How Gaza was made into an unlivable place

Source: How Gaza was made into an unlivable place | Human Rights | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

By Michael Lynk

July 25, 2017

Michael Lynk is the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel.

What is it like to live in a place with a few hours of electricity a day and eight hours of water every four days? Palestinians gather in front of the gate of Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza during a protest against the blockade calling for reopening of the crossing [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

 

Gaza and Tel Aviv lie only 75 kilometres apart from each other. They share the same sandy topography and the same intensely hot Levantine summers. But the similarities largely end there. Any recent satellite image taken at night over the eastern Mediterranean would show an incandescent blaze for Tel Aviv, and only wan pinpricks of light further down the shore in Gaza.

Gaza is in the third month of an externally enforced reduction of its already meagre electrical power supply. The enclave of two million people would ordinarily require about 450 megawatts (MW) of electricity daily for around-the-clock power. However, over much of the past decade, as part of the tight Israeli blockade of Gaza, its power supplies have fluctuated around 200MW, resulting in persistent blackouts. But over the past several months, according to the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha, Gaza’s supply each day has varied from 140MW to an all-time low of 70MW, lengthening the blackouts and the human suffering.

The immediate cause of the power crisis lies with the dispute between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas over fuel taxation. This prompted the PA to request the Israel reduce the 120MW it sold daily down to around 70MW, and Israel has complied. 

A second source of electricity is Gaza’s sole power plant, which can only produce 50-55MW daily (on those occasions when it has been able to import fuel from Egypt). The power plant was badly damaged by Israeli bombings in 2006 and again in 2014, and Israel has restricted the entry of replacement parts into Gaza. If the plant was fully operational, it could produce around 140MW.

The third supply source for power to Gaza comes from Egypt, which provides around 28MW daily, although there are ongoing disruptions to its availability. And the fourth source is individual solar panels and generators, which are available only to the well-off.

The social consequences of this extraordinary power crisis are severe. Households without access to generators or solar panels – which is most of Gaza – have between 4-6 hours of electricity at the best of times, followed by 12-16 hours of blackouts. Hospitals rely on over-extended generators, and have to ration power. Workplaces are shuttering. More than 100 million litres of untreated sewage spills daily into the Mediterranean, fouling the beaches and the fishing grounds. Food must be bought daily and consumed quickly. Internet service – for almost all Gazans, their only link to the outside world – is spotty. And there is little available power for air conditioning and fans to combat the sweltering summer heat.

The background to the Gaza crisis

The United Nations Country Team in the occupied Palestinian territory recently released an incisive report on Gaza (PDF), focusing on the humanitarian impact of Israel’s 10-year blockade and the internal political divisions among the Palestinians. Its findings are bleak: Gaza’s impoverishment is entirely the product of human decisions, and not the fate of nature.

The year 2007 was ground zero for Gaza. In July of that year, Israel imposed its comprehensive blockade on the Strip, and declared it to be an “enemy entity”. Life before 2007 in Gaza was already very difficult, but now it has become harsh and unremitting. Gaza, which was once said to be the future “Singapore of the Middle East”, has become a metaphor for immiseration. 

INTERACTIVE: 24 Hours in Gaza

According to the UN report, between 2006 and 2016, Gaza’s real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita declined by 5.3 percent, while it grew in the occupied West Bank by 48.5 percent. Poverty has increased from 30 percent of the population in 2004 to around 40 percent today. Gaza suffers from one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, at 41 percent by the end of 2016. Over 60 percent of Gazans between 20-24 years old are without work, and the unemployment rate for women between 2006 and 2016 increased sharply from 35 percent to 64 percent. More than 60 percent of the population in 2017 was partly or wholly dependent on humanitarian assistance. According to other reports, gender-based violence, divorce rates, suicide and drug use are all on the rise.

The UN report reminds the world that Israel remains the occupying power in Gaza, as it controls its land, sea and air borders, even if it no longer has “boots on the ground”.

Gaza’s traditional economic sectors are withering. Agriculture, forestry, fishing and manufacturing have all declined in economic size, and the principal source of growth, tragically, has come from the reconstruction of the neighbourhoods destroyed during the three conflicts with Israel over the past nine years.

Israel controls what leaves and enters Gaza, with the average number of truckloads of goods exiting Gaza in the first five months of 2017 less than a third of what it was during the first half of 2007. “Gaza’s economic trajectory over the past decade”, the UN report stated, “is a strong indicator of the ongoing de-development in the Strip.”

The situation of drinking water in Gaza is at a desperate level. The unsustainable over-extraction of Gaza’s coastal aquifer has caused the intrusion of seawater, with 96 percent of the groundwater now unsuitable for human consumption.

Half of the population has access to water for only eight hours every four days, and another 30 percent receives water for eight hours every three days. Trucked water is 15-20 times more expensive than network water, and it is unreliable in terms of quality. As with other scarce goods, it is the poor and vulnerable who are affected the most. A new water agreement between Israel and the PA, announced recently, may bring some future relief, but Gaza’s best bet is water self-reliance through desalination plants and secure electricity sources.

The UN report reminds the world that Israel remains the occupying power in Gaza, as it controls its land, sea and air borders, even if it no longer has “boots on the ground”. As such, it retains legal obligations to the population to ensure its health, dignity and well-being. In particular, the report emphasises that “the numerous restrictions imposed by Israel on both movements of people and goods into and out of Gaza impede the enjoyment of a range of human rights such as the right to freedom of movement and … the right to health, education, work, adequate standards of living and family life”. The other parties that share responsibility for Gaza – Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt – also have a legal duty to observe human rights and humanitarian standards, which has not always been kept in recent years.

In 2012, the UN issued a report entitled “Gaza in 2020: A Liveable Place?” (PDF). If that report was gloomy, the new UN report is desolate. It concludes that Gaza, in the interceding five years, has endured a “downward spiral of de-development, while the people of Gaza are caught in a cycle of humanitarian need and perpetual aid dependency”.

With less than three years before 2020, the report warns that, unless the present path is radically altered, Gaza will become “more isolated and more desperate” with the chances of more devastating conflicts and an even more flattened economy on the horizon. Should this happen, the hope for political reconciliation among the Palestinians and an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine will become that much more elusive. Will those nighttime satellite images of Gaza soon be able to detect any lights at all?

Michael Lynk is the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967. He was appointed in 2016. He also teaches at the Faculty of Law, Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Israel’s Ever-More Sadistic Reprisals Help Shore up a Sense of Victimhood

Wow,  the Israeli government and its military is composed of a bunch of sadistic turds, isn’t it? This is disgusting Israel. No wonder the world hates you. Relocate to Florida where you belong ye pathetic psychopaths.

Imagine how you would react if this happened to you or your loved ones.

Source: Israel’s Ever-More Sadistic Reprisals Help Shore up a Sense of Victimhood

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Jonathan Cook

Photo by Kristoffer Trolle | CC BY 2.0

Nazareth

When Israel passed a new counter-terrorism law last year, Ayman Odeh, a leader of the country’s large minority of Palestinian citizens, described its draconian measures as colonialism’s “last gasp”. He said: “I see … the panic of the French at the end of the occupation of Algeria.”

The panic and cruelty plumbed new depths last week, when Israeli officials launched a $2.3 million lawsuit against the family of Fadi Qanbar, who crashed a truck into soldiers in Jerusalem in January, killing four. He was shot dead at the scene.

The suit demands that his widow, Tahani, reimburse the state for the compensation it awarded the soldiers’ families. If she cannot raise the astronomic sum, the debt will pass to her four children, the oldest of whom is currently only seven.

Israel is reported to be preparing many similar cases.

Like other families of Palestinians who commit attacks, the Qanbars are homeless, after Israel sealed their East Jerusalem home with cement. Twelve relatives were also stripped of their residency papers as a prelude to expelling them to the West Bank.

None has done anything wrong – their crime is simply to be related to someone Israel defines as a “terrorist”.

This trend is intensifying. Israel has demanded that the Palestinian Authority stop paying a small monthly stipend to families like the Qanbars, whose breadwinner was killed or jailed. Conviction rates among Palestinians in Israel’s military legal system stand at more than 99 per cent, and hundreds of prisoners are incarcerated without charge.

Israeli legislation is set to seize $280 million – a sum equivalent to the total stipends – from taxes Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, potentially bankrupting it.

On Wednesday Israel loyalists will introduce in the US Senate a bill to similarly deny the PA aid unless it stops “funding terror”. Issa Karaka, a Palestinian official, said it would be impossible for the PA to comply: “Almost every other household … is the family of a prisoner or martyr.”

Israel has taken collective punishment – a serious violation of international law – to new extremes, stretching the notion to realms once imaginable only in a dystopian fable like George Orwell’s 1984.

Israel argues that a potential attacker can only be dissuaded by knowing his loved ones will suffer harsh retribution. Or put another way, Israel is prepared to use any means to crush the motivation of Palestinians to resist its brutal, five-decade occupation.

All evidence, however, indicates that when people reach breaking-point, and are willing to die in the fight against their oppressors, they give little thought to the consequences for their families. That was the conclusion of an investigation by the Israeli army more than a decade ago.

In truth, Israel knows its policy is futile. It is not deterring attacks, but instead engaging in complex displacement activity. Ever-more sadistic forms of revenge shore up a collective and historic sense of Jewish victimhood while deflecting Israelis’ attention from the reality that their country is a brutal colonial settler state.

If that verdict seems harsh, consider a newly published study into the effects on operators of using drones to carry out extrajudicial executions, in which civilians are often killed as “collateral damage”.

A US survey found pilots who remotely fly drones soon develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress from inflicting so much death and destruction. The Israeli army replicated the study after its pilots operated drones over Gaza during Israel’s 2014 attack – the ultimate act of collective punishment. Some 500 Palestinian children were killed as the tiny enclave was bombarded for nearly two months.

Doctors were surprised, however, that the pilots showed no signs of depression or anxiety. The researchers speculate that Israeli pilots may feel more justified in their actions, because they are closer to Gaza than US pilots are to Afghanistan, Iraq or Yemen. They are more confident that they are the ones under threat, even as they rain down death unseen on Palestinians.

The determination to maintain this exclusive self-image as the victim leads to outrageous double standards.

Last week the Israeli supreme court backed the refusal by officials to seal up the homes of three Jews who kidnapped Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old from Jerusalem, in 2014 and burnt him alive.

In May the Israeli government revealed that it had denied compensation to six-year-old Ahmed Dawabsheh, the badly scarred, sole survivor of an arson attack by Jewish extremists that killed his entire family two years ago.

Human rights group B’Tselem recently warned that Israel has given itself immunity from paying compensation to all Palestinians under occupation killed or disabled by the Israeli army – even in cases of criminal wrongdoing.

This endless heaping of insult upon injury for Palestinians is possible only because the west has indulged Israel’s wallowing in victimhood so long. It is time to prick this bubble of self-delusion and remind Israel that it, not the Palestinians, is the oppressor.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

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More articles by:Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

Gaza conditions ‘unlivable’ 10 years into siege: UN

Source: Gaza conditions ‘unlivable’ 10 years into siege: UN | News | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

July 12, 2017

Report says threshold of ‘unlivability’ passed with decreasing electricity supply and 60 percent youth unemployment.

Palestinians spend time on a beach in a warm weather in Gaza City [Reuters]

A report by the United Nations says living conditions in the Gaza Strip have worsened in the 10 years since the territory was blockaded by Israel.

The report, which was published on Tuesday and titled “Gaza – 10 years later“, says that key indicators identified in an earlier 2012 UN report, such as declining incomes, healthcare, education and electricity have deteriorated yet further.

The UN said that real GDP per capita in Gaza has decreased while the provision of urgently-needed health services has continued to decline.

The report also finds that Gaza’s only water source is predicted to be “irreversibly-depleted” by 2020, unless immediate action is taken.

“Gaza has continued on its trajectory of de-development, in many cases even faster than we had originally projected,” said Robert Piper, the UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid and Development Activities. 

“When you’re down to two hours of power a day and you have 60 percent youth unemployment rates … that unlivability threshold has been passed quite a long time ago.”

Robert Piper, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the West Bank and Gaza and a deputy secretary general [Ronen Zvulun/Reuters]

Piper said that while continuous humanitarian assistance, particularly through UN services, are helping to slow this descent, the downward direction remains clear.

“I see this extraordinarily inhuman and unjust process of strangling gradually two million civilians in Gaza that really pose a threat to nobody,” he added.

Commenting in an interview with a Palestinian news agency, Piper said that it is still possible to avoid a humanitarian crisis only if the international community acted fast.

“We need first to put these people a bit higher up, if not at the top of the agenda,” he said.

“We’re 100 percent optimistic that it’s doable if there’s a willingness on the part of the key actors to make it happen.”

In 2007, the Palestinian movement Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, after a failed US-backed pre-emptive coup by its rival faction Fatah.

Immediately after, Israel moved to isolate the group by restricting the flow of goods and people in and out of Gaza, limiting access to the sea and working with Egypt to enforce a blockade.

The coastal enclave is home to around 2 million Palestinians, and has a median age of 18.

Israel has launched three offensives on Gaza since 2008, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed.

Severe damage to Gaza’s already weak infrastructure has contributed to the current humanitarian crisis.

On July 7, Israel’s intelligence and transport minister announced plans to build an island port along the coast of the Gaza Strip, to help ease the humanitarian situation there, though the project has not been officially approved yet.

Source: Al Jazeera News

John Pilger: Why Palestine is Still the Issue

Boycott everything Israeli and relocate Israel to Florida!

Source:  Why Palestine is Still the Issue

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by John Pilger

July 11, 2017

Photo by Gigi Ibrahim | CC BY 2.0

When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called themselves socialists. I liked them.

One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter.

“Arabs”, they said, “nomads”.  The words were almost spat out. Israel, they said, meaning Palestine, had been mostly wasteland and one of the great feats of the Zionist enterprise was to turn the desert green.

They gave as an example their crop of Jaffa oranges, which was exported to the rest of the world. What a triumph against the odds of nature and humanity’s neglect.

It was the first lie. Most of the orange groves and vineyards belonged to Palestinians who had been tilling the soil and exporting oranges and grapes to Europe since the eighteenth century. The former Palestinian town of Jaffa was known by its previous inhabitants as “the place of sad oranges”.

On the kibbutz, the word “Palestinian” was never used. Why, I asked. The answer was a troubled silence.

All over the colonised world, the true sovereignty of indigenous people is feared by those who can never quite cover the fact, and the crime, that they live on stolen land.

Denying people’s humanity is the next step – as the Jewish people know only too well. Defiling people’s dignity and culture and pride follows as logically as violence.

In Ramallah, following an invasion of the West Bank by the late Ariel Sharon in 2002, I walked through streets of crushed cars and demolished houses, to the Palestinian Cultural Centre. Until that morning, Israeli soldiers had camped there.

I was met by the centre’s director, the novelist, Liana Badr, whose original manuscripts lay scattered and torn across the floor. The hard drive containing her fiction, and a library of plays and poetry had been taken by Israeli soldiers. Almost everything was smashed, and defiled.

Not a single book survived with all its pages; not a single master tape from one of the best collections of Palestinian cinema.

The soldiers had urinated and defecated on the floors, on desks, on embroideries and works of art. They had smeared faeces on children’s paintings and written – in shit – “Born to kill”.

Liana Badr had tears in her eyes, but she was unbowed. She said, “We will make it right again.”

What enrages those who colonise and occupy, steal and oppress, vandalise and defile is the victims’ refusal to comply. And this is the tribute we all should pay the Palestinians. They refuse to comply. They go on. They wait – until they fight again. And they do so even when those governing them collaborate with their oppressors.

In the midst of the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer never stopped reporting. He and his family were stricken; he queued for food and water and carried it through the rubble.  When I phoned him, I could hear the bombs outside his door. He refused to comply.

Mohammed’s reports, illustrated by his graphic photographs, were a model of professional journalism that shamed the compliant and craven reporting of the so-called mainstream in Britain and the United States. The BBC notion of objectivity – amplifying the myths and lies of authority, a practice of which it is proud – is shamed every day by the likes of Mohamed Omer.

For more than 40 years, I have recorded the refusal of the people of Palestine to comply with their oppressors: Israel, the United States, Britain, the European Union.

Since 2008, Britain alone has granted licences for export to Israel of arms and missiles, drones and sniper rifles, worth £434 million.

Those who have stood up to this, without weapons, those who have refused to comply, are among Palestinians I have been privileged to know:

My friend, the late Mohammed Jarella, who toiled for the United Nations agency UNRWA, in 1967 showed me a Palestinian refugee camp for the first time. It was a bitter winter’s day and schoolchildren shook with the cold. “One day …” he would say. “One day …”

Mustafa Barghouti, whose eloquence remains undimmed, who described the tolerance that existed in Palestine among Jews, Muslims and Christians until, as he told me, “the Zionists wanted  a state at the expense of the Palestinians.”

Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician in Gaza, whose passion was raising money for plastic surgery for children disfigured by Israeli bullets and shrapnel. Her hospital was flattened by Israeli bombs in 2014.

Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, whose clinics for children in Gaza — children sent almost mad by Israeli violence — were oases of civilization.

Fatima and Nasser are a couple whose home stood in a village near Jerusalem designated “Zone A and B”, meaning that the land was declared for Jews only. Their parents had lived there; their grandparents had lived there. Today, the bulldozers are laying roads for Jews only, protected by laws for Jews only.

It was past midnight when Fatima went into labour with their second child. The baby was premature; and when they arrived at a checkpoint with the hospital in view, the young Israeli soldier said they needed another document.

Fatima was bleeding badly. The soldier laughed and imitated her moans and told them, “Go home”. The baby was born there in a truck. It was blue with cold and soon, without care, died from exposure. The baby’s name was Sultan.

For Palestinians, these will be familiar stories. The question is: why are they not familiar in London and Washington, Brussels and Sydney?

In Syria, a recent liberal cause — a George Clooney cause — is bankrolled handsomely in Britain and the United States, even though the beneficiaries, the so-called rebels, are dominated by jihadist fanatics, the product of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the destruction of modern Libya.

And yet, the longest occupation and resistance in modern times is not recognized. When the United Nations suddenly stirs and defines Israel as an apartheid state, as it did this year, there is outrage – not against a state whose “core purpose” is racism but against a UN commission that dared break the silence.

“Palestine,” said Nelson Mandela, “is the greatest moral issue of our time.”

Why is this truth suppressed, day after day, month after month, year after year?

On Israel – the apartheid state, guilty of a crime against humanity and of more international law-breaking than any other– the silence persists among those who know and whose job it is to keep the record straight.

On Israel, so much journalism is intimidated and controlled by a groupthink that demands silence on Palestine while honourable journalism has become dissidence: a metaphoric underground.

A single word – “conflict” – enables this silence.  “The Arab-Israeli conflict”, intone the robots at their tele-prompters. When a veteran BBC reporter, a man who knows the truth, refers to “two narratives”, the moral contortion is complete.

There is no conflict, no two narratives, with their moral fulcrum. There is a military occupation enforced by a nuclear-armed power backed by the greatest military power on earth; and there is an epic injustice.

The word “occupation” may be banned, deleted from the dictionary. But the memory of historical truth cannot be banned: of the systemic expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. “Plan D” the Israelis called it in 1948.

The Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by one of his generals: “What shall we do with the Arabs?”

The prime minister, wrote Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand”. “Expel them!” he said.

Seventy years later, this crime is suppressed in the intellectual and political culture of the West. Or it is debatable, or merely controversial.  Highly-paid journalists and eagerly accept Israeli government trips, hospitality and flattery, then are truculent in their protestations of independence. The term, “useful idiots”, was coined for them.

In 2011, I was struck by the ease with which one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, Ian McEwan, a man bathed in the glow of bourgeois enlightenment, accepted the Jerusalem Prize for literature in the apartheid state.

Would McEwan have gone to Sun City in apartheid South Africa? They gave prizes there, too, all expenses paid. McEwan justified his action with weasel words about the independence of “civil society”.

Propaganda – of the kind McEwan delivered, with its token slap on the wrists for his delighted hosts – is a weapon for the oppressors of Palestine. Like sugar, it insinuates almost everything today.

Understanding and deconstructing state and cultural propaganda is our most critical task. We are being frog-marched into a second cold war, whose eventual aim is to subdue and balkanise Russia and intimidate China.

When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke privately for more than two hours at the G20 meeting in Hamburg, apparently about the need not to go to war with each other, the most vociferous objectors were those who have commandeered liberalism, such as the Zionist political writer of the Guardian.

“No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg,” wrote Jonathan Freedland. “He knows he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has made America weak again.”  Cue the hissing for Evil Vlad.

These propagandists have never known war but they love the imperial game of war. What Ian McEwan calls “civil society” has become a rich source of related propaganda.

Take a term often used by the guardians of civil society — “human rights”.  Like another noble concept, “democracy”, “human rights” has been all but emptied of its meaning and purpose.

Like “peace process” and “road map”, human rights in Palestine have been hijacked by Western governments and the corporate NGOs they fund and which claim a quixotic moral authority.

So when Israel is called upon by governments and NGOs to “respect human rights” in Palestine, nothing happens, because they all know there is nothing to fear; nothing will change.

Mark the silence of the European Union, which accommodates Israel while refusing to maintain its commitments to the people of Gaza — such as keeping the lifeline of the Rafah border crossing open: a measure it agreed to as part of its role in the cessation of fighting in 2014. A seaport for Gaza – agreed by Brussels in 2014 – has been abandoned.

The UN commission I have referred to – its full name is the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia — described Israel as, and I quote, “designed for the core purpose” of racial discrimination.

Millions understand this. What the governments in London, Washington, Brussels and Tel Aviv cannot control is that humanity at street level is changing perhaps as never before.

People everywhere are stirring and are more aware, in my view, than ever before. Some are already in open revolt. The atrocity of Grenfell Tower in London has brought communities together in a vibrant almost national resistance.

Thanks to a people’s campaign, the judiciary is today examining the evidence of a possible prosecution of Tony Blair for war crimes. Even if this fails, it is a crucial development, dismantling yet another barrier between the public and its recognition of the voracious nature of the crimes of state power – the systemic disregard for humanity perpetrated in Iraq, in Grenfell Tower, in Palestine. Those are the dots waiting to be joined.

For most of the 21^st century, the fraud of corporate power posing as democracy has depended on the propaganda of distraction: largely on a cult of “me-ism” designed to disorientate our sense of looking out for others, of acting together, of social justice and internationalism.

Class, gender and race were wrenched apart. The personal became the political and the media the message. The promotion of bourgeois privilege was presented as “progressive” politics. It wasn’t. It never is. It is the promotion of privilege, and power.

Among young people, internationalism has found a vast new audience. Look at the support for Jeremy Corbyn and the reception the G20 circus in Hamburg received. By understanding the truth and imperatives of internationalism, and rejecting colonialism, we understand the struggle of Palestine.

Mandela put it this way: “We know only too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

At the heart of the Middle East is the historic injustice in Palestine. Until that is resolved, and Palestinians have their freedom and homeland, and Israelis are Palestinians equality before the law, there will be no peace in the region, or perhaps anywhere.

What Mandela was saying is that freedom itself is precarious while powerful governments can deny justice to others, terrorise others, imprison and kill others, in our name. Israel certainly understands the threat that one day it might have to be normal.

That is why its ambassador to Britain is Mark Regev, well known to journalists as a professional propagandist, and why the “huge bluff” of charges of anti-Semitism, as Ilan Pappe called it, was allowed to contort the Labour Party and undermine Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The point is, it did not succeed.

Events are moving quickly now. The remarkable Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) is succeeding, day by day; cities and towns, trade unions and student bodies are endorsing it. The British government’s attempt to restrict local councils from enforcing BDS has failed in the courts.

These are not straws in the wind. When the Palestinians rise again, as they will, they may not succeed at first — but they will eventually if we understand that they are us, and we are them.

This is an abridged version of John Pilger’s address to the Palestinian Expo in London on 8 July, 2017. John Pilger’s film, ‘Palestine Is Still the Issue’, can be viewed here.

More articles by:John Pilger

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

Israel Steals Solar Panels Donated To Palestinians, Netherlands Protests

Wow Israel, this is not classy whatsoever. This is despicable and should be called theft. You have no class whatsoever Israel. 

Boycott everything Israeli until it rejoins the human species.

Relocate Israel to Florida!

Source: Israel Steals Solar Panels Donated To Palestinians, Netherlands Protests – Counter Current News

countercurrentnews.com

By Jeremiah Jones

July 7, 2017

The Netherlands is furious and has lodged a complaint with the Israeli government after dozens of Dutch solar panels donated to a West Bank village were “confiscated” by Israeli authorities.

The solar panels were installed last year in remote Jubbet al-Dhib, a village home to 150 people in an area of the West Bank occupied by Israel., reported The Independent. 

Israel used the same excuse they use when they destroy Palestinian houses and farms, even ones that have been there hundreds of years, they claimed the panels were not built with proper permits and permissions as they stole equipment belonging to the £307,000 humanitarian project last week.

Because Israel (formerly Palestine) is governed by extremely racist and prejudice people/policies, it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to get permits for anything.  They are simply the wrong race and/or religion.

The village mayor told Ma’an News the panels were destroyed, but Comet-ME, the aid organisation which installed the panels, said that between 60 and 90 were taken away intact and other equipment at the site destroyed and left behind by Israeli forces.

The Dutch Foreign Ministry asked for the stolen equipment to be returned to Jubbet al-Dhib and is considering what “next steps can be taken”, reported Haaretz.

The issue is causing outrage in the Dutch government and in the Palestinian territories.

Cogat, the Israeli military agency responsible for coordinating Israeli policy in Palestinian areas, said that several work-stop orders were issued before the day of the raid. Villagers maintain that they did not know the site had been targeted until Israel Defence Force (IDF) soldiers showed up, according to The Independent.

It is important to realize that Jubbet al-Dhib is very close to Israeli outpost villages, illegal settlements under both Israeli and international law, but they still have a full connection to the main power grid. 

Cogat said in a statement that the village had “other electricity sources” other than the “illegal electricity room”. Haaretz reported the “other electricity sources” as a couple of “old and noisy” diesel generators they used to use for three hours of power a day.

More than 300 Palestinian structures in the occupied West Bank were demolished by the Israeli authorities in 2016 and were at least in part funded by the EU or international NGOs, an Israeli military official said earlier this year according to The Independent.

UN Last Hurdle Before Israel Can Rid Itself of the Palestinians

Source: UN Last Hurdle Before Israel Can Rid Itself of the Palestinians

With permission from

ww.counterpunch.org

by Jonathan Cook

June 15, 2017

Photo by zeevveez | CC BY 2.0

Nazareth.

Israeli and US officials are in the process of jointly pre-empting Donald Trump’s supposed “ultimate deal” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They hope to demote the Palestinian issue to a footnote in international diplomacy.

The conspiracy – a real one – was much in evidence last week during a visit to the region by Nikki Haley, Washington’s envoy to the United Nations. Her escort was Danny Danon, her Israeli counterpart and a fervent opponent of Palestinian statehood.

Danon makes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu look moderate. He has backed Israel annexing the West Bank and ruling over Palestinians apatheid-style. Haley appears unperturbed. During a meeting with Netanyahu, she told him that the UN was “a bully to Israel”. She has warned the powerful Security Council to focus on Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizbollah, instead of Israel.

To protect its tiny ally, Washington is threatening to cut billions in US funding to the world body, plunging it into crisis and jeopardising peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

On the way to Israel, Haley stopped at the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva, demanding it end its “pathological” opposition to Israel’s decades of occupation and human rights violations – or the US would pull out of the agency.

Washington has long pampered Israel, giving it millions of dollars each year to buy weapons to oppress Palestinians, and using its veto to block UN resolutions enforcing international law. Expert UN reports such as a recent one on Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians have been buried.

But worse is to come. Now the framework of international laws and institutions established after the Second World War is at risk of being dismembered.

That danger was highlighted on Sunday, when it emerged that Netanyahu had urged Haley to dismantle another UN agency much loathed by Israel. UNRWA cares for more than five million Palestinian refugees across the region.

Since the 1948 war, Israel has refused to allow these refugees to return to their lands, now in Israel, forcing them to live in miserable and overcrowded camps awaiting a peace deal that never arrives. These dispossessed Palestinians still depend on UNRWA for education, health care and social services.

UNRWA, Netanyahu says, “perpetuates” rather than solves their problems. He prefers that they become the responsibility of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which looks after all other refugee populations.

His demand is a monumental U-turn, 70 years in the making. In fact, it was Israel that in 1948 insisted on a separate UN refugee agency for the Palestinians.

UNRWA was created to prevent the Palestinians falling under the charge of UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. Israel was afraid that the IRO, formed in the immediate wake of the Second World War, would give Palestinian refugees the same prominence as European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.

Israel did not want the two cases compared, especially as they were so intimately connected. It was the rise of Nazism that bolstered the Zionist case for a Jewish state in Palestine and Jewish refugees who were settled on lands from which Palestinians had just been expelled by Israel.

Also, Israel was concerned that the IRO’s commitment to the principle of repatriation might force it to accept back the Palestinian refugees.

Israel’s hope then was precisely that UNRWA would not solve the Palestinian refugee problem; rather, it would resolve itself. The idea was encapsulated in a Zionist adage: “The old will die and the young forget.”

But millions of Palestinian descendants still clamour for a right of return. If they cannot forget, Netanyahu prefers that the world forget them.

As bloody wars grip the Middle East, the best way to achieve that aim is to submerge the Palestinians among the world’s 65 million other refugees. Why worry about the Palestinian case when there are millions of Syrians newly displaced by war?

But UNRWA poses a challenge, because it is so deeply entrenched in the region and insists on a just solution for Palestinian refugees.

UNRWA’s huge staff includes 32,000 Palestinian administrators, teachers and doctors, many living in camps in the West Bank – Palestinian territory Netanyahu and Danon hunger for. The UN’s presence there is an impediment to annexation.

On Monday Netanyahu announced his determination to block Europe from funding Israeli human rights organisations, the main watchdogs in the West Bank and a key data source for UN agencies. He now refuses to meet any world leader who talks to these rights groups.

With Trump in the White House, a crisis-plagued Europe ever-more toothless and the Arab world in disarray, Netanyahu wants to seize this chance to clear the UN out of the way too.

Global institutions such as the UN and the international law it upholds were created after the Second World War to protect the weakest and prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust’s horrors.

Today, Netanyahu is prepared to risk it all, tearing down the post-war international order, if this act of colossal vandalism will finally rid him of the Palestinians.

More articles by:Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

Opiates: Death on the Prescription Plan

Source: Opiates: Death on the Prescription Plan – Darkmoon

With permission from Darkmoon

http://www.darkmoon.me

By Edmund Connelly, Ph. D.
Sourced from The Occidental Observer

June 7, 2017

LD: I can hardly praise this article enough or overestimate its importance. It is the first of three such articles on the subject of Big Pharma and the opiate addiction epidemic it has irresponsibly unleashed in America under the influence of organized Jewry in the form of the oligarchic Sackler family. This is Edmund Connelly at his best. We are taken right into the heart of darkness here. You owe it to yourselves and your families to acquaint yourself with the grim facts of this man-made epidemic if only for this reason: your own survival and happiness depend upon it.

PICTURES AND CAPTIONS BY DARKMOON

Like Harold Covington, I have a soft spot for Jewish writer James Howard Kunstler. For starters, his style amuses me, especially in his weekly (now twice weekly) blog Clusterfuck Nation. This blog plays a useful role beyond that, however, in that he consistently zeroes in on the damage his own tribe is doing to the United States (and the world). He can sum this up cleverly, bitingly, and accurately, yet of course he never names the Jew, even after he’s gone through half a dozen uninterrupted Jewish names.

His April 28th column is no exception. Consider the opening three paragraphs:

While the news waves groan with stories about “America’s Opioid Epidemic” you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what’s behind it, namely, the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens. I mean unspeakably literally. If you want evidence of our inability to construct a coherent story about what’s happening in this country, there it is.

I live in a corner of Flyover Red America where you can easily read these conditions on the landscape — the vacant Main Streets, especially after dark, the houses uncared for and decrepitating year by year, the derelict farms with barns falling down, harvesters rusting in the rain, and pastures overgrown with sumacs, the parasitical national chain stores like tumors at the edge of every town.

You can read it in the bodies of the people in the new town square, i.e. the supermarket: people prematurely old, fattened and sickened by bad food made to look and taste irresistible to con those sunk in despair, a deadly consolation for lives otherwise filled by empty hours, trash television, addictive computer games, and their own family melodramas concocted to give some narrative meaning to lives otherwise bereft of event or effort.

Kunstler lives in Greenwich, New York, a tiny village northeast of Saratoga Springs. He uses this setting for his surprisingly sympathetic World Made By Hand novels (four of them), where narrator Robert Earle is a carpenter in a post-oil world in which inhabitants of the United States are reduced to living like their ancestors did in the middle of the 1800s. I say sympathetic in that Kunstler creates a Gentile world, one which rings true to me, peopled by generally decent and caring folk. I salute Kunstler both for his ability to imagine a world so unlike the one in which he grew up (New York City) but more so for his willingness to actually like these White Christians. We all know many Jews have completely opposite views and feelings.

Because Kunstler has made the effort to write these four novels, I take his reportage on the current state of small-town America more seriously than I normally might. Thus, I grieve when reading about “America’s Opioid Epidemic,” for I believe it is likely true.

I also believe that Kunstler gets the cause of this psychic pain right, describing how “These are people who have suffered their economic and social roles in life to be stolen from them. They do not work at things that matter. They have no prospects for a better life.” A lot of them voted for Trump.

Par for the course, Kunstler has pointed to a tragedy, if not a crime, yet fails to name the culprits. So who might the culprits be?

Let me begin to answer that by asking, “What do David Duke and the Daily Stormer writer known as Eric Striker have in common with retired professor of sociology James Petras?” The answer: They all point to the Jewish Sackler family as being behind the upsurge in prescriptions of opiates and consequent addiction and overdose deaths of White Americans.

Normally, we would never expect a modern American social scientist to notice, much less explicitly state, that America’s ruling class (heavily Jewish) is knowingly murdering White citizens, but Petras is surely no normal scholar. And in writing about this epidemic, Petras uses the title “Death on the Prescription Plan. The ‘White Plague’ of the 21st Century.” Trust me, Petras is deliberate in using the term “White Plague” to refer both to heroin, the powder killing so many Whites, and to these Jewish-promoted opiates as being a plague to White Americans specifically. And Petras is outraged by this and highly sympathetic to the victims. How often can any of us say that about modern academics, including those academics who are themselves White?

Petras’s introduction to the essay is the opposite of the normally mealy-mouthed convoluted prose used by today’s academics. Who could fail to understand the points Petras endeavors to make?

Over the past two decades hundreds of thousands of Americans have died prematurely because of irresponsibly prescribed narcotic ‘pain killers’ and other central nervous system depressants, like tranquilizers and their deadly interactions.

The undeniable fact is that they have been mostly from the white working and lower middle class from rural and deindustrialized regions. The governing elite and oligarch macro-decision makers have quietly dismissed this sector of the country as ‘surplus’. The victims or their surviving family members have no chance of redress for the widespread malpractice and greed that led to their addiction or death. The government as a whole and the oligarch-controlled mass media have deliberately failed to document and investigate the deep causes for the epidemic, except to spout the usual superficial ‘clichéd explanations’.

How chilling that Petras refers to these small-town Whites as “surplus,” for we have heard the term used in identical ways before. Tomislav Sunic, for instance, has written in Homo Americanus that “in order for the proper functioning of future Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.”

For years, the American elite has belittled and attacked the backbone of American society — the very Whites Petras defends. Petras notes, for example, how it was candidate Hillary Clinton who dismissed this segment of the American population as “deplorables.” Prior to that, candidate Obama referred to them in a similarly negative way: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. . . . And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Yes, that helps to explain their frustration, but we might add the fact that “their” government is has long been pursuing policies that marginalize them and now is colluding to kill them. I’d be frustrated, too, and angry and afraid and I’d cling to whatever I found at hand.

Petras provides a welcome class analysis of this War on Rural Whites. While social scientists may still write in terms of class, Petras stands out, as mentioned, for both naming Whites as victims and being sympathetic. He also decries the normal tendency of “experts” to blame amorphous trends such as “globalization and automation,” calling them “superficial” or “fake” explanations. Why, he asks, is America the sole developed nation in which this kind of spike in deaths is occurring? In Germany, he notes, the death rate for workers between ages 50-54 has declined to 42/100,000, similar to the drop France has seen. Yet in America it has jumped to 80 people per 100,000.

More than that, however, is the fact that he pursues the facts to find the specific identity of those classes or groups normally referred to vaguely as “capital,” “ruling structures” or even “Big Pharma.” Observe Petras’s chain of thought in identifying those responsible for “OxyContin, the White Plague.”

He begins with an analysis of capital: “Billions of synthetic opioid narcotics have been cheaply manufactured and prescribed at extraordinary levels of profits — far exceeding those of the so-called ‘block-buster’ drugs. The billionaire owners of pharmaceutical companies specializing in narcotic pain medications have hired legions of drug salespeople to work with doctors and pain clinics in a largely unregulated field, without any intervention or oversight form the capitalist state.”

He then ramps up the charges against these forces:

“The most ‘effective’ and heavily promoted painkillers, like OxyContin, happen to be the most rapidly addictive and deadly. The pharmaceutical industry deliberately glossed over the dangerously addicting nature of these ‘wonder drugs’ through their drug representative visits to hospitals and clinics. . . . The perpetrators of mass murder by overdose have profited immensely and with total impunity for the ensuing havoc.”

Effects of cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, and OxyContin (synthetic heroin)

Typically, we would expect writers on the left to employ Marxist gobbledygook such as “the capitalist perpetrators of this ‘opioid war against the working class’ blah, blah, blah,” but Petras pointedly steers us directly toward the true culprits in this case: “One such company is Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the maker of OxyContin. It is owned by the oligarch Sackler Family, whose founders are among the most elite high cultural philanthropists in the country (the NYTimes obituary [1987] described family patriarch Arthur Sackler as “a research psychiatrist, entrepreneur and philanthropist who became one of this country’s leading art collectors and patrons”). Since entering the unimaginably lucrative US ‘pain’ market in 1995, OxyContin has earned Purdue over $35 billion dollars and brought the Sacklers into the Olympian heights of the America’s ‘Uber-rich’.”

Fortuitously, those of us aware of Jewish issues had an excellent opportunity to find out more about “the oligarch Sackler Family” by listening to a superb podcast (here) by David Duke only one week before Petras’s essay appeared. Now we at TOO don’t usually operate as a log of bad behavior by individual Jews. All groups have their bad apples. However, as recounted, for example, by Andrew Joyce in the area of money lending, there is a long and extensive history of Jews developing very lucrative schemes that ultimately prey on non-Jews, often people with less education and bleak economic prospects. These schemes ultimately spring from traditional Jewish ethics in which outgroups have no moral standing. The story of Arthur Sackler and his heirs fits this pattern.

The show’s intro reads:

Today Dr. Duke had Daily Stormer journalist Eric Striker as his guest for the hour. They had a discussion of the epidemic of opiate abuse in America. In so many cases, the introduction to opiates was initiated by the medical profession. This epidemic has hit white communities particularly hard, with middle-age white men being the only demographic in America to see its death rates rise.

Dr. Duke pointed out that the indoctrination of whites to feel guilt and hate themselves, along with the institutionalized discrimination against whites in college admissions and hiring, has helped fuel this epidemic. Eric Striker went into the history of two Jewish families, the Sacklers and the Sassoons, who played central roles in the spread of the use of opiates throughout the world.

A color map was included to show the areas hard-hit by the epidemic.

LD: You will notice that the worst affected areas for opiate abuse in America lie in the heavily populated urban centers on the east coast. Vast swathes of America on the west coast and in the rural central plains remain untouched.  

This really is a podcast worth hearing. Even after researching The Jewish Problem for more than three decades, I was still surprised to hear the figures Duke and Striker quote — numbers that parallel those cited by Petras.

The show was based on a long essay done by Striker (here) where he usefully compares what today’s Sackler family is doing to what the Jewish Sassoons did to the Chinese over a century and a half ago. In that case, the Sassoons arranged for large amounts of opium to be imported into China, the result being that “Queen Victoria got a cut, and in exchange gave them Hong Kong as a place from which world drug Jewry . . . could set up a base of operations. From here, the British military would ‘protect’ the unbridled flow of opium.”

Striker next calls the Sackler family “the New Sassoons,” and with good reason. Just as China had been severely hobbled by the opium trade and millions of users left dead or with ruined lives, today in America untold numbers of patients are being destroyed by legally prescribed drugs. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this figure, but if it is even remotely close, it amounts to a high crime. Striker writes, “A recent study in the United States has found that approximately 190,000 people have perished from prescription painkiller overdoses, the vast majority of them died from excessive doses of OxyContin.” Wikipedia cites a study finding that in 2008, recreational use of oxycodone and hydrocodone were involved in 14,800 deaths, at which rate it would take less than 13 years to reach this figure.

If this is true, how could the American medical establishment allow this? And what forces might be responsible for pushing this known danger on innocent Americans?

Like Petras, Striker points his finger straight at the Sackler family, digging up the history of the family and their pioneering efforts at reaping profits in the pharmaceutical industry despite the damage their actions caused. During the post-war years, American doctors in general still tended to put patients’ health over profits. The practice then, as Striker sees it: “The lack of prolonged use limited the profitability of the drug market, and true to the Hippocratic oath, the questions of health, life and death were not seen as appropriate venues for those driven by an unquenchable capitalist thirst, much less for people interested in crippling and enslaving those around them.”

The Sacklers changed all this. As his Wikipedia page says, “Sackler became known as “the father of modern pharmaceutical advertising” and is considered to have inspired the ambitious OxyContin marketing strategy.”

Their first “Copernican shift” came in 1963, when Arthur Sackler secured the license for the tranquilizer Valium and turned it into “the world’s first $100 million drug” (and later the first billion-dollar drug).

Thirty years later, a new drug was ready: “Until 1995–96, Oxycodone was reserved as a last resort for those suffering from extreme, terminal cancer. But seeing the market limitations, … Purdue Pharma submitted a patent to the Food and Drug Administration for a new iteration of the drug: OxyContin.”

Again, we must ask, “How did the medical establishment allow this?

Striker traces Sackler’s efforts to break down medical resistance, and in doing so, Striker reveals a key element of the mystery — how “Jewish cooperation across different sectors” [my emphasis] achieved untold profits for them and untold misery for the goyim.

In short, the Sacklers devised an unseemly strategy to promote “pain management” by creating front groups that furthered Sackler interests, by providing incentives for doctors to use their drug, by defaming doctors who resisted the use of OxyContin, and ultimately threatening doctors with the loss of their medical license “unless they started prescribing synthetic heroin for minor ailments.”

The result: “Suddenly, giving out OxyContin like it’s ice cream became the norm. The few honest medical practitioners who got in the way were hopelessly silenced and crushed. The expansion of opiate use geared specifically at White workers and the middle class was mandated down the private and public chain of medical command.”

RAVAGED BY OXYCONTIN

ANOTHER VICTIM OF THE RUTHLESS SACKLER EMPIRE

LD: White American workers and the middle classes are deliberately hooked on this killer drug. The Sassoon family (Iraqi Jewish settlers in England) got hundreds of millions of Chinese people hooked on opium in the 19th century on behalf of the British Empire’s East India Company. (See here). Today, exactly the same thing is being done by the oligarchic Sackler family to millions of vulnerable Americans on behalf of Big Pharma. (LD)

Though Purdue Pharma eventually triumphed, generating $35 billion worth of sales for OxyContin (Petras quotes the same figure), there were bumps along the way, such as the conviction of three Jewish executives in a case against Purdue. Wiki’s reportage mirrors that of Striker:

In May 2007, the company pleaded guilty to misleading the public about OxyContin’s risk of addiction, and agreed to pay $600 million in one of the largest pharmaceutical settlements in U.S. history. Its president, top lawyer, and former chief medical officer pleaded guilty as individuals to misbranding charges, a criminal violation, and agreed to pay a total of $34.5 million in fines. Those executives are: Michael Friedman, the company’s president, who agreed to pay $19 million in fines; Howard R. Udell, its top lawyer, who agreed to pay $8 million; and Dr. Paul D. Goldenheim, its former medical director, who agreed to pay $7.5 million.

Though $600 million is a large number, Striker dismisses it as “merely a cost of doing business,” which seems plausible in light of the $35 billion figure for sales.

So it has come to this? The Establishment enables a situation where the former backbone of the United States’ society — rural and working class Whites — is suffering addiction and often death? Sadly, the evidence suggests just this.

The increasing invisibility of these people can be seen in an article by Jewish writer Hanna Rosin appearing in the September 2013 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (“Murder by Craigslist: A serial killer finds a newly vulnerable class of victims: white, working-class men”). In it, she described how single White males were lured to the Ohio countryside by promises of work, then ambushed and murdered. The murderer figured that such men would not be missed, so the crimes might go undetected. As Rosin chillingly sums it up, “At what other moment in history could a serial killer identify middle-aged white men as his most vulnerable targets?”

I think by now it might be clear that a “full-spectrum assault” on Whites is underway — the flood of non-White immigrants, the discrimination against White males through affirmative action, the job-killing trade policies, the assault on family formation due to feminism, etc. Now we have the medical establishment targeting “surplus” Whites. What a crime!

I don’t mean to depress my readers with this information but I do want people to wake up to the danger. And for this story on the manifest risks of OxyContin, we owe a debt of gratitude to James Petras, Dr. Duke and Eric Striker.

Let me add another point as well. Petras notes that the Sackler family is “among the most elite high cultural philanthropists in the country,” endowing the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution and the Sackler Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet as I pointed out in my review of the Richard Gere film Arbitrage, “Hollywood conceals the facts about massive Jewish involvement in Wall Street finance — including immense malfeasance and endless instances of shady practices. Not only does Hollywood conceal these facts, it then PROJECTS them onto innocent Gentiles.” Recall that in Arbitrage, the goy played by Gere involves himself in very shady business practices and is responsible for the fiery death of his mistress, yet at the end of the movie he is feted in some elite New York City setting for his philanthropy.

This miscue is part and parcel of the ongoing Jewish effort to divert attention away from Jewish misbehavior. Arbitrage and six other films compose what I think of as my “How They Lie to Us” series of big-name films that peddle goy characters as the financial malefactors. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio playing the lead in The Wolf of Wall Street when in fact the convicted villain was well known to be Jewish.

I’m going to close this essay with an invitation. Yesterday I happened to read a blog about the risks of modern vaccinations, which made many claims about how vaccines are actually seriously hurting or even killing the recipients. I claim no expertise whatsoever in this area and do not in fact have much exposure to the topic. Still, the basic storyline strikes me as similar to the one about the legal prescription of OxyContin. We are all well aware that concern about vaccines is seen by the medical establishment as the ultimate conspiracy theory — except that the medical establishment signed on to doling out OxyContin like ice cream. Thus, I invite informed readers to address the topic of possibly harmful vaccines and any possible link to the Tribe of the Sassoon and Sackler families. Who knows what we might find?

THE EVIL FACE OF CRIMINAL CAPITALISM
(Click to expand)

Arthur Sackler, Jewish “philanthropist”, 
with the looted art treasures he purchased with his drug fortune.