Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/06/scandal-israeli-october-7-fabrications/

Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/

New Israeli report alleging ‘systematic and intentional rape’ by Hamas relies on debunked Western media reports
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/02/22/israeli-hamas-debunked-western-media/

Journalism professors call on New York Times to review Oct. 7 report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/04/29/new-york-times-oct-7-journalism-professors-letter/

Editor’s note: Since the publication of this interview, an Israeli police investigation has confirmed that Israeli Apache helicopters killed numerous Israeli citizens at and around the Nova electronic music festival, and that Hamas did not know in advance about the festival. The Israeli government has also acknowledged that 200 of those it counted as Israeli casualties were, in fact, Hamas militants killed by its forces on October 7, and that it may have marketed images of their charred bodies to the public as proof of Hamas’ brutality.

For all the sensationalism surrounding the events of Oct. 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza fence and seized territory in the Gaza Envelope as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, there is still much that we do not know. The official Israeli death toll from the attack is estimated at 1,200 civilians, revised from an initial estimate of 1,400. Among this figure are several hundred civilians, which Israel says were killed by Hamas militants. Other testimony from survivors of Oct. 7 suggests an alternative explanation—that in its fervor to defeat Hamas, Israeli commanders may have willingly targeted and sacrificed Israeli soldiers and civilians in the crossfire. Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone joins The Chris Hedges Report for an in-depth look.

Chris Hedges:  There’s growing evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters but the Israeli captives with them. Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, told the Israeli press, that he set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. Escapa told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, that his desperation began to set in. “The commanders in the field made difficult decisions, including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.” The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were, “Compelled to request an aerial strike against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza in order to repulse the terrorists who had seized control.”

That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers. Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians. The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on August 1, 2014, captured an Israeli soldier, Lieutenant Hadar Golden. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles, and shells on the area where he was being held. Golden was killed along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.

Joining me to discuss the reports of Israel shelling its own citizens with tanks and missiles is Max Blumenthal, who investigated this for The Grayzone. So you did a wonderful job piecing together these reports that are coming out of Israel. Why don’t you lay out what Israeli commanders faced after roughly 10 hours, several hours after this incursion, and then perhaps give me some details about what you found out?

Max Blumenthal:  Well, thanks, Chris. I’m still trying to piece together what happened on October 7. One reason that I’m left investigating even after this report that I thought was comprehensive was that in the face of so much death and destruction caused by Israel’s military in Gaza – Which is basically tantamount to genocide. You have systematic killing in Gaza – Everyone I know there has … Luckily I don’t know anyone who’s been killed, but everyone I know there has lost neighbors or relatives. They’ve all lost their homes. So the Israeli military and the Prime Minister’s office, Netanyahu’s office, are recycling October 7 atrocities and they’re also introducing new deceptions in order to try to keep the media’s lens focused on October 7 now that it is starting to hone in on the horror of Gaza. We have all these new stories about babies baked in ovens, we’ve heard stories about babies cut out of mothers’ wombs by so-called Hamas terrorists, rape, gang rape, women after being taken, gang raped in the streets in Gaza City.

All of these lies were spun out. The 40 beheaded babies was repeated by Biden, who claimed he’d seen photographs. All of these lies were repeated and put forward in order to give Israel the latitude to carry out this genocidal assault that we’re now witnessing. And we can see Biden was so stunned by the propaganda that was being pushed on him by Netanyahu’s office and the pro-Israel media that he immediately caved. Tony Blinken in his recent Senate testimony also repeated some of these lies. So I’m still trying to unpack it because it’s these lies that went beyond the actual killings and atrocities that were committed by gunmen from the Gaza Strip on October 7 that have made it possible for Israel to target and exterminate hundreds of entire families in the Gaza Strip as well as hospitals and medical centers. So I started my investigation when testimony started to filter out in Israeli media which contravened the official story of October 7.

The official story, which has been told to Americans and Israelis, is that Hamas “terrorists” stormed into Southern Israel and began shooting and killing people at random. Then burned them alive, tied up entire families in their homes, and then burned them all, somehow, melted cars and burned people in their cars as they were trying to flee, and carried out this gigantic mass shooting. It does appear clear that many Israeli non-combatants were shot by Hamas gunmen but that’s where the official story stops. What I was able to determine from these testimonies, as well as basic and visual analysis of the photos that the Israeli Foreign Minister and Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister’s office were putting forward, was that Israel used disproportionate force on its own citizens in order to dislodge a politically driven military offensive by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which was aimed at extracting political concessions from the state of Israel, which had been besieging the Gaza Strip for 15 years. So you read one of those testimonies, and I guess we can go into some detail about them and how I came to my conclusions.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah, let’s go in because, in your article, which people can read on The Grayzone, you print pictures. I’ll let you go from there. The photographic evidence seems to contradict the statements that have come out of Jerusalem.

Max Blumenthal:  It’s important to understand that the main goal in this Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military offensive was to gather as many captives as possible, particularly Israeli soldiers, in order to trigger the prisoner exchange that was witnessed when Gilad Shalit in 2011 was released; The Israeli soldier who was taken in 2006, who was operating a tank outside Gaza, was taken in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including the current prime minister of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. So this entire Al Aqsa Flood operation is understood against the backdrop of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. So gunmen were sent with detailed maps to population centers and to military bases. In the military bases, they were obviously given instructions to attack and kill Israeli soldiers who were maintaining the siege of Gaza. Much of the Gaza division, which has also been responsible for so many massacres inside Gaza over the years, was wiped out. The Erez Crossing… I don’t know if you’ve been through there, Chris.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah, many times. Many times, yes.

Max Blumenthal:  Okay. Yeah, because you’ve been to Gaza, I’ve been through there three times. It is the nexus, the nerve center of the siege of Gaza. It’s not only where you cross through if you want to enter Gaza and return to, or if you’re a resident of Gaza you’ll have to pass through there to get medical treatment outside. It’s the home of the civil administration, the bureaucracy of the panopticon-style occupation of Gaza. So that was immediately overrun by gunmen as a military target, and with all these soldiers inside, the head of the Gaza division actually went into an underground bunker. He recounted this story to Haaretz and made the tough decision to bomb Erez Crossing and they sent Hellfire missiles onto the Erez Crossing from Apache helicopters. And this was basically the beginning of the Iron Swords Operation that Netanyahu declared several days later, which is essentially the carpet bombing of Gaza.

But Apache helicopters were scrambled in the morning. The assault began around 6:00AM at daybreak, and by 10:30AM, according to Israeli media accounts, all of the special force’s commando teams, and the well-trained Hamas teams had already left. By that point, there were two squadrons of Apache helicopters that had been scrambled, and they were not even at full strength until 12:00PM. So you have action at Erez Crossing, and then you have Kibbutz Be’eri, which is the site that registered the most casualties of non-combatants. I counted something like 150 among the confirmed death toll printed at Haaretz and most of them, they were not soldiers. These were people who were caught in the crossfire, Hamas gunmen had tried to take them captive, and there were standoffs in their homes. And by the time Israeli special forces arrived, many of those standoffs had either ended or they ended them simply by shelling people’s homes with tanks.

According to Yasmin Porat, who had fled the electronic music festival – Which had come under attack, which was held right between Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Rahim, which also have military bases essentially embedded within them – It was held on the road between these two kibbutzim and came under attack. Many captives were taken. This woman, Yasmin Porat, fled to Kibbutz Be’eri, went into a home with her partner, and then they were taken captive momentarily by gunmen. She recounted to Israeli National Radio that when the Israeli special forces arrived, they started shooting everyone and that most of the captives, along with the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire, and that everyone was killed except for her and her captor, who used her as a human shield in order to guarantee his own safety when he surrendered.

She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors, get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells into the home that she had been in. So if you look at the pictures of Kibbutz Be’eri, they look like the homes in Gaza that I’ve seen, or you may have seen that came under shelling from Israeli tanks and Israeli artillery. There’s no way that Hamas gunmen could have done that much structural damage to this entire kibbutz with the small arms that they were equipped with; Kalashnikovs and some RPGs.

I24, an Israeli Foreign Ministry-sponsored propaganda network, actually went to this kibbutz on a guided tour and said they saw tank tracks everywhere. It’s obvious what happened there and it was stated clearly by the security coordinator of Kibbutz Be’eri, who you quoted at the top of this interview. He was on a hotline with the Israeli Military Command and they decided to shell houses on top of their occupants, including Israeli civilians. Now, why were they doing this? As you mentioned, there’s the Hannibal Directive, this once-secret directive that was introduced after Israel entered into a major prisoner swap with I believe the PFLPGC, which operates out of Syria in exchange for Ahmed Jabril and hundreds of other prisoners in order to get back some Israeli soldiers who had been taken in the Lebanese Civil War.

Chris Hedges:  It was only three. I don’t think it was a very –

Max Blumenthal:  Yeah, it was three.

Chris Hedges:  – Yeah.

Max Blumenthal:  So this is a politically painful prisoner swap, and the Israeli public was furious, and the right-wing politicians were furious. So they introduced this directive named after the Carthaginian general Hannibal – Who took his own life, he took poison rather than being taken captive by the enemy – And it authorizes Israeli commanders to kill their own soldiers if they’re taken captive by the enemy in order to prevent such a prisoner swap from taking place. And it was used again, this is when it got exposed in 2014 – August 1, 2014, what’s known as Black Friday in Southern Gaza – And I was actually there in the aftermath of this massacre. A lieutenant named Hadar Golden was taken by Hamas fighters. He was in the field when Israel broke a ceasefire and started attacking around the southern city of Rafa. The Israeli Military Command authorized airstrikes, artillery strikes, and tank fire to bring the full wrath of the Israeli military onto this area in order to make sure that this soldier did not get taken alive.

Over 100 people in Rafa were killed in this massacre. The morgues were filling up. It was hideous. I actually visited a hospital called Kuwaiti Hospital, which is now under attack again, and because the mortuaries were so full of bodies on this day, they actually had to bring in ice cream coolers to store the bodies of babies. The doctor who interviewed me, who I interviewed about that, his entire family was killed about a week and a half ago, after he refused Israeli orders to evacuate Kuwaiti Hospital. But back to the Hannibal directive. We have to question whether it was put into play on October 7. Because we not only have the Erez Crossing where many soldiers were killed – And if you look at the aftermath, the roof was clearly brought down. There’s serious structural damage to the roof of Erez Crossing – You have Kibbutz Be’eri where there was tank shelling, and then you have these Apache helicopter pilots in the air who were stating in their testimonies in Hebrew to Israeli media that they had no intelligence, no way of distinguishing civilian from combatant on the ground.

And yet they were told to empty their tanks, completely unload their ammo, then head back to the base, get filled up again, reload, and then go shoot as many cars and people as they could on the ground. Pure chaos. These testimonies have been totally ignored, by the way, by Western media. Were they encouraged to kill captives or shoot cars that they thought contained captives? We don’t know. What we do know is there were orders from the top to kill Israeli civilians if Hamas gunmen were around them in order to get the gunmen. And it’s like the same military doctrine that’s being employed in Gaza: Any civilian is a target if they are the “terrorist’s next-door neighbor.” Israel actually calls it the Neighbor Policy. They don’t know any other doctrine. They don’t have any other means of targeting and they weren’t prepared, obviously, for this military onslaught. So they went to their core doctrine of bombing everything in sight.

That brings us to the third scenario. We talked about Erez Crossing and Kibbutz Be’eri, then you have the chaos of the Nova Electronic Music Festival. And it’s there that it appears clear that after a lot of these Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad commando teams had left – This is an element that’s left out in a lot of Western media – Many people from Gaza started streaming in, including lower level characters from the armed factions who may have had weapons but weren’t part of the operation or weren’t trained, onlookers, people who wanted to see what Israel looked like, to see the land that their families had been kicked off. There were some heinous killings, and you could see actual captives being taken by guys on motorcycles who didn’t even have weapons. They were grabbing people.

A lot of this happened around the Nova Music Festival. There was a lot of shooting between festival security guards and various gunmen, and a lot of people were killed, but many people were fleeing the festival by car. There is a video of some Hamas gunmen stopping cars and shooting people. But then you have all of these images that the Israeli Foreign Ministry put out of cars that are completely melted, and their corpses inside are charred. And those to me are telltale signs of Hellfire missile strikes from Apache helicopters, and the Apache crews, the squadrons. They put out a video afterward of themselves shooting cars, hitting cars with Hellfire missiles, and shooting people who were pedestrians walking on the ground with cannon fire.

We don’t know who those people were, but if you look, a lot of the cars were heading back to Gaza. So they were very likely cars of people from Gaza who may have been taking captives and so many captives or would-be captives were killed. Was one of them Shani Louk? This woman whom the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been making such a big deal of who was a festival partygoer, who was attractive, and was a German citizen. There’s some video of her being taken. They say they found a skull fragment from her.

Was she in a car that was hit by a Hellfire missile? Unclear. But it’s very clear that many of these cars were hit by Apache helicopters and the helicopter pilots said they had no idea who was in them. They were shooting people on the other side of Gaza after they entered, by the afternoon of October 7. It’s very clear to me that many people were killed. Many Israelis were killed by Israeli forces, along with many active duty, uniformed Israeli soldiers who were actively engaged in the siege of Gaza were combatants.

Chris Hedges:  I want to buttress that I went into Kuwait after the first Gulf War and drove up the Highway of Death, which was miles and miles of Iraqi military vehicles, all of which had been hit by Apache helicopters. And when I saw one of the pictures, one of the images of a car with two completely blackened corpses, that is what I saw in vehicle after vehicle after vehicle going into Kuwait. Some of these images which were disseminated by the IDF have been removed. And maybe you can explain why you think they were no longer made available to the public.

Max Blumenthal:  Well, when I first went to Gaza in 2014, in the midst of Israel’s 51-day-long assault on Gaza, I came across a car that was on the roadside that had been roasted by a Hellfire missile along with its driver. The driver’s body had been removed but it was undoubtedly charred and you could actually see his sandal melted into the gas pedal. He had been hit by a Hellfire missile. I embedded the picture in my article to compare it to the vehicles that the Israeli Foreign Ministry was pointing to as evidence of Hamas savagery, and it’s identical. By the way, he was a taxi driver, a poor young guy named Fadi Alowa, who had taken a wounded Hamas fighter to the hospital without even knowing that he had been a fighter. And so they killed him.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has a website called hamas-massacre.com. And the UN Ambassador – This unhinged character named Gilad Iradan, who used to be in charge of Israel’s meddling operations to attack college students who were organizing to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, or forming Palestine solidarity student groups – Gilad Iradan whipped out this QR code at his UN address, about two weeks ago, and the QR code was supposed to lead to a Google Drive folder that contained all these images of charred cars, melted bodies, and all sorts of other atrocities that Hamas had committed. But all the pictures eventually disappeared. My initial read was that they concluded that a lot of these pictures were either fake, or they could have even depicted Hamas fighters who had come in and been hit by Hellfire missiles. But then Gilad Iradan in embarrassment later said that there was a technical error, and he tried to repost the images.

And that makes sense because they have no shame. They lie relentlessly, shamelessly and so it didn’t seem like they actually deleted them out of shame. They deleted them because of a major technical error, which is also ironic because Israel’s supposed to be the technically savvy startup nation that’s teaching the world through innovation and creativity how we can enter the AI future, but they can’t even maintain a simple Google Drive.

And that shows the boneheadedness of this entire operation. But it’s worked. It’s been very successful in convincing Brussels and Washington that Hamas was ISIS. That is Israel’s message: Hamas is ISIS, they’re irrational, they aim to simply kill Jews, they don’t have any political demands, and the only response to them is the response that the US waged on ISIS – After supporting ISIS, by the way, in Syria – Which was to destroy much of Raha, ISIS’s base of operation, as well as Mosul in Iraq. The man who actually oversaw those operations, James Glynn, the marine officer, was sent to Israel to consult the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of October 7 on how they should respond. Now, the Pentagon’s pulling back and saying, whoa, this is a little bit crazy for us even. We don’t even know what you’re targeting, or where your targeting is coming from. But they gave him the green light because they fell for the propaganda shock and awe campaign of these photos.

And recently actually at a fundraiser for the Republican Jewish Coalition – Which is funded substantially by the Adelson family of the late laconic oligarch, Sheldon Adelson, but also many other wealthy Republican, pro-Israel Jews in Las Vegas at Adelson’s Hotel – A character named Ellie Beir appears on stage, who is a volunteer rescuer and a religious nationalist orthodox Jew from New York, who is living in Israel and had arrived as a first responder in October 7 through a group called United Hatzalah. And this is obviously like a fundraising speech. And he declares that a baby had been burned in an oven, had been baked in an oven by Hamas “terrorists.”

I’m looking at his comments right now. I have them in front of me. He actually had not seen any baby in an oven. It was someone named Ellie Moskowitz, who is from his first responder United Hatzalah team. And Ellie Moskowitz had not seen any baby baked in an oven. He said that he found a small bag with contents of body parts that had been apparently pressed against a heating element. These body parts were displayed by Netanyahu filtered out on Twitter and sent to influencers by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in the PM’s office after Netanyahu was embarrassed by the retraction of the story about 40 beheaded babies. So if we go back to October 8, CNN and Biden begin telling this phony story about 40 beheaded babies, they are both forced to retract, Netanyahu puts out an image of some burned body parts, says it’s a baby, and then flash forward to this fundraiser in Las Vegas where these first responders are saying that there was a baby baked in an oven based on body parts they had in a bag which were pressed against a heating element.

Now, put two and two together. What heating element could have created that much heat to char a body part, which didn’t even belong to a baby, but was put forward by Netanyahu to save face? It was likely a Hellfire missile and body parts that had been blown to bits by a Hellfire missile, which were likely an Israeli citizen but could have been someone from Gaza, are being put forward as an Israeli baby. But if you look at the confirmed death count, only one Israeli baby was killed. It’s horrible and tragic. It was a 10-month-old baby named Millie Cohen, who was accidentally shot by Hamas gunmen in an exchange of fire.

And more reporting will come out about this, but you can look at the confirmed death toll at Haaretz. There’s no other baby. There’s no baby burned in an oven, no one’s even saying that. So what we’re looking at is the most horrific, lurid propaganda, which is bogus, all derive from apparent friendly fire and is being spun in order to justify the actual beheading of babies with missiles in the Gaza Strip and the systematic extermination of an entire society. A senior Israeli security source told Yedioth Ahronoth, the top Israeli tabloid, that 20,000 people had been killed in Gaza. I personally think that could be an overcount, and they’re trying to boast to the Israeli public about how many people they’ve killed to satisfy the bloodlust of the public after October 7.

But if that’s true, that’s like 1% of the entire population, which definitely qualifies as genocide. So this propaganda has been used to justify the realization of the lie. Many Israelis who are involved in this military operation or who are seen torturing people in the West Bank, workers in the West Bank on camera, are reenacting the lurid propaganda that they believe to be true about October 7, and it could lead to a regional war. Because the genocidal fury has overwhelmed Israeli society, the propaganda, the shock and awe campaign, has prevented Brussels and Washington from being able to put any check on it. (read much more)

As FMU transmitted no ads, it conducted pledge drives to pay whatever bills a radio station with volunteer DJs who bring in their own records must pay. 

FMU’s pledge drives were characteristically unconventional. One Saturday afternoon, an FMU DJ launched into that formulaic sales pitch spoken both earnestly and, by turns, wearily by all public broadcasters:

“You know we work really hard to bring you shows and music that no one else plays. Unlike other stations, we don’t interrupt that programming with commercials. We’re here for you 24/7/365, even during blizzards and hurricanes. Our DJs don’t get paid. A standard pledge is only pennies per day, blah, blah, blah…”

After continuing in this time-worn vein and tone for a few more minutes, and without breaking his cadence, the DJ added, with some late-breaking exasperation:

“..so if you don’t support us by sending a check, well, I hope you get run over by a bus!”

His delivery was perfect. I LOL’d. 

But not all public broadcasting is as pleasing. 

Last Wednesday night, I stumbled on the PBS program entitled The Invisible Shield: A Celebration of Public Health. It turns out that Wednesday’s show was one of four parts of a series, which I found the next day on the Net. As I exercised, I listened at 2x to the other three phony and propagandistic episodes.

The PBS series, like so much other public TV and radio content, is profoundly agenda-driven and deeply disconnected from reality. The series’s theme is that we all owe our existence to Public Health bureaucrats, especially for the protection they provide against infectious diseases. 

This is a plainly false premise. Infectious diseases—especially respiratory viruses— are not nearly the threat to the populace that the series, the Covid Era media, or our culture make them out to be. 

I owe my existence to being under 80 and taking decent care of my baseline-vital body. And to food; farmers, harvesters, ranchers, and fishermen sustain infinitely more lives than do Public Health officials. For that matter, so do truckers and food store stockers and checkers. Plus, I grow and forage some of my own vegetables, greens and berries. 

Germs don’t scare me. If some untoward microbe infects me, my God-given, or inborn, immune system deals with it. Though I take no meds, I might use antibiotics or steroids in a pinch.

Reasonably healthy people didn’t die from Coronavirus infections. Nonetheless, ignoring this core fact, the series demagogically begins by portraying the Black Death and cholera epidemics of centuries ago and noting that improved human waste management thwarted the spread of disease at those times. 

From there, PBS spuriously implies that Covid lockdowns, social distancing, Plexiglas barriers, masks, testing, and tracing were smart and necessary because these were also “Public Health” measures. Linking these long-apart eras and the very different forms of interventions during each is the biggest intuitive leap I’ve ever heard. 

No one who opposed the Covid overreaction has said that modern management of human waste should revert to pre-1900 methods. Further, while “The Invisible Shield” praises sanitation upgrades for lengthening human lives, the show never mentions that when chronically hungry people ate more calories and protein, they lived longer. Further, with much less mining and manufacturing, US jobs have become far less dangerous and many fewer people smoke (tobacco) now. 

In contrast, during the 21st century, segments of affluent societies have begun to eat worse. Consequently, they’ve become obese, diabetic, and/or have cardiovascular damage. Many of these unhealthy people were falsely said to have died “of Covid.” 

The four-hour series is a crass PR-puff piece for the Public Health racket. In it, a string of bureaucrats relentlessly make conclusory, fear-mongering and superficial five-to-ten-second assertions. Nearly every one of these statements could easily be discredited via cursory cross-examination. But the series’ writers don’t allow facts to get in the way of their agenda. They disgracefully present these self-promoting lies as if they were truth. 

Throughout, the on-camera bureaucrats wear masks. They seem to be among the last not to know, even after four years, that The Virus isn’t scary and that masks don’t work. They also cluelessly laud the vaxx campaigns and portray mRNA shot opponents as dimwitted political partisans. The bureaucrats ignore that the shots failed, as had been promised, to stop the spread of a virus and that more jabbed than unjabbed, people have “died of Covid.” The bureaucrats also decline to mention vaxx injuries and deaths and fail to note the excess deaths in heavily injected nations. 

To falsely connote a state of crisis, the four episodes continually depict pedestrians in masks and visors or hospital patients hooked to medical machines. Throughout, an alternately panicky and mournful, minor-key soundtrack, with plenty of manipulative, single-note piano, cello, and violin, plays in the background as talking heads parrot such buzz-phrases as “soaring cases,” “people will die,” “body bags,” and “blood on their hands” as ambulance sirens wail and excerpts of frantic 911 calls play. If you wanted to parody histrionic Coronamania coverage, you couldn’t outdo this series.

The featured Public Health “experts” continually express frustration that some people ignored their Covid edicts. Blinded by self-importance, these experts can’t understand why everyone didn’t/doesn’t defer to, and obey, them. They seem not to understand that those who disregarded them saw the obvious illogic in, and refused to acquiesce to the suffering caused by, their pronouncements. 

Time has shown that those who refused to stay home, mask up, test and report their contacts, or inject were right: none of this theater worked. Despite their awful job performance, the delusional experts show no humility. 

This epistemically and journalistically bankrupt series relies heavily on the PC trope that minorities were disproportionately killed by Covid. It never cites statistics regarding this differential, nor disaggregates for income or other factors. A cursory Google search reveals data refuting PBS on this point. See, e.g., Covid death rate now higher in whites than in Blacks | News | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I go by what I see with my own eyes: I know many Black and Latino people. Every one of them has survived the Scamdemic; good to know, but unsurprising. 

PBS pretends not to know that all of the Covid data are highly suspect and that medical mistreatment killed many patients who would have survived with either appropriate treatment or no treatment. 

It’s appalling that PBS could present a four-hour series, focusing mostly on Covid, and never acknowledge that the very slight risk of death presented by this [synthetic] virus was plainly age-driven and that, therefore, locking down the non-old or closing schools made no sense. This conspicuous omission tells you all you need to know about the series’ and the network’s lack of candor and credibility. 

Worst of all, the series says nothing of how lockdowns and Scamdemic spending trashed economies worldwide, have enabled the biggest transfer of wealth in history from the middle class to the already wealthy and have permanently impoverished billions of people. As Fazi and Green observe in The Covid Consensus, this impoverishment has already killed millions. Deaths caused by Covid lockdowns, school closures—and consequent educational deficits and giveaway-induced inflation and poverty will continue to grow as years unfold. On average, the less educated make less money and live shorter lives.

After all that’s happened, the series’ talking heads/cheerleaders still stick to the fable that lockdowns, school closures, masks, testing and tracing, and the shots saved lives. Laughably, the show suggests that only rash, political opposition/obstruction prevented better outcomes. They link NPI and vaxx opposition to MAGA-ism and even to January 6 demonstrations, even though many have pointed out, as I have, that many Republicans injected mRNA and that Trump messed up badly in March 2020 by caving to the public health bureaucrats, subsidizing lockdowns and later, foolishly promoting the jabs, which many Trump opponents—especially minorities— sensibly refused.

Ultimately, this series is the most blatant example of revisionism that I’ve witnessed. The series’ producers glorify the Public Health apparatus’s ham-handed 2020-2023 disruption of American life, which delivered no public health benefits. The series fails to note that Sweden and many African nations that declined to lock down, mask, test, and trace had better health outcomes than did the US. Similarly, a February 2022 Johns Hopkins study confirmed what was obvious to the naked eye: states and cities that imposed many burdensome Covid restrictions didn’t fare significantly better, and often did worse, than did those that applied a much lighter touch; without all or the collateral damage. 

Various public health bureaucrats shown by PBS whine about how hard they worked during the Scamdemic aggregating and crunching phony data and developing rules to harass the public. They audaciously claim, as Democrats do in many other contexts, that the Public Health bureaucracy was underfunded during the Scamdemic and that, to prevent the next pandemic, taxpayers must more heavily subsidize ineffectual bureaucrats. They’re effectively saying, ‘“Spend more on us so we can do more harm.” 

But less is often more; it certainly would have been during the Covid response. The Public Health bureaucracy should be sharply downsized, not expanded. The money saved would be far better spent on annual classes to show students how to eat and be active. Note to educators: discourage carb consumption. The public would also benefit much more if we spent a fraction of erstwhile public health budgets to subsidize healthy food instead of funding the bloated salaries of Public Health bureaucrats, both domestic and international. 

You can lead horses to water but you can’t make them drink. Ultimately, we should accept that many of those who know that eating, drinking, smoking, and injecting some substances will damage their health but will do so anyway. And that, as a result, some people will get sick and die younger than do others. We should also accept that not everyone’s bodies are the same. It’s how life is.

In the series’ final ten minutes, the music changes from grim to cheerful as Public Health grifters say that more people should pursue Public Health careers and that we should more heavily underwrite this extremely overrated enterprise.

In the meanwhile, and as manifested in “The Invisible Shield,” Public Health bureaucrats and the media will continue to lie about everything that’s happened and everything that they’ve done during the Scamdemic. They’ve calculated that, by doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on untruth, they can avoid ever having to admit that they lied throughout the past four years. 

Anyone connected with this thoroughly dishonest series should be deeply ashamed and discredited for praising Public Health officials’ Scamdemic performance. The public health bureaucrats and the purveyors of this misinformation, and their public broadcasting allies, are a blight on humanity. 

But these two factions are very well-capitalized. Pharma can bankroll private and public media outlets in perpetuity. And taxpayers will continue to subsidize public TV and radio. And NPR [National Propaganda Radio] and PBS [Public Brainwashing System] pledge drive pitch-people will repeatedly tell gullible prospective donors how important it is to support “independent” media that keeps them well-misinformed. (read more)

Hello, Hungary. Hello, Budapest. Hello, fellow Europeans and American friends. Thank you so much for having me. Allow me to skip formalities for a moment and dive right into a subject that is not so cheerful, but very, very necessary to discuss. Let me walk you through the past seven days in Europe.

This week in Stockholm, three elderly women in their 70s were stabbed in broad daylight on the streets. In London, four people were stabbed in a time span of just 42 hours. In Paris, hundreds of Afghan migrants took to the street to riot. And in Bringolo, also in France, yet another church was burned down to the ground.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just a few incidents in just a couple of days on our beautiful continent. But we all know that these incidents aren’t incidents anymore. If there’s one thing that’s for sure it’s that we know, and our governments also know, that there is a link between mass migration and crime.

In the Dutch city of Dordrecht, something interesting happened the other day. They announced, and this is a small city in the Netherlands, in my home country, that a new asylum center will be put in that little town. And what did the municipality do? They said, “We are going to offer citizens who live in the vicinity of this center, a thousand euros to take extra safety measures.”

Our new reality in Europe consists of frequent rapes, stabbings, killings, murders, shootings, even beheadings.

But let me be clear about one thing. This did not used to happen before. This is a newly imported problem.

Samuel P. Huntington predicted this over 25 years ago when he wrote, and I quote:

In the new world of mass migration, the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflict will not be between the social classes. They will not be between the rich and the poor. They will be between peoples belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations

Well, boy, was he right! And the worst part is, we as a society seem to have become indifferent to it.

When another white boy or a white girl dies at the hand of an immigrant, we might shake our head, we might let out a sigh, we might even get angry for a minute or two, and then we go on with our lives. We offer the family thoughts and prayers, but nothing ever changes.

Ladies and gentlemen, what does that say about us? This is the response of a society that has already given up, a society that has already accepted its defeat.

But is this true? Have we given up? Do we really accept the new reality that our globalist leaders have in mind for us?

I know one thing for sure, and that is that if nothing changes, if we don’t start to seriously fight for our continent, for our religion, for our people, our countries, then this time that we live in will go down in history as the time in which Western nations no longer had to get invaded by hostile armies in order to be conquered. This time will then go down in history as the period in which the invader was actively invited in by a corrupt elite. And not only did this corrupt elite invite the enemy in, they made the native population pay for it, too.

Everyone who has eyes can see it. The native, white, Christian, European population is being replaced at an ever-accelerating rate.

Let me back this up for you with some statistics from my home country. Let’s take Amsterdam, the capital. Amsterdam currently consists of 56 percent migrants. The Hague, 58 percent migrants. Rotterdam, almost 60 percent migrants. And of course, most of these immigrants come from non-Christian, non-western, African and Middle Eastern countries. Conclusion, the Dutch population is already outnumbered in the majority of our cities.

But let’s look onwards. London, 54 percent migrants. Again, conclusion, native population outnumbered. Brussels, color me shocked, 70 percent migrants. Conclusion, native population, majorly outnumbered. And other Europeans will, of course, follow suit soon if they haven’t already.

I’m going to draw the forbidden conclusion here. The Great Replacement Theory is no longer a theory, it’s reality. And what’s interesting about replacement is that the Establishment will either deny its existence or when they admit to it, they say that it’s a good thing that the native European population is soon no longer a majority on its own continent.

Dutch national disgrace—and dubbed ”Climate Pope”—Frantz Timmermans, already stated in 2015 that diversity is humanity’s destiny, and that Europe will be diverse.

And of course, by now, I think we all know what they mean with the word ”diversity.” It means less white people, less of you.

Imagine this in an Asian or an African country. Imagine their leaders rejoicing in the fact that their people will soon no longer be a majority in their own country. Absolutely unthinkable, unimaginable!

So what in the world is wrong with our leaders? The underlying sentiment of what they say is always the same. Our Establishment claims that white people are evil and that our history is somehow fundamentally different from that of others. Consciously or unconsciously, they have sucked up the lies and the anti-white dogmas of the neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory.

That’s why the totalitarians in Brussels are trying to force you, the Hungarian people, a sovereign nation, to accept immigrants despite the fact that the population has said no, and so has the government.

But make no mistake, the majority of the Dutch people haven’t asked for this either. Just like Brussels is forcing Hungary to accept these hordes of immigrants, they are doing the same now, even in the smallest of towns in the Netherlands.

No part may remain Dutch in the traditional sense of the word. No part of Europe may remain European.

And it’s not difficult to understand why. If the old Europe still exists in certain places, then people will be able to compare the new Europe to the old, and—news flash—they will prefer the old.

That’s why the Eurocrats hate Hungary so much.

And their message is clear. Our way of life, our Christian religion, our nations, they have to go without exception. Their vision of the future is the neoliberal, unrecognizable Europe, where every city becomes like Brussels. Ugly, dirty, unsafe, zero social cohesion, where the buildings are constantly under construction and they never, ever seem to finish. And even when they do, the end result is ugly or somehow than what they started with.

What are we left with? A permanent state of isolation, confusion, and disorientation. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the New World Order. (Applause.)

So what’s the antidote? A strong Christian Europe of sovereign nation-states. That’s why we need to outright reject the lie that nationalism causes war.

It’s not nationalism or national sovereignty that causes war. It’s expansionism. And where in Europe do we find that nowadays? In one place and one place only, Brussels. (Applause.)

Isn’t it funny how the same people who erode our national sovereignty and love to do it, give it all up to the Eurocrats there, that those people are now telling us that we need to spend billions and billions of euros on the national sovereignty of Ukraine? (Applause.)

It’s a joke, honestly, and it’s a pretty sick, expensive, and dangerous joke.

During a recent interview, I got asked by an interviewer: Do you think that you ever go too far? Do you think that you’re ever too radical? I thought about it for a second and I said, ”No, I don’t think I go too far.” (Applause.)

Truth be told, ladies and gentlemen, I think we in Europe do not go far enough. I think that if we really think about the organized structural attack on our civilization, that we don’t do enough.

Do we do enough to stop the attack on our families, on our continent, on our countries, on our religion? When we hear about another murder, another stabbing of a young innocent child, do we do enough?

When we know that our national sovereignty has been given up in less than a century to Brussels, do we do enough? When we hear that Christian kids in Germany are now converting to Islam to fit in, do we do enough? I don’t think so.

The totalitarian institution of the European Union needs to come down.

Let me be clear, I don’t believe in reforms. When the foundation of your institution is rotten, and that is the case in Brussels, you can rebuild the house on top of it all you want, but it’s still going to crumble.

So the only answer is the Tower of Babel needs to be destroyed. (Applause.)

Ladies and gentlemen, we are the daughters and sons of the greatest nations on Earth. (Applause.) And we need to ask ourselves, what has happened to us? Where do we come from? And more importantly, where are we going?

Our elites have declared a war on us, and now it is time for us to put on the full armor of God, fight back, and win.

Thank you so much. (Applause, cheering.)

[Links added by VDARE.com]

A few weeks ago, the New York Times told us that “As It Turns Out, the Deep State Is Pretty Awesome.” These are the same people who claim that Trump is trying to get rid of democracy. The Deep State is the opposite of democracy, unelected and unaccountable in every way, impervious to elections and the will of the people. Now we have the NYT celebrating this. 

And the latest bears notice too: “Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe.” The authors are classic Deep Staters associated with Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. They assure us that having an Orwellian state is good for us. You can trust them, promise. The rest of the content of the article doesn’t matter much. The message is in the headline. 

Amazing isn’t it? You have to check your memory and your sanity. These are the people who have rightly warned about government infringements on privacy and free speech for many decades dating way back.

And now we have aggressive and open advocacy of exactly that, mainly because the [illegitimate] Biden administration [regime] is in charge and has only months to put the final touches on the revolution in law and liberty that has come to America. They want to make it all permanent and are working furiously to make it so. 

Along with routine warrantless surveillance, not only of possible bad guys but everyone, comes of course censorship. A few years ago, this seemed to be intermittent, like the biased and arbitrary actions of rogue executives. We objected and denounced but generally assumed that it was aberrant and going away over time. 

Back then, we had no idea of the scale and the ambition of the censors. The more information that is coming out, the more the full goal is coming into view. The power elite want the Internet to operate like the controlled media of the 1970s. Any opinion that runs contrary to regime priorities will be blocked. Websites that distribute alternative outlooks will be lucky to survive at all. 

To understand what’s going on, see the White House document called Declaration on the Future of the Internet. Freedom is barely a footnote, and free speech is not part of it. Instead it is to be a “rules-based digital economy” governed “through the multistakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” 

This whole document is an Orwellian replacement of the Declaration of Internet Freedom from 2012, which was signed by Amnesty International, the ACLU, and major corporations and banks. The first principle of this Declaration was free speech: don’t censor the Internet. That was 12 years ago and the principle is long forgotten. Even the original website has been dead since 2018. It is now replaced with one word: “Forbidden.”

Yes, that’s chilling but it is also perfectly descriptive. In all mainline Internet venues, from search to shopping to social, freedom is no longer the practice. Censorship has been normalized. And it is taking place with the direct involvement of the federal government and third-party organizations and research centers paid for by tax dollars. This is very clearly a violation of the First Amendment but the new orthodoxy in elite circles is that the First Amendment simply does not apply to the Internet. 

This issue is making its way through litigation. There was a time when the decision would not be in question. No more. Several or more Supreme Court Justices do not seem to understand even the meaning of free speech. 

The Prime Minister of Australia made the new view clear in his statement in defense of fining Elon Musk. He said that social media has a “social responsibility.” In today’s parlance, this means they must obey the government, which is the only proper interpreter of the public interest. In this view, you simply cannot allow people to post and say things that are contrary to regime priorities. 

If the regime cannot manage public culture, and manipulate the public mind, what’s it there for? If it cannot control the Internet, its managers believe, it will lose control of the whole of society. 

The crackdown is intensifying by the day. Representative Thomas Massie shot a video after the Ukraine vote for a total foreign aid package of an astonishing $95 billion. Vast numbers of Democrats on the House floor waved Ukrainian flags, which you might suppose smacks of treason. The Sergeant-at-Arms wrote Massey directly to tell him to take down the video or get a $500 fine.

Instead of fining democrats for waving flags, the House Sergeant at Arms just called and said I will be fined $500 if I don’t delete this video post.

Mike Johnson really wants to memory hole this betrayal of America. https://t.co/5DPWoo4cLw

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 23, 2024

True, the rules say you cannot film in a way that “impairs decorum,” but he simply took out his phone. The decorum was disturbed by masses of lawmakers waving a foreign flag. So Massie refused. After all, the entire disgraceful scene was on C-SPAN but the presumption is that no one watches that but everyone reads X, which is probably true. 

Clearly, GOP speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t want his perfidy this well-advertised. After all, it was he who shepherded the authorization of spying on the American people using Section 702 of FISA, which 99 percent of GOP voters opposed. Just who do these people think they are there to represent? 

It’s actually astonishing to do a conjectural history in which Elon did not buy Twitter. The regime monopoly on social media today would be 99.5 percent. Then the handful of alternative venues could be shut down one by one, just as with Parler a few years ago. Under this scenario, closing the social end of the Internet would not be that difficult. The domains are another matter but those could be banned gradually over time. 

But with X rising in a meteoric way since Elon’s takeover, that is now far more difficult. He has made it his mission to remind the world of core principles. This is why he told the boycotting advertisers to jump in a lake and why he refused to comply with every dictate by the despotic head of the Brazilian Supreme Court. Daily he is showing what it means to stand up for principle in extremely hard times. 

Glenn Beck puts it well: “What Elon Musk is doing in both Brazil and Australia is this: He is simply standing where the Free world used to stand. They have moved, not him. They are the radicals not him. HAVE THE COURAGE to remain standing, unmovable in the truth that can never change and you will be targeted and eventually change the world.”

Censorship is not an end unto itself. The purpose is control of the people. That is also the purpose of surveillance. It is not, rather obviously, to protect the public. It is to protect the state and its industrial partners against the people. Of course, just as in every dystopian film, they always pretend otherwise. 

Somehow – call me naive – I just didn’t expect the New York Times to be all-in on the immediate establishment of the surveillance state and universal censorship by the “awesome” Deep State. But think of this. If the NYT can be fully captured by this ideology, and probably captured by the money that goes with it, so can any other institution. You have probably noticed a similar editorial line being pushed by Wired, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Salon, Slate, and other venues, including the entire suite of publications owned by Conde Nast including Vogue and GQ magazine. 

“Don’t bother me with your crazed conspiracy theory, Tucker.”

I get the point. What is your explanation? (read more)