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By Countercurrents Collective

The U.S. launched airstrikes in Syria on Thursday, targeting facilities near the Iraqi border used by Iranian-backed militia groups.

The Pentagon said the strikes were retaliation for a Feb. 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops.

The airstrike was the first military action undertaken by the Biden administration, which in its first weeks has emphasized its intent to put more focus on the challenges posed by China, even as Mideast threats persist.

The U.S. launched the strike one day after Biden spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. The two leaders “discussed the recent rocket attacks against Iraqi and coalition personnel and agreed that those responsible for such attacks must be held fully to account,” the White House said Wednesday in a statement.

“I’m confident in the target that we went after, we know what we hit,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters flying with him from California to Washington. Speaking shortly after the airstrikes, he added, “We are confident that that target was being used by the same Shia militants that conducted the strikes,” referring to the Feb. 15 rocket attack.

Austin said he recommended the action to Biden.

“We said a number of times that we will respond on our timeline,” Austin said. “We wanted to be sure of the connectivity and we wanted to be sure that we had the right targets.”

“At President Biden’s direction US military forces earlier this evening conducted airstrikes against infrastructure utilized by Iranian backed militant groups in eastern Syria,” the Pentagon’s spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement. The attack took place around 6 pm Eastern time on Thursday.

Kirby echoed earlier media reports that the bombing of the Syrian territory was in retaliation to “recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq.” He further argued that the raids were aimed at defusing the tensions in the Middle East.

Kirby claimed that the strikes inflicted serious damage on the infrastructure of “a number of Iranian backed militant groups including Kait’ib Hezbollah and Kait’ib Sayyid al Shuhad,” noting that “multiple facilities” were destroyed.

Unconfirmed reports from Syria spoke of explosions near Al-Bukamal, a town in the Deir-ez-Zor province near the border with Iraq.

The reported airstrikes come after a series of rocket attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad, the Balad Air Base and the Erbil International Airport in Iraq over the past two weeks. No group has claimed responsibility and the Pentagon has not officially blamed anyone.

This is not the first time the U.S. has blamed Iran for attacks on U.S. troops and contractors in neighboring Iraq. After one contractor died, the Trump administration targeted the Kataib Hezbollah militia and other Shia Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), which culminated in the drone assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran, in January 2020.

Biden himself led the chorus of Democrats who denounced President Donald Trump’s move at the time, saying he “tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) had said the Soleimani strike risked “provoking further dangerous escalation of violence” and was undertaken without congressional authorization.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, criticized the U.S. attack as a violation of international law.

“The United Nations Charter makes absolutely clear that the use of military force on the territory of a foreign sovereign state is lawful only in response to an armed attack on the defending state for which the target state is responsible,” she said. “None of those elements is met in the Syria strike.”

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the decision to carry out these strikes was meant to send a signal that while the U.S. wanted to punish the militias, it did not want the situation to spiral into a bigger conflict.

The official added that Biden was presented with a range of options and one of the most limited responses was chosen.

It was not clear how, or whether, the strike might affect U.S. efforts to coax Iran back into a negotiation about both sides resuming compliance with the agreement.

At about 2 a.m. local time, a single F-15 jet fired at a cluster of buildings at a location believed to be a transit point for smuggling militia members into Iraq, according to a U.S. official. A handful of people were expected to be at the location, the official said.

After about a decade of civil war, Syria’s military is in little position to respond directly to a U.S. attack. The country faced two attacks by the U.S. military during former President Donald Trump’s tenure.

By hitting a facility in Syria said to be tied to Iranian-linked militia groups, the U.S. avoids raising tensions that would come with a strike directly on Iran, which the Biden administration is seeking to persuade to return to the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump withdrew from three years ago.

26 February 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ghulam Nabi Fai

Kashmir is internationally recognized as a disputed territory whose final status has yet to be determined by its people. Both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and have fought three wars during the past 73 years. This is a matter that urgently needs to be put on the road to finding a just and viable solution.

Any effort to resolve the conflict requires confronting the issue directly and honestly, and it is something that seems difficult for the Indian government to do. India does not want to resolve the Kashmir conflict but to dissolve it. India wants the Kashmir issue to be buried under the rug when the subject is raised by the international community, alleging that it is a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan and no one else’s business. If forthrightness was involved, it could be a strictly bilateral issue.

It may also be mentioned here that India presents a wholly false picture of the situation in Kashmir. The Indian government’s agenda and its various mouthpieces continue to mislead the public about the dispute and Kashmir, appears to be unimpeded.

New Delhi has tried to weave a smokescreen with some unfounded myths, which seek to discredit the genuine struggle of the people. But these ploys will never be able to cover up the reality and sufferings of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. India has particularly failingly tried to equate Kashmiri people with fundamentalism. I want to debunk this myth created by India that Kashmir is an issue of fundamentalism.

The term fundamentalism is quite inapplicable to Kashmiri society. A hallmark of Kashmir has been its long tradition of tolerance, amity, goodwill, and friendships across religious and cultural boundaries. It has a long tradition of moderation and nonviolence. Its culture does not generate extremism or fundamentalism. Its five chief religious’ groups – Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and a small minority of Christians – have for centuries flourished in harmony and mutual bond: no religious ghettoes, no religious apartheid, no economic or sharp cultural divides. All religious persuasions rejoiced at each other’s holidays and times of celebration, attended social gatherings together, lived in harmony as neighbors, and treasured their mutual trust.

The various faiths of Kashmir eschew fanatical or extremist dogmas that distort and debauch their doctrinal origins. Tolerance and mutual respect are their watchwords. For example, Kashmiri Sikhs feature no antagonism towards other religions. Indeed, their trust in Muslims is so strong that they have refused bribes from the Indian army to blame Muslims for the killing of 36 Sikhs at Chittisinghpura, Kashmir, on March 20, 2000, during then-President Bill Clinton’s visit to New Delhi that the Indian military itself had covertly organized.

Kashmir has been haloed as the land of saints. Its culture embraces diversity and Kashmir has been the confluence of a rich mixture of philosophies and ways of life that merge without losing their distinct identities.

 

Here are few latest shining examples of diversity in Kashmir:

Daily Kashmir Observer reported that Muslims helped a Hindu family in the cremation process of a man who died in the Maisuma area of Srinagar city on Feb. 8, 2021. According to reports, one Rakesh Kumar breathed his last on Monday. Muslim neighbors arranged everything required for the cremation process. Locals said they arranged a priest and shouldered his body up to the cremation ground.

India’s leading newspaper, the Hindustan Times, reported on May 1, 2020. Muslim men helped Hindu man’s kin perform his funeral rites in north Kashmir’s Uri. Due to the lockdown, the relatives of the deceased could not reach the place for his funeral, and no vehicle was available to carry the body to the cremation ground. Members of the Muslim community helped perform the last rites of their Hindu neighbor (54-year-old Shekhar Kumar) in north Kashmir’s Uri town amid the nationwide lockdown. Deceased’s son Gautam Kumar said the Muslim community has always helped them in difficult times. “It was not possible to perform my father’s last rites without their support,” he said.

India’s other daily, The Hindu, reported on June 5, 2020. “Local Muslims made special arrangements to perform the last rites (of Mrs. Rani Bhat, a Hindu). Firewood was arranged for cremation. The body was also shouldered by Muslims. It’s our duty to ensure that we are with our Pandit neighbors in thick and thin,” said Abdul Qadir, a Muslim villager.

Joginder Singh Raina of the All Party Sikh Coordination Committee said, “Kashmir is about Kashmiriyat, which means brotherhood… Sikhs settled in the city during the turmoil but never went away, but now Kashmiri Pandits should also come and live together like us.”

I believe that the best solution to this dilemma is that the Pandit brethren should return to the valley and the majority community must open their hearts and minds to give them moral support and a sense of security. The rights and culture of Kashmiri Pandits must be respected and protected at all costs.

Dr. Syed Nazir Gilani, president of the Jammu and Kashmir Council for Human Rights, expressed the sentiments of the majority community in these words: “My teachers at higher secondary school, college, and university were Kashmiri Pandits. Men and women of great character and stature. Many close friends were Kashmiri Pandits. They allowed me to enter their homes, except kitchens. It did not bother me. The atmosphere of trust was overwhelming, and I did not have time to consider the merits of the ‘kitchen’ being a no-go area. I felt sorry for their exodus in 1990. The sense of glee and emotion is uncontrollable whenever a Kashmiri Pandit visits his or her home in Kashmir. Therefore, I raised the issue of their rights at the UN Human Rights Commission and the Sub-Commission in Geneva.”

The people of Kashmir are fully aware that the settlement of the Kashmir dispute cannot be achieved in one move. Like all qualified observers, they visualize successive steps or intermediate solutions in the process. It is one thing, however, to think of a settlement over a relatively extended period. It is atrociously different to postpone the beginning of the process on that account.

The people of Kashmir do not wish anybody to take a partisan side. Nevertheless, Kashmiris are convinced that impartial observers will support the Kashmir cause based on universal principles, democratic values, the rule of law, and international justice. It is high time that all concerned parties – India, Pakistan and the Kashmiri leadership – sit together and chalk out a strategy for the sake of peace and stability in the region of South Asia. Because ultimately, negotiations, not violence, are the only way to resolve the Kashmir conflict. Kashmiris cannot be excluded from the negotiating table if a peace process is to be profound, meaningful, and result-oriented.

The Biden administration faces two options concerning Kashmir. First, it can continue the Trump administration’s policy of ignoring the Kashmiri dispute while warning India and Pakistan against going to war with each other. Besides condoning the atrocities being committed in Kashmir, this policy rests on a tacit agreement between India and Pakistan that war between them is unacceptable. However, with the growth of the fascist ruling party in India, such an agreement is extremely vulnerable. The prospect of a nuclear exchange in the subcontinent, which contains a fifth of the world’s population, cannot be dismissed in the event of an outbreak of hostilities.

The second US option is to play a more activist mediating role by initiating a new peace process for Kashmir. This could take the shape of a quadrilateral dialogue involving the US, India, Pakistan, and Kashmir or appropriate use of the new mechanisms and abilities of the United Nations. In either case, the US will supply the necessary catalyst for a settlement.

Dr. Fai is the Secretary General, Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum.

21 February 2021

Source: www.aa.com.tr

By Eva Bartlett

16 Feb 2021 – Israeli missiles reportedly targeted Syria again yesterday. Usually carried out under the pretense of “targeting Iranian/Iranian-backed militias,” Israel’s strikes violate Syria’s sovereignty and breach international law.

Israel’s military chief of staff boasted earlier about hitting over 500 targets in just 2020 alone. Bearing in mind that Syria’s air defenses do intercept Israeli missiles, it is clear that Israel attacked Syria exponentially more than 500 times last year, and an untold number of times more in the many years that Israel has been bombing Syria.

This latest assault on Syria comes after an Iranian official clarified any Iranian forces in Syria are there at the invitation of the Syrian government to fight terrorists in Syria. This of course applies to all of Syria’s allies, but not to the illegal US and Turkish occupation forces.

Yet, one of the many ironies regarding reporting on Syria is that while Syria and her allies fighting terrorism there are routinely lambasted by Israeli and Western officials, both Israel and Western nations have long been supporting terrorists in Syria, claiming they are “opposition forces” although they are either part of Al-Qaeda in Syria, closely aligned to them, or members of equally brutal factions, including even Islamic State ( IS, formerly ISIS).

If Israel’s routine bombings of Syria are reported in Western media at all, it is with the usual downplaying of (and normalizing of) Israel’s violations of international law.

A SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency) report on the February 15 bombings read as most reports prior over the years, noting the Israeli aggression and that Syria’s “air defenses intercepted the missiles and downed most of them.”

Reuters’ account, referring to the SANA report, put Israeli aggression in quotation marks, as though the bombings don’t amount to an aggression. Perhaps Reuters views them as late Valentine’s greetings…Google “Iranian” or “Russian aggression” and see how often quotation marks are used.

Did Reuters or similar media bother to speak with civilians terrorized by these and the many prior Israeli assaults on Syria? Would they ever mention the psychological component of bombing at night, which is inevitably when Israel usually bombs?

Unlikely. Their narrative is to establish that “Iranian militias” are overtaking Syria and pose a threat to Israel that justifies Israel’s incessant bombings of Syria.

Who do Israel’s bombs target besides “Iranian/Iranian-backed militias”?

If Western media reported honestly on Israeli bombings of Syria, they would be forced to acknowledge not only that Syrian civilians, including children, have been killed in the bombings, but perhaps offer a human face. Given the frequency of Israeli attacks and disregard for civilians, it is likely that the number of civilians maimed or killed by such bombings is not low.

Even in media traditionally hostile to Syria, one can find reports of civilians killed by Israeli bombings in Syria.

Western media do periodically mention that civilians were killed, but always usurp that point with justifications, like Israel, “periodically attacks what it says are threats to Israeli security in Syria.”

In June 2019, I travelled to Quneitra, southern Syria. Standing near al-Baath City, with around 2,000 civilians living there, and around 4km from the occupiedSyrian Golan Heights, security there spoke of Israeli attacks in previous years and also just roughly two weeks before my visit.

While their emphasis was on the fact that every time Israel attacked it enabled terrorists (al-Nusra and other groups) to advance, the other take away was that the bombings took place next to or where civilians were living.

In July 2019, among the routine Israeli bombings of Syria was an attack that killed at least four civilians, including an infant, injuring many more. A France 24 mention of the bombings reported six civilians killed, including three children. The report was careful to also specify “pro-regime” for fighters killed, weighted lexicon so common in Western media.

Of that day’s attacks, the BBC ran with: “Israeli jets ‘hit Iranian targets in Homs and Damascus’’. The BBC justified, as the BBC does, Israel’s bombings with: “It periodically attacks what it says are threats to Israeli security in Syria.” Were the dead civilians Israelis, you can bet they would have made the BBC’s headline and not be buried in a justification.

More recently, on the morning of January 22, 2021, Israel (violating Lebanese airspace) bombed Tartous, Hama and Homs countryside. The bombings resulted in the deaths of at least five in one suburb.

Writing from Beirut and Gaza, AP cited the highly partial Syrian Observatory For Human Rights, who from their position afar in the UK attributed the cause of deaths to a Syrian air defense missile. The media ran with that.

And although the big corporate media networks have abundant “unnamed sources,” “citizen journalists” and other credible anonymous sources to support claims of Russian or Syrian atrocities, when it comes to attacks by Israel or the US or allies, these networks run strangely dry of sources and dry of empathy for the victims.

So it is that we never hear of the personal tragedies that come with such bombings.

Regarding the January 22 bombings, journalist Vanessa Beeley went to Kazu, Hama, which she wrote, “took a direct hit with four rockets landing in a narrow residential street.” Beeley reported on how five members of an internally displaced family from Idlib were killed in their sleep (one later dying of her injuries). And sharing horrifying nuances you will not find in Western corporate media, she wrote:

“Hossam was the first on the scene and to see the broken bodies, crushed by the debris of the blast. He told me that he later found the mobile phone of the daughter visiting from Tartous. Her husband had heard news of the attack and had been trying to call her, unaware that his wife had been killed alongside their daughter. Hossam told me that one family member had been sleeping when the shrapnel sliced into their face, tearing skin from bone…”

Now just imagine these were Syrian bombings killing Israeli civilians and children. There would be hell to pay, and the media would scream about it 24/7.

Because some lives matter, but most do not, when it comes to reporting on Syria.

I asked Beeley about the SOHR claims. She replied:

“All survivors of the attack that I interviewed were adamant that four Israeli rockets targeted the narrow residential streets, killing five members of one family and grievously injuring four other relatives living in the same house.”

Why does this hypocrisy matter?

Perhaps people far from the war in Syria and inundated with other terrible information and news wonder why I’m harping on about something that has happened a million times (figuratively) before, Israeli bombings of Syria. Yes, it isn’t news, yes it happens routinely. But it shouldn’t. That’s the bottom line. And it wouldn’t be accepted were a Western nation the target.

These are beyond hypocritical times, when repeatedly bombing a sovereign nation, killing civilians in doing so, merits no outrage, much less any UN or other actions against the offender.

But fighting designated terrorists in Syria warrants media indignation, accusations from Western politicians and the UN itself, and the cruel sanctioning of the people affected.

So why does the hypocrisy matter? Because every time Israel bombs Syria, it is either killing civilians, enabling terrorism (which kills civilians), or preventing the forces fighting terrorism from doing so.

And because Syrians aren’t just numbers behind headlines about “Iranian-backed” fighters. They are people long-abused by Israel and the West’s backing of terrorism and by media complicity.

Eva Bartlett is a freelance journalist and rights activist with extensive experience in the Gaza Strip and Syria.

22 February 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

Israeli efforts at co-opting Africa countries received a major setback on Saturday, February, when the African Union issued a strong statement of solidarity with Palestine, condemning Israel’s illegal settlement activities and the US’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’.

African leaders reaffirmed in their 34th African Union Summit, held virtually in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, that all Israeli settlements erected on the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan, are illegal. In the final statement of the two-day Summit, African leaders stressed that Israel’s settlements constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law and relevant United Nations resolutions, and defies the calls of the international community to stop all settlement activities.

They also reiterated their full support for the Palestinian people and their representative, the Palestine Liberation Organization, in their legitimate struggle against the Israeli occupation to restore their inalienable rights, including self-determination and independence. African leaders expressed their desire to reach a just political solution to the Palestinian issue in accordance with the principles of international law and all relevant United Nations resolutions, leading to a complete end to the Israeli occupation, which began in 1967, and the independence of the State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, within the borders of June 4. 1967, and finding a just solution to the plight of the Palestinian refugees, in accordance with United Nations Resolution No. 194.

The final statement also called for the resumption of credible negotiations between the two sides, in order to achieve a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East, through an international multilateral mechanism based on international consensus, international law and United Nations resolutions.

The African Union Summit also called on all members of the international community to preserve the legal status of East Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine, respect international law and relevant United Nations resolutions in this regard, and refrain from any actions or decisions that undermine the legal status of the city, especially moving embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The Union stressed that any measures taken by Israel, the occupying power, to colonize the city of Jerusalem, including imposing its laws, jurisdiction and administration, are illegal measures, and therefore are null and void, and have no legitimacy whatsoever. Moreover, the final statement called on the Israeli occupation authorities to immediately stop all these illegal and unilateral measures, including provocations and incitement against Christian and Islamic holy sites.

The African leaders condemned Israel’s use of lethal, unlawful and other excessive force against Palestinian civilians, including civilians who enjoy a special protection status under international law who do not pose an imminent threat to life. They called for accountability for these unlawful acts as well as for the actions committed by Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories, stressing that Israel, the occupying power, is fully responsible for acts of violence committed against Palestinian civilians and their property. African leaders also emphasized the rejection of any unfair or partial solutions, including the so-called “Deal of the Century”, stressing that they will work tirelessly with other international actors to ensure the independence of the State of Palestine within the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Palestinians Welcome AU Statement

The Palestinian leadership welcomed the strong AU statement of solidarity with their cause, particularly the continent’s support for the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.

“We deeply appreciate African solidarity for the Palestinian cause, and are particularly appreciative of the AU’s call to its members to preserve the legal status of East Jerusalem as the capital of the future Palestinian state, and refrain from any actions that undermine the legal status of the city, particularly moving embassies to Jerusalem,” Palestinian Ambassador to South Africa Hanan Jarar said Monday. “The AU Summit’s final statement reflects the deeply-rooted bonds between Africa’s anti-colonial struggles and that of the Palestinian people, and the deep-seated historic solidarity between the peoples of Africa and Palestine.”

Hamas also welcomed the statement: “We welcome the African Union condemnation of the Israeli settlement and its call to end any form of relation with the [Israeli] occupation,” Hamas praised the AU’s “historical” support for the Palestinian cause.

Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian journalist has argued that Africa’s strong stance in solidarity with the Palestinian people is rooted in shared struggles and common histories. “Despite its many successes in luring African governments to its web of allies, Israel has failed to tap into the hearts of ordinary Africans who still view the Palestinian fight for justice and freedom as an extension of their own struggle for democracy, equality and human rights,” Baroud said.

19 February 2021

Source: palestineupdates.com

By Edward Curtin

“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.

This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience. We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket. All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.

With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

Just the other day The New York Times had this headline:

Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.

Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.

First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc. They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically. Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.

Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says:

They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’

Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.

In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc. They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.

As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:

There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.

It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.

Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.

The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK. It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.

So they killed him.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.

To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it. That’s where the true stories lie. That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years.

19 February 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jafar M Ramini

I think it is. The tide of international dissent against Israel’s impunity is becoming a torrent since the introduction by the IHRA, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance of what they have defined as ‘Antisemitism’.

This new definition has been interpreted and used as a weapon to bash, intimidate and silence any voices of criticism against the government of Israel. Even the man who drafted it, Kenneth Stern, has admitted that this is not what he had in mind. According to Stern it had originally been designed as a ”working definition” for the purpose of trying to standardise data collection about the incidence of antisemitic hate crime in different countries. It had never been intended that it be used as legal or regulatory device to curb academic or political free speech.

Antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, discrimination and denial of rights against any person or persons is abhorrent. But legitimate criticism and condemnation of regimes and political doctrines are a must if we are to keep those regimes and political movements under check. After all, this is what democracy and free speech are all about.

Not, it seems, when it comes to Israel. Every time any one of us opens his or her mouth and speaks of Israel with anything other than complete approval and admiration is automatically labelled ‘antisemite’.

Why am I saying this at this time? Because recently anti semitism has been used, not only to silence freedom of speech, but to damage and destroy the careers and livelihoods of many a political activist who seeks peace and justice and equal rights for all. For those of you who might like to challenge these assertions you need go no further than the recent proclamation by B’Tselem, the Jewish human rights organisation based in Israel, stating clearly that Israel is an apartheid state.

As Hagai El Ad, the director of B’Tselem said, “Calling things by their proper name — apartheid — is not a moment of despair; rather it is moment of moral clarity, a step on a long walk inspired by hope. See the reality for what it is, name it without flinching — and help bring about the realisation of a just future. We can and must bring about a just future for Palestinians and Jews. “

Yes, the tide is turning, and the people of the world, especially young Jews, are saying it out loud. “Not in my name!” and “If not now, then when?” Within Israel itself there is a growing group of dissenters within the Israeli army. They call themselves ‘Breaking The Silence’ and they are doing just that. Speaking up about their experiences of brutality and savagery against the Palestinian people, which they were trained and ordered to do under military command.

Even within the corridors of power in the west there is growing dissent. Politicians are calling on their colleagues to stop using antisemitism as a battering ram against those who defend the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.

Here is one good example, which happened only this week here is Australia, in Parliament House, Canberra, when Senator Anne Urquhart of Tasmania challenged a fellow senator to come out from under the protection of parliamentary privilege and repeat his accusations of anti semitism against a former parliamentarian, Ms Melissa Parke. Here is the text.

Senator URQUHART (Tasmania—Opposition Whip in the Senate) (20:13):

“I rise tonight to reject a statement made recently in this place by Queensland Senator Scarr, who cynically used the protection of parliament to impugn the integrity of a former parliamentarian, with no basis in fact…He accused her of uttering a vile lie, of spreading vile misinformation and, by direct implication, of being an anti-Semite. His false accusations relate to events that occurred when Melissa worked as a lawyer for the United Nations in Gaza in 2003. One of those events involved a well-documented case of a Palestinian refugee woman being forced by an Israeli soldier to drink a bleach-like cleaning fluid.

“We must engage with what is occurring here. The senator is using parliamentary privilege to defame Melissa Parke. He’s using parliamentary privilege in an effort to silence criticism of the Israeli government for the human rights abuses it has perpetuated and continues to perpetuate against Palestinian citizens.

“I challenge Senator Scarr to reiterate his assertions that Melissa Parke has spread a vile lie and a vile misinformation and that she is an anti-Semite outside the walls of this place…

I put it to my colleagues in this place that the cynical use of the slur of anti-Semitism as a tool to silence critics of Israel for that state’s exhaustively documented human rights abuses against Palestinians must stop. Equally, this place must not be used as a refuge from reality from which false accusations can be hurled against people of greater integrity than their accusers.”

Yes, the tide is turning. Good on you, Senator Urquhart. Ms Parke, I hope that very soon you will get the respect you so richly deserve.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago, as was published in ‘Truth Out’, Rabbi Walt, who grew up in South Africa and knows what apartheid looks like was calling on his fellow Jews to recognise Israel for what it is, an Apartheid state. For years he had hesitated to use the ‘A’ word for fear of alienating fellow Jews, but his moment of truth arrived while in Hebron in 2008 when the street they were walking down, Shuhada Street, was described as ‘a sterile street’. No Palestinians are allowed to use it. Only Jews and tourists. Not even in South Africa, says Rabbi Walt, were there ‘sterile streets’.

“As a student at the University of Cape Town,”he writes, “ I had fought against Apartheid…and throughout my anti-Apartheid activism, Israel was always a central part of my Jewish identity: I was a committed, progressive Zionist.

“But, over decades, in tours and activism on the West Bank I had witnessed disturbing realities that impacted me profoundly: the demolition of Palestinian homes, the expropriation of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements, olive orchards uprooted by settlers, and Palestinians evicted from homes in Jerusalem that they had owned for generations.

“These experiences were so shocking that, if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes, I would never have believed they were true. They reminded me of very similar injustices that I had seen in South Africa.

But, it was the “sterile street” that pushed me over the edge.

At that very moment, when I walked down a street stripped of Palestinians, I decided that I would never again avoid using the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies against Palestinians. I know what apartheid is, and I was seeing it in front of me.

Rabbi Walt is no longer alone. Young, thoughtful American Jews are no longer alone. To quote B’Tselem:

“It is a commitment to the foundational principle of Judaism, that every human being is of infinite value, deserving of dignity, freedom, equality and justice. It is time to commit ourselves to the fulfilment of this core Jewish moral value for all people between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”

Even inside the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset itself, there are voices which are, at last, calling it as it is. MK Ofer Cassif, while taking part on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story programme last week had this to say.

“Israel is the occupier… I want to mention two things… One, is the Nation State bill, the Basic Law, which actually turned Israel into an apartheid state. The second is the policy, practically speaking, of Netanyahu, especially in the last five years or so, that actually has been pursuing an ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

As I said, the tide is turning.

Jafar M Ramini is a Palestinian writer and political analyst, based in London.

19 February 2021

Soure: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Texas’s freeze entered a sixth day on Thursday. At least 31 people have died as of Wednesday afternoon as a result of the severe weather in Texas. But some media reports said, days of glacial weather have left at least 38 people dead in the U.S. The snow made many roads impassable, disrupted coronavirus vaccine distribution and blanketed nearly three-quarters of the continental U.S. And that number is expected to climb with no end to the Texas nightmare in sight.

Media reports from the U.S. said:

More than 3 million Texans were without power. But some media reports put the number to more than 4 millions. Some have gone four days without electricity after a rare winter storm slammed the U.S. state and created bitterly cold and unlivable conditions. All of the water pipes in many homes are frozen.

Many Texans are fearful for what the near future looks like, some elected officials appear to care less.

Twitter blew up Thursday morning with accusations that Republican Sen. Ted Cuz and his family flew to Cancun to stay at a resort, and Associated Press later confirmed the news.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Texans don’t know when they will get their lights back on or access to running water.

Additionally, on social media, viral videos show apartment complex pools frozen over, water rushing into homes from burst pipes, long lines for grocery stores and cars idling in the streets, unable to get to their destinations.

Power grid operators in Texas say they cannot predict when the outages might end, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the agency that oversees the grid.

In an effort to avoid a total blackout, ERCOT is instructing utility companies to cut power to customers.

“We needed to step in and make sure that we were not going to end up with Texas in a blackout, which could keep folks without power — not just some people without power but everyone in our region without power — for much, much longer than we believe this event is going to last, as long and as difficult as this event is right now,” ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said.

Local and federal leaders have left many Texans confused and frustrated with their reluctance to take responsibility for the crisis.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, blamed ERCOT on Tuesday, saying the utility “has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours.”

He then appeared on cable news that evening to argue that the fiasco is due to green energy, specifically frozen wind turbines.

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said to Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”

The power grid in Texas is unique in that it does not cross state lines and therefore is not under the oversight of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In the early 2000s, Republican leaders in the state pushed to deregulate the state’s power market and allow power companies to determine when and how to build and maintain power plants. Now this setup and its flaws are coming back to haunt the state.

The mayor of the west Texas town of Colorado City recently resigned from backlash after saying it was not the government’s responsibility to help those suffering.

“No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this!” Tim Boyd wrote on Facebook, based on screenshots from local CBS affiliate KTAB. “Sink or swim, it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!”

For residents going through the blackouts and below freezing temperatures in their homes, the pointing of fingers from elected officials is doing nothing for them in their most desperate time of need.

Thomas Black, 29, from Dallas, posted images of the devastation on his Twitter page that have now gone viral. In one photo he took in the hallway of his apartment complex, 4-foot icicles hang from an indoor ceiling fan.

“Texans just aren’t used to this sort of thing, so of course there’s going to be panic just like there was at the beginning of COVID,” Black told. “If you go to the grocery store right now, the entire meat section is gone, the whole entire produce section has gone. I’m sure a lot of the nonperishables are gone at this point, and I’m sure the toilet paper’s gone again.”

“The leadership has failed us on all fronts,” he added. “It certainly is worrisome.”

“We are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis and it’s going to take people stepping up from our leadership team to really make a difference in what the future looks like for us,” he said.

Erica Gittens of San Marcus has been couch surfing since Sunday, when water came rushing into her apartment while she was talking to her roommate.

“We first thought like, maybe it was the air conditioning starting up,” Gittens said. “And then it’s like, ‘psych, no it’s waterfall.’ Our ceiling started to cave in on us.”

Gittens, who has apartment insurance, says she is unable to get the immediate help she needs because her apartment complex’s corporate office also flooded and the insurance company cannot send or receive the documents that they need. She started a GoFundMe campaign to help stay afloat in the meantime and said, “It’s going to be weeks” before anything begins to work itself out. For now, she has to depend on friends and strangers.

Gittens says that despite her unfortunate situation, there are others who are doing much worse.

“People may have machines that they have to be hooked up to at night,” she said. “I’m thinking about my residents and how some places may not even be able to have generators due to the freezing. You never know what may happen.”

“This isn’t something that we’re used to. … We just need to pray for Texas as a whole,” she said.

Water Crisis Deepens Misery

Amid widespread power losses, millions of Texans were also advised to boil their water for safety.

The power crisis spurred by the massive winter storm hobbling Texas has also become a water crisis, with hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses dealing with burst pipes or ordered to boil water, as water utilities suffer from frozen wells and treatment plants run on backup power.

In Harris County, which includes Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, more than one million people have been affected by local water systems either that have issued boil-water notices or that cannot deliver water at all, said Brian Murray, a spokesperson for the county emergency management agency.

Residents in the Texas capital, Austin, were also told to boil water because of a power failure at the city’s largest water-treatment facility.

The city of Kyle, south of Austin, asked residents on Wednesday to suspend their water use until further notice because of a shortage.

“Water should only be used to sustain life at this point,” officials of the city of 48,000 said in an advisory. “We are close to running out of water supply in Kyle.”

At St. David’s South Austin Medical Center, officials were trying Wednesday night to fix a heating system that was failing because of low water pressure. They were forced to seek portable toilets and distribute bottles of water to patients and employees so they could wash their hands.

In San Antonio, Jesse Singh, 58, a Shell gas station owner, said that his father, Ram Singh, 80, was turned away from regularly scheduled dialysis treatments Tuesday and Thursday because his clinic was having water issues.

“It’s a dangerous situation,” the younger Mr. Singh said.

His other problems Thursday were indicative of the broader troubles still facing Texas. He said he had low water pressure at his house. His gas station had no fuel to sell and was running out of food at its convenience store because deliveries hadn’t arrived.

Thursday’s winter storm brought freezing rain, snow and temperatures that were “much below average,” a gut punch for Texans who have resorted to stoves, barbecue grills, gasoline generators and their vehicles to keep themselves warm.

There were also reasons for hope on Thursday morning. The state had just under 500,000 customers without power, down from millions in recent days.

Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, which had been forced to shut down on Wednesday because of water supply issues, announced early Thursday morning that it had restored water in a limited capacity, and that flights would resume.

Of the 12.5 million utility customers in the state, 490,456 remained without power Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, which records and aggregates live power outage data from utilities.

Feed fireplaces

Even fireplaces have to be fed. To keep two parents, two daughters and two grandmothers from freezing, one person had to spend hours in the afternoon scouring the neighborhood for fallen trees and rotten wood.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is sending generators and other supplies to Texas to help the state cope with power outages after a severe winter storm.

FEMA is also supplying Texas with water, meal and blankets.

Record-low temperatures in Texas and elsewhere have strained power grids and forced millions to reconsider how to stay warm. Now, days after that arctic blast chilled parts of the Central and Southern parts of the U.S., a new problem is emerging: finding water.

For water, some in Texas have turned to a once-unthinkable source: snow.

From Mississippi to New York

The winter storm that swept through Texas has moved to the northeast, causing power outages and slick driving conditions from Mississippi to New York.

Nearly 200,000 Mississippi customers were without power as of Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, and tens of thousands more were without electricity in Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.

The Carolinas are also bracing for power outages from wind and fallen trees.

The utility company Duke Energy predicted a million customers in the Carolinas could lose power for several days from the storm.

Gov. Roy Cooper issued a state of emergency Wednesday and encouraged people to plan ahead.

“People need to be ready to stay home and be prepared to lose power for a while, especially in the northern, western and Piedmont counties,” he said in a statement.

Winter storm warnings and advisories are in place for parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut through Friday night, and heavy snow was already falling in New York City Thursday morning. The city is expected to see several inches of snow.

Weather Delays Opening of 2 N.Y.C. Vaccine Sites

New York mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said city vaccine sites would stay open through Thursday’s snowfall, but the planned opening of two new distribution sites would be pushed back due to nationwide shipping delays.

However, wind power was not chiefly to blame for the Texas blackouts. The main problem was frigid temperatures that stalled natural gas production, which is responsible for the majority of Texas’ power supply.

Science suggests the effects of a warming world have something to do with these sudden bursts of Arctic cold, as well. The cold air at the top of the world, the polar vortex, is usually held in place by the circulating jet stream. The Northern Hemisphere’s warming appears to be weakening the jet stream, and when sudden blasts of heat in the stratosphere punch into the vortex, that Arctic air can spill down into the middle latitudes.

There is also fascinating research that links a warming Arctic to increased frequency of the broad range of extreme winter weather in parts of the United States. It is known as “warm-Arctic/cold-continents pattern,” a phenomenon that’s still being studied.

Cold and Hungry

James F. McIngvale, a Houston furniture store owner known as “Mattress Mack,” saw his fellow Texans cold and hungry, with little shelter from the winter storm that has ravaged the state and knocked out power to millions.

Mr. McIngvale, 70, opened his doors, and the people came. Since Tuesday, thousands have made the trip to Mr. McIngvale’s Gallery Furniture, spending a few hours on armchairs and couches to warm up, or sleeping on their choice of beds intended. As many as 500 people have chosen to spend the night for the past two nights, he said.

At this impromptu shelter, those in need can eat donated meals or food paid for by Mr. McIngvale.

Texans are also struggling with a lack of clean drinking water.

Rosie May Williams, 48, who said she is homeless, tried to take shelter at a convention center earlier this week but was told it was over capacity. She was transported by bus to the furniture store, and has slept for the past two nights on a recliner, eating smothered chicken for dinner on one of those nights.

Come Up with Own Plans to Survive

The former mayor of Colorado City in Texas said that residents who are dealing with electricity and water problems because of the winter storm need to “sink or swim” and to come up with their own plans on how to survive, local media stations reported.

“If you don’t have electricity, you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe,” the former mayor, Tim Boyd, wrote in a post on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

“The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” he wrote.

The post was later deleted but KTXS and local media stations and newspapers republished it.

The posts struck a nerve in a state where hundreds of thousands of people have been without power and water in freezing temperatures for days because of the winter storm.

An Old Lady Crossed 6 Miles of Snow

Last weekend was one of Seattle’s snowiest on record. But Frances H. Goldman had struggled for weeks to book a coronavirus vaccination, so when she got a Sunday appointment, she did not intend to miss it — even if it meant braving the elements alone.

It was too snowy to drive, so Ms. Goldman, 90, ended up walking a total of six miles through the snow to get the vaccine.

It was a quiet walk, Ms. Goldman said. People were scarce. She caught glimpses of Lake Washington through falling snow. It would have been more difficult, she said, had she not gotten a bad hip replaced last year.

At the hospital, about three miles and an hour from home, she got the jab. Then she bundled up again and walked back the way she had come.

It was an extraordinary effort — but that was not the extent of it. Ms. Goldman, who became eligible for a vaccine last month, had already tried everything she could think of to secure an appointment. She had made repeated phone calls and fruitless visits to the websites of local pharmacies, hospitals and government health departments. She enlisted a daughter in New York and a friend in Arizona to help her find an appointment.

Finally, on Friday, a visit to the Seattle Children’s Hospital website yielded results.

Into Mexico

As the largest energy producing, state in the U.S. Texas grappled with massive refining outages and oil and gas shut-ins that rippled beyond its borders into neighboring Mexico.

The deep freeze has shut in about one-fifth of the nation’s refining capacity and closed oil and natural gas production across the state.

The outages in Texas also affected power generation in Mexico, with exports of natural gas via pipeline dropping off by about 75% over the last week, according to preliminary Refinitiv Eikon data. Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s natural gas providers not to ship outside Texas and asked state regulators to enforce that ban, prompting reviews.

Abbott’s request to the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, set up a game of political football, according to a person familiar with the matter, between groups that do not have the authority to interfere with interstate commerce.

Texas exports gas via pipeline to Mexico and via ships carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) from terminals in Freeport and Corpus Christi. It also supplies numerous regions of the country, including the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.

The ban prompted a response from officials in Mexico, as U.S. gas pipeline exports to Mexico fell to 3.8 billion cubic feet per day on Wednesday, down from an average over the past 30 days of 5.7 billion, according to data from Refinitiv.

The Mexican government called the top U.S. representative in Mexico on Wednesday to press for natural gas supplies.

Power cuts have hit millions in northern Mexico. Major automobile manufacturers shut operations temporarily because they did not have natural gas needed to operate plants.

About 4 million barrels of daily refining capacity has been shuttered and at least 1 million barrels per day of oil production is out.

The state accounts for roughly one-quarter of U.S. natural gas production. As of Feb. 10, Texas was producing about 7.9 billion cubic feet per day, but that fell to 1.9 billion on Wednesday, according to preliminary data from Refinitiv Eikon.

Several Texas ports, including Houston, Galveston and key LNG exporting sites at Freeport and Sabine Pass were closed due to weather, according to U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Jonathan Lally.

From Canada

The freeze has also sent Canadian natural gas exports to the United States soaring to levels last seen in 2010, said IHS Markit analyst Ian Archer.

Net Canadian exports have jumped above 7.5 bcf a day for the last couple of days and Archer estimated they were close to 8 bcf per day on Wednesday.

A family with one piece of firewood to keep warm

A grandmother and three children in Sugar Land, Texas, died in a house fire in an attempt to keep warm.

Massive power outages due to a winter storm has left Texans pleading for help on social media, including one father who revealed his family only had a single piece of firewood left.

Chester Jones shared on TikTok, under the account name @checkjones, on Tuesday a video of his four children asleep underneath blankets in one room of their home in Dallas, Texas.

In a caption, Mr Jones revealed that the power was off in their home and it was freezing temperatures outside. The family was left with just one piece of firewood to keep them warm through the night.

“Please help me,” he said to other TikTok users.

The video went viral online, giving users a glimpse into what Texans have suffered this week after a massive winter storm brought snow and freezing temperatures to the state.

Mr. Chester’s post about his family’s situation has garnered more than 6.6 million views, as of Thursday morning. The Red Cross commented on the TikTok, saying, “Please stay safe! If you need somewhere to go for warmth, visit www.redcross.org/shelter to find an open shelter or warming centre near you.”

He later updated his followers that several people who saw his TikTok reached out and donated more firewood for his family to use in order to stay warm.

19 February 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By F William Engdahl

In September 2021 the UN will hold a Food Systems Summit. The aim will be to reshape world agriculture and food production in the context of the Malthusian UN Agenda 2030 “sustainable agriculture” goals. The recent radical farm laws from the government of Narenda Modi in India are part of the same global agenda, and it’s all not good.

In Modi’s India, farmers have been in massive protest since three new farm laws were rushed through Parliament last September. The Modi reforms were motivated by a well-organized effort of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its New Vision for Agriculture, part of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, the corporate side of the UN Agenda 2030.

Modi Shock Therapy

In September, 2020 in a rushed Parliamentary voice vote, rather than a duly-registered formal vote, and reportedly with no prior consultation with Indian farmer unions or organizations, the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi passed three new laws radically deregulating India’s agriculture. That has sparked months of national farmer protest and nationwide strikes.The protests which are spreading across all India, demands repeal of the three laws.

In effect the laws end restrictions on large corporations’ buying land and stockpiling commodities to control farmer prices. They also allow large multinational businesses to bypass local or regional state markets where farmers’ produce is normally sold at guaranteed prices, and allows business to strike direct deals with farmers. This all will result in the ruin of an estimated tens millions of marginal or smallholder farmers and small middlemen in India’s fragile food chain.

The new Modi laws are measures the IMF and World Bank have been demanding since the early 1990s to bring Indian agriculture and farming into the corporate agribusiness model pioneered in the USA by the Rockefeller Foundation decades ago.Until now no Indian government has been willing to attack the farmers, the country’s largest population group, many of whom are on tiny plots or bare subsistence. Modi’s argument is that by changing the present system, Indian farmers could “double” income by 2022, an unproven,dubious claim. It allows corporations to buy farm land for the first time nationally so large companies, food processing firms, and exporters can invest in the farm sector.Against them a small farmer has no chance. Who’s behind the radical push? Here we find the WEF and the Gates Foundation’s radical globalized agriculture agenda.

WEF and the Corporativists

The laws are a direct result of several years’ effort of the World Economic Forum and its New Vision for Agriculture (NVA) initiative. For more than 12 years the WEF and its NVA has pushed a corporate model in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The “big target” has been India, where resistance to corporate takeover of agriculture has been fierce ever since the failed 1960’s Green Revolution of the Rockefeller Foundation. For the WEF Great Reset, better known as the UN Agenda 2030 for “sustainable agriculture,” India’s traditional farm and food system must be broken. Its smallholder family farmers must be forced to sell to large agribusiness conglomerates and regional or state-level protections for those farmers eliminated. It will be “sustainable,” not for the small farmers, but rather the giant agribusiness groups.

To advance that agenda the WEF created a powerful group of corporate and government interests called the NVA India Business Council. Its website at the homepage of the WEF states, “The NVA India Business Council serves as an informal, high-level leadership group to champion private sector collaboration and investment to drive sustainable agricultural growth in India.” An idea what they mean by “sustainable”is found in their membership.

The WEF’s NVA India Business Council in 2017 included Bayer CropScience, one of the world’s largest purveyors of agriculture pesticides and now,of Monsanto GMO seeds; Cargill India Pvt.of the giant US grain company; Dow AgroSciences, GMO seed and pesticide producer;GMO and agrichemical firm DuPont;grain cartel giant Louis Dreyfus Company; Wal-Mart India; India Mahindra & Mahindra (world’s largest tractor maker); Nestle India Ltd; PepsiCo India; Rabobank International; State Bank of India; Swiss Re Services, the world’s largest re-insurer; India Private Limited, a chemicals maker;and the Adani Group of Gautam Adani,the second richest man in India and major financier of Modi’s BJP party. Notice the absence of any Indian farmer organizations.

In addition to top Modi backer Guatam Adani on the WEF NVA India Business Council, MukeshAmbani, sits on the Board of Directors of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. Ambani, another top Modi backer, is Chairman and Managing Director of India’s largest conglomerate, Reliance Industries, and Asia’s second wealthiest person worth some $74 billion. Ambani is a strong advocate of the radical farm reform as Reliance stands to reap huge gains.

In December farmers in Punjab burned effigies of Prime Minister Modi, along with Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani, accusing them of being behind the new laws of Modi.

For anyone with even a slight idea of these corporate behemoths, it is clear that the interests and welfare of India’s estimated 650 million farmers are not the priority. Notably, IMF’s Chief Economist Gita Gopinath, an Indian now in USA,has endorsed the laws, and has said that India’s recently-enacted agriculture laws have the “potential” to increase farmers’ income.

On 26 November a nationwide general strike began that involved approximately 250 million people in support of the farmers. Transport unions representing over 14 million truck drivers have come out in support of the farmer unions. This is the biggest challenge to the BJP Modi regime to date. The fact the government refuses to back down suggests it will be a bitter battle.

For the Agenda 2030, or Great Reset to transform the global food and agricultural industries as Klaus Schwab prefers to call it, to succeed, it is highest priority that India, with the world’s largest population,be brought into the globalist web of corporate agribusiness control. Clearly the timing of the Modi deregulation has in mind the UN 2021 Food Systems Summit.

AGRA and the UN Food Systems Summit

Indication of the agenda in store for India’s farmers is the upcoming September UN Food Systems Summit. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in 2019 announced the UN will host Food Systems Summit in 2021 with the aim of maximizing the benefits of a “food systems approach” consistent with UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. He named Agnes Kalibata of Rwanda as his Special Envoy for the 2021 Food Systems Summit. The summit’s founding statement pushes “precision farming” such as GPS, Big Data and robotics, and GMO, as solutions.

Kalibata, former Minister of Agriculture in war-torn Rwanda,is also the President of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. AGRA was created by the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations to introduce GMO patented seeds and related chemical pesticides into African agriculture. A key person Gates put in charge of the AGRA, Robert Horsch, spent 25 years as a senior Monsanto executive. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is also a “Contributing Partner” of the WEF.

After nearly 15 years and some $1 billion in funds from Gates, Rockefeller and other large donors, AGRA has failed to lift farmers into a better wellbeing. Farmers are forced by their governments to buy seeds from commercial suppliers, often tied to Monsanto and other GMO companies, as well as commercial fertilizer. The result is debt and often bankruptcy. The farmers are forbidden to reuse the commercial seeds and are forced to abandon traditional seeds which they could reuse. AGRA’s focus on “market-oriented” means the global export market controlled by Cargill and other major grain cartel giants. In the 1990s, under pressure from Washington and agribusiness, the World Bank demanded African and other governments in developing countries end their agriculture subsidies. That, while the USA and EU agriculture remains heavily subsidized. The cheap subsidized EU and OECD imports drive local farmers bankrupt. That’s intended.

A 2020 report on AGRA, False Promises, concluded, “yield increases for key staple crops in the years before AGRA were just as low as during AGRA. Instead of halving hunger, the situation in the 13 focus countries has worsened since AGRA was launched. The number of people going hungry has increased by 30 percent during the AGRA years… affecting 130 million people in the 13 AGRA focus countries.” Gates’ AGRA has made African food production more globalized and dependent than ever on the will of global multinationals whose aim is cheap inputs. It forces farmers into debt and demands specific “cash crops” like GMO corn or soya, be grown for export.

Gates Foundation’s confidential Agricultural Development Strategy 2008-2011 outlined its strategy:

“Smallholders with the potential to produce a surplus can create a market-oriented agricultural system… to exit poverty…The vision of success involves market-oriented farmers operating profitable farms…this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production.” (emphasis added)

In 2008 Rajiv Shah was the Gates Foundation’s Director of Agricultural Development, and led the Foundation’s creation of the AGRA together with the Rockefeller Foundation. Today Shah is President of Rockefeller Foundation,Gates’ partner in AGRA, which foundation also financed the creation of GMO patented seeds back in the 1970s, the creation of CGIAR seed banks with the World Bank and India’s 1960’s failed Green Revolution.Rajiv Shah is also an Agenda Contributor at the World Economic Forum. Small world.

The fact that the President of AGRA is heading the September 2021 UN Food Systems Summit (note the use of “food systems”) exposes the seamless links between the UN, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Economic Forum and their web of global corporate mega companies.

India, with 1.4 billion people, perhaps half in agriculture, is the last bastion where global agribusiness has been unable to dominate the production of food. The OECD has been globalized by industrial agribusiness since decades and the deterioration in food quality and nutrition confirms it. China has opened up and is a major player in the GMO world with Syngenta, as well as the world largest producer of glyphosate. China industrial pork factory farms such as Smithfield Farms, where the recent African Swine Fever is believed to have originated, are on the way to wipe out small-scale farmers there.The central role of the Gates-Rockefeller AGRA in the UN 2021 Food Systems Summit, the major role of the WEF in the world “food systems” reset, and the pressures in recent months on the Modi government to implement the same corporate agenda in India as in Africa, are all no accident. It sets the world up for catastrophic harvest failures and worse.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

17 February 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Susan Abulhawa

The author of this essay is a Palestinian writer, whose latest novel is “Against the Loveless World,” Atria, 2020.

Memes abounded on the internet in response to President-elect Biden’s remark during the Jan. 6 attempted right-wing coup. “This is not who we are,” he had said.

One of the most salient of memes was a graphic of six panels, one for each word in that sentence, each depicting an era in U.S. history: from slavery, lynchings and burning crosses to Jim Crow, police murders, mass incarceration and separation of immigrant families.

Biden’s sentiments were echoed across a nation looking on in horror at its Capitol building. It is difficult to know if Americans are ignorant of our history and reality or simply unwilling to have a hard look in the mirror. But it is clear that this country has no real sense of itself, clinging instead to notions of exceptionalism and eternal goodness.

Rather than engage in much needed national self-reflection, lawmakers and journalists doubled down, suggesting that the scenes in Washington were something foreign and un-American. Another popular phrase repeated ad nauseam was that the Capitol “looked like Baghdad.”

In fact, the Baghdad of my youth was a vibrant and beautiful tapestry of a high-functioning ancient society with deep cultural traditions, acclaimed literary and artistic outputs, self-sufficiency and strength — even after the CIA had engineered a coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein to power.

Even under her tyrants, Baghdad remained an oasis of intellectual exchange, high literacy, towering libraries and socialist ideals that met the people’s basic needs. It was only after the U.S. decimated and looted Iraq that Baghdad became what it is in the American imagination. In reality, the American image of Baghdad is simply Baghdad à la U.S. invasion.

Likewise, Libya. Once one of the most prosperous African and Arab nations, with high literacy, free health care, no homelessness, free education, free electricity and zero national debt — a U.S. invasion made Libya one of the most dangerous places in the world, where slavery, illiteracy, abuse and chaos have taken hold with no reprieve in sight.

The U.S. has sowed chaos, fear, food and water insecurity, crime and terror throughout the Global South. Those of us who know and understand this history, and present, do not see the Jan. 6 coup attempt as an aberration. It is most certainly not “like Baghdad” or like Libya or Sudan, or any other nation of Black and Brown societies unfortunate enough to have natural resources the U.S. wanted for itself.

To be clear, what happened in Washington, D.C., was wholly American. It looked like the United States that all of the Global South knows good and well. It was, and is, indeed who we are.

16 February 2021

Source: palestineupdates.com

By Jonathan Cook

15 Feb 2021 – It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.

It is time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly improved outcomes for their health.

The pre-print paper in the Lancet shows there was an 80 per cent reduction in admission to intensive care units among hospitalised patients who were treated with large doses of Vitamin D, and a 64 per cent reduction in death. The possibility of these being chance findings are infinitesimally small, note the researchers. And to boot, the study found no side-effects even when these mega-doses were given short term to the hospitalised patients.

Spain, convincing therapeutic evidence

Those are astounding figures that deserve to be on front pages, especially at a time when politicians and doctors are uncertain whether they can ever find a single magic-bullet vaccine against Covid as new variants pop up like spring daffodils.

If Vitamin D can approximate a cure for many of those hospitalised with Covid, one can infer that it should prove even more effective when used as a prophylactic. Most people in northern latitudes ought to be taking Vitamin D through much of the year in significant doses – well above the current, outdated 400IU recommended by governments like the UK’s.

This is a very important study on vitamin D and Covid-19. Its findings are incredibly clear. An 80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths, simply by giving a very cheap and very safe therapy – calcifediol, or activated vitamin D. [https://t.co/lB7sYxDQfn]

— David Davis (@DavidDavisMP) February 13, 2021

Knee-jerk dismissals

This new study ought to finally silence the naysayers, though doubtless it won’t. So far it has attracted little media attention. What has been most troubling over the past year is that every time I and others have gently drawn attention to each new study that showed the dramatic benefits of Vitamin D, we were greeted with knee-jerk dismissals that the studies showed only a correlation, not a causal link.

That was a deeply irresponsible response, especially in the midst of a global pandemic for which effective treatments are urgently needed. The never-satisfied have engaged in the worst kind of blame-shifting, implicitly maligning medical researchers for the fact that they could only organise small-scale, improvised studies because governments were not supporting and funding the larger-scale research needed to prove conclusively whether Vitamin D was effective.

Further, the naysayers wilfully ignored the fact that all the separate studies showed very similar correlations, as well as the fact that hospitalised patients were invariably deficient, or very deficient, in Vitamin D. The cumulative effect of those studies should have been persuasive in themselves. And more to the point, they should have led to a concerted campaign pressuring governments to fund the necessary research. Instead much of the medical community has wasted valuable time either ignoring the research or nitpicking it into oblivion.

The evidence grows ever more overwhelming that good Vit D levels offer significant protection against Covid with little risk of adverse effects, experts tell Haaretz, Israel’s version of the NYT [https://t.co/zep2HPh8iq]

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 9, 2020

There should have come a point – especially when a treatment like Vitamin D is very cheap and almost entirely safe – at which the precautionary principle kicked in. It was not only foolhardy but criminally negligent to be demanding 100 per cent proof before approving the use of Vitamin D on seriously ill patients. There was no risk in treating them with Vitamin D, unlike most other proposed drugs, and potentially much to gain.

Stuck in old paradigm

Already the usual voices have dismissed the new Barcelona study, saying it has yet to be peer-reviewed. That ignores the fact that it is an expansion on, and confirmation of, an earlier, much smaller study in Cordoba that has been peer-reviewed and that similarly showed dramatic, beneficial outcomes for patients.

In addition to the earlier studies and the new one showing a causal link, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to bolster the case for using Vitamin D against Covid.

For many years, limited studies – ones that Big Pharma showed no interest in expanding – had indicated that Vitamin D was useful both in warding off respiratory infections and in treating a wide variety of chronic auto-immune diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis by damping down inflammatory responses of the kind that often overwhelm hospitalised Covid patients.

But many doctors and politicians were stuck in an old paradigm – one rooted in the 1950s that viewed Vitamin D exclusively in terms of bone health.

The role of Vitamin D – produced in the skin by sunlight – should have been at the forefront of medical research for Covid anyway, given that the prevalence of the disease, as with other respiratory infections, appears to slump through the sunny, summer months, and spikes in the winter.

And while the media preferred to focus exclusively on poverty and racism as “correlative” explanations for the disproportionate number of deaths among BAME doctors and members of the public, Vitamin D seemed an equally, if not more plausible, candidate. Dark skins in cloud-covered northern latitudes make production of Vitamin D harder and deficiency more likely.

Magic bullet preferred

We should not be surprised that Big Pharma had no interest in promoting a vitamin freely available through much of the year and one they cannot license. They would, of course, rather patent an expensive magic bullet that offers the hope of enriching company directors and shareholders.

TO CONTINUE READING Go to Original – jonathan-cook.net

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

15 February 2021

Source: www.transcend.org