatment for COVID-19, steroids that may keep the lungs from failing.

There are three possible explanations for health regulators’ refusal to allow the use of a highly promising, well-tolerated off-label medicine such as Ivermectin:

• As a generic, ivermectin is cheap and widely available, which means there would be a lot less money to be made by Big Pharma if it became the go-to early-stage treatment against covid.
• Other pharmaceutical companies are developing their own novel treatments for Covid-19 which would have to compete directly with ivermectin. They include ivermectin’s original manufacturer, Merck, which has an antiviral compound, molnupiravir, in Phase 3 clinical trials for COVID-19. That might explain the company’s recent statement claiming that there is “no scientific basis whatsoever for a potential therapeutic effect of ivermectin against COVID-19.
• If approved as a covid-19 treatment, ivermectin could even threaten the emergency use authorisation granted to covid-19 vaccines. One of the basic conditions for the emergency use authorisation granted to the vaccines currently being used against covid is that there are no alternative treatments available for the disease. As such, if ivermectin or some other promising medicine such as fluvoxamine were approved as an effective early treatment for Covid-19, the vaccines could be stripped of authorisation.

This may explain why affordable, readily available and minimally toxic drugs are not repurposed for use against Covid despite the growing mountains of evidence supporting their efficacy.

Ivermectin has already been approved as a covid-19 treatment in more than 20 countries. They include Mexico where the mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Scheinbaum, recently said that the medicine had reduced hospitalisations by as much as 76%. As of last week, 135,000 of the city’s residents had been treated with the medicine. The government of India — the world’s second most populous country and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of medicines — has also recommended the use of ivermectin as an early outpatient treatment against covid-19, in direct contravention of WHO’s own advice.

Dr Vikas P. Sukhatme, the dean of Emory School of Medicine, recently wrote in a column for the Times of India that deploying drugs such as ivermectin and fluvoxamine in India is likely to “rapidly reduce the number of COVID-19 patients, reduce the number requiring hospitalization, supplemental oxygen and intensive care and improve outcomes in hospitalized patients.”

Four weeks after the government included ivermectin and budesonide among its early treatment guidelines, the country has recorded its lowest case count in 40 days.

In many of India’s regions the case numbers are plunging in almost vertical fashion. In the capital Delhi, as in Mexico City, hospitalisations have plummeted. In the space of 10 days ICU occupancy fell from 99% to 70%. Deaths are also falling. The test positivity ratio slumped from 35% to 5% in just one month.

One of the outliers of this trend is the state of Tamil Nadu, where cases are still rising steeply. This may have something to do with the fact that the state’s newly elected governor, MK Stalin, decided to exclude ivermectin from the region’s treatment protocol in favor of Remdesivir. The result? Soaring cases. Late last week, Stalin reversed course once again and readopted ivermectin.

For the moment deaths in India remain extremely high. And there are concerns that the numbers are being under-reported. Yet they may also begin to fall in the coming days. In all of the countries that have used ivermectin widely, fatalities are the last thing to fall, after case numbers and hospitalizations. Of course, there’s no way of definitively proving that these rapid falloffs are due to the use of ivermectin. Correlation, even as consistent as this, is not causation. Other factors such as strict lockdowns and travel restrictions no doubt also play a part.

But a clear pattern across nations and territories has formed that strongly supports ivermectin’s purported efficacy. And that efficacy has been amply demonstrated in three meta-analyses.

India’s decision to adopt ivermectin, including as a prophylaxis in some states, is already a potential game-changer. As I wrote three weeks ago, if case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities fall in India as precipitously as they have in other countries that have adopted ivermectin, it could even become a watershed moment. But for that to happen, the news must reach enough eyes and ears. And for that to happen, reporters must, as Capuzzo says, begin to do their job and report both sides of this vital story.

The original source of this article is naked capitalism

By Middle East Eye

Comment: so much for defending itself. These lot are bent on destruction and savagery

Israeli air force pilots’ bombing and flattening of Palestinian residential towers in the besieged Gaza Strip in its military offensive earlier this month was a way to vent their frustration for failing to stop Palestinian armed factions from firing rockets into Israeli towns, according to an Israeli TV report.

A number of Israeli pilots spoke anonymously to Israel’s Channel 12 last week about their experience flying warplanes over the Palestinian enclave during an 11-day military campaign that ended with a ceasefire on Thursday evening.

In total, Israeli air strikes killed 248 Palestinians in Gaza, including 66 children, between 10 and 21 May, and wounded 1,948 others, the Gaza health ministry has reported.

Nine high-rise buildings were flattened to the ground by Israeli air strikes, including al-Jalaa tower, which housed the offices of numerous media production companies and news agencies, including the Associated Press, Al-Jazeera and Middle East Eye, drawing condemnation from media and human rights organisations.

“I went on a mission to carry out air strikes with a feeling that destroying the towers is a way to vent frustration over what is happening to us and over the success of the groups in Gaza,” one Israeli pilot told Channel 12.

The pilot, identified as Major D in the report, added:

“We failed to stop the rocket fire and to harm the leadership of these groups, so we destroyed the towers.”

Israel has said that Palestinian armed factions in the Gaza Strip had launched almost 4,000 rockets, which killed 12 people and injured hundreds in Israel, before a ceasefire was reached at 2am local time on Friday.

The Egyptian-brokered ceasefire was declared between Israel and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

This article appeared in The Middle East Eye

A historical analysis By Donald Monaco

Comment: how do those who support this entity do it, knowing the history, know their support is utter hypocrisy?! It is beyond comprehensive.

Israel’s crimes against the people of Palestine reveal a record of barbarism and cruelty unmatched in the modern world except for the unrivaled chronical of suffering resulting from murderous wars perpetrated by U.S. imperialism in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Nicaragua, and beyond.

The offspring of the Zionist movement, the state of Israel, has spawned a history of terrorism as vicious as it is pernicious. Settler colonial projects are racist and genocidal.  They involve the ethnic cleansing of native populations.

Israel’s history mirrors America’s.  Beginning with the first English colony at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, settlers moved ever westward, bringing disease, forced population transfers, massacres, wars, broken treaties, reservations, and genocide to Native Americans.  The European invasion produced a holocaust for indigenous peoples on this continent that has yet to be acknowledged, let alone redressed, by the American government.

In historic Palestine, the colonists were European Zionists who set out to create a Jewish state on a land inhabited by an Arab population.  The unrelenting colonization of Palestine was undertaken by a people who claim victimhood. The Nazi holocaust has long been referred to by Zionists as a justification of  the creation of a Jewish state as well as a means to prevent criticism of Israel.  However, the project of Zionist colonialization predates the Nazi holocaust by more than half a century, preceding the publication of Theodore Herzl’s book The Jewish State in 1897.  For Zionists, any criticism of Israel is labeled an expression of anti-Semitism, providing a shield for their criminality.

Victimization propaganda is clearly exemplified by Israel’s repeated assertion that it bombs the Gaza Strip as an act of self-defense in response to rockets fired by Hamas, as if the settler state does nothing to provoke the missile barrage.

It does plenty.  And it has done so since its vile inception.

The Zionist movement introduced terrorism to the Middle East during its ‘War of Independence’ against the British when the Irgun and Stern paramilitary gangs murdered British commanders, shot British constables, hung captured British soldiers, assassinated a United Nations representative, and bombed crowded Palestinian venues.

The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, causing the deaths of 91 people including Arab, British, Jewish, Armenian, Egyptian, Russian, and Greek residents, workers, and visitors on July 22, 1946.

Zionist terrorists belonging to the Stern gang assassinated United Nations representative Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden on September 17, 1948.  Bernadotte was on a mission to mediate the conflict that erupted after the U.N. General Assembly, in a corrupted vote, partitioned Palestine on November 29, 1947 giving 56% of the most fertile land to Jewish settlers and 44% of the land to the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.

The Irgun and Stern gangs bombed Arab fruit and vegetable markets, busses, coffee shops, and homes slaughtering Palestinians throughout the 1930s.  Two notorious right-wing terrorists, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, became Prime Ministers of Israel.

The Zionist terror campaign to cleanse indigenous Arabs and Christians from the land they inhabited for centuries developed in three phases.   The first phase began before the United Nations partition resolution in 1947.  The second phase took place six months prior to the end of the British Mandate and withdrawal of British troops on May 14, 1948. And the third phase commenced with the declaration of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, when the nascent Jewish state implemented ‘Plan Dalet’ to drive Palestinians from their homeland.

A horrific massacre was carried out by the Irgun gang in the village of Deir Yassin where 107 unarmed men, women, and children were murdered in cold blood on April 9, 1948.  Other massacres were perpetrated by Haganah and Palmach troops.

Over 500 Palestinian villages were occupied and depopulated.  More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee for their lives in the onslaught.  The armies of five Arab countries intervened to stop the rampage of Zionist forces and were defeated.  By the end of 1948, a terrible Nakba, or catastrophe, befell the Palestinian people as 78% of historic Palestine was lost.

Israel’s expansionist machinations did not stop there.

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister unleased the Haganah and Mossad in 1950 to conduct a covert terrorist bombing campaign against Iraqi Jews in order to induce the Jewish community living in Iraq to flee to Israel.

In another infamous act of terrorism, the Palestinian village of Qibya was attacked by Israeli troops who murdered 69 defenseless men, women, and children on October 14, 1953.  Leading the attack was Ariel Sharon.

In 1956, Israel, supported by the British and the French, attacked Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez canal.  The assailants were forced to cease their attack by an irate President Eisenhower, who vehemently opposed the operation.  It was the last time an American president stood up to Israel and the American Zionist lobby.

In 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in a six-day war that brought defeat and humiliation to Arab armies. Israel conquered the remaining 22% of Palestine, Syria’s Golan Heights, and Egypt’s Sinai desert.  Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 and returned the Sinai to Egypt as the result of the Camp David Accords of 1978.

During the war Israel attacked the USS Liberty in international waters near the Sinai, killing 34 American crew members and wounding 171 others.  Israel was never held accountable for the attack.

Immediately after the war, Israel launched a settler movement in the newly occupied territories that involved construction of huge Jewish only settlement blocks and bypass roads connecting the colonies.  A massive separation wall was constructed on Palestinian land in 2002.  Approximately 622,670 settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem as of 2019, rendering proposals for a two-state solution void of any viable meaning.

In 1972, Israel began an ongoing program of assassinating Palestinian leaders.  The extra-judicial executions are part of a terror campaign that included the murder of Yasir Arafat and Khalid al-Wazir of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Wadie Haddad and Abu Ali Mustafa of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Kamel Nasser, a Palestinian Christian poet.  Israel assassinated the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi.  The Mossad tried and failed to kill Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in 1997.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria went to war against Israel to recapture land lost in 1967 and were defeated.  Both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union went on nuclear high alert during the conflict.  The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries slapped an oil embargo on the United States as punishment for its support of Israel during the war.

In 1978, Israel invaded South Lebanon in the “Litani River Operation” to drive PLO fighters away from its southern border.  Between 1,100 and 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed and 250,000 displaced by the invasion.

In 1979, Benjamin Netanyahu organized the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism.  At the conference, Netanyahu, a disciple of Irgun and Stern terrorists Began and Shamir, announced a “war on terror” by which he meant a war on Palestinian resistance fighters who would henceforth be criminalized as “terrorists” justifying preemptive military strikes, assassinations, home demolitions, preventive detention, torture, and suspension of civil and human rights.  Known as the “Likud Doctrine”, the “war on terror” would be adopted as the “Bush Doctrine” after 9/11 by neoconservative allies of Israel.

In 1981, Israel bombed a nuclear facility in Iraq.  The attack was supported in Congress by Joe Biden who called himself “Israel’s best Catholic friend.”

In 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon, leading to an occupation that continued until their army was driven out by Lebanese resistance fighters led by Hezbollah in 2000.

An estimated 17,825 Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians were killed and 30,203 were wounded during the invasion.  In one horrifying incident, Israeli troops commanded by Ariel Sharon surrounded the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila near Beirut allowing right-wing Christian Phalange militias to enter the camps and massacre 3,500 Palestinian civilians.  Photographs of the carnage shocked the world, revealing Israel’s responsibility for the savage crime.

On December 9, 1987, Palestinians revolted against brutal conditions spawned by twenty years of military occupation.  The first Palestinian Intifada was met with brutal repression.  Israel’s military was ordered to shoot protesters, deliberately break the bones of captured Palestinians with batons and rocks, routinely torture prisoners in Israeli jails, abduct and torture children, and demolish homes.

One of the most notorious massacres of Palestinians was perpetrated by an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein on February 26, 1996 in Hebron.  Goldstein, an American physician from Brooklyn, New York, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque and shot 29 Palestinian men and boys to death.  He wounded another 125 Muslims worshipers during the rampage.  Goldstein was a member of the Jewish Defense League, a para-military organization founded by the fascistic Rabbi Meir Kahane.  The city of Hebron remains on military lock down to this day as a handful of Jewish settlers terrorize the Palestinian population.

The Jewish fundamentalist settler movement comprises ultra-nationalist groups such as Gush Emunim founded by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, an unapologetic Arab killer, who believe it is their duty to “redeem,” meaning steal, the “Promised Land” for “God’s Chosen People.”  Gush is one of the most violent settler groups in the West Bank.  The history of armed settler violence is extreme.  Settlers routinely gun down Palestinians, firebomb their homes, cut down their olive and citrus trees, some over 100 years old and considered sacred, and steal Palestinian land.

On April 18, 1996, Israeli troops shelled a United Nations compound in Southern Lebanon killing 106 Lebanese civilians, half of whom were children.  The dead were among 800 civilians who took shelter from an Israeli bombardment of their towns and villages.  The Qana massacre was ordered by Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who accused Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields, a persistent Israeli lie meant to excuse the murder of civilians.

On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon provoked a massive revolt by invading the Haram al-Sharif compound which houses Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, surrounded by hundreds of armed police.  The Al-Aqsa Intifada was the second Palestinian uprising fought to win freedom from Israel’s malicious occupation.

In 2002, Ariel Sharon waged war to destroy the Oslo peace process, obliterate the Palestinian Authority, and crush the Al-Aqsa Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza.  The Israeli military targeted Palestinian security forces and conducted massacres in Bethlehem, Nablus, Ramallah, and Jenin refugee camp.  The atrocities were supported by George W. Bush.

In 2003, right-wing pro-Israel neoconservative zealots in Washington carried out their plans for war in Iraq by decimated an independent Arab nation supportive of Palestinian independence as part of a fraudulent “War on Terrorism.” The fragmentation of Iraq was supervised by U.S. viceroy Paul Bremmer, whose directives followed the blueprint advocated in the Yinon thesis, a policy document that advocated the breakup of Arab countries posing a threat to Israeli hegemony.  Over one million Iraqis died as the result of the U.S. destruction of Iraq.  The dirty war in Syria is the latest application of the Yinon thesis.

In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a young American peace activist was deliberately crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she tried to block the demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza.  Rachel belonged to the International Solidarity Movement, a pacifist organization that opposes the occupation of Palestine.  Another youthful ISM peace activist from Britain, Thomas Hurndall, was shot to death by an Israeli sniper as he tried to escort Palestinian children to safety during an Israeli siege in Gaza.

On July 12, 2006, Israel launched a war against Hezbollah that involved the terror bombing of Southern Lebanon and Beirut, causing 1,109 deaths, 4,399 injuries, and 1 million displaced persons with devastating damage to buildings, homes and infrastructure, an Israeli specialty.

With the victory of Hamas in Palestinian national elections held in 2006, Israel imposed a near-starvation blockage on Gaza in 2007, blocking land, sea, and air transportation to the coastal enclave.  Gaza, with a population of 2 million Palestinians, 45% of whom are under the age of 14 years, is the largest open-air prison in the world.  It is also the poorest, with its inhabitants facing hunger and darkness. The blockade was imposed after the United States attempted to provoke a Palestinian civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.  In the fighting, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and the PA exerted authority on behalf of Israel over enclaves in the West Bank.

Not content with starving and humiliating the people of Gaza, Israel launched a series of military campaigns designed to annihilate resistance in the strip.

Operation Cast Led in 2008/09,

Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and

Operation Protective Edge in 2014

All of which were genocidal attacks on a captive population conducted under the pretext of fighting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.  Thousands of Palestinians were killed, injured, crippled, disfigured, and driven from their homes.  The infrastructure of Gaza was destroyed and its people only survived because of an elaborate tunnel system built by Hamas that supplemented the small amount of aid allowed into the strip.  Egypt’s dictatorial President Sisi attempted to flood the tunnel system at Israel’s behest in 2015.

In 2011, Israel began relentlessly bombing Syria acting as a jihadist air force in the U.S. dirty war against the Assad government.  Israel has also provided medical treatment for jihadist fighters.

In 2018, Palestinians launched the “Great March of Return” to reclaim land stolen from them in 1948 and 1967 and to demand an end to the siege in Gaza.  Israel brutally repressed peaceful demonstrators by murdering 267 Palestinians and injuring 20,000 to 30,000 others.  Some protesters are crippled for life.  Others had limbs amputated.  The Gandhian approach to civil disobedience can only work if an oppressor has a moral conscience.  Israel has none.

In 2021, Israeli operatives killed Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.  Israel fears that its nuclear monopoly would be broken if Iran developed the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, neutralizing its ability to attack Arab and Muslim countries at will.

Israel’s murderous past proved to be an ominous prelude to what lie ahead.

In May 2021, Israel escalated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, sent its police into the Al-Aqsa Mosque to smash Muslims who protested the evictions of families from their homes, perpetrated genocidal bombings of Gaza in response to rockets fired by Hamas protesting the Al-Aqsa assault, and unleased rabid mobs of right-wing Jewish extremists and armed settlers against Palestinians living in Israeli cities.

Israel committed atrocities by bombing Gaza’s civilian population and destroying infrastructure needed to sustain life. To hide its crimes, Israel bombed Al Jazeera and Associated Press media outlets in Gaza, and declared the strip a “closed military zone” off limits to journalists.  The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s farms and infrastructure precipitated a humanitarian crisis as residents are without water, electricity, sanitation, adequate food, and medicine.

Entire families were eradicated in Gaza by Israeli air strikes.  Dozens of men, women, and children have been buried alive under the rubble of collapsed apartment buildings.

Imposing a starvation blockade and bombing a defenseless population are crimes against humanity and war crimes. The attacks are savage and sadistic.  Israel’s strategic aim is to cripple Hamas and make Gaza uninhabitable. Inflicting collective punishment on a captive population is genocide.

Israel’s war on the Palestinian people is abetted by the United States.  Joe Biden’s late calls for a “cease fire” were a rhetorical deception meant to provide Israel with an opportunity to attack Hamas and punish the people of Gaza.

During the Israeli bombardment, 265 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza, including 63 children.  Over 72,000 Gazans have been displaced from their homes.  Israeli occupation forces shot 10 Palestinian protesters dead in the West Bank.  In Israel, 12 Israelis and 2 migrant workers were killed by Hamas missiles.

Palestinians have responded with protest marches and a general strike across the West Bank, Israeli cities, and the Gaza Strip unifying resistance to occupation.  Massive pro-Palestinian solidarity protests have taken place in Australia, Bangladesh, Britain, Canada, Chile, France, Jordan, Italy, Germany, Kenya, Morocco, New Zealand, Sudan, South Africa, Switzerland, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and beyond.

In the United States, protesters took to the streets of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Dearborn, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington in solidarity with Palestine.

The message is clear.  Millions of people are disgusted by the racist brutality of the Israeli terror state and angrily demand “freedom for Palestine.”

The butchers who run the terror state of Israel and their enablers in Washington have isolated themselves around the world.  The U.S. empire is unsustainable.  The cost in lives and treasure is too great to endure.  Its people will no longer tolerate endless wars, particularly in the Middle East.

In an unprecedented move, members of Congress led by Bernie Sanders are questioning military aid to Israel considering the assault on Gaza.  Minnesota representative Betty McCollum introduced a bill designed to restrict military aid to Israel used to violate Palestinian human rights in April 2021, a month prior to the latest Zionist atrocities.

Israel is wedded to imperialism. When America’s empire is finally compelled to stop supporting the apartheid state, Israel will suffer an existential catastrophe, because it has no other friends in the world.

The Zionist project in Israel is a chronicle of relentless barbarity and deceit.  Zionism’s core ideology is racist and genocidal.  The Zionist state is an apartheid state, a pariah state, a terror state.  It is condemned by its own heinous philosophy to provoke contempt and revulsion. The apartheid terror state will not survive the historical reckoning that awaits it.