Hi,
Although I’m going to be abroad all of March, Alastair and the FNF team will be posting a newsletter and a food and farming related video at the end of the month as usual.
If you would like to join our ‘Free Palestine’ WhatsApp group, please follow this link to the WhatsApp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LqmNOye88jG4pxeb4kYS5N
Love Tracy
Newsletter
The purpose of my newsletter is to give you important information that is censored in the mainstream media. If you would like to keep up to date with the latest information, then please follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Telegram.
“The way you get democracy to function is by informing the public.” – Robert Kennedy Jr.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.” – Carl Sagan
“Never worry about who will be offended if you speak the Truth. Worry about who will be misled, deceived and destroyed, if you do not.” and
”Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost
Though the newsletter chapters interrelate, they are divided into five sections and have a common realisation that a cabal of corporate elites have captured global trade, global governance, mainstream and online media, and ultimately many of our minds.
As a stenographer, I link to an article or audio and paste a key paragraph or two. My most trusted websites are platforms for journalists who don’t compromise on the truth and have thereby been shunned by the mainstream media. These include; Local Futures, SUSTAIN, Farm Gate, Global Research, Children’s Health Defence, Geopolitical Economy Report, The Grayzone, Unlimited Hangout, 21st Century Wire, UK Column; The Duran, Robert F Kennedy podcast, The Jimmy Dore Show, Palestine Declassified, Alex Krainer, Mattias Desmet, Dr John Campbell, The Cradle, Quds News Network, The Grayzone News, The Electronic Intifada, Jonathan Cook, Richard Medhurst, The Light printed newspaper, and Russell Brand or follow us on Telegram, For The People, Assange News, Resistance News Network, Juan Sinmiedo and Pepe Escobar.
Rooting for Real Farms Series
Step into the captivating realm of fire cooking with Genevieve Taylor in our video this month, where every dish tells a story. Genevieve delves into the ethos behind her choice of pork from Gothelney Farm. Explore how Fred Price embraces agro-ecological farming, nurturing the land for future generations, raising high welfare heritage breed pigs outdoors in spacious fields at Gothelney Farm. His commitment highlights the importance of sourcing from and supporting our small-scale farmers.
Genevieve stresses, “Eating meat is a big deal for me. It’s crucial that the meat I consume comes from animals that lived a happy, fulfilling, natural existence.”
Watch the video and read the blog. Join us in celebrating sustainable farming, delectable dishes, and the magic of fire cooking. Give it a like and a share:
Food, Farming & Ecocide
UK farmers have the same grievances as their colleagues in Europe. We must support them as they resist unwarranted attacks on their viability in the form of NetZero restrictions, cheap imports produced to standards that are illegal in the UK, and fraudulent practices by supermarkets such as late payment, alterations to orders, and cancellation of contracts in mid-season.
Read; Tractors gather at Parliament in farmer go-slow protest BBC News, 25 March 2024;
‘More than 100 tractors have rolled past the Houses of Parliament as farmers protested against what they say is a lack of support for UK food production.
Convoys with horns blaring made their way through central London’s streets to Westminster on Monday evening.
Organisers Save British Farming and Fairness for Farmers of Kent said cheap food imports and unsupportive policies were putting UK food security at risk.
“I’m a third generation farmer. I’m here for my future,” Ben Stickland, 21, from West Sussex, told BBC News. “There are multiple nails being put into this coffin built around us.”
The protest comes as months of heated demonstrations in Europe, including blockades, saw angry farmers in Greece, Germany, Portugal, Poland and France demonstrating against European Union regulations and cheap imports.Thousands of farmers also joined forces in Wales to fight new farm subsidy plans launched by its government. There have previously been a handful of demonstrations in England, including in Kent and Cornwall, but Monday’s tractor rally was the largest so far.
In England, campaigners say government agricultural policy and its Environmental Land Management farm payments scheme, together with weak trade deals, “non-existent” import controls and misleading labelling, have all served to undermine farming businesses. They say that threatens the country’s ability to produce enough food to feed its own population, “leaving our food security in peril”.
Founder of campaign group Save British Farming Liz Webster said: “Farming is fraught with risks: risks that have intensified every year with the climate emergency, Ukraine war and Brexit reality, which have only served to exacerbate problems. Polling shows that the public back British farming and food and want to maintain our high food standards and support local producers. We need a radical change of policy and an urgent exit from these appalling trade deals which will decimate British food.”‘
Watch; London Tractor Rally 2024 -100 Tractor Convoy hits Capital Farming Britain, 26 March 2024
Read; Farmers RAGE against net zero as furious protest held over ‘extreme environmental policies’ GB News, 20 March 2024;
‘Organisers Farmers Movement Cornwall (FMC) said agricultural workers’ livelihoods were threatened by net-zero-aligned “extreme environmental policies”, and drew attention to protests in Wales, where the Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) has caused uproar.
In scenes similar to those in Canterbury earlier this month, tractors decked in Union Flag bunting and bearing slogans like “end the net zero madness” proceeded through the cathedral city, as Cornish and British flag-waving bystanders cheered and clapped.
Farmer Pete, an outspoken critic of climate policy who helped organise Saturday’s protest, said: “We’re starting our campaign for agricultural reform… We believe so much is wrong with farming… that nothing short of complete reform is required.
“We need to take a completely different approach now – we need a nationalistic approach rather than a globalistic approach to farming in the UK – we need to very quickly secure British food security as much as possible.
“As far as I’m concerned, the main thrust is we have got to get rid of the Climate Change Act 2008, and the 2050 carbon emissions target – net zero.
“This government’s policy is destroying the country and farming at a pace never seen before. The farmers are whistleblowing this.”
A mission statement from FMC reads: “We stand in solidarity with the wider UK and European farmer protest movements who oppose green policy overreach and globalist attacks on the farming sector which threaten both national food security and the livelihoods of farming families.’
Read; 5,500 wellies outside Senedd to signal job losses from Wales’ Sustainable Farming Scheme Farmers Guardian, 6 March 2024;
‘Welsh farmers have created a symbolic display of 5,500 pairs of wellies on the steps of the Senedd to represent the jobs forecasted to be lost through Welsh Government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme proposals.
The stark visual display was put together in Cardiff Bay on (March 6) the eve of the closing of Welsh Government’s ‘Keeping Farmers Farming’ Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) consultation.
Each of the 5,500 wellingtons outside the Senedd building represents an agricultural job that is projected to be lost based on 100 per cent take up of the scheme, as based on figures from Welsh Government’s own impact assessment.
NFU Cymru member and display organiser Paul Williams said: “Seeing these 5,500 wellies lined up on the steps of the Senedd is an emphatic depiction of the potential jobs that will be lost to Welsh agriculture if these proposals go ahead in their current guise.
“The MSs who have looked out on the display today from the Senedd must understand what is at stake and commit to ensuring the final Sustainable Farming Scheme proposals don’t harm Welsh businesses and communities.”
NFU Cymru has long warned of the impacts of aspects of the proposals contained within the SFS scheme outline – not least the 10 per cent tree planting and habitat requirements – on the sector’s productivity and viability.’
Share; EU Mobilisation in Brussels, La Via Campesina, 26th Mar 2024;
‘Peasant Farmers Mobilise!’
Watch; This is the third time farmers have had to come to Brussels to get our voices heard, La Via Campesina, 26th Mar 2024
‘This is the third time farmers have had to come to Brussels to get put voices heard, but our demands remain the same!
-Put an end to free trade agreements and unfair competition, starting with a definite halt to negotiations on EU-Mercosur agreement.
-Strengthen the EU Directive on Unfair Trading Practices to legally ensure that prices are higher than our production costs.
-Regulate markets via the CAP to ensure fair and stable prices, protected from speculation.
-Ensure a sufficient budget and a fair distribution of CAP aid to enable a viable transition to agro-ecology and sustainable practices.
-Reduce the administrative burden on farmers, through measures that respond to current climate and environmental challenges’.
Share; Because resistance is fertile!!! De Groentelaar, 26th Mar 2024;
‘A different world is possible. She starts on the fields and ends on your plate!!!’
Please send this letter asking the government to support farmers and encourage local food production, and not undermine them with NetZero targets, opaque subsidy schemes and trade deals that allow farmers to be undercut by cheap, substandard imports.
Take action; Tell Party Leaders To Take Farming Seriously Ahead Of The General Election, Landworkers’ Alliance, 20th Mar 2024;
It’s time politicians and party leaders got serious about food and farming.
For too long farmers and food producers have been undervalued by government and exploited by supermarkets, food has been treated as a cheap commodity instead of a basic human right, and nature has been degraded for the sake of high yields and even higher profits. Now, for the sake of our planet, our health and our communities we need to transition to a greener, fairer and more resilient food system.
Use this letter-writing action to urge party leaders and key politicians to commit to policies in their General Election campaign that will defend British farmers and growers, enable a just transition to more sustainable farming practices, and support a new generation of farmers and food producers onto the land.
Please be sure to read the letter and make sure it is relevant to your identity, work and values before clicking send. It is always more effective to personalise the letter if you have time, though we do ask that you please keep the three bulletpoint LWA policy asks as they are.
Read: Defra makes changes to SFI in response to food security concerns, AHDB, 25th March 2024;
‘Defra has announced that there will be limits to the amount of land businesses are able to put into the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme. Businesses will only be able to put 25% of their land into the six land sparing SFI actions, those actions taking land out of food production.
Previously there have been no limitations on the amount of land a farmer can put into the SFI scheme, which has prompted much discussion from the industry about risks to food production and food security, especially considering the challenging market and weather conditions we have seen over the winter months.This new development demonstrates recognition that food production remains an integral part of the SFI scheme alongside sustainability and environmental protection. The actions affected by the new 25% upper limit are:
– Flower-rich grass margins
– Pollen and nectar flower mix,
– Winter bird food on arable and horticultural landGrassy field corners and blocks
– Improved grassland field corners or blocks out of management
– Winter bird food on improved grassland
Defra says that the six actions will continue to play an important role in supporting sustainable food production but were always intended to be implemented on smaller areas of the farm.’
Read; Trade Agreement CETA threatens small and medium-scale livestock farms in Italy, La Via Campesina, 5 March 2024;
‘While tractor protests continue in Italy and Europe, and the European Commission, bending to the demands of agribusiness, backtracks on the environmental commitment made with the Green Deal, we at Associazione Rurale Italiana (ARI) are called to testify before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies to discuss the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), the trade agreement between the European Union and Canada.
On February 21st, we presented our position on CETA and free trade agreements in general, which Europe continues to push as a solution to the food crisis. Here you can read and download the briefing note sent to the Deputies and the basis of our intervention.
Among the key points, we highlighted the deep damage that CETA causes to small and medium-scale livestock farms in Italy; the risks of further economic (and therefore decision-making) reinforcement of a single industrial group on the entire dairy sector; unfair competition among imported products, especially cereals; the impact on Italian products still certified “free from GMOs,” which may be contaminated by seeds and reproductive materials imported from Canada. Furthermore, by foreseeing the possible commercialization of cloned livestock meat, we warned of the negative impact on consumers who are deprived of the choice between different types of meat.
In conclusion, we emphasized how “the liberalization of trade between two countries with strong agricultural production structures benefits only a small number of agri-food companies, which in Italy are multinational companies, some of which have their legal headquarters and majority ownership outside Italy itself.”’
In this film three people explain their vision for a reformed food system that rewards farmers properly, and supplies healthy food direct to consumers at lower than supermarket prices through creative direct marketing schemes.
Watch; Farming under threat – what we’re facing & how we fix it The People’s Food and Farming Alliance, 6 March 2024;
Sharon Walters; ‘50% of the food retail Market in the UK is dominated by three supermarkets, Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda who last year made roughly 9 billion pounds gross profit. At the same time farm incomes have been falling and household costs have been rising. Even local shops are struggling and town centers are empty, but the supermarkets offer convenience late opening 7 days a week low prices, the one-stop shop. I’d like to introduce you to the People’s supermarket, the same one-stop shop, everything under one roof, take your trolley in, fill it up, wheel it out to your car, open late 7 days a week, but what’s the difference? The People’s supermarket is non profit making so it can pay the farmers more money for their produce, it can keep the prices keener for the customer, it can be located in redundant buildings that are lying around at the moment, but it’s owned and managed by locals for locals.
Nick Weir; ‘Hello I’m Nick, I’m a part-time Open Food Network grower on a CSA project and part of the open Food Network which is a global community of farm growers, community food enterprises and software geeks with a common belief that the food systems of the world are broken and we’re in the process of rebuilding them from the bottom up. It’s the Open Food Network in 21 countries. This is a map of the UK, we’ve got a thousand producers in the UK shown by these tractor symbols and about 150 shops shown by this shop symbol. The shops may be producers selling direct from the farm or they may be food hubs that bring together multiple producers with a single online shop front. They may be online farmers markets, they may be food hubs and new buying groups, lots of different ways of getting the produce from the people who produce the food to the people who eat it using a short supply chain as possible.
Danny Moore; ‘Hi, I’m Danny one of the co-founders Pharmacy Coop. We’re a not-for-profit social enterprise, we launched in 2020 in February so we’ve been operating for nearly four years now. Our focus on helping to create this secure and resilient local food system so everything is owned by the people to benefit the people, but also these systems will regenerate the planet and our health as well. We’re focused on building a national network of farms and food suppliers and creating national infrastructure which includes operational and logistical infrastructure as well as that national focus. We’re also working with community groups all over the country, focused on their local systems as well, but very quickly what we offer at the moment is an organic fruit and veg box scheme where people can come and collect from a local collection point or have it delivered to them.
Also from the PFFA (The Peoples Food and Farming Alliance), who produced the film above, a worksheet for diversification on farms;
‘Over the past few decades, the transformation of farming from mixed farms to large-scale monocrop farms has resulted in negative impacts on local communities, health, and the environment. These modern and industrial practices have depleted our topsoil, and farmers have lost control over their farming practices.
The People’s Food & Farming Alliance believes that now is the time for farmers and producers to directly supply to their communities by working together and considering a cross-section of produce to meet their nutritional needs. The alliance encourages farmers to take back control of national food production and sovereignty.
The People’s Food & Farming Alliance is here to offer solutions and engage with communities to support local farmers and producers. The Alliance is focused on connecting with local farmers who understand the need for change and are ready to take control of their farming practices. With the help of community ambassadors and partners, PFFA is committed to bringing change and supporting farmers in their efforts to diversify and meet the needs of the local community.’
In this interview Vandana Shiva talks about the ‘Green Revolution’ which brought us chemical-dependent, industrialised monocultures and the false claims that this kind of farming is essential to feed the world. In fact the Green Revolution only benefits Big Ag and, along with GMOs, bankrupted a generation small farmers causing mass suicides. Vandana challenges Big Ag to measure agricultural yields by nutritional value per acre, not dollars, and to start accounting for the true costs of their destructive practices.
Watch; Vandana Shiva False Claims Of The Green Revolution, Then And Now Real Organic Project, 21 February 2024;
‘For me it’s tragic that United States which started as a farming country. If you think of the history of the Native Americans, they were farmers, or if you think of the settlers, America was a land of small farmers, and that’s what made it free.
Now 1966 is the year the Green Revolution was introduced to India. It’s not that they hadn’t been trying to introduce the chemicals ever since the end of the wars. The Rockefellers and Fords had been pushing the chemicals, the problem was native seeds don’t like chemicals. I call it the Civil Disobedience of native seeds, because native seeds are bred for multi-purpose, you know it grows the soil, it grows the animals, the grain goes to humans, so you maximize everything, you maximize the straw and you maximize the grain, and when you take the total biomass into account all traditional varieties produce more, and then if you take the nutrition into account they produce much much much more.
As they moved in, in the first five years 25% of the small peasants had disappeared in Punjab because they couldn’t afford the chemicals, and then the land started continue to get consolidated, and basically the small farmer, who’s the real provider of food in my book, who really feeds the world, its documented you know, it’s the small farmers who feed the world. The large farms produce commodities, and commodities don’t feed people. They make biofuel, they make animal feed, and that’s the reason the Amazon is being invaded with GM soya, not because people need it for eating.
I wrote the book The Violence of the Green Revolution, I didn’t know what would be the right way, but I just called it nonviolent farming, farming without violence. Why are we using these tools of war? Why are we using these tools of war in the most beautiful activity which is care for the Earth?
We have to create new possibilities for farming, and it won’t be easy, but we have to find way for eaters really to just recognize that eating that crap is very cruel to your body. Organic is a necessity, it’s not a luxury, we’ve been made to feel it’s a luxury and when you feel overwhelmed by the power of the four to five poison cartel, just turn to the Earth and turn within you and think of the power of the Earth. You put one seed and it grows you your crop. Think of your power, your power as a thinking, conscious being. We have a beautiful word for this, the power within the power to act, it’s called Shakti, so you know every time you get overwhelmed by the poison cartel and their power, turn the other way, turn to the Earth, turn to yourself, turn to your community so we have the real power, we have the real power to do what is right.’
Watch; Saving Farmers and Humanity Richard Vobes; 29 February 2024;
Richard Vobes; ‘Michael O’Bernicia joins me to discuss a remedy for farmers and way to stop the interference from government to private people.
Michael O’Bernicia; ‘As Buckminster Fuller pointed out back in the 1970s, when you have a tyrannical system the only way that system can be stopped or abated is for you to build concurrently a new advanced civilization that makes the old one obsolete. So this led to me coming up with the concept of Universal Community Trust and Universal Community Trust is the first in living memory, at least because nothing after all is new under the sun, but in living memory this is the first time that a government- free jurisdiction has been created and we created it by international Treaty.
The only reason that the British farmers are currently under the cosh of the government is because of one technical problem that exists for all landowners in this country and that is when the land is conveyed. Let’s just take an example, when a farmer bought the land that they’re farming, even if there are no financial incumbrances like mortgages or loans, or fake mortgages and loans more like obviously, but if there if there are no financial incumbrances registered at the Land Registry, the owner of the land is free to write whichever Local Authority he chooses in the box marked Local Authority on the land registry form. You can fill in your own name or your own trust or your own organization as the Local Authority instead of your local Council and there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to stop you.
What I’m saying is, in the event this UCT (Universal Community Trust) remedy is adopted by all British farmers, they take the jurisdiction of the government to act away from them, and the legal argument becomes very easy to win. Where is the jurisdiction to act? It doesn’t exist, and because they demonstrate through the Land Registry that they have established jurisdiction elsewhere, the matter is settled and closed. We’ve seen in other countries where they’re protesting because they don’t want to lose their land, or they don’t want to be told how to farm, or not to farm, as is the case being pushed on us all, so that that is an amazing, I mean that is such a simple and very easy to do remedy.’
Our 2009 film Pig Business shows how stinking toxic ‘lagoons’ of pig waste make local people sick and prevent them from opening their windows or sitting outside. The 2009 Swine Flu pandemic originated near a factory pig waste lagoon in Mexico, now factory farmers in California are given incentives to concentrate ever more animals in cruel, overcrowded animal factories where antibiotics have to be used routinely to keep the animals alive, leading to antibiotic resistant diseases that pass from pigs to humans.
Read; How California’s prized solution for methane gas is backfiring on farmers, Cal Matters, 18 March 2024;
‘When industrial operations confine thousands of animals on factory farms, they drain the resulting river of manure into massive lagoons – foul-smelling reservoirs that pollute local communities and create climate-warming methane gas. California regulators have basically set up a pollution-trading scheme that pays corporate and foreign-owned farms to install massive digesters that chemically treat manure to produce gas. The captured gas is then piped through expensive systems for other uses in California.
My family knows from firsthand experience that living nearby these large-scale operations can cause negative health impacts, reduce our property values and foul our water and air.
Nearly everyone agrees that these manure lagoons are a disaster for farms, our environment and our health. But rather than changing policies to incentivize cleaner, sustainable farming practices, officials have long celebrated the program as a model.
The main problem is that when you monetize this type of management practice, industrial operations are incentivized to also expand them and build more factory farms, creating more manure, more air and water pollution in local communities, and yes, more climate warming methane – the very gas that California regulators want to reduce.
Meanwhile, farmers like me who are practicing sustainable methods are barred from participating in the market and benefitting from these incentives. Family farms don’t have massive manure lagoons, which means we don’t have pollution to capture through digesters.’
The pig factory farm system is inherently cruel, polluting and unhealthy to both humans and pigs. This failed system prevails only because the meat is cheap, but it’s only cheap because the real costs are paid by the suffering of the pigs, by neighbours poisoned by the toxic stench from the lagoons of pig waste, and by people suffering antibiotic resistant diseases such as MRSA caused by the reckless overuse of antibiotics to keep the pigs alive in the overcrowded, unhealthy animal factories.
Read; Calls for legal action after ‘unimaginable suffering’ filmed at Devon pig farm The Guardian, 10 March 2024;
‘Undercover footage of pigs at a Devon farm showing them exposed to “unimaginable suffering” has prompted calls for legal action against the owners.
The film crew said the video of pigs being kept in filthy, cramped conditions – featuring instances of cannibalism and malnourishment, as well as animals with untreated, bleeding wounds and hernias – was filmed at Cross Farm in Holsworthy, owned by WJ Watkins and Son.
On the basis of the footage, filmed across four non-consecutive nights, the solicitors firm Advocates for Animals has sent a letter of complaint to Heart of the South West trading standards alleging “several potential breaches of the law” at the farm, which is part of the Red Tractor scheme, used to mark food produced to a “high standard”.
In 2017, Animal Equality investigated the same farm, estimated to hold 12,000 pigs, and said they found animals living in leaking, dilapidated buildings covered in slurry and forced to lie in their own waste, as well as two pigs with large hernias left in pens with other pigs, pregnant pigs kept in barren, concrete pens without any enrichment, and pigs that had had their tails docked.
Christopher Shoebridge, from Glass Wall Films, said: “We were interested to document how animal welfare has improved over time on British farms, and so we visited a farm where improvements had been promised. It was a huge shock to us that, far from being improved, things were just as bad, maybe even worse than before.’
In a recent poll by Compassion in World Farming, 66% said they wanted labelling that showed the conditions the animals were raised in. At present there is nothing on a meat label that gives any indication of the cruel, overcrowded, stressful and unhealthy conditions that factory farmed animals have to endure. If people knew the realities of factory farming, many would avoid buying the products.
Read; Defra puts forward country of origin food labelling plans NFU, 12 March 2024;
‘New food labelling proposals seek to ensure greater transparency around the origin of food and methods of production Defra has said, following its consultation launch.
The consultation will look at how to improve country of origin labelling for certain goods, including how and where this information is displayed and what products should be included.
For example, if imported pork is cured into bacon in the UK and features a Union Jack, it would explore ways to make it more obvious to consumers that the pig was reared abroad – such as increasing the size of the country of origin text, or placing it on the front of the packet.
The government has also set out plans which would require ‘method of production’ labelling on pork, chicken and eggs, including a proposed mandatory ‘five-tier label’ for both domestic and imported products.
The five tiers and standards would be primarily based on methods of production, differentiating between products that fall below, meet and exceed relevant baseline UK animal welfare regulations.’
Read; British rivers at risk of becoming ‘dead zones’ due to chicken pollution, analysis shows itvNews, 11 March 2024;
‘Rivers in at least seven counties across the UK are at risk of becoming dead zones depleted of wildlife if the government does not ban new factory chicken farms, according to a new Soil Association (SA) report shared with ITV News.
The charity issued the warning in the wake of its analysis, which showed the chicken meat sector in England and Wales has been rising by one million birds per month for the last decade. Ten rivers across the UK have been identified by the SA as currently being at risk, if the number of intensive poultry units continues to rise.
As a result, the British government is being urged to introduce a UK-wide ban on new intensive poultry units and give support to farmers to enable them to leave a “damaging” and “impossible to regulate” industry.
So-called dead zones are created in rivers when chicken manure is washed into waterways, raising the level of phosphate. If this level becomes too high, then it creates algal blooms, which suffocate plant life and starve wildlife that depend on it. High phosphate levels have been blamed as the leading cause of dead zones in the River Wye, where manure runoff from a quarter of the UK’s chickens feeds into.
Tom Tibbets used to swim in the river 20 years ago and now says it’s becoming too polluted.’
We made this film with Julius Roberts in 2019 when he was raising goats, sheep, chickens and two magnificent Mangalitza sows which he kept in the oak woods on his parents’ 12-acre farm in Essex. He also had a flourishing fruit and veg garden and cooked meals for people in their houses using produce from the farm.
Listen: Juius Roberts on reconnecting people with the story behind their food Sustainable Food Trust, 13 March 2024;
‘After studying sculpture at university, Julius worked as a full-time chef in London before moving to a smallholding in Dorset where he now farms. He keeps a range of livestock, including goats, sheep and pigs, and grows a wide variety of vegetables. He’s also amassed an online audience of over one million followers, where he shares delicious, seasonal recipes, inspiring people to think more about the seasonality and provenance of their food. In 2023 he published his recipe book, The Farm Table, which is now a Sunday Times bestseller.
During the conversation, Patrick and Julius discuss a range of issues, including the pressured but inspiring time that he spent working as a full-time chef in London, the role of restaurants in providing a “home for good farming”, and humans’ responsibility to ensure a good life and death for the animals that provide our milk, cheese, meat and more. Talking about his animals, Julius comments, “I feel very privileged to be so close to my food. When you rear animals on the scale that I do, they become companions… and they should be respected… What has happened to the world of meat to make it cheap for us and an everyday commodity is a scar on humanity.”
They also explore the power of storytelling and social media in connecting people with the story behind their food, as well as touching upon the current farmer protests taking place in Europe and the UK.’
Read: Food Security must be based on agroecology Sustain, 20 February 2024;
‘The UK currently produces about 60% of its domestic food consumption by economic value, part of which is exported. We are heavily reliant on imports, with 85% of our fruit and 43% of our vegetables currently imported. The Government estimates that just under half of the food on our plates is produced in the UK.
The Food Foundation’s Broken Plate report paints a grim picture for household food security: the poorest 20% in the UK would need to spend half of their disposable income to afford a government-recommended healthy diet. In June 2023, 17% of households faced food insecurity, with often the only option being cheap, ultra-processed foods high in fats, salts, and sugar. Unhealthy food is flooding our shops and propelling obesity rates toward a projected 40% by 2035, with a staggering financial burden on the NHS projected to surpass £15 billion. It’s clear: our current food system is failing to provide accessible, affordable and nutritious food for all.
The misguided metric: Quantity over quality
The myopic focus on yield has to change. With food security, the narrative has long been dominated by a singular approach: maximise the use of available land for agricultural production and maximise the yield grown on that land. Since 1950, government-supported intensification, in the name of ‘productivity’ has led to the destruction of 118,000 miles of hedgerows. This perspective, while well-intentioned, overlooks a crucial aspect of what it truly means to secure healthy food for our growing population. It’s time to shift the conversation towards a more holistic understanding of food security, one that is deeply rooted in agroecological principles.’
Food Sovereignty is a concept developed by La Via Campesina, the world’s largest peasant farmers union that represents over 200 million farmers worldwide. Food Sovereignty has been defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through socially just, ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their collective right to define their own policies, strategies and systems for food production, distribution and consumption’. For 75 years farmers in Palestine have endured land theft, poisoning of their wells, destruction of their centuries old olive trees which have been passed down for generations, house demolitions and murder by zionist zealots and illegal settlers. Now in Gaza, in contempt of all humanitarian laws, people are being deliberately starved of food and water while the world looks on in anguish and sorrow.
Read; The Confédération Paysanne vehemently denounces the use of starvation as a weapon of genocide in Gaza La Via Campesina, 15 March 2024;
The Confédération Paysanne expresses its dismay at the use of starvation as a tool of genocide against the Palestinian people. For months, officials of the Israeli state have explicitly advocated the use of food as a weapon of war in Gaza. This deliberate strategy has led to the catastrophic situation in which the entire population of Gaza finds itself today: people have no choice but to consume animal feed, infants are dying of hunger and dehydration, and 100% of the population faces severe food insecurity.
This is not merely a “humanitarian crisis,” as too many French media outlets imply. It is genocide and crimes against humanity. Who could deny the intentionality behind starving the Palestinian people? The fields of Gaza’s farmers have been ravaged, agricultural facilities destroyed, and fishermen barred from accessing the sea. Thousands of humanitarian aid trucks wait at the border in Rafah, just a few kilometers from where Gazans are starving, and food aid rots on the Egyptian side because the Israeli state only permits a few dozen trucks to pass each day, when over five hundred are needed. Furthermore, the Israeli military has repeatedly bombed locations where food aid distributions were taking place.
Moreover, the atrocities committed against farmers in the West Bank also reveal a strategy to destroy Palestinian food sovereignty. Settlers seize Palestinian farmers’ lands, appropriate or destroy their crops, confiscate or destroy access to water, with the support of the Israeli armed forces. Yet, in Palestine as elsewhere, food sovereignty is a right and an essential element of people’s self-determination.
Mexico is standing up to the US bullying tactics to force unwanted US- produced GM crops and herbicides onto the country. Here are two articles supporting Mexico’s stance. Let’s hope they can withstand the aggressive backlash which is likely to follow, as the main objective of US trade policy is to protect corporate profits at any cost.
Read; Mexico Brings Science to a Trade Fight Over GMO Corn Common Dreams, 19 March 2024;
‘Frustration with Mexico grows, not over the border or drugs, but over science. The United States demands that Mexico explain why GMO corn is unsafe. Last year, out of concern for human health, Mexico outlawed GMO corn for human consumption. This type of corn is engineered with lab techniques that modify the genetic content of seeds. Issued as a Decree, these restrictions apply to corn in tortillas or masa (dough).
Immediately, American officials complained that this blocks imports. No surprise, most American corn is GMO. They said Mexico lacks a scientific basis for the restrictions, required by the USMCA, NAFTA’s successor. A dispute panel was established. This insistence on science grew, becoming standard talking points for trade and agriculture officers, members of Congress, and lobbyists.
Mexico definitely offers scientific proof and lots of it in its reply, which was recently made public. It includes over one hundred and fifty scientific studies, referred to in peer-reviewed journals, systemic research reviews, and more. Mexico incorporates perspectives from toxicology, pediatrics, plant biology, hematology, epidemiology, public health, and data mining, to name a few.
This clearly and loudly responds to American persistence. The practical result: American leaders cannot claim there is no science supporting the Decree. They may disagree with or dislike the findings, but there is proof.
Based on this, Mexico points to safety risks when humans consume GMO corn and consume corn exposed to herbicides like glyphosate. A World Health Organization (WHO) agency concluded that glyphosate is a likely cause of cancer. Five years ago American courts agreed and continue to do so.
Science-based research supports the Decree in two ways, with justifications for safety measures and with trade obligations. First, corn plays an enormous role in Mexican diets. Because of this, any potential risk from corn creates significant public health concerns for Mexico. Corn provides half of the daily protein intake for Mexican adults. In Mexico corn products are consumed at rates ten times higher than in the United States, according to data from the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization). Put simply, any toxicity from eating corn poses substantial dangers for Mexico.’
Read: Mexico’s Precaution on GM Corn Safety Is Justified Food Tank, 7 March 2024;
‘Most GM corn plants are genetically modified to kill insect pests. The GM plants express a toxin from the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that is known to harm the guts of specific types of insects but not others. Farmers have long used Bt as a spray to kill pests but the Bt toxins in GM crops are different from this natural Bt in structure, function, and biological effects. In fact, peer-reviewed studies across the scientific literature continue to find that Bt toxins in GM plants can harm insects (spiders, wasps, ladybugs, and lacewings, for example) that are not the intended targets.
Just last year, new peer-reviewed studies further found impacts of Bt where there was assumed to be none. For example, a 2023 study conducted by a team of researchers from universities in Brazil and Colombia, funded by the Brazilian government, found Bt had many significant impacts on the health of wasps, even affecting the next generation. University researchers in China and Pakistan also found lower diversity of bacteria in the gut of wolf spiders exposed to Bt. This adds to a laboratory test published in 2023, funded by the French government, that found a particular Bt toxin disrupts normal growth and functioning of gut cells in fruit flies, raising the possibility that Bt toxins could harm the intestinal lining of animals, including humans.’
Read; India: Karnataka Farmers Protest Proposed Field Trials of Genetically Modified Maize and Cotton, Via Campesina, 12th March 2024;
‘The Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha – one of the largest peasant unions in South India – has voiced opposition to the decision of the State Biotechnology Coordination Committee to grant a no-objection certificate (NOC) for conducting field trials of MLS 4301 and MLS 2531 transgenic cotton and maize varieties from 2024 to 2026.
A 2020 study, which combines data from multiple sources spanning 20 years, concluded that while Bt cotton has effectively controlled one major cotton pest, it has also led to the development of resistance in another pest and increase in populations of non-target pests compelling farmers to spend more on pesticides than they did before the introduction of Bt cotton. This also finds resonance among other experts in India, who argue that Hybrid Bt cotton in India has resulted in a yield plateau, high production costs, and low productivity leading to farmer distress and suicides. Recent studies have also pointed out that the distress is acute among small farmers from historically oppressed communities, where structural and social discrimination coupled with the family’s inability to generate capital has led them to take their own lives.’
‘I have seen that community and a close relationship with the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.’ Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder and director of Local Futures.
Read; 50,000 People Say Another World is Possible Local Futures, 6 March 2024;
‘World Social Forum Nepal 2024 – Local Futures reports from the World Social Forum, Nepal 2024:
From the 15th to the 19th of February, some 50,000 people and 1,400 organizations from 98 countries converged in Kathmandu, Nepal, for the World Social Forum (WSF), reaffirming the central conviction that gave rise to the original WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001 – that ‘another world is possible’.
‘Another’ world, of course, refers by contrast to today’s dominant systems of political and economic power, and to their various destructive consequences. Though the WSF encompasses a huge range and diversity of issues, causes, and yearnings, they are united by a basic rejection of neoliberal/capitalist globalization, corporate power, and militarism. They advocate for common values like justice, solidarity and sustainability.
A brief glance through the 27 pages worth of offerings during the Forum gives a taste of the massive diversity of concerns, broadly focusing either on resistance to the status quo, or on alternatives to it, and sometimes a combination of both. Of the former, for example:
• ‘Resisting False Solution on Climate Change’
• ‘Impact of Privatization on Public Services’
• ‘Fighting against Ecocidal Multinationals’
• ‘Mobilizing Against International Financial Institutions’
• ‘Resisting Free Trade in South Asia’
On the latter side of positive alternatives:
• ‘Agroecology as a Transformative Approach to Tackle Climatic, Food, and Eco-systemic Crises’
• ‘Let’s Create Our Own Money’
• ‘Staying Hopeful and Sustaining Ourselves as Activists and Organizers’
• ‘Agrobiodiversity and Community Seed Banks’
• ‘Revitalizing Rural Reconstruction Movements: Addressing Multiple Crises’
• ‘Decent Work and Care Economy’
Watch; Children of the Vine, Documentary, 2022;
‘A global nightmare is unfolding as farmers and scientists stand at a crossroads questioning the impacts of pesticides and herbicides on human health. At the center of this controversy is glyphosate, the primary active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world. Glyphosate was recently identified as a possible cancer causing agent and is now found in breast milk, baby food, wine and 80% of food grown in the United States.
Why is glyphosate filtering into so many facets of our daily lives? And why are countries banning glyphosate while the United States uses more of it than any other country in the world? Children Of The Vine will peel back the curtain on the flawed regulatory practices that are causing more harm than good to public health while also revealing the scary science behind toxic farming practices. In the end, this solution driven documentary will highlight more sustainable large scale farming practices capable of feeding the world.’
The Sustainable Food Trust recommend five films that focus on food and farming; Six Inches of Soil; Feeding Tomorrow; Poisoned-The Dirty Truth about your Food; Live to 100-Secrets of the Blue Zones and A New Day is Possible.
Watch; Reviews: Food and farming in film 2024, Sustainable Food Trust, 12th Mar 2024;
Finally, here’s a chance to catch up on some of the sessions at ORFC.
Watch; Oxford Real Farming Conference session recordings 4th and 5th January 2024;
Censorship/Surveillance/Coercion/Corruption
The judges’ decision on Julian Assange’s February hearing is a shameful sell-out. Like Pilate washing his hands, they have schemed a way to sidestep the issues. If the US provide ‘assurances’ by 16 April, the appeal could be refused and extradition allowed. This doesn’t offer any comfort to Julian’s wife, family and the growing numbers of people around the world who are disgusted by the way the justice system is being manipulated to accommodate the US case.
Read; Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up Jonathan Cook, 26 March 2024;
‘The US has had years to clarify its intention to give Assange a fair trial but refuses to do so. The UK court’s latest ruling is yet more collusion in his show trial. The interminable and abhorrent saga of Julian Assange’s incarceration for the crime of journalism continues. And once again, the headline news is a lie, one designed both to buy our passivity and to buy more time for the British and US establishments to keep the Wikileaks founder permanently disappeared from view.
The Guardian – which has a mammoth, undeclared conflict of interest in its coverage of the extradition proceedings against Assange (you can read about that here and here) – headlined the ruling by the UK High Court today as a “temporary reprieve” for Assange. Nothing could be further from the truth. The word “reprieve” is there – just as the judges’ headline ruling that some of the grounds of his appeal have been “granted” – to conceal the fact that he is prisoner to an endless legal charade every bit as much as he is a prisoner in a Belmarsh cell.
In fact, today’s ruling is yet further evidence that Assange is being denied due process and his most basic legal rights – as he has been for a decade or more. In the ruling, the court strips him of any substantive grounds of appeal, precisely so there will be no hearing in which the public gets to learn more about the various British and US crimes he exposed, for which he is being kept in jail. He is thereby denied a public-interest defence against extradition. Or in the court’s terminology, his “application to adduce fresh evidence is refused”.
Even more significantly, Assange is specifically stripped of the right to appeal on the very legal grounds that should guarantee him an appeal, and should have ensured he was never subjected to a show trial in the first place. His extradition would clearly violate the prohibition in the Extradition Treaty between the UK and the US against extradition on political grounds.
Nonetheless, in their wisdom, the judges rule that Washington’s vendetta against Assange for exposing its crimes is not driven by political considerations. Nor apparently was there a political factor to the CIA’s efforts to kidnap and assassinate him after he was granted political asylum by Ecuador, precisely to protect him from the US administration’s wrath.
Today’s ruling is most certainly not a “reprieve”. It is simply another stage in a protracted, faux-legal process designed to provide constant justifications for keeping Assange behind bars, and never-ending postponements of judgment day, when either Assange is set free or the British and US justice systems are exposed as hand servants of brutish, naked power.’
Charles Glass, a multiple award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker who has covered the Middle East for fifty years, writes about the CIA plot to kidnap and kill Julian Assange while he was being granted asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. Another example of the lawless gangsterism that the US uses to achieve its aims.The plot to kill Assange was clearly intended as a signal to all journalists that anyone who embarrasses the US risks a violent death.
Read; The US Government’s Plot to Murder Julian Assange Charles Glass, The Nation, 22 March 2024;
‘In most of the countries whose wars I’ve covered over the past 50 years, journalists were fair game. The first deliberate killing I remember took place during Lebanon’s civil war in May 1976, when a sniper shot Le Monde correspondent Edouard Saab. Saab, who also edited Beirut’s French language daily, L’Orient-Le Jour, had excoriated the Syrian regime for stoking Lebanon’s violence. While no one proved Syrian responsibility for his assassination, Syria did not bother to hide its role in the murder of another Lebanese journalist four years later. Salim al-Lawzi, a fierce critic of the Syrian regime, had fled to London when his magazine’s offices in Beirut were blown up. Yet he risked returning to Lebanon for his mother’s funeral. Kidnapped on arrival at Beirut Airport, he turned up dead a week later. His body had been disfigured in an unmistakable message: pens stuffed into his abdomen and his writing hand dissolved in acid. Other media critics, like Gebran Tueini and Samir Kassir of Beirut daily An Nahar, followed him to their graves.
America did not stand with the reporters and camera operators from Al Jazeera, Reuters, and Spain’s Telecino in Baghdad when US forces fired on and killed them on April 8, 2003. Washington said the deaths were accidental, an explanation rejected by their colleagues as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. The case that the killings were unintentional wore thinner in July 2007, when a US Apache helicopter killed a group of unarmed civilians on the streets of Baghdad. Among the dead were Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. The Pentagon, which rejected Freedom of Information requests for the helicopter’s video record, said all those shot by the Apache were terrorists. Only WikiLeaks’ publication of the “Collateral Murder” footage, complete with the crew’s voiced glee at the killings, exposed the official lie.
In March 2017, two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, WikiLeaks published CIA documents related to the agency’s “Year Zero Program” of massive, warrantless spying on American citizens and foreign politicians. The 8,761 CIA documents showed that the agency was wasting taxpayer money by duplicating a similar National Security Agency program and installing “Weeping Angel” bugs in consumers’ Samsung television sets to invade their privacy. WikiLeaks commented on what it called the “Vault 7” documents: “After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.” Someone with security clearance, realizing that the CIA listened to millions of Americans’ private conversations without their knowledge or approval, forwarded the files to WikiLeaks.
A Yahoo! News investigation last year revealed newly installed CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s swift and furious reaction: He instructed the agency to make plans to kidnap and murder WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange was already the focus of investigations by the CIA, the FBI, and the departments of Defense, Justice, and State over his publication in 2010 of the government’s own communications proving its culpability in war crimes. “But what really set Mike Pompeo…off was that Vault 7 leak,” Yahoo! News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff told Democracy Now!. “This was on his watch. This was his agency. The campaign against Assange went into overdrive.
Pompeo appeared before the Center for Strategic and International Studies on 13 April to declare, “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Defining WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service” rather than what it is—a publisher—would legitimize any action the agency took against Assange. Except that it didn’t. National Security Council lawyers doubted the legality of killing Assange, and cooler heads within the CIA leaked the plot to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Meanwhile, the Spanish private security firm, UC Global, that monitored Assange in his refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, were told to prepare a kidnapping. One UC Global staffer, a “protected witness” in Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US, testified: “Specifically, the suggestion that the door of the embassy could be left open, which would allow the argument that this had been an accidental mistake, which would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee; even the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange was discussed, all of these suggestions.”
Alexander Mercouris, who worked as a barrister at the Royal Courts of Justice for 12 years, comments on the 20-21 February hearing to decide whether Julian Assange can appeal against extradition to the US, describing the chaotic, confused American legal arguments and the huge worldwide support for Julian, along with the crowds of supporters demonstrating outside the Court all day on both days of the hearing.
Watch; ASSANGE’S LAST STAND? The Duran, 3 March 2024;
Alexander Mercouris; ‘This this is in essence a very simple case indeed, a very simple case in terms of English law. This is a political case brought by the United States against a journalist for carrying on the work of journalism. That’s all it is. Now if it’s simply argued in that way, and that is where I think Assange’s lawyer did an excellent job on the first day, if it’s just understood in that way then of course an extradition is impossible, and by the way I suspect a case in the United States would be impossible as well. So what does the United States do in that situation? They obscure the facts, they bring in all kinds of strange arguments, they sometimes advance them, sometimes they retreat from them, sometimes they then bring them back, they say he’s actually committed crimes when he obviously hasn’t. Sometimes they say that he actually put people in danger when there’s no evidence that he did. But it’s a cloud of obfuscation and misdirection to take us away from that essential point about this case.
Joe Lauria; I think particularly now because of Ukraine creating a whole another system in the world that doesn’t need the United States, American rule is being questioned in a way it probably hasn’t been since the second world war ended, and I wonder if the outpouring we now saw, there were hundreds of people in front of that courtroom, all the major Human Rights and Press Freedom organizations, Presidents of countries in Latin America and elsewhere, there’s an enormous support that’s risen up. People don’t buy the American story anymore. Am I making too much to conflate that with this? People are not buying American lies anymore like they used to. Could these two judges step out of the fantasy world that they’re plunged in?
Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s half brother, and their father John Shipton, have been touring the world for the past five years, filmmaking, lobbying and campaigning to bring this shameful miscarriage of justice to the attention of politicians and the public. Numerous Human Rights NGOs and governments worldwide see the persecution of Assange as an attack on Press Freedom and an attempt to criminalise any journalism that embarrasses the US government by revealing its war crimes, electoral corruption and illegal surveillance. Meanwhile Julian is serving time in the maximum security Belmarsh Prison, without being charged in the UK, while the courts decide whether he can be extraditied to the US to face a lifetime in prison in conditions that the UN defines as torture.
Watch: Assange’s brother: “Julian could receive the death penalty” if extradited The Grayzone, 5 March 2024;
Max Blumenthal; ‘Gabriel Shipton what brings you to Washington DC ?’
Gabriel Shipton; ‘I am here to lobby Congress and the Senate around Resolution 934 which is a free Julian resolution that’s in Committee in the Congress in the house.
So have you had any breakthroughs with members of Congress?
I think since since the end of last year Jim McGovern has come come on board and he’s quite senior in the Democratic party. Having him on board has made a massive difference, he hosted a briefing on Monday with Agnes Callamard from Amnesty International, Jody Ginsburg from CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists), and that briefing was full, they had to turn people away, so I think there’s a real momentum building around the interest in the case in the Congress, so I think that you can see a constituency for Julian growing in the Congress.
What are you asking lawmakers for lawmakers for, what are you asking them to do for Julian Assange?
We want them to come forward and support this resolution so that it could potentially get a vote. We’re looking for around 20 co-sponsors on the resolution, so we’re asking them directly to do that and also be vocal supporters, or call this prosecution out for what it is, an attack on Press Freedom, an attack on First Amendment Rights of Americans, so that’s ideally what we’re asking them to do, similar to what other Congress people have done in the past like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim McGovern who are now vocally calling on the Biden Administration to end this prosecution.’
Read: Assange Truth and UN Shenanigans Craig Murray, 16 March 2024;
‘I spent the last week at the UN, trying to ram home some truths about the Assange case as input to the UN’s Periodic Review (every 7 years) of the UK’s human rights record, in terms of its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Staff are visibly afraid to take on the UK/US interest. I met a number of UN staff who were happy to chat away until I brought up Assange; then they quite literally physically recoiled, in some cases took an actual step back, and always discovered they had pressing business elsewhere.
After the Human Rights Committee meeting with NGOs, the committee then met with the UK government representatives to discuss their concerns. One member of the committee, Rodrigo Carasco of Costa Rica, decided he would raise the case of Julian Assange, based on the briefing which we had supplied. A full elected member of the committee, Carasco is also the former Costa Rican Ambassador to the United Nations.
Carasco was put on the speakers’ list and he informed the committee what he was going to raise. Come the meeting with the UK delegation, Amb. Carasco was astonished when the Chair simply skipped over him in the speaking list and did not call him.
My conclusion from this is that the UK and US are currently very sensitive to international criticism over Assange, and that rather than be discouraged we need to keep pushing. As both the US and UK are becoming international pariah states over Gaza, we need to remind the world of their long established crimes.
Watch this RT documentary about Julian Assange, telling the story of how WikiLeaks became the main source of truthful information in a mediascape that was increasingly being swamped by propaganda and manipulated, pro-establishment ‘journalism’. The Guardian headlined WikiLeaks stories evey day for six weeks, then as the security services began their revenge offensive against Julian, starting with bogus rape claims which forced him to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy, the Guardian editors, who had profited from his journalism, tried to distance themselves from him by smearing his character. The extract below relates how conditions at the Embassy deteriorated after pro-US Lenin Moreno won the Ecuador election and cancelled Julian’s asylum, allowing police to drag him out of the Embassy and into the maximum security Belmarsh Prison where he has been for the past five years.
Watch; The Assange Story (2024) 21st Century Wire, 17 March 2024;
‘Julian compared his stay at the embassy to be living in a spaceship because he was subjected only artificial light and he never saw sunlight. He didn’t have dental care, proper medical care. There were huge challenges. For years he was constantly under surveillance there, like open surveillance. And when you were in the embassy you could constantly hear the people outside with speaking on walkie talkies. There was nearly no corner in the embassy where you were not watched. We also had long range video cameras pointing at the embassy all the time. This was the most surveyed place in the world for many years.
Then the government changed. There was an election in Ecuador and Lenin Moreno became president, and he was a great supporter of America, still is. The new government decided to shift Ecuadorian foreign policy. They decided to have a different relationship with United States. Julian was an obstacle for that.
The Moreno government was determined that they had to get rid of him and turned his life into hell. Turning away lawyers, searching visitors, installing cameras in every room. Private meetings had to be held in the toilet. Not supplying toilet paper, forgetting to bring food, forgetting to bring milk. If they forgot to bring food for Julian, then it meant he didn’t eat.
The WikiLeaks founder was sent to Belmarsh prison, just outside London.The Belmarsh prison where Julian is currently housed is a high security, maximum security prison. It’s where you keep murderers and terrorists and bombers and brutal people. Belmarsh prison is said to be a worse place even than Guantanamo.
He is denied the right of fraternising with other prisoners. He told me that when he sees people go past his cell, he wished he speak to them. I saw those leaked videos where he appears to have lost a lot of weight. When I saw that, I really started crying.’
One of the many crimes that WikiLeaks exposed was that the shameful, cowardly attack on Libya in 2011 was not to protect civilians, but to prevent a pan-African gold-backed currency that would have weakened the dollar and euro. Described by Obama as a ‘shit show,’ the whole debacle reminds us how the US/NATO alliance constantly threatens world peace with violence and aggression, and how the assault on democracy in Ukraine and the expansion of NATO to Russia’s border follow a pattern of lawless US global gangsterism.
Watch; Blockbuster Interview: Gaddafi Spokesman Reveals TRUTH About NATO Assault On Libya! The Jimmy Dore Show, 22 March 2024;
Jimmy Dore; ‘Thirteen years ago NATO bombed Libya to protect civilians, that was what they said. This led to thousands of deaths and a country in ruins and I just want to give you a little brief history before I bring in our guest. On the 19th of March 2011 the NATO block began a violent 8-month long military onslaught of Libya, a sovereign African Union founding member state which had enjoyed four decades of stability and prosperity, and one of the highest human development index scores in all of Africa. So we’ve said this before on this show that Libya was the most successful country in all of Africa, it was stable, had prosperity, Muammar Gaddafi brought that to the people.
What Muammar Gaddafi was really doing was threatening Western hegemony. Hillary’s emails reveal the true motive for Libya’s intervention. Newly disclosed emails show that Libya’s plan to create a gold-backed currency to compete with the euro and the dollar was in fact the motive for NATO slaughtering innocent people, decapitating its leader and turning Libya from one of the most successful countries in all of Africa with a stable government and a prosperous culture into a failed state with open slave trading. The price of ‘freedom’, as John Stewart says. That’s exactly what happened, that’s what NATO did, that’s not what Putin did, that’s not what Hamas did, that’s not what Isis did, that’s not what Al-Qaeda did or the Taliban, that’s what the French the British and the United States did.
Moussa Ibrahim (Former spokesperson for Gaddafi); What happened in Libya, dear Jimmy, is a very powerful example. Libya is a very rich country, it has really wonderful natural resources that were owned by American and British companies especially up to 1969 when Gaddafi led his Green Revolution as we call it in Libya, and within one year of him coming to power he ordered and obliged all American and British companies to hand back the national wealth of Libya to Libyans, something of course that angered the West against Gaddafi, and he became an enemy, a top enemy to the Western greed machine.’
This changes everything; the brazen lie that to criticise zionism and the racist, genocidal state of Israel is anti-semitic, is dead forever in this country, thanks to David Miller.
Read; How a British university helped me to establish anti-Zionism is not racism David Miller, TRTWorld, 14 March 2024;
David Miller; ‘I have just won an employment tribunal against the UK’s Bristol University which sacked me from my post as Professor of Political Sociology in October 2021 after a thirty-month campaign by the Zionist movement to have me removed.
This is why my tribunal victory is so important. It sets out for the first time by any court in the UK the determination that anti-Zionist views are not racist and that they are “worthy of respect”. This is a tremendous victory not just for the protections it will afford to people in employment. It will also be available in argumentation against the so-called “new antisemitism”, a concept publicly stated by the Zionist regime as early as 1972 in a speech in the US by Foreign Minister Abba Eban. The regime has worked on this concept for more than fifty years and has tried to institutionalise it as a “working definition” of antisemitism – first in the European Union Monitoring Center which adopted the Working Definition of Antisemitism in January 2005, recognised as a draft in progress, after a fierce lobbying campaign by the Zionists.
Perhaps most significantly the tribunal judgement is already giving new confidence to pro-Palestine campaigners which are becoming less concerned about attacks under the label “antisemitism” and more ready to use the term Zionism properly and regularly. The IHRA has been influential in dissuading many pro-Palestine campaigners from using the term “Zionism”, “Zionist entity” or “Zionist movement”.
Siren voices on the left have declared that we should use the term sparingly or not at all. We should instead just criticise the government of Israel and its policies, or describe the human rights abuses or use the term Apartheid. They also say we should avoid calling the fundamental legitimacy of the Zionist colony into question. Sometimes this is because they oppose the end of the Zionist colony and sometimes for tactical reasons. In either case, all of this should, and now can, stop. We should be clear that Zionism is fundamentally racist, colonial and genocidal and we should use phrases such as Zionist entity, and Zionist movement deliberately to undermine the legitimacy of the colony and also to make it clear that it is the whole Zionist movement that needs to be dismantled, not just that part of it which currently occupies Palestine.’
David Miller’s free speech victory is also a victory for Jews who object to the violence, apartheid and land theft by zionist/settler fanatics.
Watch; MASS MURDER IN MOSCOW George Galloway, 24 March 2024;
David Miller; ‘The main purpose of taking this case was to establish that anti-zionist views are and should be protected under the law, and this now becomes available to anyone in employment across the UK, to protect them from being sacked for the same reason, but it does more than, that it drives a coach and horses through the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition, and it will become increasingly difficult for the Israelis to impose their views on that all across the world as a result of this victory.
So the whole point of this was to was to win a strategic victory against zionism, and we have done that, I think handsomely. The question is well what happens next? Zionism is, as you know, as one can see in the daily pictures that we see from Gaza, in a in a crisis. Zionism is on the verge, I would say, of a collapse, and the whole question we have to face now is what happens when zionism collapses? How do we move towards de-colonising, yes Palestine, but also the rest of the world. I mean the zionists have a huge operation in the UK, in the US, in Germany, in France and many other countries, and their brand of racism will not go away quietly, it will have to be piece by piece dismantled so that the zionist movement itself is taken to pieces and that Jewish community organizations, for example, can be desized and put back to their proper purpose, which is to represent ordinary Jews and not to be vectors of racist zionist ideology.
It’s very difficult for Jews who are non-zionist or anti zionist to find anywhere to represent them, because almost all of the communal organizations are zionists, so we need to move towards a position where it’s recognised that zionism is racism, and that as a result we are opposed to to zionism, just like we are to anti-muslim racism or anti-black racism, it’s just a similar kind of idea. The University of Bristol itself has on its website a commitment that we should be in favor of what what they call eradicating racism, and I very much support that view, and it’s a view which I think should be applied to zionism as well.’
It seems like some people would like us to go back to the middle ages when if you uttered a word of blasphemy you were burnt at the stake. The victory that David Miller won for our freedom of speech in the UK is under attack in the US after the Oscars.
Read; Even Mentioning “Occupation” at the Oscars Is Antisemitic, Some Jewish Hollywood Figures Say The Intercept, 19 March 2024;
‘The backlash against even the mildest-mannered protests for Gaza at the Oscars was predictable. Artists, musicians, and actors who wore a pin symbolizing a call for a ceasefire in Israel–Palestine are being called antisemitic.
“The Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer, however, went further in his Oscars acceptance speech: He actually said something. After winning the Academy Award for best international film, Glazer objected that his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust were “being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
The largest offense here, if the backlash is to be believed, was that Glazer dared speak of context — of the Israeli occupation. He was so bold as to suggest that history did not begin on October 7.
As a letter signed by more than 900 people, described as Hollywood “creatives and professionals,” and published Monday made clear: The very word “occupation” was off limits.
“The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history,” the letter said, never mind that the military occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, has been recognized as such by the United Nations since 1967.
But the letter went on to say that “occupation” did more than just distort history, it invoked history’s worst antisemitic tropes: “It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood.”’
Disregarding the verdict in David Miller’s case against Bristol University, the UK Civil Service tries to close down free speech in its ranks. Watch out for a humiliating climbdown soon when they realise the law has changed and thanks to David Miller’s case against Bristol University, criticism of zionism is now protected free speech.
The Muslim Network for civil servants is suspended following discussions about Gaza David Miller, 19 March 2024;
‘The Civil Service Muslim Network (CSMN) has been suspended by the British government, and members are being investigated following the hosting of discussions about the Israel lobby, the British role in Gaza, and the “sharing of anecdotes from a lecture by controversial anti-zionist rapper Lowkey.”‘
Read; META REFUSES TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ON GAZA CENSORSHIP, SAY SENS. WARREN AND SANDERS The Intercept, 26 March 2024;
‘Citing the company’s “failure to provide answers to important questions,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are pressing Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to respond to reports of disproportionate censorship around the Israeli war on Gaza.
The letter was written following widespread reporting in The Intercept and other outlets that detailed how posts on Meta platforms that are sympathetic to Palestinians, or merely depicting the destruction in Gaza, are routinely removed or hidden without explanation.
Accusations of systemic moderation bias against Palestinians have been borne out by research from rights groups.
“Since October 7, Human Rights Watch has documented over 1,000 cases of unjustified takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook related to Palestine and Palestinians, including about human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch said in a late December report. “The censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook is systemic, global, and a product of the company’s failure to meet its human rights due diligence responsibilities.”
A February report by AccessNow said Meta “suspended or restricted the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists both in and outside of Gaza, and arbitrarily deleted a considerable amount of content, including documentation of atrocities and human rights abuses.”
A third-party audit commissioned by Meta itself previously concluded it had given the short shrift to Palestinian rights during a May 2021 flare-up of violence between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” said the auditor’s report.’
Watch; Britain struggles to define extremism Palestine Declassified, 23 March 2024;
Latifa Abouchakra; ‘The British government has been grappling with the question of extremism for years now. It has failed even to define extremism in any clear fashion and has been struggling to fight back against an avalanche of criticism that its counter-extremism policies are islamophobic. The genocide in Gaza has focused minds in the British elite because of the massive sympathy for the Palestinians visible on the streets. The desperate attempt to cast pro-Palestine protesters as genocidal is a desperate attempt to split the movement. The government is trying to reframe extremism in such a way that more radical supporters of Palestinian liberation are demonised, criminalizsed and disavowed by the rest of the movement.
The minister leading this is the toxic Michael Gove, the most pro zionist minister in the government. He has a history of involvement with zionist lobby groups and, for example, was the first chairman of the neo-conservative and islamophobic think tank Policy Exchange. It’s no coincidence that the new policy he is introducing was dreamt up by the Policy Exchange in a paper published in 2022. All of its main proposals were adopted by Lord William Shawcross in his review of Prevent, published in 2023. Shawcross is famously islamophobic and was appointed as a senior fellow at the Policy Exchange in 2018.
Prior to being appointed to the Prevent review in 2021, Shawcross’s recommendations were all accepted by the government, and thus the new policy has effectively been written by leading islamophobic think tank.
Among the innovations are a new blacklisting agency in Gove’s department and a change in the status of the Commission for Countering Extremism, which changes from being an advisory to an enforcement agency.
But behind Policy Exchange are a shadowy group of foundations which provide cash for its work. Though they are secretive, we can reveal at least two. The first and most significant is the Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust, which donates almost every year and has given policy exchange more than 3 million pounds between 2007 and 2022. The Wolfson family, which runs the trust, are the owners of the Next retail chain. The Wolfson family also funds Beit Lechem which channels money to the occupation forces, and the Jerusalem foundation, which is engaged in promoting illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.
Another source of funds is the Rosencrantz foundation, which has given to the think tank for more than a decade, along with other islamophobic causes. Its director, Robert Rosenkrantz, was appointed a director of Policy Exchange in 2010. In other words, British government policy on extremism is captured by Policy Exchange, and Policy Exchange is in part a front for zionist interests.’
Watch: US TikTok ban aims to weaken China & protect Big Tech monopolies Geopolitical Economy Report, 18 March 2024;
Ben Norton; ‘The US government has for years threatened to ban TikTok and it’s looking like this might actually happen. This March the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass legislation called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary-Controlled Applications Act. This bill quote ‘prohibits distributing maintaining or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary-controlled application’ and cites TikTok as an example.
What we’re seeing is that the US government is waging a technological war against China and the US is essentially trying to ban all competition from Chinese tech companies in order to protect US big Tech monopolies, any apps, any technological products that are made by Chinese companies the US is trying to ban them, put tariffs on them, whether it is Chinese electric vehicles, Chinese solar panels, Chinese phones like from the company Huawei, the US is trying to prevent China from technologically developing and TikTok is only one part of this larger technological war. The US Commerce Secretary Gina Rondo made this clear as day back in 202, she stated quote ‘if we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation we need to work with Europe calling to prevent China from technologically innovating’. The US Commerce Secretary has since repeated comments like this multiple times. This March 2024 she said that ‘the US will do whatever it takes to prevent China from getting access to the most advanced technology.’
Read; TikTok threat is purely hypothetical, US intelligence admits The Intercept, 16 March 2024;
‘THE PURPORTED THREAT of TikTok to U.S. national security has inflated into a hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions, but the official record tells a different story: U.S. intelligence has produced no evidence that the popular social media site has ever coordinated with Beijing. That fact hasn’t stopped many in Congress and even President Joe Biden from touting legislation that would force the sale of the app, as the TikTok frenzy fills the news pages with empty conjecture and innuendo.
In interviews and testimony to Congress about TikTok, leaders of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence have in fact been careful to qualify the national security threat posed by TikTok as purely hypothetical. With access to much of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, they are well placed to know.
The basic charge is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese company, could be compelled by the government in Beijing to use their app in targeted operations to manipulate public opinion, collect mass data on Americans, and even spy on individual users. (TikTok says it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked. This week, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said that “there’s no CCP ownership” of ByteDance, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.)
Though top national security officials seem happy to echo these allegations of Chinese control of TikTok, they stop short of saying that China has ever actually coordinated with the company.
Typical is an interview CIA Director William Burns gave to CNN in 2022, where he said it was “troubling to see what the Chinese government could do to manipulate TikTok.” Not what the Chinese government has done, but what it could do.
What China could do turns out to be a recurring theme in the statements of the top national security officials.
Here is a film that explains the other side of the climate story, how the climate crisis has been manipulated to strengthen authoritarian control, create global financial trading schemes/scams, and provide captive markets for corporate profit-making projects in pursuit of fabricated NetZero targets. For example, 2,000 acres of pristine heritage farmland in Wiltshire have been targeted for solar panels by an offshore company that will pay no UK tax, and leave hundreds of rural homes surrounded by fields covered with black solar panels, security fencing and arc lights.
Watch: Climate, The Movie (The Cold Truth) 20 March 2024;
‘The film explores the nature of the consensus behind climate change. It describes the origins of the climate funding bandwagon, and the rise of the trillion-dollar climate industry. It describes the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on the climate crisis. It explains the enormous pressure on scientists and others not to question the climate alarm: the withdrawal of funds, rejection by science journals, social ostracism.
But the climate alarm is much more than a funding and jobs bandwagon. The film explores the politics of climate. From the beginning, the climate scare was political. The culprit was free-market industrial capitalism. The solution was higher taxes and more regulation. From the start, the climate alarm appealed to, and has been adopted and promoted by, those groups who favour bigger government.
This is the unspoken political divide behind the climate alarm. The climate scare appeals especially to all those in the sprawling publicly-funded establishment. This includes the largely publicly-funded Western intelligentsia, for whom climate has become a moral cause. In these circles, to criticise or question the climate alarm has become is a breach of social etiquette.’
Covid/Vaccines Scam and Pandemic Treaty
Watch; So, Now It Makes Sense Russell Brand, 11 March 2024;
Russell Brand; ‘Even though they’re currently being sued because it appears that some of their products kill people, AstraZeneca have just done a 650 million pound deal with the British government. Meanwhile the process of taking Covid shots is being normalized like flu shots, something you should do every Covid season. Should we be having a deeper look at the relationships between Big Pharma and the government or should we just be taking these shots all the time and crossing our fingers?
The British government have announced in the form of Jeremy Hunt the rhyming slang Chancellor of the Exchequer, who just announced that they’ve done a £650 million deal or about $880 million deal with AstraZeneca. If you’ve heard of AstraZeneca at all, it is because it was the Bill Gates-connected vaccine that it seems caused blood clots and was withdrawn in many countries relatively early perhaps not early enough.
As a Business Insider investigation from December 2020 revealed, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and to a lesser degree Moderna have together hired an army of lobbyists and contributed millions of dollars to political causes during 2019 and 2020, as well as censoring online information. What is the extraordinary power that these companies have that they’re able to broker these deals, become excluded from ordinary legislature, and why is it that they are continually investing in lobbying? AstraZeneca’s influence team this year includes 21 registered lobbyists, includes both in-house and contract professionals, most have previously worked in government.
In a way, if you regarded these matters from some perch on high you would see that between government and private Industry the doors are revolving so quickly that it’s essentially one interwoven entity, with employees from the government going to work at Moderna, with employees from the FDA going to work at Moderna, with lobbyists for Moderna or Pfizer or AstraZeneca lobbying the government that they used to work for in order to get favorable deals for Moderna and Pfizer. Sometimes I think we do live on a different plane of reality where we’re not invited to access the same kind of information so we can’t see the reality we’re living in.
You hear patient outcomes, but some of the patient outcomes are worthy of scrutiny, particularly when it comes to AstraZeneca because in this country there are currently lawsuits regarding blood clotting and serious injuries including brain injuries, and the most serious injury I think that you can get which is death. The Oxford AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has been branded defective in a multi-million pound Landmark legal action that will suggest claims over its efficacy were vastly overstated.
That does seem to be the general trajectory of information around vaccines in the pandemic period. The pharmaceutical giant is being sued in the High Court in a test case by Jamie Scott, a father of two who suffered a significant permanent brain injury that’s left him unable to work as a result of a blood clot after receiving the jab in 2021. A second claim is being brought by the widower and two young children of 35-year-old Alba Taylor, who died after having the jab made by AstraZeneca, the UK based pharmaceutical giant. The the test case could pave the way for as many as 80 damages claims, I would think it could be a little higher than that, worth an estimated 80 million, over a new condition known as vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis that was identified by a specialist in the wake of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine roll out. The UK medical regulator failed to sound the alarm over Covid vaccine side effects and should be investigated, MPs have said. I wonder if their inability to sound an alarm could be connected to the lobbying money that appears to be being spent the numerous deals between governments and these companies. I wonder if that in any way muddies the water or makes it complex when it comes to sounding alarms and effectively regulating these organizations.’
Watch this car crash intervention by the White House Press Secretary to shield Fauci from the question everyone wants an answer to; ‘Where did the Covid virus come from?’
Watch; Tucker Carlson Tonight 19 March 2024; (This video has been removed, read below to see why.)
Carlson; ‘So 81-year-old Tony Fauci, the highest paid employee in the entire federal government, headlined his last press conference today, and very quickly it got very strange. Chaos broke out when someone asked one of the most basic questions of all, where did Covid come from? It destroyed our economy, killed millions of people around the world, shouldn’t we know where it came from? Wait till you see how the Biden Administration responded to that question, tells you a lot. We’ve got the tape straight ahead, so when the Covid pandemic began in early 2020 everyone wanted to believe Tony Fauci, we did we had him on the show actually, and then he started lying in ways that were so obvious that you couldn’t ignore it, and you began to ask yourself, what is this about? The guy in charge of Covid response is lying about Covid, why? He lied about herd immunity, then he lied about masks, and then he repeatedly lied about vaccines. You can’t lie if you’re a public health official, but he kept doing it.
Today Tony Fauci now 81 held his last press conference. Inappropriately enough he decided to tell one final lie about masks, watch;
Fauci; I know sometimes when you walk in and you have a mask and nobody has a mask you kind of feel guilty. You shouldn’t feel guilty, you look terrific.
Carlson; Everyone knows that the science shows that but for some reason Tony Fauci is still pretending it makes sense to wear a mask. He also pretended, once again, that you will die unless you get the Rona vaccine.
Fauci; The real danger is in the people who have not been vaccinated, so that’s where we expect, if we’re going to see a problem this winter, it’s going to be among those people.
Carlson; Oh, it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated is it? This is insane, this is not science, in fact all the science shows just the opposite. It’s more risky for most people to get the vaccine than to get Covid at this point. This is not speculation, the data from a bunch of different countries, UK and Israel included, prove that. But Fauci somehow doesn’t know that? Remember this is the guy who’s funding bat coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, which at this point seemed pretty likely to be the cause of the entire pandemic. So a reporter for the Daily Caller decided to ask Fauci about that, because how could you not ask, were you involved in creating this virus or where did it come from shouldn’t we know? Millions have died, we wrecked our economy, but you’re not allowed to ask that question, because then Joe Biden’s glass ceiling shattering publicists rushed in and shut the whole thing down, watch this.
Reporter; What have you done to investigate the origins of Covid?
Press Secretary; Hold on one second… we have a process here, I’m not calling out on people who yell, and you’re being, you’re being, you’re being disrespectful to your colleagues and you’re being disrespectful to our guest. I will not call on you if you yell, and also you’re taking time off the clock, Dr Fauci has to leave in a couple of minutes. I.. I’m done, I’m not going, I’m not getting into it back and forth with you.
Another Reporter; She has a valid question, she’s asking about the origin of Covid, Dr Fauci is the best person to answer that…
Press Secretary; I hear your question but we’re not doing this the way you want it, this is the disrespect, I’m done Simon, I’m done, I’m Simon, I’m done I’m done with you right now.
Carlson; it’s unbelievable and the rest of the supine press corps sit there with their weird little masks on and say nothing, and it’s left to some guy from Africa to point out the obvious, which is what this is the most legitimate question there is, where did Covid come from and what are you doing to find out?
Tulsi Gabbard; Frankly it’s the most important question because the most dangerous thing facing the American people and frankly the world is the fact that people like Dr Fauci and those in power refuse to even acknowledge that there is a very real possibility even a probability that the origins of Covid came from the kinds of so-called scientific gain of function research, this dangerous research that is funded by American taxpayers at the behest of the likes of Dr Fauci that was occurring in China and other countries around the world and even here in the United States. This is what needs to be investigated, and this dangerous research which which Fauci refuses to acknowledge or speak about it every time he’s questioned about it.
We can’t deny the danger that he has created for the American people, not only with regards to his refusal to answer questions about the origins of Covid and gain of function research, and how it is very likely continuing on that we are paying for, but also the other big lies that he’s continued to propagate, even in his press conference today, about about mask, he’s telling people mask up knowing full well that when people hear that they’re going to throw on a cloth mask or or a mask like the one he’s wearing in that picture that you’re showing or a paper mask knowing that they don’t do anything to prevent someone from getting Covid or spreading Covid, the only things that do that are actually respirators the tightly held N95 or K95. They continue to lie the American people and it’s putting the American people at risk.’
Watch; Covid Inquiry appears fundamentally biased, Dr John Campbell, 14 March 2024;
John Campbell; ‘Now there’s been a letter written by a group of 55 leading British academics, mostly professors, to the Hallet Covid inquiry in my country pointing out deficiencies in it. An open letter to Baroness Hallett, Chair of the UK Covid Inquiry;
We, the undersigned, are a group of UK public health scholars and academics in related disciplines, widely published in our fields, deeply concerned that the Covid Inquiry is not living up to its mission to evaluate the mistakes made during the pandemic, whether Covid measures were appropriate, and to prepare the country for the next pandemic. The Inquiry must urgently address its apparent biases, assumptions, impartiality, & lack of evidence-based approach.
First, the Inquiry gives the impression of being fundamentally biased. There has been little opportunity for petitions to be brought by those who have suffered from the negative effects of pandemic policy decisions. This is preventing a more holistic assessment of impacts on population health and wellbeing. This lack of neutrality appears to have led to biased reasoning and predetermined conclusions, for example, to lockdown faster next time.
Second, the Inquiry is taking key assumptions for granted instead of examining and critiquing them in light of the evidence. The consensus position in pre-2020 pandemic plans was that non-pharmaceutical interventions, including lockdown, had weak evidence of effectiveness, and were predicted to cause substantial harm to society, especially if used for prolonged periods.
Third, the Inquiry lacks impartiality in the selection and questioning of expert witnesses. It has given preferential treatment to scientific advisers on SAGE, who have a vested interest in maintaining the justification for their policy recommendations. Very few scientists with an alternative position have been asked to testify, and the Inquiry has been confrontational rather than inquisitorial in its questioning of these views.
Fourth, the format of the Inquiry is impeding investigation into the key scientific and policy questions. The Inquiry has adopted a legal format that prevents a systematic evaluation of the evidence by biomedical and social scientists on the harms of restrictions to the British public, the impact on Covid from policies such as mandatory NPIs, and the state of evidence for best practice.
Fifth, the Inquiry risks reducing public trust in the impartiality and independence of government accountability and oversight. Its size and cost (by some estimates £300-500 million) will make it the largest public Inquiry ever undertaken to date, and yet its shortcomings, if not addressed, risk compromising the credibility of future public inquiries.
Read: Breaking: Japanese Researchers Warn About Risks Associated with Blood Transfusions from COVID-19 mRNA Vaccinated Individuals; Thailand Medical News, 16 March 2024;
Many countries around the world have reported that so-called genetic vaccines, such as those using modified mRNA encoding the spike protein and lipid nanoparticles as the drug delivery system, have resulted in post-vaccination thrombosis and subsequent cardiovascular damage, as well as a wide variety of diseases involving all organs and systems, including the nervous system. In this article, based on these circumstances and the volume of evidence that has recently come to light, we call the attention of medical professionals to the various risks associated with blood transfusions using blood products derived from people who have suffered from long COVID and from genetic vaccine recipients, including those who have received mRNA vaccines.
Risks associated with blood transfusions from genetic vaccine recipients.
Blood abnormalities – Studies have reported cases of thrombocytopenia, thrombotic disorders, and abnormal red blood cell morphology in genetic vaccine recipients.
Immune dysfunction – Genetic vaccines may lead to immune related complications, including immune imprinting, antibody dependent enhancement, and alterations in immunoglobulin class switching
Neurological complications – There is growing evidence suggesting that the spike protein produced by genetic vaccines has neurotoxic properties and can cross the blood brain barrier.
Read; To All COVID Vaccine-Injured, Watch This Video. Fraud Is Identified, You Were Tricked and Lied To to Take an Unsafe Vaccine Global Research, 17 March 2024;
‘To all of the COVID vaccine injured. Please watch this video.
Fraud is identified and as a result you were tricked and lied to in order to take an unsafe vaccine.Had you been given informed consent, as it states in law, it is likely you would not have taken it. You suffered an unnecessary and avoidable injury as a direct result of the Fraud and the other already identified criminal acts.
There were proven safe and effective treatments that worked, they were deliberately withheld by government policy and further evidence of the crimes committed against you.
Please also see my previous video about the law and informed consent dated 14/3/24. I believe without the Fraud being committed you would not have been injured. Those injuries are an assault against your person and criminal under The Offences Against the Person Act 1861.
For this very reason watch the video and I suggest you make contact with The Metropolitan Police stating you want to make a criminal complaint of assault and to add your details to crime number 01/62447/24.’
Read; UK Lawmaker Stuns Parliament with Call for Members of the ‘COVID Cabal’ to Face Death Penalty Global Research, 17 March 2024;
‘British Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen last week called for the death penalty for Bill Gates and the “Covid cabal” which he said committed “crimes against humanity” during the Covid pandemic.
“Heads of governments around the world and others below them have engaged in what is tantamount to treason against the public,” declared Bridgen in response to a rebuttal from his colleague Penny Mordaunt, who is a long-term World Economic Forum (WEF) member.
“I’ve always opposed capital punishment on the principle that it’s wrong to take a life so it can’t be right for the state to take a life in revenge. Events have caused me to reconsider my position. So can we have a debate on crimes against humanity and the appropriate punishment for those who perpetuate, collude and cover up for these atrocities, atrocities and crimes so severe that the ultimate punishment may be required?”
Bridgen said he has reached out to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley and plans to organize a meeting where experts and whistleblowers will present evidence to demonstrate criminal activities conducted by senior members of the UK government and civil service during the pandemic.’
A retired chiropractor and airline pilot explains why the untested and dangerous Covid vaccine should never have been mandated for airline pilots.
Watch; Aviation Safety Kevin Stillwagon 21 March 2024;
‘People are starting to see the signs that an injection of mRNA, particularly the man made messenger RNA is extremely dangerous. And we’re seeing all of the warning signs now, and people that are having severe adverse reactions. And yeah, people are waking up. So it’s all a matter of education and spreading the truth around. And that’ll wake enough people up that we won’t be fooled the next time.
And unfortunately, the antibodies that are created by these shots called vaccines, particularly using the mRNA platform. These are suboptimal antibodies and they end up doing more harm than good. And we can get into the biology on that, but I think what we probably need to focus on today is aviation safety.
So it was known even before the shot rolled out that it could cause myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart muscle itself, endocarditis, which is the inflammation of the inside lining of the heart, and pericarditis, which is inflammation of the sac that surrounds the heart. All three of these conditions are extremely dangerous for a pilot to experience because it can result in sudden cardiac death. In fact, if a pilot is diagnosed with any of those three things, they are immediately grounded. They can’t even be issued a license or a medical certificate, which is required to fly an aircraft of any type, even a small Cessna, because again, of the possibility of a sudden cardiac failure.
So why they allowed this shot to go into pilots, we need to figure out why that happened. My suspicion is that it could have been one of two things. Either it was a political pressure thing because the FAA, of course, is a government entity, and if the edict comes down from the Biden administration that we’re going to mandate this thing, the FAA just runs the flag up the pole and says, okay, we’re going to go with this. And they didn’t bother doing their own investigation or testing, which they admit that they don’t do. They’re relying on the testing that was supposedly done, and they’re trusting that testing was accurate. We now know that it wasn’t.
Another reason it could be is because of fear. They fell for the narrative. They fell for the lie that this was a deadly pathogen, and if you came in contact with it, it was going to kill you. And anybody that was paying attention should have clearly seen that. In February of 2020, the Diamond Princess cruise ship was quarantined off the coast of Japan. Everybody on that ship was tested and tracked. The only people that died were elderly and co-morbid, and pilots are not elderly and co-morbid. So then they changed the narrative, you see, to, well, we should just inject everybody because it will protect people from becoming infected and stop the spread. That was an absolute lie. As I’ve already touched on, these shots were not designed to do that. Fauci knew it. Burks knew it. They even admitted, you know, anybody at the FAA that was a doctor worth their salt should have known that also. So this thing should have never gone into pilots. So, yeah, we need to take some serious looks at this and make sure that this kind of thing never, ever happens again.’
Russia / Ukraine conflict
Watch; MASS MURDER IN MOSCOW George Galloway, 24 March 2024;
George Galloway; ’11 people are now under arrest in connection with the cowardly murder of currently more than 180 people, innocent people, unarmed people, civilian people during Ramadan, when it is actually forbidden to make an aggressive attack. Muslims are allowed during Ramadan only to defend themselves from attack, they are forbidden to mount an aggressive offensive attack, even against an armed adversary. So that was my first whiff of how badly the swiftly distributed American/ UK/ Western lie that this was terrorist mass murder, had been carried out in the name of Islam. We never believed it, some of you may have been fooled, but you’d have to be up early in the morning to fool the likes of me.
You see I’ve been through many a false flag operation in the course of my lifetime. I saw the United States drawn into the Vietnam War. which killed millions of people on a false flag operation. I’ve seen lots of false flag operations that were called conspiracy theories, even though now everybody accepts that they were true. Now you won’t find anybody anywhere in the United States, anywhere in the world, who any longer believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone killed President Kennedy on Elm Street in that nightmare in November of 1963. I saw with my own eyes Senator Robert F Kennedy being murdered on his way to being appointed as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate in California in 1968, as I saw with my eyes the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King, I saw with my own eyes the murder of the great Malcolm X. I saw all these things, I heard all the official narratives, and all of them turned out to be a pack of lies. So I don’t automatically accept anything, especially when it comes out within minutes of an act of mass murder from the country that hasn’t yet solved the assassination of their own President in broad daylight, as long ago as 1963, so when the US and the UK and others swiftly tried to reassure me that it was only Isis that carried out this mass murder in Moscow I knew automatically that they were lying.
Scott Ritter; I’ll just make it as clear as I can, this was a Ukrainian intelligence operation that I believe was aided abetted by the Central Intelligence Agency because the United States is at war with Russia and I want to repeat that one more time so people understand the gravity of what I’m saying the United States is at war with Russia. It’s a covert war, it’s a denial war, but it’s a war nonetheless, and Russia’s on to this, and if you’re going to go to sleep tonight resting easy, don’t. You need to be scared to death about what’s to come, because no nation will take an attack like this on their territory lying down, and when the Russians find out, as they will, the extent to which Ukraine was involved, they already have the evidence, add to which Ukraine was assisted by the United States, and may I say, your secret intelligence service, there will be hell to pay. We’re talking about the potential of global thermonuclear war, because that’s where this leads, that’s where war with Russia leads, and if you’re not scared to death then there’s something wrong with you.’
With Rishi Sunak’s public approval rating at 25% and Biden’s at 37%, Western ‘democracy’ does not seem to be working. Western media and politicians denounce the election in Russia as undemocratic, while continuing to promote our phoney democracy as the real thing.
Watch; West In Meltdown As Putin Takes 88% Of The Vote UK Column News, 18 March 2024;
‘Well, we’re going to get straight on with the election of Putin. Of course, this has caused huge angst in the western governments, and we’ve only got to have a look at some of the headlines to see the vitriol that’s come across as a result of an 88% of the vote for Putin. So we’ve got snarling
– ‘Vladimir Putin’s chilling switch to anger and defiance in election victory’.
– ‘Putin says Russian election indicates trust and hope in him’.
– ‘Putin may be the biggest dupe of his fake election landslide’.
– ‘Putin warns of World War III if Western troops enter Ukraine as he wins another election’
Brian Gerrish; So, Alex, I’ll welcome you into today’s news and just ask you what you think. I had to smile because, of course, I’ve seen over many, many elections in UK and the West, what is essentially the controlling of the vote by massive amounts of money to influence which way the public are going to vote. And, of course, we’ve seen the shambles in the United States over recent years. It seems a bit rich for the finger to be pointed at Putin, but perhaps I’m being cynical again.
Alex Thomson; Well, Putin did himself lay his finger on this issue you just raised of US vote fraud in acceptance speeches. He has been accurately subtitled by outlets available in the West. He did say that the USA is now a joke electorally. He knows very well what the game is. I mean, he, being a man who believes in strong central rule, although Russia is also a federal state, has often said, we Russians have a very different system from the US, we don’t quite understand it. A lot of Europeans say the same thing. We don’t understand how the US states and counties have so much sovereignty. But nevertheless, he has come out and done what he never did before. I’m not cheerleading for him, I’m just observing. Whereas until a few months ago, he would have said, the internal political affairs of the United States are not for me, as President of the Russian Federation, to speak about, he is now saying, you don’t have a leg to stand on. Cynics would, of course, say that that’s him deflecting. But I think the point is solidly made. I think the overwhelming majority of the population, the large majority anyway and certainly outside the three main cities did vote for him.’
Read; Putin’s Election Victory Global Research, 25 March 2024;
‘Before Putin came to power in 2000, Russia’s Gross National Product was approximately $196 billion in 1999. Today, the same figure is 2 trillion 215 billion dollars, that is, more than 11 times that of 1999. (By the way, there is also dollar inflation, but we can still say that it is at least 8-9 times higher. In 1999, per capita income in Russia was 1,330 dollars. Today it is $14,400, almost 11 times that. Inflation was 36 and a half percent in 1999, and 3 and a half percent today, and during the war. Gold reserves were 12.6 billion dollars in 1999. Today it is more than $600 billion (47x increase). Debt accounted for 92 percent of GNP in 1999, today it is 23 percent. The average pension in 1999 was 449 rubles per month (about 4 and a half dollars at today’s exchange rate!). Today it is 19,332 rubles.
Check out Vladimir Putin’s performances in the four previous Russian presidential elections in which he ran as a candidate:
2024 – 87.30%
2018 – 76.69%
2012 – 63.6%
2004 – 71.3%
2000 – 52.9%
As can be seen, as we moved away from Western influence, that is, as we moved away from under the wings of imperialism, the economy and votes increased.
Although the historical figure whom Putin takes as an example is shown as Peter the Great by most Russians, many experts also liken him to Ataturk. The title of the article written by British lawyer Christopher B. Stone in 2005 was ‘A Kemalist in the Kremlin’.“Putin could be Russia’s Ataturk,” Moscow Times writer Aleksey Bayer wrote in 2009.
In 2017, Patrick Buchanan, a politician and writer for The American Conservative magazine in the USA, said, “Putin is behaving like the Ataturk of the 21st Century.” In 2018, at the international press conference watched by the whole world, Putin said of Ataturk, “He was a friend of Russia. The founder of modern Turkey is very valuable to us,” he said.
Atatürk also fought against Western Imperialism and established a modern independent republic, but not a westerner one. Today, we can say that Putin is doing something similar.’
Watch this excellent interview with economics professor Michael Hudson about the murky, deceitful strategies behind the US obsession to gain world domination by forcibly exporting terrorism, criminal capitalism and endless racism-based wars.
Watch; NATO’s Ship Sinking as Russia Crushed Ukraine’s Army Dialogue Works, 19 March 2024;
‘When we look at this war in Ukraine what was the end game for the US foreign policy in Ukraine?
Michael Hudson; Well it wasn’t really an endgame so much as a fantasy. The United States actually believed that it would enable Ukraine to drain Russia’s resources, that was the main thing. It had no intention or expectation that Ukraine could actually beat Russia, what it thought was that if they could get a puppet leader like Zelenskyi to fight to the last Ukrainian, every Ukrainian that died would at least absorb one Russian bullet, and that would help deplete Russia’s military capacity. Obviously Russia has a lot more bullets than Ukrainians had individuals, and the Americans had no understanding of how large Russia’s manufacturing ability was.The state department and military strategists believed the Kool-Aid that they’d been drinking, they believed the fantasy that Russia was just a gas station with atom bombs and that all Russia could do was either drop an atom bomb or else let the Ukrainians march right into Moscow, and all the people would get so upset that Russia had lost that they’d overthrow Putin and bring back an American-backed Boris Yeltsin and America could then repurchase Russian resources and restore neoliberalism.
Why did the US sanctions not bring the Russian economy to its knees?
Sanctions against any country have almost always backfired because the effect of sanctions is very much like creating protective tariffs for the country. When America told the Baltics stop exporting your cheese and your food, your grain crops to Russia, what did Russia do without chese? It didn’t starve to death, it said okay we’re going to start our own cheese industry. Now it no longer depends on Lithuania and the Baltics for cheese. Europe had hoped to be a grain exporter, well once there were sanctions on Russia, Russia develops its own agriculture and its own grain, so the effect of sanctions was to make Russia independent of the Euro Zone and increasingly self-reliant, and that has certainly strengthened its balance of payments, not losing it, so Russia has lost the export income from its oil and gas to Europe but it no longer has to pay the import charges of its food and the other products that it was getting before the sanctions because it’s producing these at home, so basically it’s as if President Biden said ‘President Putin we love you, we want to help you, we’re going to help you get rich in Russia the same way we got rich in the United States, we’re going to help you do protective tariffs’. Now your neoliberal people in Russia don’t tell you that but you do need protective tariffs, and since you won’t enact these yourselves like we did in the 19th century, we’ll have sanctions and that will help you develop your own industry and so you can end up getting rich just the way the United States did. Russia is now much more independent and strong and there’s no power that America or Europe have to impose any further sanctions on Russia.
What Russia could have done (in 1992) as opposed to Yeltsin was what I had been advocating when I went back three times and lectured before the Duma, and said look, you have all your housing, you can give your housing to everybody who occupies it now. Give your all of your real estate to its current occupants free. You will have the lowest cost economy in the world by just turning over the real estate to them, you will be an economy without land rent and in the West, America, England, 80% of bank credit of the debt overhead is mortgage rent. Russia was free of all this, it could have got free of it, but the Americans convinced Russia that the way to get rich was to emulate the neoliberalism that American students are taught in the schools.’
Mainstream media at last admits what alternative news sites have been saying for years, that the CIA/US/NATO have been pushing this war for decades.
Watch: The Ukraine War Lie Just COLLAPSED – This Changes EVERYTHING, Russell Brand, 28 February 2024;
‘On the weekend of the 2nd anniversary of the war the New York Times has published a lengthy article revealing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February the 24th 2022 was instigated by a systematic and widespread campaign of military intelligence aggression by the United States.’
Russell Brand; ‘What we’re talking about is the New York Times have now acknowledged that there are CIA bases inside Ukraine and have been for the last 10 years and they’ve been waging a shadow war on Russia from within Ukraine and essentially deep State interests have been in control of Ukraine for the last 10 years which is all since that 2014 coup which we’ve been talking about in Independent media but they’ve not been talking about in legacy media, and that’s before we talk about NATO’s role in exacerbating these conditions and the escalation of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. So why are the New York Times telling us now that there are CIA bases in Ukraine and probably biolabs and all the sorts of things that we’ve been discussing in these spaces for a while, and were of course called conspiracy theorists for discussing, is evidently true, so what’s the agenda of the legacy media? Is it as simple as ensuring that funding can continue? And is it clear now that the legacy media are starting to acknowledge that you cannot completely suppress truth?’
it’s very interesting that the most censored events in history are the most lied-about events in history and they’re not being lied about by conspiracy theorist they’re being lied about by The Establishment and their Legacy Media attack dogs. Let’s get into the story. For the past 2 years nearly every reference in the US media to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia has been unprovoked, the public was told that this was a war without cause, the Ukraine was blameless and that the invasion was to be explained entirely in terms of the intentions and psychology of one man, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Of course that’s why there was so much hysteria about the now famous Tucker Carson interview because then you can watch him with your own eyes and you can make your own evaluations about Russian propaganda versus US propaganda.
This (2014) coup was the culmination of two decades of imperialist inroads into the former Soviet block with the expansion of NATO to include virtually all of Eastern Europe in violation of pledges made to the leaders of the former Soviet Union. The New York Times is silent on this earlier history as well as on the role of the CIA in the Maidan events. Why are they silent on those important facts? Maidan set the stage for a massive escalation of the CIA intervention. As detailed in the Times report the intelligence agency played a central role in fuelling conflict between Ukraine and Russia, first as a low-level war against pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine, then as a full scale war after the Russian invasion in February 2022. Three US administrations were involved, first Obama then Trump now Biden. I’m sure you know by now that what I suppose that indicates is that whoever you vote for, when it comes to significant issues like perpetuating forever wars, you don’t really have the right to vote. That’s why we’ve got independent candidates like Robert Kennedy who say they will end these wars.’
Watch; Post-Election Putin Surge to Spell Disaster for NATO & Ukraine Colonel Douglas Macgregor, 17 March 2024;
‘What I do know about Russia is that none of it bears any resemblance to the description in the West and people have got to put an end to this because you got a country that doesn’t want to go to war, what it wants to do is business with the West. This is the real aim in Russia, and this nonsense about democracy, we keep throwing this word around, it becomes an excuse for something. No one used the word democracy more frequently than the Bolsheviks and the Communists, they talk about it all the time and there never was any, there’s no democracy in Ukraine, it’s a very much a Stalinist like state at this point, with an NKVD called the Ukrainian secret police, the SBU, that is threatening people. The Ukrainian population lives in fear of its government in Kiev. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians want this war to end and it needs to end or Ukraine will cease to exist as a nation, and we need to stop it, we want to stop it, the Russians want to stop it. Go back to March and April of 2022 when despite very difficult circumstances, the Ukrainians and the Russians came to an agreement. They were ready to sign a peace agreement with each other and end the war. We sent Boris Johnson in as a surrogate for the US president to tell Mr Zelensky, ‘Don’t sign it, continue to fight, you will win, you will have the entire backing of NATO, of all of Europe stands behind you, you will have
inexhaustible supplies of weapons and money and troops and so forth.’ It’s all nonsense. It was never true, but he did it, and now Ukraine is virtually destroyed. No one in Washington wants to admit the truth, no one in London wants to admit the truth. We failed miserably and there is no chance, no chance of Europe mobilizing to march into Ukraine. Anybody who knows anything about the European forces as I do knows that they are simply incapable of launching major offensive operations against the Russians in Eastern Europe.’
Watch; Macron is freaking out over Ukraine collapse The Duran, 27 February 2024;
Alex Christoforou; ‘Alexander what do you make of Macron’s statements about NATO troops or EU troops possibly entering into the conflict in Ukraine?’
Alexander Mercouris; ‘Well I think it is first of all a symptom of panic, I mean they they can see the way in which the situation in Ukraine is now accelerating out of their control, so it’s panic, but people who are in panic, and you know he called this urgent meeting to the Elysee Palace, brought people from you know all 20 countries to come along and attend, people who are panicking do incredibly reckless and dangerous things, and I have to say I’m not at all surprised that it is Macron who’s advocating this, and it may happen, I mean you know there’s a lot of talk about this.
Now you remember we were talking a few days ago about setting up this iron triangle of fortified cities on the Dnieper River to try to hold the Russians back, we’ve had all this rhetoric now for several weeks about, you know, the fact that the Russians are coming and we’ve got to stop them on the Dnieper or somewhere else, so I could just quite easily see the political leaders in France, Germany, the EU, of course enthusiastically embracing this, wanting to send troops into Ukraine.
Now various governments, Sweden for example, I believe Germany as well, have said that they’re not going to do this, and the Polish foreign minister, and you know Poland’s already got massive protests on the borders with Ukraine, farmers protesting, it isn’t just apparently farmers, people right across Poland are becoming angry and they’re flying Soviet flags and putting up pictures of Putin, which you know anything about Poland you would know how extraordinary that is.’
Real journalists like Ben Norton have been saying for years that the US/CIA provokes pointless destructive and murderous wars around the world, driven by US arms companies, bought politicians and unaccountable secret agencies.
Watch; How the CIA oversees the Ukraine proxy war on Russia Geopolitical Economy Report, 17 March 2024;
Ben Norton; The United States has been involved from very early on in this conflict, exacerbating it, pushing for proxy war on Russia, and for decades US diplomats, US politicians have known that they could cause a civil war in Ukraine that could lead to a Russian invasion. This was admitted by the former US ambassador to Russia William Burns who today is the Director of the CIA. I wrote an article about that over at geopolitical economy.com and I will link to that in the description below, but back in 2008 when he was US ambassador to Russia he published a confidential embassy cable titled niet means niet. Niet is no in Russian so no means no Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines. We only have this document thanks to WikiLeaks whose founder Julian Assange is being tortured in a British prison, according to the the UN expert on torture, and is facing being imprisoned in the United States for the rest of his life for the so-called crime of doing journalism. And in this Embassy cable William Burns wrote that Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition to Ukraine joining NATO, stressing that Russia would view further Eastward expansion of NATO as a military threat, and he was speaking of the 2008 Bucharest Summit, the NATO Summit in Romania, in which US President George Bush insisted that Ukraine and Georgia, both former parts of the Soviet Union, were going to join NATO.
And in that Summit, by the way, France and Germany were angry and criticized the US because they were afraid it could set off a war in Ukraine, which is of course exactly what happened. Now William Burns, in this embassy cable, he wrote this is back in 2008, he wrote quote ‘in Ukraine these include fears that the issue that is NATO expansion ‘could potentially split the country in two leading to violence or even some claim civil war which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene’. And this is exactly what happened, the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that overthrew the democratically elected, geopolitically-neutral president and installed a pro-western regime which set off a civil war. According to the United Nations between 2014 and the end of 2021 more than 14,000 Ukrainians died in the civil war fuelled by the West, and then after years of deliberating the Russian military did decide to intervene, which is exactly what the US ambassador to Russia warned about in 2008, and today he is the director of the CIA which has played a key role in fuelling the war in Ukraine.
So this brings me back to the NY Times reveals CIA operations in Ukraine article with which I started today’s analysis, published in the New York Times this February titled the ‘Spy War- how the CIA secretly helps Ukraine fight Putin’.
Now I’ll start pointing out that this article is by two journalists who are very friendly to the CIA, Adam Entous and Michael Schwarz, they’re both anti-Russia hawks and they have a long history of writing articles in the New York Times and other media outlets that are very sympathetic to US spy agencies, and this is how the media works, you get these journalists that make friendships and build contacts in spy agencies and then the CIA and other US government agencies give them information, and these are controlled leaks, managed leaks, and it’s part of how the CIA uses the media as what a former CIA operative referred to as a ‘mighty worlitzer’, that is the the CIA plays the the media like a musical instrument and uses the media to spread this information that makes it look good. But also is part of psychological warfare and information war against Russia and of course the New York Times in particular is very closely allied with the CIA and has been used for many years to spread disinformation.’
The true colours of yet another US assault on democracy, this time to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of relentless, expansionist US empire building.
Read; Waffen SS Veteran Lauded by Trudeau and Zelensky is Given Award by Ukraine 21st Century Wire, 20 March 2024;
Ternopol Region in western Ukraine announced on Tuesday that it had decorated Yaroslav Hunka, the World War II Nazi soldier controversially cheered by Canadian lawmakers in parliament. The medal was presented on Hunka’s 99th birthday to his great-niece.
Hunka served in the 14th Waffen SS division, which was made up of Ukrainian volunteers and was responsible for atrocities against Poles, Jews, and the Soviet resistance.
A week after that, Canada refused Russia’s request to extradite Hunka, who has been charged with genocide for his role in World War II. Hunka was a guest of honor at the Canadian Parliament last September, during the visit by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Then-speaker Anthony Rota introduced him as “a Canadian hero” who “fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians,” after which Hunka received two standing ovations. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau deflected blame for the affair onto Rota, who had to resign. About a month after the incident, Moscow charged Hunka with genocide and issued a warrant for his arrest. Russian diplomats have pointed to the incident as proof of “strong influence” of neo-Nazi ideology in Canada.
Palestine / Israel
Ralph Wilde, Professor of International Law at University College London, represents the Arab League at the International Court of Justice in the case against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its illegal annexation of Palestine.
Watch; Lawyer’s incredible speech dismantling Israeli occupation of Palestine at The Hague PoliticsJoe, 29 February 2024;
‘It’s a great honor and privilege to appear before you and to represent the League of Arab States.
The Palestinian people have been denied the exercise of their legal right to self-determination through the more than century long violent, colonial, racist effort to establish a nation state exclusively for the Jewish people in the land of mandatory Palestine. When this began after the first world war the Jewish population of that land was 11%. Forcibly implementing zionism in this demographic context has necessarily involved the extermination or forced displacement of some of the non-Jewish Palestinian population, the exercise of domination over and subjugation, dispossession and immiseration of remaining non-jewish Palestinians. The immigration to that land of Jewish people, regardless of any direct personal link, and the denial of Palestinian refugees the right to return, all operating through a racist distinction privileging Jewish people over non-Jewish Palestinian people, has necessitated serious violation of all the fundamental Yos Kogan and Erga Omnes norms of international law, the right of self-determination, the prohibitions on aggression, genocide, crimes against humanity, racial discrimination, apartheid and torture, and the core protections of IHL (International Humanitarian Law). Today I will address first violations of international law arising out of the regime of racial domination, apartheid, perpetrated against the Palestinian people across the entire land of historic Palestine.
The occupation of the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank including East Jerusalem is existentially illegal on two mutually reinforcing bases. First the law on the use of force. Here the occupation is illegal both as a use of force without valid justification and because it’s enabling an illegal purported annexation. As such it is an aggression. Second, the law of self- determination. Here it’s illegal again because of the association with illegal purported annexation and also more generally because it is quite simply an exercise of authority over the Palestinian people that by its very nature violates their right to freedom. This multifaceted existential illegality involving serious violations of peremptory norms has two key consequences, first the occupation must end. Israel must renounce its claim to sovereignty over the Palestinian territory. All settlers must be removed immediately. This is required to end the illegality, to discharge the positive obligation to enable immediate Palestinian self administration and because Israel lacks any legal entitlement to exercise authority. Second, in the absence of the occupation ending, necessarily everything Israel does in the Palestinian territory lacks a valid International legal basis.
I will close by quoting Palestinian academic and poet Refaat Alareer from his final poem posted 36 days before he was killed by Israel in Gaza on the 6th of December 2023, ‘ if I must die you must live to tell my story, if I must die let it bring hope, let it be a story.’
Politicians who support Israeli genocide and war crimes may go to prison if the International Criminal Court (ICC) decides that by doing so they have breached international law. UK law forbids any support for Hamas, even by spoken or written words, now if the ICC rules in favour of this case, support for Israel’s crimes may become a terrorist offence.
Watch Tweet; ABC News on Australian PM Anthony Albanese’s referral to the International Criminal Court for alleged complicity in Gaza Genocide ABC News, 5 March 2024;
Presenter; ‘Now, the legal team you’re advising argues to the International Criminal Criminal Court a case can be made the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has personally aided, abetted or assisted in the commission of genocide, their words, in Gaza by Israel. On what basis is this claim made?
Sheryn Omeri KC; Well, that’s one mode of accessorial liability set out in the Rome Statute. Another mode is that a person has made any other contribution to the actions of another group, knowing that that other group has the intention of committing, in this case genocide and that other group would be members of the israeli government and its defence forces.
And so the allegations in this communication are that Prime Minister Albanese, among other members of Australian parliament who are mentioned in the communication, have assisted, in either of those two ways, Israel to commit genocide in Gaza by providing rhetorical support in their public statements, their press conferences, their speeches, have also provided material assistance by means of arms export to Israel, perhaps most particularly exporting parts of the F 35 fighter jets.
They’ve also provided military intelligence to Israel through, for example, the facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory and also through the suspension of funding to UNRWA.
Those two modes of accessorial liability have been defined in the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court and including in a case that I worked on when I worked at the International Criminal Court to include providing, for example, moral support or encouragement through public declarations of support or failing, for example, to call out a genocide.
It is the international criminal court that’s responsible for prosecuting international crimes. And if someone is convicted by the international criminal court, they may well be sent to prison.’
People are becoming more and more horrified and incredulous as their deranged political leaders continue to support the Israeli massacres. This investigative report by Lowkey shows the extent of the power that Israel holds over the UK and explains why both parties and the media abjectly surrendered any semblance of humanity in supporting Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Watch; Lowkey EXPOSES Israel’s Secret Role in Britain Double Down News, 15 February 2024;
‘We know that Britain has a role in Israel but Israel has a role in Britain. Pro-israel forces currently have control of NHS, Foreign Office, Home Office and Ministry of Defence data, your data. Nigel Farage liked to talk about “taking back control” but he wouldn’t say anything about Israeli intelligence companies taking control of key functions of our intelligence and police services. He wouldn’t say anything about the 12,000 US soldiers in this country. They don’t want to take back control they want to control you. What about Rishi Sunak our Prime Minister? Well his family company Infosys which was founded by his father-in-law, and that his wife still has £500 million worth of shares in, has many Israeli subsidiaries and hundreds of employees within Israel. Infosys signed a memorandum of understanding with the state of Israel in 2012 to develop relations and deepen cooperation. Infosys which works on collecting biometric data has also had a director until recently who was a veteran of Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200, Yuri Levine.
Let’s not forget that 44 whistleblowers from within Unit 8200 came out and said that this unit is surveilling the Palestinians to build kompromat against them and blackmailing them with that information. Unit 8200, don’t forget that name because the very company that the British police use to hack phones in this country is Cellebrite. This is an Israeli intelligence company which is headed by alumni of Unit 8200 in the Israeli military.
The CEO of Cellebrite has claimed that they have remote control access to all of the information procured through their products. The British police not only use this Israeli intelligence company to hack phones of their citizens they also use something called Nice Systems as part of their investigations. Now Nice Systems is a subsidiary of Israel’s largest Arms Company Elbit Systems. The level of integration between British and Israeli intelligence is unprecedented. Not only is this program used by British police it’s also used by the British Foreign Office.
So you are talking about the outsourcing of Britain’s external intelligence functions to elements of the Israeli intelligence agencies. When we look even further at this question we wonder how companies like Cellebrite could have got such a foothold in the British public sector. Well there is an organisation by the name of the UK Israel Tech Hub which has played a very important role in all of this, it’s based in the British Embassy in Israel, but it is staffed by former military and intelligence personnel from the Israeli regime. It’s headed by the former director general of the Israeli finance ministry Haim Shani. Shani was also simultaneously the director of Cellebrite. But who funds the UK-Israel Tech Hub? The UK-Israel Tech Hub is funded by the British Foreign Office, by the British Embassy in Israel and the British Department of Trade. The UK-Israel Tech Hub exists for the sole purpose and with the stated objective of procuring public sector contracts in Britain for Israeli cyber and tech companies. British taxpayers fund an organization which is facilitating Israeli tech companies, staffed by former Israeli intelligence personnel, taking over public sector contracts in Britain, including in the NHS.
Currently the data for the British Home Office, the British Ministry of Defence and the NHS is handled by a company called Oracle. Oracle was founded by Larry Ellison, the seventh richest man in the world and close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu. Larry Ellison is the largest funder of the Friends of the IDF charity in the history of the organization. In addition to that, this company Oracle offered the directorship to Benjamin Netanyahu, meaning that the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence the Foreign Office and the NHS, has its data stored in a cloud run by a company that Benjamin Netanyahu was supposed to be the director of.’
Doublespeak from American and UK politicians and media has brought us to the Orwellian nightmare hellscape where words mean nothing and insane, child-murdering depravity is normalised and excused.
Watch; Aaron Maté : More State Dept. Lies Aaron Mate, 20 March 2024;
Judge Andrew Napolitano; ‘Aaron a pleasure my dear friend, thank you for joining us. What do you think will happen when the IDF invades Rafa? We have a city that had about a population of about a quarter of a million, it now has a million and a quarter there, the original population plus refugees that the Israelis have forced South under the pretext that they’re going to a safe haven, and now prime minister Netanyahu’s government is planning an invasion how is this going to end?’
Aaron Mate; ‘It’s hard to fathom that this mass murder campaign by Israel could get even worse, but that’s what Israel is threatening right now unless it’s stopped. What would happen, people would die in even bigger numbers and try to break the gates of Gaza to flee to Egypt, and it’s unclear if they would be able to succeed, they’re pretty effectively caged in the Gaza death camp, so it’s it’s really hard to imagine. And what is the US doing to stop this? Well they claim they oppose Israel’s planned invasion of Rafa but they’re not slowing any of the military support that allows Israel to carry out such attacks.’
Andrew Napolitano; ‘Professor Jeffrey Sachs, whom you know, has referred to the Israeli government as a criminal regime unlike anything we’ve seen since World War II.’
Aaron Mate; ‘The brutality and the brazenness of this Israeli government and the outright supremacy the outright expressions of supremacy that underpin their actions in Gaza, that to me is not seen since the Nazis espoused similar views about their supremacy and the complete dehumanization of their victims, so it’s hard not to draw those comparisons.
Now we’ve seen at least 31,000 Palestinians slaughtered by Israel including over 13,000 children and again the official tolls are always in undercount because many more bodies are buried under the rubble.
it just it speaks to how feckless the Biden Administration looks, bending over backwards to arm Israel, finding creative ways to send it weapons, so for example, breaking up weapons packages into smaller little chunks so it doesn’t have to provide notification to Congress that it’s sending the weapons, and when it does send a huge weapons package then bypassing congressional oversight by issuing these waivers on national security grounds. And even that isn’t enough for Netanyahu who now feels empowered to come and humiliate Biden in his own town. The D waivers are extremely troublesome to me because they are documents signed under oath by Anthony Blinken in which he says two things, this is a matter of American national security and it’s an emergency, we don’t have time to go to Congress. Now we all know it’s not a matter of either, it’s not a matter of American national security and it’s not an emergency, they have plenty of time to go to Congress and he keeps getting away with this.’
Read; UNRWA staffers tortured by Israeli troops to falsely admit ‘Hamas links’ The Cradle, 9 March 2024;
‘Israel has sought for years to dismantle the UN agency to destroy Palestinian refugees’ right of return.
An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reuters reported on 9 March.
The testimonies are contained in a report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reviewed by Reuters and dated February 2024.
“Agency staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli authorities while in detention and pressured to make false statements against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities,” the report says.
The report included allegations of abuse and torture in Israeli detention, including severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.
Though waterboarding is widely viewed as torture by human rights groups, the Reuters report described Israeli actions only as “coercion” and “pressure” to force detained Palestinians to make false statements.
In addition to describing the torture of UNRWA employees, the report stated that Israel has subjected Palestinian detainees more broadly to beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, and sexual violence. Some detainees have also died after Israel denied them medical treatment, the report added.
Israel’s campaign against UNRWA is part of a broader campaign started years ago to dismantle the agency, which helps keep the hope of Palestinian refugees returning to their stolen lands and homes in what is now Israel alive.’
Read: Leaked Israel lobby presentation urges US officials to justify war on Gaza with ‘Hamas rape’ claims Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone, 6 March 2024;
‘The Grayzone has obtained slides from a confidential Israel lobby presentation based on data from Republican pollster Frank Luntz. They contain talking points for politicians and public figures seeking to justify Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.’
‘Two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups are holding private briefings in New York City to coach elected officials and well-known figures on how to influence public opinion in favor of the Israeli military’s rampage in Gaza, The Grayzone can reveal. These PR sessions, convened by the UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council, rely on data collected by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster and pundit.
The Luntz-tested presentations on the war in Gaza urge politicians to avoid trumpeting America’s supposedly shared democratic values with Israel, and focus instead on deploying “The Language of War with Hamas.” According to this framing, they must deploy incendiary language painting Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while insisting Israel is engaged in “a war for humanity.”
Initiated at Israel’s United Nations mission in December 2023 with speeches by neoliberal tech oligarch Sheryl Sandberg and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and speaking fees from Israel lobby organizations, Tel Aviv’s propaganda blitz has yet to produce a single self-identified victim of sexual assault by Hamas. A March 5 report by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten did not contain one direct testimony of sexual assault on October 7. What’s more, Patten’s team said they found “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.”
To further the demonization of Palestinians, the Luntz-crafted slides advise that “Israel’s best response is the brainwashed children of Hamas spewing hatred towards Jews (even more than condemning Israelis) with words they don’t know the meaning of and can’t even pronounce.”
The portrayal of the youth of Gaza as ignorant tools of Hamas is clearly intended to deflect from Israel’s industrial-scale slaughter of some 15,000 children in the Gaza Strip since October 7, as well as the wounding, orphaning and starving of countless more in the besieged territory.’
Read; Lawyer behind ‘Hamas rape’ claims exposed as fraud The Cradle, 26 March 2024;
‘Israeli officials have “dissociated themselves” from a lawyer who has played a vital role in promoting false claims that Hamas carried out systematic rape and sexual abuse on 7 October, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on 24 March.
The Israeli newspaper reported claims by Israeli ministry officials that lawyer Cochav Elkayam-Levy had produced inaccurate research, spread false stories about Hamas atrocities, and sought to collect millions of dollars in donations for a so-called ‘civic commission’ of which she is the only member.
Elkayam-Levy, who is the head of the Deborah Institute and a lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University, was among the first to spread false claims that Hamas had carried out systematic rape during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
As The Grayzone detailed, Elkayam-Levy presented images of female Kurdish fighters killed in Syria while claiming they were Jewish Israeli women who had been killed and raped by Hamas fighters at the Nova Music Festival on 7 October.
Elkayam-Levy spread the story in the international press “about the pregnant woman who had her stomach cut open – a story that was proven to be untrue,” one official complained. “It’s no joke. Little by little, professionals began to distance themselves from her because she is unreliable.”
She also created a ‘civilian commission’ to investigate alleged Hamas atrocities. While the commission’s name suggests it was a government-established body, it consisted only of Elkayam-Levy herself.
She then solicited millions of dollars in donations for the fake commission, claiming a budget of $8 million, including $1.5 million for administrative fees, was needed.’
Watch; George Galloway Wins Rochdale, Sends Establishment Running; Flour Massacre, NYT Hoax Richard Medhurst, 2 March 2024;
Richard Medhurst; ‘George Galloway has won and I couldn’t be happier because you know George Galloway for me is a is a towering epic in the true sense of the term, an epic figure in in British politics, and especially for his foreign policy. So you know, when I was growing up I would watch George Galloway, my mother would say ‘look look at the TV that’s George Galloway’, and you know you’d see him opposing the Iraq War, opposing what’s happening in Palestine, the many massacres in Gaza, and I couldn’t be happier that he won, and it’s not just the fact that he won, it’s how he’s upset the establishment, because you have to understand that now that George Galloway is back in Parliament he’s going to be like a thorn in their side, because right now they’re very content with the way things have been going, where they can just help the Israelis commit all these war crimes and there’s no one really to hold them to account.
Let me show you some stuff that happened in Gaza which is I mean truly truly so horrific that even the mainstream media couldn’t ignore it, which is rare you know, they’ll usually take a while to actually give the truth, if they ever do, but this was so awful that they couldn’t even lie about it. So this is being called The Flour Massacre. What happened is that food came in, driven in by the Israelis into Gaza, and again this doesn’t even begin to cover the basic needs of the people in Gaza, but nevertheless this is what happened, they were driving in these trucks and then when people started rushing towards the trucks, which is understandable given that they’re being starved to death in a genocide, the Israelis began opening fire at them. They killed over a 100 people and wounded 750 people. I mean if this had happened in Europe, if this had happened in Paris, if this had happened in Berlin, what what kind of reaction do you think that would elicit? 750 people wounded over 100 killed, I mean it’s a massacre, and it’s just one of many massacres. Almost every single day you’re having things like this happen, maybe not on the same scale but certainly hundreds being killed every day in the most horrific fashion. It’s called the Flour Massacre because they were rushing just to get flour you know because there’s people are eating animal feed. One person was crushed by a tank, I’m not going to show the photos because its so bad.
Watch; Upending the “West’s Dictatorship.” New MP George Galloway on the Next Era of Politics Glenn Greenwald, 8 March 2024;
George Galloway MP; ‘What if what I did last Thursday is done by scores of constituencies up and down the country maybe hundreds? We’ve got 300 parliamentary candidates, all ready to pay their own parliamentary election expenses, 300. We didn’t have three five weeks ago. What if this is an idea whose time has come, what if it bursts the toxic bubble in the Beltway in Whitehall and Westminster, what if it puts the skids under the prevailing orthodoxy that we have lived under for so very long?
Dr Johnson said the grimmest dictatorship of them all is the dictatorship of the prevailing orthodoxy and that’s the dictatorship we’ve been living under. Sure there was a bit of lipstick on the pig, and a lot of synthetic sound and fury between the two front benches, just like as you describe happens in America, but in truth you could argue about the color of the walls in the Ministry of Health or a penny or tuppence on or off the income tax, but that’s all you could argue about. The basic given that Britain will be a neoliberal capitalist country in thrall to the United States and will follow an imperialist foreign policy abroad, these were beyond questioning, and anyone who even might be a questioner of those things, like Mr Corbyn my parliamentary colleague for many decades, he had to be destroyed, not because he would have put the income tax up by tuppence instead of tuppence ha’penny, he might not even have done that actually, but because he could not be depended upon to support the foreign policy of the United States which is de facto the foreign policy of Britain.’
Abbey Martin says Joe Biden is a genocider and a war criminal, and the mainstream media are accomplices in it. Follow @MoatsTV #Biden #Gaza @AbbyMartin
Watch; Air drop and bomb drop George Galloway X 5 March 2024;
George Galloway; ‘What were your thoughts when you saw the beneficence of Joe Biden parachuting in some loaves and fishes not to feed the multitudes in the Gaza Strip? Both you and I know the Gaza Strip very well. You made a wonderful series of films about it. Were you sickened by me at the revolting fair that was dropping from the air from American Air Force jets?’
Abby Martin; ‘Joe Biden is a genocider, he’s a criminal, he’s sitting there eating ice cream, pontificating on, oh, maybe we can have a ceasefire next week or perhaps the week after. It’s an abomination as 2.3 million people, less now since so many scores have been killed, but starvation has taken hold, George, and we know that dropping a mere 28,000, I think, aid packets, food packets as bombs are also simultaneously being dropped while people are starving to death. What does that do? It’s a drop in the bucket.
And you have the audacity of publications like the New York Times, who just ran with a falsified story about mass rape taking place, hiring random psychopaths to adjudicate the atrocities on October 7. And they’re writing haikus, trying to talk around this nonsense on the heels of this massacre, this widespread massacre where israeli tanks and snipers open fire on Palestinians scavenging, starving to death, George, this is what we’re dealing with. It’s complete moral bankruptcy from the entire world.
And look at two congresspeople in our congress, Corey Bush and Rashida Talib. They’re the only people who have pledged to stop arming this genocidal apartheid state. I’m embarrassed to be an American. I’m embarrassed that this is the political representation that we have five months in to this genocide.’
George Galloway; ‘It has to be a matter of deep psychology for so many politicians in your country and in mine to be as unmoved by what you and I are watching as we are moved by it. What lies beneath it, what’s the reason for our politicians being completely unmoved? At massacres of infants, at the maiming amputations and heads burst open, of little babies being taken to now nonexistent hospitals. How is it possible not to be moved by that. Five months to have seen children shredded apart?’
Abby Martin; ‘I do not know the answer to that, George, other than political cowardice and the fact that these politicians only care about one thing and one thing only, their political careers You do not get into politics in either of our countries if you are a moral person, other than, of course, people like you. I mean, it is unbelievable and disgusting to see the amount of politicians completely beholden to a genocidal apartheid state committing genocide. I mean, killing scores of civilians, women, infants, like you said. I mean, this is a genocidal policy. You are depriving infants of formula and nursing mothers of water.
I always say, George, that corporate media as we know, is subsidised by the very institutions that journalists should be exposing, right? Banks, oil companies, defence contractors. When you are a journalist getting into corporate media, you are a willing agent of empire. You have to believe in the reigning orthodoxy of global capitalism and of US imperialism. Otherwise you will not sustain jobs in these institutions.
Because institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these Beltway media publications and so called papers of record, they are accomplices to genocide. Those who are running the editorial line in these publications should be brought up to the Hague, right, for complicity, for engineering and manufacturing consent among the American public.’
Read; Global protests erupt against Israeli aggression on Gaza Quds News Network, 17 March 2024;
‘Yesterday, capitals and cities worldwide witnessed a surge of impassioned protests denouncing the ongoing war waged by Israel on the Gaza Strip. Masses of demonstrators voiced urgent pleas for an immediate cessation of the Israeli genocide and the delivery of essential aid to the besieged enclave. In Paris, France, crowds rallied, demanding accountability for what they labeled as Israeli genocide in Gaza. Similar sentiments echoed in Berlin, Germany, where protesters called for an end to hostilities and an embargo on arms exports to Israel. Stockholm, Sweden, joined the chorus of condemnation, with protesters decrying Western governments’ complicity in the suffering of the Palestinian people. The call for justice reverberated across Danish cities, including Copenhagen and Kolding, where demonstrators demanded accountability for Israeli crimes.
Italy’s Milan saw a massive sit-in, urging an immediate halt to the bloodshed in Gaza, while Oslo, Norway, witnessed hundreds demanding an end to the Israeli onslaught. Even as far as South Korea’s Seoul and Tunisia’s capital, Tunis, voices rose against the atrocities, condemning the international community’s inaction and calling for solidarity with Palestine.
Since October 7th last year, Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza, supported by the US, has inflicted untold suffering, with tens of thousands of civilian casualties, predominantly women and children, and leaving behind a trail of humanitarian catastrophe and infrastructure devastation.’
Yemen is the only country in the world prepared to take action in support of Palestine. The Ansarallah say until humanitarian aid is allowed into Gaza they will continue to intercept ships supplying Israel.
Read; Yemen’s Indian Ocean checkmate The Cradle, 21 March 2024;
‘Ansarallah’s maritime reach has surpassed all initial expectations, now extending to the distant shores of the Indian Ocean in its ambitious plan to besiege Israel by targeting the occupation state’s shipping interests.
Yemen’s strategic position not only serves as a beacon of hope for Palestinians enduring Israel’s brutal military assault on their lives, homes, and livelihoods but has also become a crucial pillar in the Axis of Resistance’s fight against US hegemonic machinations in West Asia.
In late February, al-Houthi vowed to expand the scope of attacks against Israel-linked vessels, stating, “We have surprises that the enemies do not expect at all,” before announcing the successful testing of a new hypersonic missile.
This stands in stark contradiction to western narratives trumpeting their own containment efforts to encircle Yemen and thwart its ability to intercept Israel-bound vessels. If anything, the naval operations undertaken by the Ansarallah-aligned armed forces are instead rippling outward, spanning a remarkable distance of over 6,000 kilometers from the Yemeni coast to the Indian Ocean.
Yet al-Houthi’s unequivocal declaration on barring the passage of ships associated with Israel, or those engaged in commercial ties with it, from traversing the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope shows that Washington and London have been dealt a resounding strategic defeat.
By targeting these two new critical waterway passages, Yemen imposes a new reality on global shipping routes. This phase of the naval battle presents a significant threat to the world’s established maritime corridors, compelling commercial vessels traveling to and from Southeast Asia to navigate lengthier and more costly routes around the southern tip of Africa to reach the Mediterranean Sea.
While the US and UK do not reveal the number of naval vessels assigned to their almost impossible mission, numbers circulating claim the participation of several US battleships, including the USS Laboon, USS Carney, and USS Mason – and from the British, the destroyer HM Diamond. Greece is estimated to have one frigate involved, France contributes naval vessels under US command, and Italy claims to have a frigate that operates outside the operation’s banner. Although the coalition publicly announced the inclusion of more than twenty countries in its mission, the actual naval commitment from its members appears negligible.
Furthermore, it’s hard not to notice the fundamental inefficiencies inherent to the western naval operation: the US “is launching $2 million defense missiles to stop $2,000 Houthi drones.” It was no surprise then when a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged a few days ago that despite ongoing western strikes on Yemen, Ansarallah’s capabilities have not been undermined.’
Watch: US economist Jeffrey Sachs says Israel has a murderous gang in government Middle East Eye, 7 March 2024;
‘Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved? I’m not using an exaggeration. I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non stop war crime status now, I believe in genocidal status, and it is without shame, without remorse, without truth, without insight into what it’s doing. But what it is doing is endangering Israel’s fundamental security because it is driving the world to believe that the israeli state is not legitimate. This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel. There is none in this government.This is a murderous gang in government right now. These are zealots. They have some messianic vision of controlling all of today’s Palestinian lands. They’re not going to stop. They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse, depending on whatever is needed. And it is again the United States which is the sole support. And it’s our mumbling, bumbling president and the others that are not stopping this slaughter.’
The zionist brainwashing machine works on tirelessly, distorting, threatening, blackmailing, targeting young people with propaganda and lies, in cahoots with their natural criminal allies the CIA and FBI.
Watch; Zionist Spies on Campus, Palestine Declassified, 15 March 2024;
‘Chris Williamson; ‘In this week’s show, we’ll be inspecting the role of zionist spyings on US university campuses who are using covert methods to stamp out criticism of Israel and crush pro Palestine student groups.
Press TV Presenter; As the Palestinians say, every zionist accusation is a confession. In reality, the only country with really significant spy networks in the US is the zionist entity. The FBI and the CIA know this, but they are either unwilling or unable to investigate. Israeli espionage networks operate freely in universities, businesses and government facilities across the United States. One well known spy network is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Created in 1913, it has been spying on Arab Americans since before the creation of the zionist entity. Throughout this period, the ADL has also closely collaborated with the FBI.
Today, the ADL is doing more than attempting to suppress free speech on Palestine, it is attempting to have ordinary pro Palestine activism declared to be terrorism. What they are trying to do is use a vaguely worded law, which they lobbied for, to entrap Palestine solidarity activism as falling under a legal definition of material support for terrorism. In late October, the Anti-Defamation League and another zionist group published an open letter urging universities to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine under the material support statute introduced in 1996.
As well as accusing SJP of supporting Hamas, they were also, the ADL claimed, voicing an increasingly radical call for confronting and dismantling zionism on US college campuses. Material support for terrorism can include giving advice or other speech, so long as it’s at the behest or in coordination with the terrorist group. But there is also an attempt by the ADL and its allies to claim that routine pro Palestine activism should be legally understood as support for terrorism. They are working to blur the line between independent advocacy, which is allowed, and coordination, which could be terrorism.
David Miller; Also then in the 90s, when there was a spy case taken against the ADL and it was revealed that the ADL were coordinating with the Bureau of State Security in South Africa’s apartheid regime, they were passing information about anti apartheid protesters to the South Africans, that they coordinated directly with the Israelis.
And the FBI were investigating some of that. They, in fact, said, this is clearly a foreign agent of the israeli government and it should be registered as such. But, of course, there’s always been, in these circumstances, an attempt at the top of the American power structure to drop these things.
It’s been the case actually also with the CIA, especially with the FBI, there’s been tons of examples where the ADL and other israeli spy operations have been flagged as being a problem. And there’s always been somehow some pressure put and the investigation has just dropped. But I think there’s much more to it, which is that there are people in the top of the FBI and indeed the CIA who don’t want this story to be told. And so the people who want to investigate it, honest people in the FBI, get squashed.’
This is zionist aggression in another form, malicious words instead of bombs and rockets, aimed like a gun to the head of anyone with a sympathetic word for Palestine.
Listen: The Antisemitism Industry doesn’t speak for Jews. It speaks for western elites Jonathan Cook, 14 March 2024;
‘Many years ago, the Jewish US scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a best seller that caused uproar among a group he exposed as the “Holocaust Industry”: people who invariably had not been direct victims of the Holocaust, but nonetheless chose to exploit and profit from Jewish suffering.
Anyone who challenges the Antisemitism Industry’s – and therefore Israel’s – stranglehold on Jewish representation in public life is hounded as an antisemite or self-hating Jew, as is currently happening most prominently to Jewish film-maker Jonathan Glazer. He is the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, about the family of a Nazi commandant of Auschwitz who lived blind to the horrors unfolding just out of view, beyond their walled garden.
In his acceptance speech, he denounced the hijacking of Jewishness and the Holocaust that has sustained Israel’s occupation over many decades and generated constant new victims, including the latest: those who suffered at the hands of Hamas when it attacked on October 7, and the many, many tens of thousand of Palestinians killed, maimed and orphaned by Israel over the past five months.
There are plenty of Holocaust survivors who have spoken out against Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people, including Finkelstein’s own mother and the late Hajo Meyer, the distinguished physicist who became one of Israel’s harshest critics. Meyer regularly made comparisons between what Israel did to the Palestinians and what the Nazis did to Jews like himself.
Meyer, the Holocaust survivor and believer in a universal ethics, would find himself unwelcome in every major British political party. Glazer, the humanitarian Jewish film-maker who cares about Palestinians as much as he does other Jews, is currently being cast out of respectable society in precisely the same way.
It can happen only because we let western establishments foist on us these Antisemitism Industry charlatans and conmen. It is time to listen to the people who care about humanity, not the people who care about their status and their wallets.’
Richard Medhurst, a journalist and broadcaster who was born in Syria, remembers Rachel Corrie who was murdered because she was a witness to the zionist crimes of murder, kidnapping and demolition of peoples’ homes in Palestine 21 years ago.
Watch; Remembering Rachel Corrie: American in Gaza Crushed by Israeli Bulldozer Richard Medhurst, 18 March 2024;
Richard Medhurst; ‘Rachel Corey was an American, and 21 years ago she was in Gaza. She was trying to protest and stop an israeli bulldozer from demolishing a palestinian family’s home. And she was crushed to death by the israeli bulldozer on purpose. On purpose. Absolutely on purpose. Without question. And then, of course, Zionists will laugh at her and make fun of her. Because they are like that. They have nothing else to say, really.’
Rachel Corrie speaking in 2003; ‘I’ve been here for about a month and a half now, and this is definitely the most difficult situation that I’ve ever seen in the time that I’ve been here. Children have been shot and killed. On the 30 January, the Israeli military bulldozed the two largest water wells, destroying over half of Rafa’s water supply. Every few days, if not every day, houses are demolished here’.
Richard Medhurst; ‘I wonder what she would say if she saw now 1.5 million Gaza residents huddled, all shoved into Rafa. Truly scandalous. Truly scandalous. What the Israelis have done, the crimes of this occupation. They are a mountain of crimes.’
The new port is no doubt part of the ongoing occupation, domination, land theft/settler plan. There are hundreds of trucks with food and medicine waiting at Rafah, all they have to do is open the gates and allow food to get to people who are starving. Another in the long list of depraved inhuman atrocities by Israel against innocent civilians in Palestine.
Read; What’s the real purpose of Biden’s Gaza port? The Electronic Intifada, 14 March 2024;
‘Palestinians in Gaza received the news about the planned port with fear and suspicion.Analysts have speculated that this could be a ploy to eliminate Egypt as an outlet between the Gaza Strip and the rest of the world, and sever the coastal enclave’s reliance on Egypt economically and politically by way of the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing – the sole point of exit and entry for most people in Gaza.
Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, slammed what he called “absurd” US plans for getting aid into Gaza, whether through airdrops or the temporary port. “From a humanitarian perspective, from an international perspective, from a human rights perspective, it is absurd in a dark, cynical way,” he said.
Human rights groups have dismissed announcements of building a temporary pier as a distraction from Israel’s systemic and deliberate policy of starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
“The proposed maritime humanitarian corridor and temporary seaport is another tool to weaponize aid,” the Palestinian refugee advocacy group Badil said. It is meant to “absolve Israel of its responsibilities and obligations, and support Israel in its ‘day after plans’: to eliminate and replace UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestine refugees] and establish a potential mechanism for Palestinian forcible transfer out of the Gaza Strip.”
UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are on the verge of collapse as donor countries, including the US, the agency’s largest funder, suspended $440 million worth of aid during February after Israel made unverified allegations that a handful of the UN refugee agency staff had been involved in the attacks of 7 October. The agency plays a significant role in distributing aid within Gaza. That has been recognized by countries such as Sweden and Canada, both of which announced in the past few weeks that they are resuming their financial contributions to UNRWA’s work.
Twenty-five charities and human rights groups have issued a statement that “an immediate and permanent ceasefire” as well as the opening of “all land crossings” should be the main priority.
The construction of a temporary pier and the dropping of aid packages from the sky are political gestures aimed at maneuvering and establishing political realities on the ground. There is no technical reason why aid trucks should not be able to enter Gaza by land. It is the most efficient, cost-effective and safe method of delivering aid to Gaza.’
Read: David Cameron admits Israel is committing war crimes Another Angry Voice, 22 March 2024;
‘In February the UK foreign secretary David Cameron stated that Israel “would be in breach of international law” if it continued to block food aid for Gaza.
On March 15th he wrote a letter to Alicia Kearns admitting that aid has not been getting into Gaza due to “arbitrary denials by the Govt of Israel and lengthy clearance procedures, including multiple screenings and narrow opening windows in daylight hours” and that UK aid for Gaza has been routinely held waiting for Israeli permissions, meaning UK food aid for Gaza is being stuck at the border for literally weeks.
Cameron’s comments have caused a rift with Rishi Sunak, with his Downing Street spokesperson continuing to defy reality by insisting that UK arms sales to Israel would continue because they still believe that Israel “could” comply with their obligations under international law.
The Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute prohibit weapons transfers when those weapons will be used to violate international humanitarian law, which means the UK government has been making itself complicit in Israeli war crimes all along, and especially so now that a senior government minister has expressed frustration at Israel’s continued use of unlawful siege tactics.
Furthermore Israel’s continued siege tactics, as acknowledged by David Cameron, are in direct defiance of the International Court of Justice order to “ensure the delivery of basic services and essential humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza”.
It’s beyond outrageous that Rishi Sunak continues Britain’s complicity with Israeli war crimes, even when his own foreign secretary admits that they’re defying the ICJ by blockading food aid.’
Watch; How Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, in conversation with Tony Greenstein The Electronic Intifada, 2 November 2022;
‘The first book about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis was nearly 40 years ago by Lenni Brenner. And there has been nothing since. There’s been a lot of research, a lot of journal articles and books and so on. But there’s been nothing from an anti-Zionist perspective. And I felt it was necessary to do so. Because as we can see, today, the Holocaust is exploited mercilessly by the Zionist movement. I mean, the very false definition of anti-semitism — the IHRA — is produced or used by a group that calls itself, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
So the Zionists have tied the Holocaust very closely to the narrative that Israel is a refuge, is a defence, is an answer to anti-semitism. And I thought it’s extremely important to actually look at what happened during the Holocaust. What was the Zionist record then? Because you would assume from the way they use it now, that the Zionists were at the forefront of trying to save Jews, trying to support Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, to try to open the avenues of rescue. So anyone reading the book, I think, will be quite amazed by the fact that the Zionists during the war, saw the Holocaust as a complete distraction from their own efforts, which were to build the jewish state. Of course, between 1941 and 1945 there was no jewish state, but it was in the offing. That was their main goal. And they saw it as their only goal.
They had a weird and incredible logic. But it was their logic and the Zionist logic was that where there are Jews, there is anti-semitism. Jews cause anti-semitism, because they are living in the countries of other people. In the words of AB Yehoshua, they are guests in other people’s hotels and of course, they’ve outstayed their welcome. So, simply transplanting Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to America or Britain would not solve the problem. It would simply recreate anti-semitism in another place. So you had to be cruel to be kind and say the only place of settlement was Palestine.
Watch; Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas – but he enabled its development ABC News, 11 March 2024;
‘ABC News; Are you saying Benyamin Netanyahu deliberately boosted Hamas to try to prevent a Palestinian state?
Ehud Barak (Former Prime Minister of Israel); Yeah, sure. He deliberately and systematically even told on record, whoever wants to avoid the ‘threat’ of a two state solution has to support my policy of paying protection money to the Hamas.
Ami Ayalon (Former Head of Israel Secret Service); So what we did, with the permission of our prime minister, is to let Qatar to transfer a huge amount of money in cash, probably more than $1.4 billion. By doing it, we increased the power of Hamas. We did everything in order to make sure that Hamas will go on controlling Gaza and Palestinian Authority will control the West bank, so they will fight each other.
ABC News; Netanyahu maintains the Qatar money was to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe. Having helped to build up Hamas, Netanyahu has now vowed to destroy it.
Yehuda Shaul (Former IDF Commander); He fed the beast and it exploded in our face. If you base your national security strategy solely on force, then you need to win 24/7 forever.’
Read; What is the Real Hamas? Joshua Leifer, The Guardian, 21 March 2024;
‘Five months into Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, more than 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed. The Israeli ground invasion has displaced 2 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, many of them now forced into makeshift tents in and around the southern city of Rafah. In northern Gaza, vast swaths of which have been flattened by relentless Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling, international experts warn that “famine is imminent”. Gazan children have already begun to die from lack of food.
As the war continues, how Israeli, Palestinian and American political actors understand Hamas is not merely a theoretical question; it is as much a material factor on the ground as bullets and tanks. It is one of the factors shaping military strategy, and will determine what kind of agreement can be reached to bring the current war to an end, and what the future of Gaza will look like.
When we spoke in January, the Palestinian scholar Tareq Baconi said that “the major misconception” at the core of the dominant discourse about Hamas is the idea that “if Hamas as a security threat was undermined, Israel will have no issue with the Palestinians”. But if “Hamas were to disappear tomorrow,” he said, the Israeli blockade on Gaza and military rule in the West Bank would remain. “There’s this tendency to suggest that this is a war between Israel and Hamas rather than a war between Israel and Palestinians, which places Hamas outside of Palestinians,” he added. “It’s an inability to address the political drivers animating Palestinians.”
Khaled Elgindy, who is a former adviser to the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership on negotiations with Israel and now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute thinktank, argues that any postwar arrangement that excludes Hamas will be doomed to repeat the mistakes that led to the current war. “It’s exactly this notion of: ‘We’re going to make peace with this group of Palestinians while we make war with that group of Palestinians,’” which had served as the rationale for Israel’s economic suffocation and periodic bombardment of the Gaza Strip, he told me. “That’s nonsensical in terms of conflict resolution.”
“Hamas is a fact of political life in Gaza and in the Palestinian scene in general. And if anything, it is much more relevant today than it’s ever been,” Elgindy said. In an article for Foreign Affairs published late last year, he expanded on his view that Hamas must form part of a postwar settlement. The goal, wrote Elgindy, should be to incorporate Hamas and other hardline militant factions into the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the umbrella group dominated by the secular-nationalist party Fatah, which is recognised as the sole official representative of the Palestinian people on the world stage.’
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