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By Michel Chossudovsky

Half a century ago on September 11, 1973, the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet, crushed the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende.

The objective was to replace a progressive, democratically elected government by a brutal military dictatorship.

The military coup was supported by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger played a direct role in the military plot.1

In the weeks leading up the coup, US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and members of the CIA held meetings with Chile’s top military brass together with the leaders of the National Party and the ultra-right nationalist front Patria y Libertad. While the undercover role of the Nixon administration is amply documented, what is rarely mentioned in media reports is the fact that the military coup was also supported by a sector of the Christian Democratic Party.

Patricio Aylwin, who was elected Chile’s president in 1989, became head of the DC party in the months leading up to the September 1973 military coup (March through September 1973). Aylwin was largely instrumental in the break down of the “Dialogue” between the Unidad Popular government and the Christian Democrats. His predecessor Renan Fuentealba, who represented the moderate wing of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), was firmly against military intervention. Fuentealba favored a dialogue with Allende (la salida democratica). He was displaced from the leadership of the Party in May 1973 in favor of Patricio Aylwin.

The DC Party was split down the middle, between those who favored “the salida democratica”, and the dominant Aylwin-Frei faction, which favored “a military solution”. 2

On 23 August, the Chilean Camera de Diputados drafted a motion, to the effect that the Allende government “sought to impose a totalitarian regime”. Patricio Aylwin was a member of the drafting team of this motion. Patricio Aylwin believed that a temporary military dictatorship was “the lesser of two evils.”3

This motion was adopted almost unanimously by the opposition parties, including the DC, the Partido Nacional and the PIR ( Radical Left).

The leadership of the Christian Democratic Party including former Chilean president Eduardo Frei, had given a green light to the Military. Unquestionably, US intelligence must have played an undercover role in the change of leadership in the PDC.

And continuity in the “Chilean Model” heralded as an “economic success story” was ensured when, 16 years later, Patricio Aylwin was elected president of Chile in the so-called transition to democracy in 1989.

At the time of the September 11 coup, I was Visiting Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Chile (Instituto de Economia, Universidad Catolica de Chile. In the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew.

When the university reopened several days later, I started patching together the history of the coup from written notes. I had lived through the tragic events of September 11, 1973 as well as the failed June 29, 1973 coup. Several of my students at the Universidad Catolica had been arrested by the military Junta.

In the days following the military takeover, I started going through piles of documents and newspaper clippings, which I had collected on a daily basis since my arrival in Chile in early 1973. A large part of this material, however, was lost and destroyed by my research assistant, fearing political reprisals in the days following the coup.

This unpublished article was written 50 years ago (see below). It was drafted on an old typewriter in the weeks following September 11, 1973.

This original draft article plus two carbon copies were circulated among a few close friends and colleagues at the Catholic University. It was never published. For 30 years it lay in a box of documents at the bottom of a filing cabinet.

I have transcribed the text from the yellowed carbon copy draft [in 2003]. Apart from minor editing, I have made no changes to the original article.

The history of this period has since then been amply documented including the role of the Nixon administration and of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the plot to assassinate Allende and install a military regime.

Chicago Economics: Neoliberal Dress Rehearsal of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)

The main objective of the US-supported military coup in Chile was ultimately to impose the neoliberal economic agenda. The latter, in the case of Chile, was not imposed by external creditors under the guidance of the IMF. “Regime change” was enforced through a covert military intelligence operation, which laid the groundwork for the military coup. Sweeping macro-economic reforms (including privatization, price liberalization and the freeze of wages) were implemented in early October 1973.

Barely a few weeks after the military takeover, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This “economic shock treatment” had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys.”

While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.”

From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty; in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six fold (3700%). Eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.

I completed my work on the “unpublished paper’ entitled “The Ingredients of a Military Coup” (see text below) in late September 1973. In October and November, following the dramatic hikes in the price of food, I drafted in Spanish an initial “technical” assessment of the Junta’s deadly macro-economic reforms entitled

“La Medición del Ingreso Minimo de Subsistencia y la Politica de Ingresos para 1974′ .

Fearing censorship, I limited my analysis to the collapse of living standards in the wake of the Junta’s reforms, resulting from the price hikes of food and fuel, without making any kind of political analysis.

The Economics Institute of the Catholic University was initially reluctant to publish the report. They sent it to the Military Junta for its approval prior to its release.

I left Chile for Peru in December 1973. The report was released as a working paper (200 copies) by the Catholic University of Chile a few days after my departure.

In Peru, where I joined the Economics Department of the Catholic University of Peru, I was able to write up a more detailed study of the Junta’s neoliberal reforms and its ideological underpinnings. This study was published in 1975 in Spanish and English.

Needless to say, the events of September 11, 1973 also marked me profoundly in my work as an economist.

Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. Macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” –as claimed by the academic mainstream– nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation.

I also started to understand the role of military-intelligence operations in support of what is usually described as a process of “economic restructuring”.

In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” reforms as a well-organized instrument of “economic repression.”

Two years later, I returned to Latin America as a Visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina under the auspices of an ILO project.

My stay coincided with the 1976 military coup d’État. It was “The Dirty War” . “La Guerra Sucia”.Tens of thousands of people were arrested; the “Desaparecidos” were assassinated. The military takeover in Argentina was “a carbon copy” of the CIA-led coup in Chile.

And behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” reforms had also been prescribed, this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors.

The IMF’s deadly economic prescriptions under the “structural adjustment program” had not yet been officially launched. The experience of Chile and Argentina under the “Chicago boys” was “a dress rehearsal” of things to come.

In due course, the economic bullets of the “free market system” were hitting country after country.

Since the onslaught of the debt crisis of the 1980s, the same IMF “economic medicine” has routinely been applied in more than 150 developing countries.

From my earlier work in Chile, Argentina and Peru, I started to investigate the global impacts of these reforms. Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape.

(For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty and the New World Order, Second Edition, Global Research, 2003)

This forward with minor edits was initially published in 2003 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the September 1, 1973 military coup.

***

On a personal note

Chile, September 1973

On September 8, 1973, I was 31 years old. My friends and colleagues at the Universidad Catolica gathered at a birthday party at my home in Santiago. We were troubled and disturbed with what was unfolding, three days before the coup.

Today my thoughts are with the people of Chile, who are still under the brunt of neoliberal oppression.

Flash forward to September 2001

Thirty years later, September 8, 2001, again on my birthday, a young man, specialist in internet algorithms, came to our home on the outskirts of Montreal, on a wheel chair (he was handicapped). I remain indebted to him. He gave me a crash course on how to use the algorithm and upload articles to the internet.

And on the following day, September 9, 2001, two days before the dramatic events of 9/11, we launched globalresearch.ca.

We remain indebted to readers and authors worldwide who have participated in the Global Research Project for the last 22 years.

-Michel Chossudovsky, September 11, 2003 [minor revisions September 10, 2013, September 11, 2021, August 31, 2023]

2 September 2023

Source: substack.com

By Raïss Tinmaung

Aug. 25 marks the sixth anniversary of the last massacre of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Nearly half of their villages were exterminated and 800,000 people fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh. Today, the Rohingya still remain stranded in the refugee camps and the apartheid villages. They have been abandoned by the international community as other issues and conflicts have taken priority.

The Rohingya are an ethnic minority from northwestern Myanmar. Predominantly Muslims, they are subject to constant discrimination in their Buddhist-majority country. Numerous state-driven campaigns of terror and scorched earth have taken place in efforts to drive the Rohingya out of Myanmar. Notable ones include the massacres of 1978, 1991, 2012 and 2017, each one with horrific accounts of burnings, killings, and rapes. In 2019, the International Court of Justice began proceedings on Myanmar, accused of genocide, while the International Criminal Court is still collecting evidence to begin prosecutions against Myanmar’s leadership accused of crimes against humanity.

While the international media brought some attention to the matter back in 2017 and 2018, it has since almost lost interest in the Rohingya crisis. A simple Google search of Rohingya under the news tab yields 2,500 results in 0.22 seconds. On the contrary, a Google search for Ukraine under the News tab yields 71.2 million results in 0.44 seconds. The difference in numbers speak volumes of the sheer lack of attention to the Rohingya issue.

For the nearly one million Rohingya living in ultra-poverty in refugee camps, rations were cut from $12 per person to $10 per person to eventually $8 per person as of June 2023. With 27 cents a day, it becomes difficult to even have a bowl of rice and lentils once a day, let alone anything else that constitutes essential nutrients, especially needed for young developing children.

For the Rohingya that survived the massacres and remained in Myanmar, 153,000 of them live in internally displaced camps and 447,000 in villages with severe restrictions of movement, making it nearly impossible to earn a living, go to school, or be seen by a doctor. People in the camps live in severely overcrowded conditions and suffer from high rates of malnutrition, waterborne illnesses, and child and maternal deaths. It is common for children to die from recurring outbreaks of acute diarrhea.

The UN’s Independent Fact Finding Mission had described the situation of Rohingya in Myanmar as “deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Rohingya” or “measures of slow death… living under the threat of genocide” The conditions still prevail today and many try to escape through human traffickers that promise to take them to Malaysia or Indonesia in exchange of their life savings — only to desert them in the Andaman Sea where they eventually perish.

The international community has turned a blind eye to resolving the Rohingya crisis. None of the regional powers in ASEAN has proposed to bring back the Rohingya to their original homelands with full rights, a demand almost unanimously made by the refugees themselves. China has attempted to facilitate the repatriation of Rohingya under terms that appease China’s own relationships with Myanmar. At the same time, India’s response to the crisis has been through detention and deportation of the Rohingya that have taken refuge on Indian soil. None of the western powers has even proposed a repatriation plan.

The humanitarian response to the Rohingya crisis is also on a decline, which is evident from the severe ration cuts in the refugee camps. The World Food Program’s country brief (Bangladesh) from April 2023 highlighted a $56-million funding shortfall. This can be starkly contrasted with the global humanitarian response to the crisis in Ukraine: nearly $4 billion by the U.S. government alone, €670 million in EU civil protection mechanisms from the European Union and hundreds of millions, if not billions, in bilateral aid from countries all over the world.

Canada initially took leadership on the Rohingya issue by allocating $300 million for international development assistance from 2018 to 2021, as recommended by its Special Envoy to Myanmar. In 2021, Canada renewed the funding by committing another $288.3 million from 2021 to 2024 to support the Rohingya, as well as to advance peace building and democratic rule in Myanmar. Canada can do more to help bridge the funding shortage that has drastically reduced rations in refugee camps to 27 cents a day. In the least, it can leverage its platform on the international stage to influence other donors to increase their contributions.

Canada has also made a commitment to pursue accountability for crimes committed by Myanmar’s ruling junta in its strategy statements. It has expressed its intent to intervene in the proceedings against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, which it has yet to fulfill.

Aug. 25 is another anniversary of the last massacre of the Rohingya. One anniversary after another passes, and the lives of the Rohingya in the refugee camps of Bangladesh and the segregated villages in Myanmar continue as before, stateless and hopeless. What is lacking is the international community’s attention to the crisis and its genuine willingness to help.

Raiss Tinmaung is a Rohingya from Akyab (Sittwe) living in Ottawa.

25 August 2023

Source: ottawacitizen.com

By Mark H. Gaffney

As we approach the 22nd anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, more than enough evidence exists to draw reasonable conclusions about what happened that day and who was responsible.

Most of the basic facts have been known for years, though unfortunately have not been readily available to the general public.

Way back in 2007, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, Dr Steven E. Jones, turned up critical evidence while investigating samples of World Trade Center (WTC) dust. The samples had been collected immediately after September 11, 2001 from the thick deposit of dust that blanketed the WTC site and much of lower Manhattan. Jones found tiny bits of an exotic incendiary known as thermate that can cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. Thermate burns at ~5,000°F. The main product of the reaction is molten iron.

Thermate differs from its better known cousin thermite in that it contains sulfur which lowers the melting point of iron, speeding up the reaction. The presence of both sulfur and aluminum was diagnostic for thermate. Jones called this “the last nail in the coffin.” (Dr. Steven E. Jones, Revisiting 9/11/2001. Applying the Scientific Method, 2007, posted here)

Jones also found an abundance of tiny iron microspheres in the dust (up to .05% by volume), proof that large amounts of WTC steel had melted. The diameter of the spheres ranged from one micron to 1.5 mm. When Jones obtained some thermate, which is commercially available, and used it to cut through a steel plate, the reaction produced an intense spray of molten droplets which cooled into iron microspheres identical to the spheres in the dust.

Other studies of the WTC dust also reported the iron microspheres. (Heather A. Lowers and Gregory P. Meeker, Particle Atlas of World Trade Center Dust, posted here; also see Damage Assessment: 130 Liberty Street Property. WTC Dust Signature Report: Composition and Morphology. December 2003, posted here)

Jones and his colleagues learned that thermite/thermate can be made more explosive by reducing the particle size of the ingredients. This more reactive variety is known as super thermate or nano-thermate. (Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, 2009, posted here)

And there were other revelations. It is indeed shocking how far the development of thermate had “progressed” by the late 1990s. Jones & Co, learned that a liquid sol-gel form of nano-thermate can be applied to steel simply by spraying or painting it on. This means insiders could have prepped the twin towers for demolition undetected during an elevator retrofit, a fireproofing upgrade, or even during routine maintenance. Nor was it necessary to wire the entire building. Ignition can be accomplished remotely using a specially designed thermitic match triggered by a radio signal. Once thermate is ignited, the reaction is self perpetuating. (Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections between NIST and Nano-thermites, July 2, 2008, posted here)

All of this is consistent with the many eyewitness accounts of explosions on 9/11. And it is consistent with the testimony of New York City firemen, first responders and clean-up crews who reported seeing copious amounts of molten steel on site. As one fireman put it: “molten steel was flowing down the channel rails like in a foundry…”

(David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor revisited, 2008, pp. 31-37; Mark H. Gaffney, The 9/11 Mystery Plane, 2008, pp.132-139; Graeme MacQueen, 118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers, posted here)

Office and building fires do not reach temperatures anywhere near hot enough to melt steel which has a melting point of 2,500°F. Nor were there any combustible materials in the WTC, nor any combination thereof, capable of approaching this temperature. Although burning jet fuel has been frequently (and incorrectly) cited as the reason for the WTC collapse, the reality is otherwise. Jet fuel is essentially kerosene and will not burn in air in excess of 1,832°F, far below the melting point of steel.

Not long after the towers collapsed, a hard rain storm drenched Manhattan. Firemen also sprayed millions of gallons of water onto the smoking ruin of the WTC in an attempt to extinguish the fires, all to no effect. This is consistent with burning thermate, which includes its own chemically bound oxygen. This is why a thermate fire cannot be smothered by dowsing and will even burn underwater.

The WTC site was so hot it melted the workmen’s rubber boots. Search-and-rescue dogs brought in to help locate survivors suffered severe burns, and three of the dogs died. Just how hot was the pile? We got an idea on September 16, 2001 when NASA conducted a flyover using an infrared spectrometer (AVIRIS) and detected surface temperatures as high as 1,376° F. Temperatures beneath the pile were undoubtedly much higher. (See this)

The site remained intensely hot for five months. Molten steel was reported as late as February 2002 when clean-up crews finally reached the bottom of the WTC bathtub. (Jennifer Lin, “Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero”, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, May 29, 2002, posted here)

The discovery of thermate in the WTC dust should have been front-page headline news across America, and indeed, around the world. Yet, as we know, the US media went deaf and dumb on the issue. Why? If Muslim jihadists were behind the 9/11 attacks, why would the media censor this breaking story? The only plausible reason for suppressing it was to prevent the truth from emerging about what actually happened. Blanket censorship has been the rule, ever since.

Nor was the cover up limited to the media. After many months of stalling, the G.W. Bush White House reluctantly appointed a government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to investigate and explain the WTC collapse.

The agency released its findings in 2005. In its final report NIST unequivocally states that it found no evidence the WTC was demolished. The multi-volume 10,000-page report gives the appearance of a thorough investigation. But a close reading (I spent many weeks digging into it) shows that NIST worked backwards looking for facts to support a predetermined conclusion that plane impacts and office fires caused the WTC collapse. In the process, NIST dismissed an abundance of evidence to the contrary.

No doubt, this is why many concerned citizens flooded NIST with critical comments and questions about its report. The public wanted to know: Did your scientists actually look for explosives? If so, where is the beef?

In 2006, the agency posted a clarification on its website. NIST acknowledged that it failed to look for explosive residues. (See question #29 here)

The admission was fatal to the agency’s credibility, and exposed the NIST report for what it is, a pile of stinking manure. Testing for thermitic incendiaries and explosives is standard practice in fire investigations. The national standard calls for it. (NFPA 921)

All of which means that the familiar narrative about Osama bin Laden and nineteen fanatic A-rabs is nothing but a cover story: a tapestry of lies. There is no way foreign jihadists could have gained access to the WTC to pre-position explosives. Nor in any event could Al Qaeda have manufactured thermate in a cave in Afghanistan. The incendiary is high-tech and in 2001 only a handful of nations had the capacity to produce it, the US and Israel at the top of the list.

As Sherlock Holmes famously told Watson: My friend, once you rule out the impossible what remains must be the truth. Like it or not.

The Devil’s Trick?

But is thermate the whole truth? Can thermate alone account for everything we witnessed on 9/11? This is the contentious question that some in the 9/11 truth community have been attempting to raise, for years.

According to NIST, the steel in the monster box columns in the core of the towers was up to seven inches thick at the base. Could thermate cut through columns of this size? Doubtful. (NIST NCSTAR 1-3 p. 10).

We know that enormous explosions ripped through the basement of each tower shortly before they fell. A photographer named Rick Siegal actually captured these explosions on film from Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The quality of Siegal’s video was excellent because his camera was set on a tripod. Moreover, it was also equipped with audio so he was able to record the thunderous noise which carried across the river. The footage is graphic. After each blast a dust cloud is plainly visible rising from around the base of the tower. Collapse ensued within minutes. These huge explosions shook the ground and evidently were intended to weaken the towers by destroying the gigantic core columns. In my opinion they were not caused by thermate.

We also know that during the collapse large segments of the outer perimeter wall were thrown at least 600 feet from the base of the towers. Could thermate do this? Not likely. This points to a much more powerful explosive.

Recently, I also learned about another anomaly. On completion of the clean up at ground zero, two cavernous holes in the bedrock were very much in evidence at the site. They were located near to where the towers stood. The deepest of these was 110-feet below street level, so deep the bottom was below sea level. Obviously, thermate did not excavate these enormous voids in the granite. I was stunned when I learned about this.

The official story is that ice age glaciers carved the “grand canyon of Manhattan” 20,000 years ago. (David W. Dunlap, At Ground Zero, Scenes from the Ice Age, New York Times, September 21, 2008, posted here)

However, a German physicist who thinks outside the box, Heinz Pommer, has a different explanation. In 2018, during a presentation in London, Pommer argued that the twin towers were demolished with a nuclear bomb [e.g. dirty bomb, “type of a “radiological dispersal device” (RDD) that combines a conventional explosive, such as dynamite, with radioactive material”]. He thinks the enormous voids in the granite may have been a collateral effect.

Pommer is not the first to refer to the use of nukes on 9/11. Others who did so before him have faced disbelief and ridicule. The main argument against nukes is the absence of radiation at the WTC site. Although a nuclear isotope, tritium, was definitely detected, allegedly its presence has been otherwise accounted for, ruling out nukes.

But Pommer begs to differ. He argues that the placement of the Uranium charge at the bottom of the WTC elevator shaft explains the seeming absence of radiation. The nuclear reaction in these simple but effective weapons proceeded slowly, at first. As the heat from fission built up, the Uranium charge melted down into the granite.

The result was a pressure chamber in the bedrock below each tower where fission ultimately fizzled and was contained. The fusion component, however, formed a rising plasma needle that eventually broke containment. At a critical point, super-heated gas and gamma radiation vented vertically through the core of each tower, analogous to a volcanic gas jet eruption. All of this was hidden from view until the moment the tower visibly exhaled dust and gas from the upper levels. Then came the symmetric top-down collapse.

Pommer argues (yet to be confirmed) that only the vast energy of a nuke can explain the conversion of hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete and steel into dust. And only a nuke can account for the sudden disintegration of the upper portion of the South Tower (WTC-2) which had tipped at a weird angle and was falling as a unit. And only a nuke can explain the near total absence of ceramic sinks and toilets, filing cabinets, furniture, and human bodies in the wreckage. Almost everything in the towers was vaporized by gamma radiation.

According to Pommer, the nuclear reaction progressed over at least an hour, and this would explain a number of anomalies. These include electromagnetic interference of radio and tv transmissions, spontaneous fires in surrounding buildings and in nearby vehicles, the pyroclastic cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan, conspicuous venting of steam from underground sewers, strange rainbow effects and silverfish flashes in video footage, and the like.

Recently, important new evidence has also come to light. In 2019, doctors at Mt. Sinai Medical Center reported “an increased incidence of thyroid cancer among 9/11 rescue workers….the etiology of which remains unclear.” I only learned about this, a few days ago. (See this)

Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thyroid cancer has been recognized as the tell-tale signature of exposure to nuclear radiation. A spike of thyroid cancers also occurred after the Chernobyl disaster. (See this)

I believe the thyroid cancers are the true smoking gun of 9/11, and a wake up call. Pommer’s thesis deserves thoughtful consideration. He calls it the devil’s trick. (Part one below, part two here, part three here)

The 9/11 nuke’s total energy; Part 1 of “The Power Source(s) of the 9/11 Event”

Read part two of this essay

Mark H. Gaffney is the author of Dimona the Third Temple (1989), The 9/11 Mystery Plane and the Vanishing of America (2008), Black 9/11.

27 August 2023

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Mike Whitney and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Mike Whitney interviews Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, a renowned author and academic, and chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.

Mike Whitney (MW): To what extent has the war in Ukraine accelerated the move to a new global realignment?

Paul Craig Roberts (PCR): It was Washington’s economic sanctions against Russia, the theft of Russia’s central bank reserves, and the theft of Venezuela’s gold, not the conflict in Ukraine, that weaponized the US dollar and resulted in global realignment.

The limited Russian intervention in Donbas was Putin’s belated eight-year-delayed response to the US coup that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014 and installed a government hostile to Russia and to the Russian population that had been incorporated into the Ukraine province of the Soviet Union by Soviet leaders. The intervention was forced on Putin by the United States’ buildup of a large Ukraine army poised to overthrow the self-declared Donbas republics.

By habit and convenience, the US dollar is used as world money to settle imbalances in international trade, but the sanctions woke the world up to the risks of using the dollar. Consequently, the BRICS suddenly expanded with membership extended to Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The organization now contains essentially the entirety of world oil production and 40-45% of World GDP.

Clearly, a realignment has already occurred.

MW: Iran, Saudi Arabia and UAE have now all joined BRICS. How will this affect the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency? (Is this the end of the petrodollar?)

PCR: Saudi Arabia announced the end of the petrodollar when it began accepting payment for oil in other currencies. The BRICS are working out how to carry on trade among themselves without use of the US dollar, which in effect brings to an end the role of the dollar as world reserve currency.

The BRICS might try to create a new reserve currency consisting of a weighted basket of their currencies. This is unnecessary and could lead to strains among BRICS members from disputes over the shares of each currency in the basket. A reserve currency is no longer needed. A reserve currency was needed at the end of WWII because the other industrialized economies were destroyed. As the US had the only intact economy, the role fell to the US dollar. Today this is not the situation. Central banks can keep their reserves in the form of the currencies of their trading partners.

What this means for Washington is that the US will begin having financing problems for its large budget and trade deficits. As long as the dollar was the world money, foreign central banks kept their reserves in US Treasury debt. As US budget and trade deficits grew, so did the reserves of the world banking system.

The situation is changing. If a dozen countries constituting about half of the world’s population and 40-45% of world GDP cease using the dollar, the foreign central bank market for US debt shrinks considerably. Having offshored its manufacturing, the US is import-dependent. Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.

MW: Can Washington allow this realignment to stand or should we expect to see a coup in Saudi Arabia where the US has five military bases and numerous CIA offices?

PCR: I do not know if Washington has the ability to overthrow the Saudi government or whether Russia, China, and Iran would permit it. Remember, President Obama was going to overthrow Assad in Syria, but Putin did not permit it.

MW: The globalist dreams of the western oligarchs (WEF) appear to be coming to an end along with the so-called “rules-based order”. In your opinion, how important has Vladimir Putin been in spearheading the move towards a “new architecture for global security” and laying the groundwork for a new multipolar world order?

PCR: What broke up Washington’s version of global order was the West’s cold shoulder to Putin’s effort to be a part of the world order on equal standing and not in a subservient position. It was Washington’s arrogance and foolishness that broke up the global order.

MW: Before he died, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that the US would need to seek an accommodation with Russia and China to ease the transition away from the unipolar system. Here’s what he said:

“As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture… the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, i t is no longer the globally imperial power….

the United States must take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence …can be contained without destroying the global order.…

a long and painful road toward an initially limited regional accommodation is the only viable option for the United States, Russia, China, and the pertinent Middle Eastern entities. For the United States, that will require patient persistence in forging cooperative relationships with some new partners (particularly Russia and China)…

The fact is that there has never been a truly “dominant” global power until the emergence of America on the world scene…. During the latter part of the 20th century no other power even came close. That era is now ending. Toward a Global Realignment, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The American Interest

In your opinion, how should the United States deal with Moscow and Beijing? Is there a way that we can defend US interests while –at the same time– avoiding years of conflict and confrontation? What should our foreign policy objectives be?

PCR: The neoconservatives’ goal of US hegemony prevents Washington from hearing Brzezinski’s advice. Washington’s chance to deal with Russia and China has passed. The question we face is how will Russia and China deal with Washington. The neoconservative monopoly on US foreign policy means that there are no other voices for Washington to hear, and American hegemony is out of the question.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State.

Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published.

29 August 2023

Source: globalresearch.ca

 

 

By Noam Chomsky

The Path to Disaster

27 Aug 2023 – What is the future likely to bring?  A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside.  So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now — assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious — and you’re looking back at what’s happening today.  You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.  That’s been true since 1945.  It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction. So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

How to Destroy a Planet Without Really Trying

The question is: What are people doing about it?  None of this is a secret.  It’s all perfectly open.  In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions.  There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them.  If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed.  Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada.  They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world — Australia, India, South America — there are battles going on, sometimes wars.  In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences.  In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand.  The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the “rights of nature.”

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of where the government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground, instead of producing and exporting it — and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently and was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the U.N. General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a devil.  He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting.  Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer.  Oil is practically their whole gross domestic product.  In that speech, he warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil fuel use.  That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer.  You know, he was part Indian, of indigenous background.  Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the U.N. was never even reported.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster.  At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.  Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States.  Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside.  What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere.  Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something.  Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets.  It’s not because the population doesn’t want it.  Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming.  It’s institutional structures that block change.  Business interests don’t want it and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that’s what the future historian — if there is one — would see.  He might also read today’s scientific journals.  Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

“The Most Dangerous Moment in History”

The other issue is nuclear war.  It’s been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow.  You can read about it in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  It’s well understood.  So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We’ve just passed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was called “the most dangerous moment in history” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Kennedy’s advisor.  Which it was.  It was a very close call, and not the only time either.  In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that the lessons haven’t been learned.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded.  The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.  There was a point, as the missile crisis was reaching its peak, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy offering to settle it by a public announcement of a withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey.  Actually, Kennedy hadn’t even known that the U.S. had missiles in Turkey at the time.  They were being withdrawn anyway, because they were being replaced by more lethal Polaris nuclear submarines, which were invulnerable.

So that was the offer.  Kennedy and his advisors considered it — and rejected it.  At the time, Kennedy himself was estimating the likelihood of nuclear war at a third to a half.  So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we — and only we — have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others — and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does.

Kennedy did, however, accept a secret agreement to withdraw the missiles the U.S. was already withdrawing, as long as it was never made public.  Khrushchev, in other words, had to openly withdraw the Russian missiles while the U.S. secretly withdrew its obsolete ones; that is, Khrushchev had to be humiliated and Kennedy had to maintain his macho image.  He’s greatly praised for this: courage and coolness under threat, and so on.  The horror of his decisions is not even mentioned — try to find it on the record.

And to add a little more, a couple of months before the crisis blew up the United States had sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa.  These were aimed at China during a period of great regional tension.

Well, who cares?  We have the right to do anything we want anywhere in the world.  That was one grim lesson from that era, but there were others to come.

Ten years after that, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert.  It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israel-Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a ceasefire the U.S. and Russia had just agreed upon.  Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan was in office.  Soon after he entered the White House, he and his advisors had the Air Force start penetrating Russian air space to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems, Operation Able Archer.  Essentially, these were mock attacks.  The Russians were uncertain, some high-level officials fearing that this was a step towards a real first strike.  Fortunately, they didn’t react, though it was a close call.  And it goes on like that.

What to Make of the Iranian and North Korean Nuclear Crises

At the moment, the nuclear issue is regularly on front pages in the cases of North Korea and Iran.  There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises.  Maybe they wouldn’t work, but at least you could try.  They are, however, not even being considered, not even reported.

Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West — not in the Arab world, not in Asia — the gravest threat to world peace.  It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons for it, but I’ll put that aside here.  Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace?  Actually there are quite a few.  One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed a couple of months ago at a meeting of the non-aligned countries in Tehran.  In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the U.N. General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region.  That wouldn’t be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward.  And there were ways to proceed.  Under U.N. auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland last December to try to implement plans to move toward this.  What happened?

You won’t read about it in the newspapers because it wasn’t reported — only in specialist journals.  In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting.  A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn’t right.  The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states.  Nothing resulted.  So we’ll move toward ever-harsher sanctions against the Iranian population — it doesn’t hurt the regime — and maybe war. Who knows what will happen?

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing.  North Korea may be the craziest country in the world.  It’s certainly a good competitor for that title.  But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways.  Why would they behave the way they do?  Just imagine ourselves in their situation.  Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing.  Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply — a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.   And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive.  The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination.  It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death.  How magnificent!  It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

Let’s turn to the present.  There’s an interesting recent history.  In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country.  President Clinton intervened and blocked it.  Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test.  The U.S. and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted its nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides.  When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea — “axis of evil” and all that — so North Korea got back to work on its nuclear program.  By the time Bush left office, they had eight to 10 nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement.  In between, other things happened.  In 2005, the U.S. and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development.  In return, the West, but mainly the United States, was to provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements.  They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.

It was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it.  He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones.  The North Koreans reacted by reviving their nuclear weapons program.  And that’s the way it’s been going.

It’s well known.  You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship.  What they say is: it’s a pretty crazy regime, but it’s also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy.  You make a hostile gesture and we’ll respond with some crazy gesture of our own.  You make an accommodating gesture and we’ll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean-U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which, from the North’s point of view, have got to look threatening.  We’d think they were threatening if they were going on in Canada and aimed at us.  In the course of these, the most advanced bombers in history, Stealth B-2s and B-52s, are carrying out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea’s borders.

This surely sets off alarm bells from the past.  They remember that past, so they’re reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way.  Well, what comes to the West from all this is how crazy and how awful the North Korean leaders are.  Yes, they are.  But that’s hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going.

It’s not that there are no alternatives.  The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous.  So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture.  Unless people do something about it.  We always can.

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist.

28 August 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Lara-Nour Walton

22 Aug 2023 –  “This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May 8 tweet. As many of us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing.

“I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he said. The natural-language processing tool responded to Abusaada’s query ambivalently:

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, feelings or beliefs. The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a complex and controversial issue with many different perspectives and opinions….

But then he posed the same question about Israelis. This time, the chat box did not equivocate:

Yes, like all people, Israelis deserve to be free. Freedom is a fundamental human right that should be protected and guaranteed for all individuals, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is essential that Israelis, like all people, are able to live their lives free from violence, oppression and discrimination….

“Explanation?” demanded Abusaada.

The explanation lies in the overarching attitudes of the 570 GB of data that ChatGPT scrapes from the internet. And, with news media being one of the primary sources of information that the bot is trained on, Abusaada’s experience is hardly surprising.

To say that US news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. With outlets like NPR vilified as “National Palestinian Radio” and papers like the New York Times castigated by pro-Israel watchdogs for lending “the Palestinian narrative” undue credence (CAMERA, 10/15/13), the myth of pro-Palestine bias appears plausible.

Yet such claims have been litigated, and the verdict is plain: US corporate media lean in favor of Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (New Arab, 7/28/22) noted: “The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases which distort the Palestinian struggle.” Some trends are more ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation.

1. Where Are the Palestinians?

In 2018, 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, analyzed almost 100,000 news headlines published by five leading US publications between 1967 and 2017. The study revealed that major newspapers were four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over Palestinian ones. (This trend was further confirmed by Maha Nassar—+972, 10/2/20).

Owais Zaheer, an author of 416Labs’ study told the Intercept (1/12/19) that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”

In its media resource guide, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) counseled reporters: “Former US diplomats, Israeli military analysts and non-Palestinian Middle East commentators are not replacements for Palestinian voices.”

The exclusion of Palestinian voices from corporate media reporting does not stop at sourcing. For example, contrary to its pro-Israel critics, NPR’s correspondents are rarely Palestinian or Arab, and almost all reside in West Jerusalem or Israel proper (FAIR.org, 4/2/18). Editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son of the New York Times‘ then–Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (Extra!, 4/10).

When Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) acknowledged that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father,” Times executive editor Bill Keller rejected this advice, saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner “a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say, signed up with Hamas.

Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, also had a son who enlisted in the IDF (Mondoweiss, 10/27/14). Moreover, her husband, Hirsh Goodman, has worked at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (FAIR.org, 5/1/12), where his job was

shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.

When establishment media outlets privilege one narrative over another, public opinion is likely to follow. Thus, the suppression of alternative viewpoints is among today’s most concerning media afflictions.

2. Turning Assaults Into ‘Clashes’

Reporting on Israel/Palestine often relies on a lexical toolbox designed for occlusion rather than clarity, “clashes” rather than “assaults.” Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/9/18) explains that “clash” is “a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, ‘to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.’”

FAIR has documented the abuse of “clash” in the Israeli/Palestinian context time and time again: In 2018 Gaza, Israeli troops fired at unarmed protestors 100 meters away. No Israelis perished, but 30 Palestinians were murdered. That was not a “clash,” as establishment media would have you believe; that was a mass shooting (FAIR.org, 5/1/18). During the funeral for Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was assassinated by Israeli gunfire, the IDF beat mourners, charged at them with horses and batons, and deployed stun grenades and tear gas. The procession was so rocked by the attacks that they nearly dropped Abu Akleh’s casket. That was not a clash, that was a senseless act of cruelty (FAIR.org, 7/2/22). This summer, when Israeli forces raided the West Bank and stood by as illegal settlers arsoned homes, farmland and vehicles, that was not a “clash”; that was colonialism (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

The choice to use “clash”—and other comparably hazy descriptors of regional violence, like “tension,” “conflict” and “strife”—is bad journalism. Such designations lack substance, disorient readers and above all spin a spurious storyline whereby Israelis and Palestinians inflict and withstand equivalent bloodshed. (According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 3,584 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli security forces since January 19, 2009, while 196 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians during the same period.)

AMEJA’s media resource guide reminds journalists that the occupation “is not a conflict between states, but rather between Israel, which has one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the Palestinians, who have no formal army.”

But when such a power imbalance is inadequately acknowledged, “clash” and its misleading corollaries will not sound out of place, and readers will not have the context necessary to separate the perpetrators from the victims of violence.

3. Linguistic Gymnastics

The passive voice—or, as William Schneider describes it, the “past exonerative” tense—is a grammatical construction that describes events without assigning responsibility. Such sentence structures pervade coverage of the Israeli occupation.

In her 2021 investigation into coverage of the first and second intifadas, Holly M. Jackson identified disproportionate use of the passive voice—i.e., “the man was bitten” rather than “the dog bit the man”—as one of the defining linguistic features of New York Times reporting on the uprisings. The Times used the passive voice to talk about Palestinians twice as often as it did Israelis, which demonstrated the paper’s “clear patterns of bias against Palestinians.”

While Jackson’s study only examined New York Times coverage during the intifadas, passive voice remains a common grammatical cop out—still permeating national newspaper headlines in recent months:

• “At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Clashes After Israeli Raid in West Bank” (New York Times, 6/19/23)
• “Two Palestinians Killed in Separate Episodes in Latest West Bank Violence” (AP, 8/4/23)
• “Israeli Forces Say Three Palestinians Killed in Occupied West Bank” (CNN, 8/7/23)

Other times, raids are miraculously carried out on their own, violence randomly erupts and missiles are inexplicably fired. The now-amended New York Times headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” (7/10/14) begged the question: Who fired the missile that, as if it had a mind of its own, “found” Palestinian World Cup spectators?

Similarly, the Washington Post piece “Yet Another Palestinian Journalist Dies on the Job” (5/12/22) leaves the reader puzzled. How exactly did Shireen Abu Akleh—left unnamed in the title—die?

Headlines that omit the Israeli subject are unjustifiably exculpatory, because editors know exactly who the assailant is.

4. Newsworthy and Unnewsworthy Deaths

Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week military assault on Gaza in 2008, was carnage. According to Amnesty International and B’Tselem, the attack claimed 13 Israeli lives (four of which were killed by Israeli fire), while Palestine’s death toll was nearly 1,400—300 of which were children. Yet the media response was far from proportional.

In a 2010 study of New York Times coverage of Operation Cast Lead, Jonas Caballero found that the Times covered 431% of Israeli deaths—meaning each Israeli fatality was reported an average of four times—while reporting a mere 17% of Palestinian deaths. This means that Israeli deaths were covered at 25 times the rate Palestinian ones were.

The Times is not an outlier. FAIR’s examination (Extra!, 11–12/01) of six months’ worth of NPR Israel/Palestine broadcasting during the Second Intifada determined that 81% of Israeli fatalities were reported on, while Palestinian deaths were acknowledged just 34% of the time. The disparity only widened when Palestinian victims were minors:

Of the 30 Palestinian civilians under the age of 18 that were killed, six were reported on NPR—only 20%. By contrast, the network reported on 17 of the 19 Israeli minors who were killed, or 89%…. Apparently being a minor makes your death more newsworthy to NPR if you are Israeli, but less newsworthy if you are Palestinian.

Media also erase or downplay Palestinian deaths in the language of their headlines. When the New York Times (11/16/14) ran a story entitled “Palestinian Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza Border” it did not seem to occur to the editor that specifying the age of the victim would be important. The Palestinian in question was a 10-year-old boy. In another headline, “More Than 30 Dead in Gaza and Israel as Fighting Quickly Escalates,” the Times (5/11/21) neatly obscures that 35 out of the “more than 30 dead” were Palestinian, while five were Israeli.

5. Sidelining International Law

Attempts to insulate Israel from condemnation also manifest themselves in establishment media’s reluctance to identify the country’s breaches of international law (FAIR.org, 12/8/17).

In Operation Cast Lead coverage, FAIR (Extra!, 2/09) noted that—despite the blatant illegality of Israel’s assaults on Palestine’s civilian infrastructure—international law was seldom newsworthy. By January 13, 2009, only two evening news programs  (NBC Nightly News, 1/8/09, 1/11/09) had broached the legality of the Israeli military offensive. But, only one of those TV segments (Nightly News, 1/8/09) reprimanded Israel—the other (Nightly News, 1/11/09) defended the illegal use of white phosphorus, which was being deployed on refugee camps.

Meanwhile, just one daily newspaper (USA Today, 1/7/08) mentioned international law. But that single reference—embedded in an op-ed by a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy in Washington—was directed at Hamas violations, rather than Israeli ones.

When it comes to reporting on the unlawful establishment of Israeli settlements, media are no better. Colonizing occupied territories violates both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 446, yet outlets like NPR, CNN and the New York Times have a history of concealing Israeli criminality by benevolently branding settlements as “neighborhoods” (FAIR.org, 8/1/02, 10/10/14).

Such charitable descriptions have also been extended to settlers themselves. In an October 2009 Extra! piece, Julie Hollar investigated a bevy of articles that characterized settlers as “law-abiding,” “soft-spoken,” “gentle” and “normal.” One tone-deaf Christian Science Monitor headline (8/9/09) even read: “Young Israeli Settlers Go Hippie? Far Out, Man!” As Hollar observed, “ethnic cleansing could hardly hope for a friendlier hearing.”

Even when news media have characterized settlements and settlers as engaging in unlawful colonial practices, they have done so reluctantly. In 2021, Israeli settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah culminated in an unlawful campaign of mass expulsion. A New York Times (5/7/21) article on the crisis waited until the 39th paragraph before suggesting that Israel was acting criminally. Similarly, while describing Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly aggressive settlement policies, Associated Press (6/18/23) buried the lead by avoiding the “illegal” designation until the middle of the piece.

It’s important to bring up the rule of law not only when Israel is actively injuring innocents or erecting colonial communities. The ceaseless maltreatment of Palestinians constitutes—according to Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch—apartheid. Apartheid is a crime against humanity, yet news media avoid acknowledging the human rights community’s consensus (FAIR.org, 7/21/23, 2/3/22, 4/26/19). As FAIR (5/23/23) pointed out, it is a journalistic duty to do so:

The dominant and overriding context of anything that happens in Israel/Palestine is the fact that the state of Israel is running an apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory it controls. Any obfuscation or equivocation of that fact serves only to downplay the severity of Israeli crimes and the US complicity in them.

6. Reversing Victim and Victimizer

As Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 5/18/21) wrote:

Only the Israeli side has ethnically cleansed and turned millions…into refugees by preventing [Palestinians] from exercising their right to return to their homes. Israel is the only side subjecting anyone to apartheid and military occupation.

Nevertheless, US media enter into fantastical rationalizations to make the Israeli aggressor appear to be the victim. Blaming Palestinians for their suffering and dispossession has become one of the prime ways to accomplish this feat.

A 2018 FAIR report (5/17/18) analyzed coverage of the deadly Great March of Return—protests that erupted in response to Israel’s illegal land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. The ongoing siege bans the import of raw materials and significantly curtails the movement of people and goods. The International Committee of the Red Cross (6/14/10) deplores the blockade: “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility.”

Despite the ICRC indictment, FAIR found that established media held besieged Palestinians accountable for Israel’s reign of terror following anti-blockade demonstrations. The New York Times (5/14/18) editorial board went so far as to suggest that Palestinians (and not the siege-imposing Israel) were the only obstacles to peace:

Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly peaceful.

Casting Palestinians as incorrigible savages is also easier when US media use defensive language to excuse the bulk of Israeli violence (FAIR.org, 2/2/09, 7/10/14). FAIR (5/1/02) conducted a survey into ABC, CBS and NBC’s use of the word “retaliation”—a term that “lays responsibil­ity for the cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’ against, since they presumably initiated the conflict.” Of the 150 mentions of “retaliation” and its analogs between September 2000 and March 17, 2002, 79% referred to Israeli violence. Twelve percent were ambiguous, or encompassed both sides. A mere 9% framed Palestinian violence as a retaliatory response.

Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s books Bad News From Israel and More Bad News From Israel posit that television’s “Palestinian action/Israeli retaliation” trope has a “significant effect” on how the public remember events and allot blame (FAIR.org, 8/21/20). When Palestinians are consistently portrayed as the aggressive party and Israel as the defensive one, US news media are “effectively legitimizing Israeli actions.”

Coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine celebrates the efforts of Ukrainian resistance. With the anti-imperial Palestinian struggle, however, news media refuse to extend the same favor (FAIR.org, 7/6/23), thus creating a

media landscape where certain groups are entitled to self-defense, and others are doomed to be the victims of  “reprisal” attacks. It tells the world that…Palestinians living under apartheid have no right to react to the almost daily raids, growing illegal settlements and ballooning settler hostility.

***

Malcolm X once declared,“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard our screens and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to remain aware of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment news coverage. Then maybe one day we can move towards a future where ChatGPT answers “yes” when users like Abusaada ask it whether Palestinians deserve to be free.

Lara-Nour Walton is a Summer 2023 FAIR intern.

28 August 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Maria Popova

“Love the earth and sun and the animals,” Walt Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life — advice anchored, like his poetry, in that all-enveloping totality of goodwill that makes life worth living, advice at the heart of which is the act of unselfing; poetry largely inspired by the prose of Emerson, who had written of the “secret sympathy which connects men to all the animals, and to all the inanimate world around him.”

A quarter century after Leaves of Grass, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) took up this bright urgency in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (public library | public domain) — one of the great moral masterworks in the history of literature.

Dostoyevsky — who felt deeply the throes of personal love — contours the largest meaning of love:

Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God’s intent. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us!

In our era of ecological collapse, as we reckon with what it means to pay reparations to our home planet, the next passage rings with especial poignancy, painting the antidote to the indifference that got us where we are:

My young brother asked even the birds to forgive him. It may sound absurd, but it is right none the less, for everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.

Complement with Shelley’s prescient case for animal rights and Christopher Hitchens on the lesser appreciated moral of Orwell’s Animal Farm, then revisit Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the meaning of life.

My name is Maria Popova — a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing.

28 August 2023

Source: transcend.org

 

By Jon Olsen

9 Aug 1945  –  9 Aug 2023

Our faith in government, once based on trust
Has now irrevocably turned to rust.
Oh yes, there are a few whose loyalty us is true.
But countless others felt the need
To attach themselves to corporate greed.

You think the president calls the shots?
Then it’s you who don’t connect the dots.
The corporate elite, that one percent
Have directed all the laws to be bent
In their favor, against us all,
Who, in their view, should be made to crawl.

Some kids, they now say, are now illegal
And must be chased by a trained beagle.
Yet all of us are really human
Except perhaps for Harry Truman
Who authorized those awful bombs
To fall on old folks, kids, and moms
Who had nothing at all to do with war
Yet paid the price to even the score.

Today as well, his kind survive
To make pesticides that kill the hives
Of our friends the friendly  bees
And devastate majestic trees.

I could go on with this tirade
Concerning all the crimes they made:
The false flag events that place the blame
On others, that they wrongly claim
So many times to promote their wars.
Instead, they could have opened doors
To honor, truth, justice, and peace
And from misery deliver true release.

So now it is our turn to find a way
To liberate ourselves and make them pay
For all the devastation they have done.
Shall we count them all, one by one?
Shattered economy, wars, and bankrupt folk,
To them it seems some kind of joke.

So now what is it that we must do
To free ourselves from their sticky glue
That binds us to their exploitation
Of us and Nature’s great creation?

I have some answers and so do you.
Together we can see this through,
Taking inspiration from words so true.
Legitimate government for me and you
Is consent of us, the governed,
Whether red, green, white, or blue

Any trust we once had
And to say it  is so very sad,
Has all been vaporized like those
Whose lives were taken far away
On that unspeakable and horrid day.

Like the Founding Fathers of before,
It is our turn to discover the core
Of a new say, so precious and bold,
And reject this system  cruel and cold.

Jon Olsen – B.A. in philosophy from Bates College; Master degree in philosophy from University of Hawai’i; anti-imperialist activist since 1966 and founding member (in Hawai’i) of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Resistance (to the Draft), Peace and Freedom Party, and Hawai’i Green Party.

28 August 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

Anti-racist Jewish Australian writer Antony Loewenstein’s latest book “The Palestine Laboratory” describes how genocidally racist Apartheid Israel mercilessly uses high technology weapons, fences, and comprehensive surveillance to comprehensively control the 5.5 million sorely oppressed Occupied Palestinians, and how it exports this obscene technology of neo-Nazi occupation to countries around the World, from the EU and Anglosphere democracies to brutal dictatorships.

Antony Loewenstein’s chilling book “The Palestine Laboratory. How Israel exports the technology of occupation to the world” [1] is a horrifying dissection of violent and genocidal perversion in Occupied Palestine and the Developing World.  This book is addressed to a wide audience who, because of sustained lying about Palestine by Western Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic, and commentariat presstitutes, are unaware of the awful dimensions of the ongoing, century-long Palestinian Genocide and gross human rights abuses in Palestine. The author, Antony Loewenstein, has an outstanding record as an anti-racist Jewish Australian writer of exposing the evils of Zionist settler-colonialism to the Mainstream.

Antony Loewenstein devotes this important book to demonstrating how high technology Israeli militarism, confinement, and highly invasive surveillance used against the subjugated Palestinians is being sold “pre-tested” around the world, and is increasingly impacting people from impoverished, strife-torn Global South military dictatorships to rich Global North democracies. This book should be in every school, university, institutional and state library around the world because it exposes a huge threat to all of Humanity, not just in  vulnerable countries  of the Global South but also to those in the rich democracies of the Global North.

Several years ago Danish writer, activist and publisher Soren Korsgaard warned of the looming menace of the Surveillance State and Digital Dictatorship  [2, 3],  but Information Technology (IT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and high technology mass surveillance  are presently making this already a  global reality, with Quantum Computing advancing in the wings to potentially add  quantum leaps to the computational power of AI.  Rapidly advancing AI can deliver huge benefits for Humanity but there are well-grounded fears of IT and AI in the wrong hands, and indeed of rapidly evolving AI itself and of possible conscious and self-aware AI [4-9].  Fears of abuse of IT and AI  have already become a horrible reality for 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians subject to high technology  imprisonment and surveillance, and indeed for all Subjects of Apartheid Israel (over 50% being Indigenous Palestinians). Genocidally racist , neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel is now exporting high technology mass physical subjugation and mass surveillance across the World to “nice” countries and to brutal dictatorships alike. “We are all Palestinians” is transmuting from a noble statement of human rights solidarity to a worsening high technology mass surveillance reality for all of Humanity.

(A). Summary of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide and the appalling circumstances of the 15.5 million horribly abused Indigenous Palestinians.

Before reviewing the book in detail it is necessary to briefly summarize the appalling dimensions of Apartheid Israel’s ongoing, horrendous and utterly intolerable abuse of the Indigenous Palestinians. Unfortunately, for sensible focus reasons most of the following statistics were not presented in the book. They should be noted here because Western Mainstream media resolutely ignore these horrible realities that would simply not be tolerated if applied just for 1 day to nice, White folks in nice, rich, internally peaceful and democratic Western countries with all equal rights for all. The century-long and ongoing Palestinian Genocide (egregiously murderous anti-Arab anti-Semitism) has been associated with the following (for detailed and documented analyses see [10-27]) :

(a). In 1880 after 4 centuries under the benign Ottoman Caliphate there were 0.5 million Indigenous Palestinians in Palestine, 90% Muslim and 10% Christians, plus 25,000 Jews (half of them immigrants) [10].

(b). Due to racist UK-backed Zionist colonization after 1917, by 1948 there were about 2.0 million people in Palestine, 1.4 million being Indigenous Palestinians and 0.6 million being Jewish Zionist settlers, but in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) 800,000 Palestinians (57% of the Indigenous Palestinian population) were expelled by the UK-backed, UK-armed and UK-trained Zionists, this being associated with 530 villages emptied, 70 massacres, 15,000 Palestinians killed, and Zionist seizure of 78% of Palestine. In the 1967 Naksa (Setback) the genocidally racist Zionists seized all of Palestine plus parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and expelled a further 400,000 Arabs [28, 29].

(c). Today of  15.5 million mostly impoverished Palestinians, about 7 million are Exiled Palestinians (illegally prevented from return to the land continuously inhabited by their forebears for millennia), 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians (3.3 million in the West Bank, and 2.2 million in the blockaded and bombed Gaza Concentration Camp, and all deprived of the human rights specified by the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under violent and highly abusive military occupation for 56 years), and 2.0 million Israeli Palestinians (able to vote for the government ruling them, albeit as Third Class citizens subject to 60 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws, persecutions, exclusions, extensive home demolitions, and the endlessly publicly-repeated  threat of mass ethnic cleansing) [10].

(d). The GDP per capita is a deadly $3,500 for Occupied Palestine versus $55,500 for Apartheid Israel [30]. About 44% of Occupied Palestinians are children and 70% are women and children. Israeli Apartheid involves massive abuse of children, mothers and women.

(e). Indigenous Palestinians represent over 50% of the Subjects of Apartheid Israel, and Jewish Israelis 47%, but the 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians (73% of the 7.5 million Indigenous Palestinian Subjects)  cannot vote for the government ruling them i.e. they are subject to egregious Apartheid as recognized by major human rights groups, numerous eminent scholars, heroes in the fight against neo-Nazi Apartheid in South Africa, and billions of decent, informed people around the world [31-33].

(f.). The ongoing, century-long Palestinian Genocide (the term is not actually used in the book) has been associated with 2 mass population expulsion atrocities, about 0.1 million violent deaths and over 2 million avoidable deaths from violently-imposed deprivation since the British imperialists invaded the Middle East in 1914 for oil and imperial hegemony. The genocidal intent of the Zionist settler-colonial project has been clearly stated by Zionist leaders from genocidally psychopathic founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl (“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country”) to present serial war criminal Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories”). Total expulsion of the Indigenous Palestinians is presently publicly  articulated by the racist psychopaths of the present far right, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israeli government [28, 29, 34].

(g). Presently the Zionists violently kill about 500 Palestinians each year, and a further 4,000 die avoidably each year from imposed deprivation (denial of proper shelter, sustenance and medical services in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention). In the last 20 years about 10,000 Palestinians have been killed violently, scores of thousands have been wounded, and about 80,000 have died from imposed deprivation. In contrast, about 5,000 invading Zionists have been killed by Palestinians since 1920. In the last 20 years only about 50 Israelis have been killed by home-made Gaza rockets, whereas about 4,000 Israelis have been murdered by fellow Israelis. Terrorism is as terrorism does, but the violently racist West regards the mass murdering Zionists as civilized Europeans and the Indigenous Palestinians as “terrorists”, this being the justification for Apartheid Israel’s horrendous militarization, acquisition of 90 nuclear weapons and development of a deadly militarized economy [35].

(h). Not set out explicitly in “The Palestine Laboratory”, Apartheid Israel egregiously violates numerous International Laws and Conventions including the UN Charter, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UN Genocide Convention), the Rights of the Child Convention (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ), the UN Refugee Convention (the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees), the Geneva Conventions, the International Criminal Court, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, numerous UNGA and UNSC Resolutions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the 1926 Slavery Convention or the Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, the  2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and numerous UNGA and UNSC Resolutions [10].

(i). In particular and further to (h) above,  Apartheid Israel grossly violates Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that demand that an Occupier is obliged to provide its Conquered Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical requisites “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” [36]. While Apartheid Israel prospers hugely from the export of highly advanced killing, imprisoning and surveillance technology, it deliberately keeps 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians at a deadly level of bare existence that passively kills about 4,000 Occupied Palestinians each year [10].

(j) Finally, the Elephant in the Room reality not mentioned in “The Palestine Laboratory” is that the Ashkenazi Jews (Eastern European Jews) who run all of Israel/Palestine (and US foreign policy) descend from non-Semitic, Turkic Khazar converts to Judaism in abut the 8th- 9th  centuries CE. Indeed I come from a very famous Ashkenazi Jewish Hungarian family (ask any surgeon or mathematician) but DNA analysis says that it was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Jewish with zero Middle Eastern (i.e. zero Semitic) contribution. Indeed the genetic descendants today of the Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinians at the time of Jesus are the sorely oppressed Indigenous Palestinians, whereas most Jewish Israelis descend from Khazar, Berber and Yemeni converts to Judaism in the first millennium CE [37-45]. The Ashkenazi Jewish history is real and variously rich and tragic but the claim of the genocidally racist Zionists to Palestine is religious fantasy transmuted into genocidally racist neo-Nazi settler-colonialism after the fashion of 16th – 20th century genocidal Western settler-colonialism .

(B). Detailed analysis of “The Palestine Laboratory”.

Numbers matter and hopefully the above summary will fill out the quantitative dimension of the ongoing Zionist atrocity in Palestine that is largely absent from “The Palestine Laboratory”. In the following brief summation of the various chapters of the book I will concentrate on the numbers.

The Introduction outlines the major themes in the book and Zionist militarization from the time of the Indigenous Palestinian rebellion in the 1930s (not mentioned in the book is that in the1930s Arab Revolt 10% of the adult male Palestinians were killed by the British and by British-armed and British-trained Zionist terrorist militias [46-48]). The extraordinary silence of the West over the horrendous ethnic cleansing and subjugation of the Palestinians derives from Zionist subversion and perversion of the West that is dominated by Zionist-subverted America. Further, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel egregiously censors media. Thus Loewenstein: “All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) chief military censor before publication” (p3 [1]).

The Introduction sketches key issues such as (a) increasing Jewish acknowledgment of Israeli Apartheid, (b) huge Israeli sales of state-of-the-art war, control and surveillance technology (pre-tested on Palestinians) to dictatorships and amoral democracies around the world, and (c) the fervent pro-Zionism of the Zionist-subverted, US-dominated West and of White Supremacist neo-Nazis. No doubt cognizant of its wider audience and the requirement for “respectful conversation” (self-censorship) in the West, the book stops short of declaring the horrible reality that Zionism is genocidal racism and Nazism without gas chambers and industrial mass murder but with  mass population expulsions, active and passive large-scale killing,  and comprehensive subjugation of the Indigenous Palestinians population by one of the world’s biggest high technology militaries [35] with about 90 nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Also missing from the book is the plight of about 7 million Exiled Palestinians forbidden on pain of death from returning to the Land continuously inhabited by their forebears to the very dawn of the Agrarian Revolution 10,000 years ago.

Chapter 1 , “Selling Weapons to Anybody Who Wants Them”, details how the high technology Israeli arms industry from the 1930s onwards has advanced from use in the genocide and subjugation of Palestine  and repeated defeat of its impoverished neighbours to huge global sales of high technology military weapons (drones, missiles, anti-missiles, guns, warships, planes and ordnance) to the West and to dictatorships in the Global South. Apartheid Israel (variously independently or as a dirty tricks agent of the US) has been variously assisting horrendous and genocidal military violence in many countries including Chile, Colombia, Guatemala (the Mayan Indian Genocide),  Iran (under the Shah) , Indonesia (under Suharto), Romania (under Ceausescu), Haiti (under Duvalier), Paraguay (an unsuccessful scheme to get rid of Gaza Palestinians), Argentina, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Nicaragua (the Iran Contra Affair), Sudan and South Sudan (civil wars), Myanmar (Rohingya Genocide) and Sri Lanka (Tamil Genocide)  and elsewhere in Central America, Africa and Asia [49]. Loewenstein: “The sheer number of dictatorships with whom Israel has had relations is staggering (p34 [1]). Loewenstein details later in the book Israeli involvement in the Sudan, South Sudan, the Myanmar Rohingya Genocide and the Sri Lankan Tamil Genocide.

The horrendous “Body Count” of deaths from violence and war-imposed deprivation in the “death zones” of the Global South is missing from the book (that is after all to be mostly read by squeamish, personally gentle Western folk). Thus as estimated in 2007 avoidable deaths totalled 24 million (1950-2005) in countries variously occupied by Apartheid Israel (Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) [24], a huge total that puts Apartheid Israel into the Nazi Germany category of evil [21]. Of course these terrible realities are resolutely not reported in the ostensibly democratic but neo-Nazi, racist and pro-Zionist West, and any criticisms of Apartheid Israel by anti-racist Jews and non-Jews alike are falsely labelled “anti-Semitic” by the endlessly mendacious Zionists and their racist supporters.

Chapter 2, “September 11 was Good for Business”, shows how from the 1990s onward “Israel moved to become more militarily autonomous from Washington” (p45 [1]). What is not stated is that since Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons (with US, UK and French help) by the middle 1960s, the US became progressively more Zionist beholden. Indeed today 30% of the Biden Administration are Jewish Zionists and the remainder are “moderate” Christian Zionists  (as opposed to the fanatical, Biblical literalist  Pentecostal Christian  Zionist Trump supporters) [50]. The only strong opponents in Congress of Apartheid Israel’s war criminal excesses are the 6 members of the so-called Squad of decent, anti-racist Democrat women. Nevertheless neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel went from US aid being 10% of the economy in 1981 to about $4 billion or about 1% of the economy by 2020 (p46 [1]). The Israeli economy increasingly involved military and surveillance technologies. Through supply of modern weapons Apartheid Israel was involved in the 1994 onwards Rwandan Genocide (1 million Rwandans massacred) , the Colombian civil war, and dictatorship in Equatorial Guinea. The Apartheid Israeli economy was increasingly involved in cyber technology. Israel company Any Vision developed a system for mass surveillance of Palestinians, and now operates in over 40 countries, including Russia, China (Hong Kong), and the US (p63 [1]).

Of course as a Western Mainstream-published book nothing is said about almost certain US involvement (and hence very likely Israeli involvement) in the  9/11 atrocity (3,000 mostly Americans killed) that was used as the “excuse” for the US Alliance to invade the Muslim World from Libya to the Philippines in the US War on Terror. It was estimated in 2015 that 32 million Muslims died from violence (5 million) and deprivation  (27 million) in 20 countries invaded by the neo-Nazi US Alliance since the US Government’s 9/11 false flag atrocity [51, 52]. Numerous science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts have concluded that the US Government did 9/11 with some arguing for Israeli involvement.  Critical evidence for this alternative hypothesis to the lying Bush “official US version of 9/11” (the US version is accepted by only a minority of Humanity) is the endless mendacity of US and Israeli governments, low temperature fires in the Twin Towers, the sheer implausibility that men barely trained on single-engine light aircraft could fly passenger jets into precise building targets, and the rapid collapse of 3 skyscrapers (in about 10 seconds in “perfect” examples of explosive demolition). Indeed application of the latest chemical physics technologies has revealed unexploded nanothermite high explosive in the World Trade Center (WTC) dust. Further, US engineers have reported that the collapse of WTC Building 7 (WTC7) was due to simultaneous loss of all key structural support elements (i.e. due to explosive demolition). The closest the US Government has come to recognition of the Big Lie has been former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Al Gore roundly condemning the huge intelligence failure that enabled 9/11 to happen [52-59].

Loewenstein does report on how 9/11 enormously helped the Israeli war business. Israeli PM Netanyahu questioned about 9/11 on US TV stated: “It’s very good,. Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy” (p48 [1]).  The Zionist-subverted West continues to swallow the lying Bush “official US version of 9/11” and ignores the stark difference between about 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11 and over 30 million Muslims killed in the ongoing US War on Terror (aka the US War on Muslims) [51, 52]. Loewenstein: “In 2020, Israel spent US$22 billion on its military and was the twelfth biggest military supplier in the world, with sales of more than US$345 million” (p51 [1]). However he also states: “Global public opinion in the US toward Israel has taken a nosedive since 2001… 34 per cent of [US] Jews agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States”, 25 per cent agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”, and 22 per cent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians” (p51 [1]). Loewenstein concludes that “Israel has thus fully embraced the “war on terror” and richly profited from it” (p52 [1]), and describes key Israeli involvement in the Sri Lankan Tamil Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the Myanmar Rohingya Genocide, the South Sudan civil war, and violent despotism in Equatorial Guinea (pp 52-54 [1]).

Finally Loewenstein describes extraordinarily extensive use of facial recognition technology that has made the Occupied Palestinians electronic prisoners of Apartheid Israel. And now this Israeli technology is being sold to neo-Nazi regimes and ostensible democracies alike across the World.

Chapter 3, “Preventing an Outbreak of Peace”, commences with a description of horrible sophisticated electronic targeting of Palestinians so that “Killing or injuring Palestinians should be as easy as ordering a pizza” (p61 [1]). It goes on to describe the genocidal racism of Israeli leaders and the succession of mass expulsions, Gaza massacres, and proposed total ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians (for an alphabetically-organized  compendium of genocidal Zionist statements over 130 years see [34]).  Loewenstein describes the chilling Israeli Unit 8200 involved in highly intrusive mass surveillance of Occupied Palestinians. The information garnered includes information on illicit affairs and homosexuality that is used to blackmail Palestinians into collaboration with the neo-Nazi Occupiers. This technology is being sold to the World – and thus we are all becoming Palestinians.

Loewenstein: “The Covid-19 pandemic was the perfect opportunity for Israeli surveillance firms to attract business; arresting the spread of the disease required effective contact tracing and Israeli companies promoted themselves as the best in the world” (p91 [1]). However Orthodox Jews objected to control measures, this resulting in the community of Bnei Brek being sealed off.  Loewenstein comments: “For some sections of the Israeli public there’s more hatred towards Orthodox communities than Palestinians (p96 [1]).  Not mentioned in the book is that true Orthodox Judaism is intrinsically anti-Zionist by holding that Jews cannot return to Zion (Jerusalem) until the Messiah arrives to declare the glory of the Lord to the whole world [60].

Chapter 4, “Selling Israeli Occupation to the World”, describes the horrible use of Israeli technology to keep Africans out of Israel (by a high technology fence along the Israel-Egypt border) and to keep desperate refugees from reaching Europe (by Israeli drones used by the EU Frontier agency for locating but then ignoring refugees headed for the neo-Nazi EU and who thence drowned at sea). Loewenstein: “[Humanitarian] Sea-Watch cannot compete with this surveillance capability and is woefully outmatched by the Frontier infrastructure” (p100 [1]). Loewenstein castigates cooperation between Greece and the EU in general in this obscene and deadly violation of refugee human rights.

Loewenstein takes a disturbing look at Germany-Israel relations. Apparently driven by guilt over the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (but probably also driven by innate racism and neo-Nazism as reflected in election results) German reparations enabled the militarization of  Apartheid Israel. Germany buys Israeli weaponry pre-tested on Occupied Palestinians, and German authorities are threatening and censoring anti-racist public demonstrations in favour of Palestinian human rights. Germany supplied Apartheid Israel with 6 submarines as launch vehicles for Israeli nuclear weapons. Germany and all the nations that collaborated with Nazi Germany in WW2 belong to the anti-Semitic and holocaust-denying International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The IHRA is anti-Jewish anti-Semitic and anti-Arab anti-Semitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim critics of Apartheid Israel as anti-Semitic) and holocaust ignoring (by ignoring all WW2 holocausts other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million deaths), and indeed ignoring some 70 holocaust and genocide atrocities. The WW2 holocausts ignored by the IHRA include (deaths from violence and deprivation in brackets) the WW2 Polish Holocaust (6 million), the European Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies killed by the German Nazis), the Soviet Holocaust (27 million killed by the Nazis), the WW2 Chinese Holocaust (35-40 million Chinese killed under the Japanese), and the WW2 Bengali Holocaust  (WW2  Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death for strategic reasons by the British with food-denying Australian complicity) [24-26]. All but 3 IHRA member countries shockingly voted No to the annual UNGA Anti-Nazi Resolution in 2022 that  condemns Nazism, neo-Nazism and related racist obscenities [45].

This chapter concludes with a disturbing account of rising anti-Jewish anti-Semitism in Europe, in addition to the horrendously deadly, post-9/11, hysteria-driven US Islamophobia (anti-Arab anti-Semitism). One must reiterate what the Zionist-subverted Western Mainstream ignores, that while Palestinians and Arabs are ethnically Semitic, the dominant European Ashkenazi Jews (such as myself) are not Semitic and derive from non-Semitic Turkic Khazar converts to Judaism in about the 8th – 9th centuries CE [37-44].

Chapter 5, “The Enduring Appeal of Israeli Domination”, describes initial African support for an independent Israel, and how this has dramatically changed since 1990 as the genocidal racism of Apartheid Israel and its Western backers became increasingly apparent. Genocidally racist Apartheid Israel found an ideological, ethnonationalist partner in Apartheid South Africa. Neo-Nazi Afrikaaner White Supremacists  had been imprisoned during WW2 for Nazi sympathies  but in 1948 their National Party was elected (Whites only suffrage) and began installing neo-Nazi Apartheid. Apartheid Israel assisted Apartheid South Africa creating an arms industry, developing nuclear weapons, and overcoming global anti-Apartheid sanctions [24]. The book admits that South Africa permitted Apartheid Israel to test nuclear weapons but incorrectly implies that South Africa did not actually acquire nuclear weapons. South Africa acquired 6 nuclear bombs but eventually dismantled them after the fall of Apartheid. The architect of South African Apartheid, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, declared (1961): “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” [61, 62]. Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel was involved with Apartheid South African Bantustans and has applied the same model to check-point entry and exit West Bank “Bantustans” and the bombed and blockaded Gaza Concentration Camp [63].

While India under Congress lead the non-aligned and socialist world in boycotting and sanctioning Apartheid South Africa (and banned Israel arms sales over corruption issues), under the right-wing and Hindu nationalist Bharatya Janata Party (BJP; Indian People’s Party)  led by Narendra Modi Indian ethnonationalism and Islamophobia have found a common party with ethnonationalist and anti-Arab anti-Semitic Apartheid Israel and Zionism. India is applying harsh Israeli tactics and technology to disputed Kashmir.

In relation to China, Loewenstein comments: “Chinese ethno-authoritarianism scares the West” (p133 [1]) and quotes Human Rights Watch’s comparisons between the Occupied Palestinians and the 12 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang (about half the population). However while China has been heavy-handed in Xinjiang to prevent disastrous insurgency, claims by the serial war criminal and genocidal US Alliance of a “Uyghur Genocide” are utterly false and utterly hypocritical when one considers the horrendous ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Loewenstein’s analysis of Xinjiang is flawed and derives from a US-imposed Mainstream Western anti-China stance. Indeed the health and education statistics for Xinjiang and Tibet are vastly better than in neighbouring Afghanistan that suffered 20 years of US-imposed war and in which avoidable deaths from deprivation in 2001-2021 totalled an appalling 6 million, evidence of horrendous violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention by the neo-Nazi and war-criminal US Alliance [24-27, 64-66]. China supports human rights for Palestinians that are denied by US-, Australia-, UK- and EU-backed Apartheid Israel. Loewenstein asks: “But if Chinese technology and its ideology is a threat [to] the world, why is [Apartheid] Israel not viewed in the same way?” (p135 [1]).

Loewenstein also writes about the US-Mexico border as a major site of Israeli security and surveillance companies employing technologies also used against the Occupied Palestinians. This has been associated with a huge spike in refugee deaths at the border (p137  [1]), with this also impacting Indigenous Americans. Loewenstein: “Over seven thousand bodies have been found on the US/Mexico border since the 1990s” (p137 [1]) and  “It was therefore not surprising that autonomous surveillance robots started appearing on both the Israel/Gaza border and the US/Mexico border in 2021 and 2022” (p141 [1]).

Chapter 6, “Israeli Mass Surveillance in the Brain of Your Phone”, deals with the Israeli NGO Pegasus spyware system that can hack into mobile phones, spy on conversations and even insert material enabling criminal prosecution of the innocent users. Loewenstein states: “Israel’s surveillance apparatus is a competitor and ally of Washington’s National Security Agency (NSA), the most powerful eavesdropping network in the world. While outmatched in terms of manpower, Israel has a long history of spying on its closest ally, a fact that does not appear to bother the superpower” (p143 [1]). Israeli Pegasus and similar systems have been used to identify, arrest, torture and kill dissidents in the Middle East and is being adopted by India and indeed throughout the world. Another Israeli company Celebrite is widely used around the world to target political opponents and activists. Israeli Black Cube is an espionage-for-hire system being used in Africa, Europe and the US. Apartheid Israel has monetized the imprisonment and surveillance technology oppressing 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians by selling these systems to democracies and dictatorships alike around the World. Thanks to neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel the total control, galactic fascist state of the BBC outer space science fiction TV series “Blake’s 7” is well on the way to being realized on Earth [67].

Chapter 7, “Social Media Companies Don’t like Palestinians”, describes how US media giants like Google, Twitter (now X), YouTube, and Facebook censor material critical of neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel. Notwithstanding the freedom of speech First Amendment of the US Constitution (that permits flagrant religion-based lying to children i.e. massive intellectual child abuse), Facebook has over 15,000 content moderators (censors). The examples given in the  this chapter suggest that criticism of Israeli Apartheid, including that by a growing number of anti-racist Jews, is being falsely regarded as “hate speech” and “anti-Semitism”, the 2 favourite canards of the genocidally racist and remorselessly mendacious neo-Nazi Zionists (Zionazis).

Not quoted in the book, the CEO of YouTube boasted of having diverted 70% of viewers away from “concerning sites” to “approved sites” [2, 3]. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has reported that Google (or the Google-directed robot) greatly reduced the visibility of socialist articles on Google Searches, noting that about 95% of searchers don’t bother going beyond the first 20 search results [68]. Bing Searches are vastly better, and hence people are advised to “Bing it!” [69-71]. All this is very daunting. On a personal note, I found that a Wikipedia entry about me was removed (notwithstanding that I have authored 8 huge books, and hundreds of carefully researched humanitarian articles, as well as  over 100 scientific papers in a half-century scientific career). I was recently removed from Twitter (X). A resolute critic of the appalling crimes against Humanity by Apartheid Israel, I have found that that some  of my key articles have effectively disappeared from Google Searches by being relegated well down in the search results. In the last dozen years I have been falsely defamed by Zionists and coincidentally effectively removed from Mainstream visibility in Zionist-subverted and Zionist-perverted Australia.

A detailed 2018 analysis of major media companies found that a significant part of the explanation for huge Zionist media censorship is that the American 60% of the world’s 30 biggest media companies have a disproportionately high Jewish Board membership. Jews and females represent 2% and 51%, respectively, of the US population but average 33% and 19%, respectively, of Board members of the top 18 US media companies. It is a reasonable assumption that extremely wealthy Jews would be very likely to be pro-Zionist, in contrast to poor Jews or modestly prosperous intellectual Jews who would be more likely in comparison to be anti-racist and thus anti-Zionist. By way of comparison with Alphabet (owner of Google) that is #1 in the global Mainstream media, Microsoft ($4.58 billion annual revenue) is #17 in the world Mainstream media. Among other things Microsoft owns the search engine Bing and  has an 18% Jewish Board and an 18% female Board as compared to a 46% Jewish Board and 23% female Board for Alphabet. However a notable difference is that Bing Searches reveal humane websites variously rendered effectively invisible by Google [71].

These astounding disparities were not in the book. However Loewenstein notes that Facebook established an Oversight Board that “included Emi Palmor, the former director general of Israel’s [In]Justice Ministry. Palestinians are not currently represented on the Board” (p202 [1]). Further, Loewenstein notes the rightful Western indignation over the war criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine as compared to the massive Western silence over the US-backed Apartheid Israeli invasion and 56-year subjugation of the Occupied Palestinians (and indeed the US invasion of over 50 countries since the defeat of German Nazism in 1945 [72-79]).

The Conclusion of the book comments that “The worst-case scenario, long-feared but never [totally] realized, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under guise of national security” (page 211 [1]). This mass expulsion has been explicitly advocated by Zionist leaders from Theodor Herzl (the genocidally racist founder of Zionism) to present Apartheid Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his genocidally racist and fascist colleagues today (for a catalogue of  appalling genocidal Zionist statements see [34]). 2 mass expulsions have already occurred (800,000 in 1948 and 400,000 in 1967). Indeed Tom Pickering, a former US ambassador to Apartheid Israel and the UN, has predicted eventual complete ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Palestinian Territories [34].

Only the presently racist West recovering some semblance of decency and supporting Indigenous Palestinian human rights can stop such further genocidal atrocities. Indeed in so doing the West can also protect itself from the ongoing subversion and perversion by the neo-Nazi Zionist state and its traitorous and racist supporters. One notes that Australia is second only to the US as a supporter of Apartheid Israel but  there is egregious violation of Australians,  Australian institutions and Australia by Apartheid Israel and its traitorous agents [80, 81]. Thus, for example, the US supplies raw intelligence on Australians to Apartheid Israel [82], and the Zionist-subverted and US lackey Australian Labor  Government has an extraordinary record of egregious and blatant lying in support of Apartheid Israel [83].

Final comments.

Antony Loewenstein’s “The Palestine Laboratory” is a powerful and humane book that should be in every library. Anti-Apartheid and world hero Nelson Mandela famously stated that “The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” [33]. “The Palestine Laboratory” describes how Apartheid Israel is hugely profiting by exporting the high technology instruments of violent subjugation, mass incarceration and surveillance to the rest of the world. We are all set to become Palestinians.

What can decent people do? Decent people must (a) inform everyone they can (reading “The Palestine Laboratory” would be a useful start), (b) urge and apply Boycotts Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries supporting Apartheid Israel (and hence the vile crime of Apartheid), and (c) expose and oppose the globally entrenching Surveillance State that is remorselessly expanding based on technology pre-tested upon Indigenous Palestinians in neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel’s “Palestine Laboratory”.

References.

[1]. Antony Loewenstein, “The Palestine Laboratory. How Israel exports the technology of occupation to the world”, Scribe 2023.

[2].  Soren Korsgaard , “One World Digital Dictatorship”, Crime & Power, 5 January 2020: https://www.crimeandpower.com/2020/01/05/one-world-digital-dictatorship/ .

[3].  Gideon Polya, “Review: “One World Digital Dictatorship” by Soren Korsgaard – Digital Nightmare”, Countercurrents, 23 January 2020: https://countercurrents.org/2020/01/review-one-world-digital-dictatorship-by-soren-korsgaard-digital-nightmare/ .

[4]. Yuval Noah Harari, “Homo Deus. A brief history of tomorrow”, Vintage, London, 2017.

[5]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “Homo Deus” By Yuval Harari – Palestinian Genocide & Climate Genocide Ignored”, Countercurrents, 6 November 2021: https://countercurrents.org/2019/11/review-homo-deus-by-yuval-harari-palestinian-genocide-climate-genocide-ignored/ .

[6]. Max Tegmark, “Life 3.0. Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, Penguin, 2017.

[7]. Stanislas Dehaene,  Hakwan Lau and  Sid Kouider, “What is consciousness , and could machines have it?”, Science,   Vol. 358, Issue 6362, pp. 486-492, 27 October  2017: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6362/486.full .

[8]. “Artificial Intelligence. A selection of our stories on AI”, The Economist: https://www.economist.com/artificial-intelligence .

[9]. “How to worry wisely about Artificial Intelligence”, The Economist, 22 April 2023: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/20/how-to-worry-wisely-about-artificial-intelligence .

[10]. Gideon Polya, “Australia must stop Zionist subversion and join the World in comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its supporters”, Subversion of Australia, 15 April 2021: https://sites.google.com/site/subversionofaustralia/2021-04-15 .

[11]. “The genocide of the Palestinian people: an international law and human rights perspective”, Center for Constitutional Rights, 25 August 2016: https://ccrjustice.org/genocide-palestinian-people-international-law-and-human-rights-perspective

[12]. Gideon Polya, “Refutation Of Mainstream-Accepted Racist Zionist Lies Behind Israel ‘s Gaza Massacres And Palestinian Genocide”, Countercurrents, 26 July, 2014: https://www.countercurrents.org/polya260714.htm .

[13]. Gideon Polya, “Israeli-Palestinian & Middle East conflict – from oil to climate genocide”, Countercurrents, 21 August 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/08/21/israeli-palestinian-middle-east-conflict-from-oil-to-climate-genocide/ .

[14]. Gideon Polya, “End 50 Years Of Genocidal Occupation & Human Rights Abuse By US-Backed Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 9 June 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/06/09/end-50-years-of-genocidal-occupation-human-rights-abuse-by-us-backed-apartheid-israel/ .

[15]. Gideon Polya, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights & Palestinians. Apartheid Israel violates ALL Palestinian Human Rights”, Palestine Genocide Essays, 24 January 2009: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/universal-declaration-of-human-rights-palestinians .

[16]. Gideon Polya, “70th anniversary of Apartheid Israel & commencement of large-scale Palestinian Genocide”, Countercurrents, 11 May 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/05/11/70th-anniversary-of-apartheid-israel-commencement-of-large-scale-palestinian-genocide/ .

[17]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel’s Palestinian Genocide & Australia’s Aboriginal Genocide compared”, Countercurrents, 20 February 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/02/20/apartheid-israels-palestinian-genocide-australias-aboriginal-genocide-compared/ .

[18]. Gideon Polya, “Israelis kill 10 times more Israelis in Apartheid Israel than do terrorists”, Countercurrents, 1 March 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/03/01/israelis-kill-ten-times-more-israelis-in-apartheid-israel-than-do-terrorists/ .

[19]. Gideon Polya, “Israeli Jewish Nation-State Law enshrines Apartheid and genocidal racism”, Countercurrents, 24 July 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/24/israeli-jewish-nation-state-law-enshrines-apartheid-and-genocidal-racism/ .

[20]. Gideon Polya, “Submission To National Anti-Corruption Commission: Australian Labor Government’s Lying For Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 22 July 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/07/submission-to-national-anti-corruption-commission-australian-labor-governments-lying-for-apartheid-israel/ .

[21]. Gideon Polya, “A Shocking List of 52 Zionist- & Apartheid Israeli-Nazi Germany Comparisons”, Countercurrents, 7 August 2021: https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/a-shocking-list-of-52-zionist-apartheid-israeli-nazi-germany-comparisons/ .

[22]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “The Plight Of The Palestinians. A Long History Of Destruction”, Countercurrents,  17 June, 2012: https://countercurrents.org/polya170612.htm .

[23]. William A. Cook , editor,  “The Plight of the Palestinians. A Long History of Destruction”, Palgrave Macmillan, London , 2010.

[24]. . Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 2020.

[25]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, 3rd edition Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 2022.

[26]. Gideon Polya, “US-imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide”, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 2020.

[27]. Gideon Polya in Soren Korsgaard, editor, “The Most Dangerous Book Ever Published: Deadly Deception Exposed”, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 272020.

[28]. “Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ .

[29]. “2023, 75th Nakba Anniversary: 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) & Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/1948-nakba-catastrophe-palestinian-genocide .

[30]. “List of countries by GDP (nominal) per capita”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita .

[31]. BDS – Boycott Apartheid Israel: https://sites.google.com/view/bdsopinions/home .

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[33]. “Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/nonjewsagainstracistzionism/ .

[34]. “Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide”, Palestinian Genocide :  https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/zionist-quotes .

[35]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Among World’s Leading Countries For Militarization, Violence, Abuse And Genocide”, Countercurrents, 16 May 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/05/apartheid-israel-among-worlds-leading-countries-for-militarization-violence-abuse-and-genocide/ .

[36]. “Fourth Geneva Convention”: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.33_GC-IV-EN.pdf .

[37]. “Khazars”, McGill: https://cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/k/Khazars.htm .

[38]. Palestine Maps, “Jews of Khazaria, brief history and other resources”: https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Maps/Story800.html .

[39]. Gideon Polya, “Refutation Of Mainstream –Accepted Racist Zionist Lies Behind Israel ‘s Gaza Massacres And Palestinian Genocide”, Countercurrents,  26 July 2014: https://www.countercurrents.org/polya260714.htm .

[40]. Eran Elhaik,”Ashkenazic Jews’ mysterious origins unravelled by scientists  thanks to ancient DNA”,  The Conversation, 5 September 2018: https://theconversation.com/ashkenazic-jews-mysterious-origins-unravelled-by-scientists-thanks-to-ancient-dna-97962 .

[41]. Eran Elhaik, “Uncovering ancient Ashkenaz – the birthplace of Yiddish speakers”,  The Conversation, 6 May 2016: https://theconversation.com/uncovering-ancient-ashkenaz-the-birthplace-of-yiddish-speakers-58355 .

[42]. Arthur  Koestler, “The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage”, Hutchinson, 1976.

[43]. Shlomo Sand, “The Invention of the Jewish People”, Verso, London, 2009.

[44]. Marta D. Costa et al, “A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages”, Nature, 2013: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html .

[45].Gideon Polya, “Melbourne University Adopts Anti-Semitic & Holocaust-Ignoring IHRA Definition Of Anti-Semitism”, Countercurrents, 5 February 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/02/melbourne-university-adopts-anti-semitic-holocaust-ignoring-ihra-definition-of-anti-semitism/ .

[46]. “Gideon Goes To War: The Story of Major-General Orde C. Wingate”, Scribner, 1955.,

[47]. Gordon Thomas, “Gideon’s Spies. The Secret History of the Mossad”, Pan Books, 1999.

[48]. “The Palestinian Arab Revolt, 1936-1939”, The Palestinian History Tapestry: https://www.palestinianhistorytapestry.org/tapestry/0450-kuyffiyeh-1936-arab-revolt/ .

[49]. Apartheid Israeli state terrorism: (A) individuals exposing Apartheid Israeli state terrorism, and (B) countries subject to Apartheid Israeli state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/apartheid-israeli-state-terrorism .

[50]. Gideon Polya, “Zionist-subverted America:  Jewish Zionists Are One Third Of The Biden Cabinet”, Countercurrents, 27 January 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2022/01/zionist-subverted-america-jewish-zionists-are-one-third-of-the-biden-cabinet/ .

[51]. Gideon Polya, “Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm .

[52]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[53]. Gideon Polya, “Lying  Mainstream Media Ignore Expert New 9/11 WTC7 Demolition Report”, Countercurrents, 22 August 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2020/08/lying-mainstream-media-ignore-expert-new-9-11-wtc7-demolition-report/ .

[54]. Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao (Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks) , Final Report. “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7”, March 2020: https://files.wtc7report.org/file/public-download/A-Structural-Reevaluation-of-the-Collapse-of-World-Trade-Center-7-March2020.pdf .

[55]. Feng Xiao and Zhili Quan, “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7”, Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks, March 2020: http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7 .

[56]. David Ray Griffin, “The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False”, Olive Branch Press, 2012: https://www.amazon.com.au/Mysterious-Collapse-World-Trade-Center-ebook/dp/B00APDAZZ2 .

[57]. 911Truth.org, “The 40 top reasons to doubt the official story”, 911Truth.org, 16 May 2006: http://www.911truth.org/the-top-40-reasons-to-doubt-the-offical-story/ .

[58]. Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center [32].

[59]. Paul Craig Roberts, “9/11: finally the truth comes out?”, Foreign Policy Journal, 4 January 2019: https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2019/01/04/9-11-finally-the-truth-comes-out/ . Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journals, vol.2,  pp.7-31 (25), 2009: http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM .

[60]. Neturei Karta, “Israeli Independence Day”: http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Statements/20090429IID.cfm .

[61]. “BDS – Boycott Apartheid Israel”: [17]. BDS – Boycott Apartheid Israel: https://sites.google.com/view/bdsopinions/home . .

[62]. “Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/nonjewsagainstracistzionism/ .

[63]. “Gaza Concentration Camp”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/gaza-concentration .

[64]. Gideon Polya, “Submission To Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission Over Huge But Ignored Australian War Crimes”, Countercurrents, 2 August 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/08/submission-to-australian-national-anti-corruption-commission-over-huge-but-ignored-australian-war-crimes/

[65]. “Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ .

[66]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/  .

[67]. Martin Belam, “Blake’s 7: 40 years on, the dystopian sci-fi drama still packs a punch”, Guardian, 3 January 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2018/jan/03/blakes-7-40-years-on-the-dystopian-sci-fi-drama-still-packs-a-punch .

[68]. WSWS, “Google’s new search protocol is restricting access to 13 leading socialist, progressive and anti-war sites”, WSWS, 2 August 2017: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html .

[69]. Gideon Polya, “Google Censorship & Zionist Constraint On Effective Free Speech Threaten Planet”, Countercurrents, 9 August 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/08/google-censorship-zionist-constraint-on-effective-free-speech-threaten-planet/ .

[70]. Gideon Polya, “Do Bing Searches To Circumvent Mendacious Pro-Zionist Google Censorship – Bing It!”, Countercurrents, 30 April 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/04/do-bing-searches-to-circumvent-mendacious-pro-zionist-google-censorship-bing-it/ .

[71]. Gideon Polya, “Zionist subversion, Mainstream media censorship”, Countercurrents, 9 March 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/zionist-subversion-mainstream-media-censorship/ .

[72]. Gideon Polya, “Why Australia Should Quit  Military Links With Serial War Criminal America”, Countercurrents, 28 January 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/01/why-australia-should-quit-military-links-with-serial-war-criminal-america/ .

[73]. Gideon Polya, “The US Has Invaded 70 Nations Since 1776 – Make 4 July Independence From America Day”, Countercurrents, 5 July, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya050713.htm .

[74]. William Blum, “Rogue State: A guide to the world’s only superpower”, Common Courage Press, 2005.

[75]. Dr Zoltan Grossman, “From Wounded Knee to Libya : a century of U.S. military interventions”,  ” http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html . .

[76]. Benjamin Norton, “US launched 251 military interventions since 1991, and 469 since 1798”, Multipolista, 13 September 2022: https://multipolarista.com/2022/09/13/us-251-military-interventions-1991/ .

[77]. Congressional Research Service, “Instances of use of United States armed forces abroad, 1798-2022”, 22 March 2022: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738 .

[78]. David Vine, “Where in the world is the U.S. military?”, Politico, July/August 2015: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321/ .

[79]. “Stop state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/stopstateterrorism/ .

[80]. Gideon Polya, “Racist Zionism and Israeli State Terrorism threats to Australia and Humanity”, Palestinian Genocide, 2010: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/racist-zionism-and-israeli .

[81]. Gideon Polya, “50 Ways Australian Intelligence Spies On Australia And The World For UK , Israeli And US State Terrorism”, Countercurrents, 11 December, 2013: https://countercurrents.org/polya111213.htm .

[82]. Philip Dorling, “US shares raw intelligence on Australians with Israel”, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September 2013: https://www.smh.com.au/national/us-shares-raw-intelligence-on-australians-with-israel-20130912-2tllm.html .

[83]. Gideon Polya, “Submission To National Anti-Corruption Commission: Australian Labor Government’s Lying For Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 22 July 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/07/submission-to-national-anti-corruption-commission-australian-labor-governments-lying-for-apartheid-israel/ .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

29 August 2023

Source: countercurrents.org