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All posts for the day October 8th, 2023
8 Oct 2023
International law clearly shows that the Palestinian people have a legal right to armed struggle against Israeli colonialism, just as South Africans did against apartheid. Gaza suffers under an illegal Israeli blockade that even a former British prime minister recognized to be a “prison camp”. Journalist Ben Norton looks over the evidence.
The Palestinians are again fighting for their lives, refusing to live in the prison known as Gaza, controlled and policed by Israel with Palestinians killed and maimed, unreported, day after day. Now their resistance, to which they have a right, is called ‘unprovoked’. Read on:
Oct 8, 2023
They’re Repeating The Word ‘Unprovoked’ Again, This Time In Defense Of Israel.
We’re seeing the Western political/media class bleating the word “unprovoked” in unison again, this time in reference to the massive multi-pronged operation launched by Hamas against Israel on Saturday morning which reportedly killed hundreds of Israelis.
“The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians,” reads a statement from the White House.
“The loss of life in Israel as a result of the violent, calculated and unprovoked attack by Hamas is heartbreaking,” reads a statement by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
“The unprovoked terror attack today and the murders of innocent Israeli citizens are a stark reminder of the brutality of Hamas and Iran-backed extremists,” reads a statement by congressman and House Speaker contender Jim Jordan.
“This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense,” tweeted presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.
“This is an ‘unprovoked attack on civilians’: Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg,” reads a recent Fox News report.
“Unprovoked aggression by Hamas terrorists,” reads a tweet by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas,” tweeted Congressman John Fetterman.
“These attacks by Hamas against Israel were heinous and unprovoked,” tweeted Senator Mark Kelly.
“As a steadfast supporter and ally of Israel, I unequivocally condemn the unprovoked and unprecedented terrorist attack launched by Hamas and stand with the people of Israel as it rightly defends itself,” tweeted Congressman Richie Torres.
“The unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas through Gaza and via air and sea, are absolutely a terrorist attack,” tweeted Democratic Party pundit Ed Krassenstein.
“I unequivocally condemn Hamas’ horrific, unprovoked attacks and call on all parties to take steps to prevent civilian harm,” tweeted Congresswoman Sara Jacobs.
I could cite many, many more examples, but I think that’s enough to make the point I’m trying to make. Isn’t it strange seeing the same oddly specific word choice inserted over and over and over again about the same event in statements by politicians and pundits, regardless of their political affiliation? When you lay them all out together it starts to sound highly suspicious, like someone always referring to his car as “my car, which I did not steal,” or always introducing his spouse as “my wife, whom I do not beat.”
It’s clear by now that whenever you see the word “unprovoked” being forcefully repeated in a uniform way across the entire political/media class, whatever they’re talking about was definitely massively provoked.
We saw this exact same thing when Russia invaded Ukraine; from the very beginning western politics and media were saturated with the word “unprovoked”, bashing the Western public in the face with that message over and over and over again despite the obvious and undeniable fact that the war in Ukraine was most definitely provoked. As Noam Chomsky quipped last year, “Of course, it was provoked.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”
And the same is of course true of the latest Hamas offensive. There are all kinds of arguments you could legitimately make about it, but one argument you definitely cannot defend is that it was unprovoked.
As Palestinian-American writer and comedian Amer Zahr put it on Twitter, “75 years of ethnic cleansing. 15 years of blockade. Confiscation of Palestinian lands. Pogroms on Palestinian towns. Desecration of Palestinian sacred sites. Daily raids into Palestinian homes. Constant humiliation of an entire people. Nothing about today is ‘unprovoked.’” Calling Palestinian violence against Israel “unprovoked” is easily even more ridiculous than calling the Russian invasion unprovoked because the abuses of Israeli apartheid are so well-known by the general public at this point. Multiple mainstream human rights organizations have accused Israel of administering an abusive apartheid regime which treats Palestinians as lesser people. Palestinians who live in the open-air prison known as Gaza are deliberately subjected to undrinkable water, food shortages, energy shortages and bombing campaigns. Those outside Gaza are subjected to racist, violent policing and land seizure and live under a different set of laws than Jewish Israelis. The entire people were forced out of their homes to make way for a new state for reasons that had nothing to do with them, and any attempt to resist this has seen them killed as “terrorists”.
Of course, the attack was provoked.
Isn’t it odd that the Western political/media class would begin uniformly asserting something so easily disprovable? So transparently false? Why would they keep choosing over and over and over again in each instance to make use of that specific word “unprovoked” in their condemnations of the attacks by Hamas?
The answer is that this choice is not so much something they are saying as something they are doing. They’re not attempting to communicate with their audiences, they’re attempting to circumvent the critical thinking of their audience and trick them into accepting a blatant falsehood as true.
Skillful manipulators make frequent use of a cognitive bias known as the illusory truth effect, a glitch in the way human minds tend to operate which makes it hard for us to differentiate between the experience of hearing a well-evidenced fact and the experience of hearing something that they’ve heard repeated multiple times. If you want the public to believe something false you won’t be able to use facts and evidence to make your case to them, so what you can do is just repeat something over and over again until it starts sounding like the truth. Repeat the lie enough times and boom, you’ve perception-managed Westerners into viewing the world from an understanding that Israel did nothing to provoke Palestinians into their actions.
After the news broke about the Hamas offensive I tweeted, “Here come days and days of Western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.” But even I wasn’t expecting the perception management to be this brazen.
The US is now officially paying more in interest on its debt than on defense (and, as everyone knows, they spend A LOT on defense). Throughout history, this is often quite a telling sign that the end of an empire is approaching…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/america-now-paying-more-interest-113000593.html
Oct 8, 2023
America’s gross national debt hit an eye-watering $33 trillion for the first time in September — mere months after eclipsing the $32 trillion mark earlier in the year.
The U.S. is also currently spending more to pay interest on the national debt than it does on national defense, according to the Treasury’s monthly statement.
In the current fiscal year through August, the Treasury has shelled out $807.84 billion in interest on its debt securities, while the Department of Defense’s budget for military programs totaled just $695.44 billion in the same period.
This is particularly alarming when you consider how much of the federal budget goes into defense, with the U.S. outspending every other country.
The last few years have been expensive
A deficit is what happens when the government spends more money in a fiscal year than it brings in through taxes — and the last few years have been expensive for the U.S.
Several large bills with hefty price tags have been approved since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the American Rescue Plan Act, which cost $1.9 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the debt ceiling package that was signed into law this summer to prevent a national default could result in a $1.5 trillion decrease to the deficit over the next decade. However, the Committee for a Responsible Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that addresses federal budget and fiscal issues, says savings could fall to $1 trillion depending on “side deals” that fall outside the agreement.
Continue:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/america-now-paying-more-interest-113000593.html
Oct 8, 2023
Whatever your views on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the targeting and killing of civilians, or the abduction of women and children, is reprehensible and must be condemned. In Israel, In Gaza, Anywhere. The brutality of your enemy can never license or justify brutality.
Project Ukraine is dead. So the Masters of the Universe need a new war (“on terror”) to set West Asia on fire.
Context.
Two main reasons.
1. Bibi showing his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN completely erasing Palestine.
2. Serial provocations at Al-Aqsa, including a storming by hundreds of Israeli settlers. Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line – for Palestinians, for the Arab world, and for the lands of Islam.
Yet there’s WAY more.
The dead giveaway is the Israeli rhetoric of a ‘Pearl Harbor’.
Everyone knows what it means.
Project Ukraine is dead. So the Masters of the Universe need a new war (“on terror”) to set West Asia on fire.
Peaceful West Asia means reconstruction for Syria, redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11, the Russia-China strategic partnership respected and engaged all across West Asia.
The Northern Sea Route is already in effect, directly undermining the Suez Canal.
One of the key themes discussed at Valdai at the highest level was de-dollarization. All of the above is anathema for the usual suspects.
Mossad and IDF caught by surprise is a childish fantasy. They knew it was coming. The question now is whether Hezbollah will be coming to town.
https://x.com/RealPepeEscobar/status/1710925207769063627?s=20
Russian military intelligence has discovered no less than four U.S. biolabs in the West African country, with Maj. Gen. Igor Kirilov noted the “strange coincidences” of outbreaks in neighborhoods where these labs are located. (Related: HUNDREDS of accidents have occurred at U.S. biolabs but were never reported.)
Revelations made by Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, regarding similar Biolabs in Ukraine are mostly connected to the Russia-Ukraine war that began in February 2022. But when Russian forces came into possession of materials from these biolabs, she warned Congress that the “benevolent research” could become “dangerous in Russian hands.”
https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-10-06-benevolent-us-bioweapons-labs-pose-serious-danger.html
For more than 50 years, the U.S. has set up bioweapons laboratories around the world. But these facilities, supposedly built for a “benevolent” purpose, now pose a serious danger to the countries they are in.
The laboratories have been cautiously established in host countries under the pretexts of “battling epidemics” and “improving health services.” However, the close involvement of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) – which runs no less than 336 such facilities – is a major red flag. It is worth noting that this number may be higher.
Highly populated nations in Africa, such as Nigeria, are specifically exposed to such “benevolent” research. The involvement of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), an agency under the DoD, further solidifies the department’s involvement in the labs. The DTRA has been working at “modernizing and reconstructing” the National Veterinary Research Institute in the town of Vom, located in Nigeria’s Plateau State.
Moreover, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research is running related activities at the facilities of the Nigerian Ministry of Defense. The institute has been testing specifically dangerous pathogens without informing local authorities, thereby exposing thousands of Nigerians (and probably millions over the long term) to severe biohazards.
Russian military intelligence has discovered no less than four U.S. biolabs in the West African country, with Maj. Gen. Igor Kirilov noted the “strange coincidences” of outbreaks in neighborhoods where these labs are located. (Related: HUNDREDS of accidents have occurred at U.S. biolabs but were never reported.)
“According to available information, there are at least four Washington-controlled biolaboratories operating in Nigeria,” said Kirilov, who commands the Russian military’s radiation, chemical and biological defense unit. “Against the background of numerous cases of U.S. violations of biosafety requirements and facts of negligent storage of pathogenic biomaterials, we call on the leadership of the World Health Organization to investigate the activities of U.S.-funded Nigerian laboratories in Abuja, Zaria and Lagos and inform the world community about its results.”
Washington dismisses Moscow’s revelation of Biolabs as ‘disinfo’
According to local sources, tens of thousands of samples and genetic materials are being secretly moved to other U.S.-run biolabs, not only in Nigeria but also overseas. The danger of creating yet another pandemic of worldwide magnitude due to such activities is significant, even if the DoD claims the research carried out there is “benevolent.”
Despite these revelations, the West is unsurprisingly insistent that Moscow is “engaged in disinformation.” It has also dismissed these biological research facilities as “harmless” and doubled down on the claims that Washington is “simply trying to help” the host nations.
The lack of transparency on the part of the U.S. Department of State has only exacerbated the issue. Revelations made by Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, regarding similar Biolabs in Ukraine are mostly connected to the Russia-Ukraine war that began in February 2022. But when Russian forces came into possession of materials from these Biolabs, she warned Congress that the “benevolent research” could become “dangerous in Russian hands.”
But even before Kirilov disclosed the existence of the U.S. Biolabs in Nigeria, several investigators have been studying this subject matter for years. Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is among them, having broken the news story about identical Biolabs in Georgia. She interviewed several locals who contracted “mysterious” diseases just because they were living in proximity of the facilities.
Because of her coverage of this topic, she has experienced many abuses over the years. In one instance, she was expelled from the European Parliament in 2018 for questioning the then-U.S. assistant secretary of health over the Biolabs present in 25 countries worldwide. Her interesting and pioneering work was also smeared by the mainstream propaganda apparatus as “fake news.”
Follow BiologicalWeapons.news for more news about America’s biological research facilities all over the world.
Watch this video about the DoD-funded bioweapon labs in Eastern Europe and other parts of the globe.
https://www.brighteon.com/embed/3b48180b-19bb-4daa-913e-32ec80ef08f0
This video is from the SBN News Clips channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
Not just in Ukraine: US also running BIOLABS in Africa, Asia-Pacific region.
Sources include:
When you live under an empire that’s held together by lies, you’ll be asked to believe a lot of intensely stupid bullshit.
Caitlin Johnstone
SATURDAY, OCT 07, 2023
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
That, okay, all those other wars were based on lies and resulted in disaster, but that couldn’t possibly be the case for this current war.
Here are the top ten dumbest things the propagandists of the US-centralized empire try to get us to swallow.
1. That the US war machine has been surrounding its top two rivals China and Russia with war machinery as an act of defense, rather than an extremely provocative act of aggression.
2. That the war in Ukraine simultaneously (A) was completely unprovoked, and (B) just coincidentally happens to massively advance US strategic interests and therefore should be funded as much as possible.
3. That, okay, all those other wars were based on lies and resulted in disaster, but that couldn’t possibly be the case for this current war.
4. That your country’s foreign policy is determined by your official elected government, even though the foreign policy remains the same regardless of who is in office.
5. That it is only by pure coincidence that your nation’s population remains in a perpetual 50–50 deadlock which prevents anyone’s votes from changing the status quo, and the status quo just happens to be perpetually frozen along lines that hugely advantage the rich and powerful.
6. That the only reason anyone could possibly be critical of the most dangerous impulses of the world’s most powerful and destructive government is if they are a secret agent working for the enemies of that government.
7. That the western empire which spent the last two decades murdering Muslims in the Middle East suddenly cares very deeply about the Muslims in China.
8. That Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that the empire is pouring weapons into Ukraine because it loves Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.
9. That foreign propaganda and influence operations are significantly manipulating the way westerners think and vote, but the plutocrats who fully control all the most influential platforms in the western world are not.
10. That we need to be worrying about tyrannical enemies in Beijing and Moscow, instead of tyrannical enemies a lot closer to home.
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