We got hold of Israel’s dossier against UNRWA – why did donors including the UK withdraw funding on flimsy unproven allegations before investigation?”How come the US pulled out just hours later and ordered its vassal states to follow?
The summary did “not provide evidence to support its claims.”
Statistics are often given lanky legs that take their user far. But how they are used, and how they are received, is striking. The current figure of 27,500 dead is a blighting, grotesque fact.
But as they are Palestinians, the issue is less significant to certain parties than, say, 140 Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, most of them military or reservists who were locking up 2.4 million Palestinians illegally for decades.
As with much in the noisy clatter of Middle Eastern violence, the value attributed to numbers alters in the shade of ideology and self-interest. Massacres become acts of self-defence; acts of self-defence become unconscionable inflictions of murder.
It also follows that an organisation of 30,000 employees, working in the field of humanitarianism, aid and salvation, can be plastered as terrorist sponsors for having 12 individuals in their service allegedly involved in a murderous assault on Israel on October 7, 2023. Despite the relative smallness of this figure, the entire organisation itself becomes a target.
Israel was initially adamant that 12 such individuals in UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) had participated in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, sharing the detailson January 29 with several media outlets.
The accusations were made via a thin dossier amounting to no more than six pages. Little by way of evidence was supplied, though Israel was content to make further claims that almost 10% of the agency’s staff had ties to Hamas.
Never a mention of the inconvenient fact that Hamas was the originally elected and still supported government of Gaza.
As UN Crisis Group expert Daniel Forti writes, “Thus far, Israel has not provided evidence in writing to the UN to substantiate its allegations.”
For a gaggle of Western states and donors, that hardly mattered.
The mere mention of the Satanic Twelve had made their way into public and political consciousness, and something had to be done about it.
Funding to the aid body was swiftly suspended by the United States, followed faithfully by Germany, the European Union, Sweden, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
[Source: breitbart.com] Jeremy Kuzmarov The Biden administration claims that U.S. foreign policy works to uphold human rights and democracy while containing rising authoritarian powers such as Russia and China. Biden administration officials routinely condemn the jailing of opposition figures in Russia like Alexey Navalny and by socialist governments like Nicaragua and Venezuela. But the Biden […]
As doctors drop Paxlovid because it causes drug interactions, Covid rebounds, and virus shedding, Pfizer cranks the PR machine to hide facts, shame “anti-paxxers.”and still make dishonest bucks from our suffering.
Paxlovid was foisted upon us by Pfizer at an astronomical price just when most people had begun to guess that both Covid 19 and its vaccines are mostly another insane, immoral Big Pharma Scam.
An antiviral wonder drug that has saved thousands from waning Covid?? Saved some perhaps. But merely not burying cheap effective safe Ivermectin and basic treatment protocols would have saved millions of us.
When an article by Los Angeles Times metro reporter Rong-Gong Lin II recommended last month that practically everyone who tests positive for Covid takes Pfizer’s Paxlovid, some media veterans may have wondered what had become of the traditional wall between news reporting and false advertising.
The story, which appeared on January 28, swept away almost all of the reservations that have been raised about the safety and effectiveness of this patent medicine, assuring us that “Paxlovid rebound” is a non-issue and fear of serious side effects is “erroneous.”
It even went so far as to suggest that if your doctor won’t prescribe this “highly effective” medication, it’s time to go doctor shopping.
So why is this LATimes writer so desperately trying to sell us this fast-tracked antiviral that comes with a black box warning?
The article appeared at a particularly critical time for Pfizer just as it transitions from Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA Paxlovid, to FDA-approved Paxlovid.
Originally free to patients, the medication was stockpiled by the U.S. government to the tune of 24 million treatment courses at a cost to taxpayers of $530 a box. The actual cost to Pfizer for a five-day Paxlovid course is $13).
Now, the FDA-approved version (same drug, different box) sells for a list price of up to $1,500. (According to an analysis by researchers at Harvard University, the actual cost to Pfizer for a five-day Paxlovid course is $13)
But to Pfizer’s chagrin, it now doesn’t seem to be able to even give the stuff away, let alone sell it at a premium price. Last fall Pfizer accepted a return of nearly 8 million boxes sent back by the U.S. government.
What’s a drugmaker to do when both patients and doctors shun a product that was anticipated to be the better half of Pfizer’s post-Covid “multibillion-dollar franchise?
Flush with all that Covid cash and new Paxlovid FDA approval last May, Pfizer went shopping for partners to help promote its products.
No stranger to top-tier PR firms such as Edelman and Ogilvy, the drugmaker tagged two of the biggest names in contemporary communications companies, Publicis Groupe, a Paris-based giant PR and ad agency, and the humongous Interpublic Group.
These high-level agencies come at a big price tag, but what they can offer is priceless—a way to get your story told by respected media outlets.
That’s right, if you have enough money to hire the folks with all the right contacts, you too can create your own “news!” And these special contacts are something that PR firms, such as Edelman, are very proud of.
Many agency hires, in fact, are recruited directly from major media outlets, such as Edelman NYC Brand Director Nancy Jeffrey, who spent a decade at the Wall Street Journal.
As quoted in an Edelman website blog, Jeffrey recalls how Richard Edelman (son of founder Dan) would call her during her time working at the paper “to meet a client with a story to tell.” As Jeffrey says, “No one at Edelman ever rises too high to pitch a reporter.”
So was our LA Times reporter “pitched,” or does he just have an evangelical connection with Paxlovid?
Let’s take a close look at his story and see what we find.
First, there’s the article’s headline, which began: “If it’s COVID, Paxlovid”?
Getting your oft-advertised product’s rhyming tagline in a headline—now that’s branding! And we don’t have to tell any of the side effects in this venue. The LA Times piece was off to a great start.
A Ceasefire Deal may one day free 100’s of Palestinian hostages for the last Israelis held in Gaza. But Israel jails 1000’s more without charges.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said the Israeli occupation refuses to disclose any information about detainees taken from Gaza, Quds Press reported.
Israel is incarcerating approx. 10,000 Palestinian hostages (prisoners without charges).
After the start of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, the number of Palestinians held in administrative detention (hostages) rose from 1,319 to 2,070 between 1 October and 1 November.[95][96][97] AT THIS RATE OF ARRESTS ISRAEL HAD AT LEAST 4000 PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES BY THE END OF JANUARY 2024.
In November 2023, in exchange for the 240 hostages taken on Hamas’ October 7th attack,[66][67] Israel proposed release of 300 prisoners, most of them women and children.
68] But over two-thirds of these prisoners had not been formally convicted of any crime or charged with any crime.[68]We don’t have official figures but if this ratio of prisoners held without charge is generalised Israel has AT LEAST 6,000 MORE PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES, BRINGING THE TOTAL TO 10,000 APPROX.
In addition most of the thousands of “convicted” Palestinian prisoners are incarcerated under invented apartheid style laws by an illegally occupying regime and which have little justification by even the most basic international standards.
Gazans who have been illegally confined and blockaded all their lives have arguably every moral right to break out and fight back., Not of course, to kill innocent civilians, though many of their non-military victims were ‘armed reservists subsidized to live in fortified settlements by the border’.
Convicted Palestinians are also often little more than hostages. Israel is rarely accused of Human Rights abuses or sanctioned by complicit and financially linked western elites with vested interests, even though the Israeli state is clearly locking up on petty racist inspired charges people who could also be described as “hostages”.
Palestinians, holding banners and photos of their relatives, gather to stage a demonstration on demanding release of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in front of International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) building in Ramallah, West Bank on January 02, 2024 [İssam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]
The root of Israeli racist apartheid is a 3000 year old biblical assertion that Jews are God’s chosen race, as well as other scripture, taken out of context but repeatedly quoted on TV by Netanyahu, in which God urges Jews to massacre another local tribe.
Images from Gaza circulating on social media Thursday showed a mass detention by the Israeli military of men who were made to strip to their underwear, kneel on the street, wear blindfolds, and pack into the cargo bed of a military vehicle.
In a statement issued yesterday, the rights group said the Israeli occupation is carrying out “the crime of enforced disappearance” against Gaza detainees, following a number of military orders and laws specifically enacted for them.
Two northern Arizona tribes this week condemned the start of operations at a uranium mine just south of the Grand Canyon. he statements came after Denver-based company Energy Fuels Inc. announced last month that operations at its Pinyon Plain Mine had commenced.
“It is with heavy hearts that we must acknowledge that our greatest fear has come true,” a statement from the Havasupai Tribal Council read.
Meanwhile, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said in a statement that mining remains opposed “by all neighboring tribes that have forever called Grand Canyon their home.”
There is a long and controversial history of uranium mining within northern Arizona.
The Pinyon Plain Mine, previously known as the Canyon Mine, sits above the Redwall-Muav aquifer, which acts as a source of water for countless seeps and springs throughout the Grand Canyon, and is the sole source of drinking water for the Havasupai.
Throughout the Cold War era, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted and often processed from Navajo Nation lands. Hundreds of those mines, often near Navajo communities, were then abandoned by the companies operating them.
More than 500 contaminated sites remain across the Navajo Nation.
She and her family, consisting of her father, mother, 4 sisters, and the village’s people, were kidnapped by ISIS mercenaries
The young Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by ISIS mercenaries and who the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) managed to free from al-Hol Camp on Sunday said that ISIS gave her the choice between converting to the Islamic religion and being killed, and she recounted the torture, slavery and rape she was exposed to over the course of 9 years.
On Sunday (February 4), the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) were able to finally rescue a young Yazidi woman from al-Hol Camp as part of the third phase of the “Security and Humanitarian” operation launched by the Internal Security Forces pf the Rojava Revolution with the support of the Syrian Democratic Forces on January 27 of last year.
Yazidi Women’s Union: we owe to fighters’ sacrifices.6 Feb 2024 “We affirm that we, in the Yazidi Women’s Union in Rojava, will remain alongside our fighters and support their resistance and efforts in all places.
The young Yazidi woman, called “Kovan Eido Khorto,” is now 24 years old, from the village of Hardan in Şengal(Sinjar, Southern Kurdistan in northern Iraq).. She and her family, consisting of her father, mother, 4 sisters, and the village’s people, were kidnapped by ISIS mercenaries while they were trying to flee from the mercenaries in 2014.
Kovan was 14 years old when she was kidnapped by ISIS. She was taken with the other kidnappers to an area near the Syrian border, and was held in a school for 9 days.
After 9 days had passed, ISIS mercenaries separated the children and young women from their families. They transferred the young women, after dividing them into groups, to different areas of Iraq, while Kovan and a number of other young women were transferred to Mosul and then to Tal Afar.
While speaking to ANHA agency, Kovan indicated that she was raped by an ISIS mercenary called “Muwafaq,” and he took her to his family’s home in Tal Afar, then handed her over to another mercenary who took her to Mosul.
Sinjar massacre.. Mass genocide and kidnapping carried out by ISIS
The Sinjar massacre marked the beginning of the genocide of Yazidis by ISIL, the killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children. It took place in August 2014 in Sinjar city and Sinjar District in Iraq’s Nineveh Governorate and was perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, vowing to kill them all as infidels. Wikipedia. As Iraq and the US looked on the Kurdish PKK guerillas intervened and saved the Yazidis from genocide to the mountains, but 1000’s of women were taken as slaves.
After Mosul, two other mercenaries nicknamed «Abu Dunia and Abu Abd» transported her to Salah al-Din Governorate, where the mercenary «Abu Dunia and his family» hides.
According to Kovan, an ISIS leader known as “Abu Jaafar (Haider)” communicated with the mercenary “Abu Dunia” and ordered him to bring Kovan to Fallujah and hand her over to him, who raped, beat, and handcuffed her many times.
During this period, Kovan tried to escape from the mercenaries, but they found out about her and started beating and harming her.
Two years after that, the leader, “Abu Jaafar,” handed Kovan over to another mercenary called “Abu Radwan,” who in turn married her to another mercenary called “Abu Hudhayfah.”
The tragedy of Kovan did not end in Iraq. The mercenary “Abu Hudhayfah” headed with Kovan to the Syrian city of Albu Kamal, and during this period, “Abu Hudhayfah” was killed in the desert of the Syrian desert, and the leader “Abu Jaafar” was also killed during that period, so that she could be married to another mercenary called «Abu Asia Al-Jumaili.»
With the start of the campaign to liberate Deir ez-Zor from ISIS mercenaries in 2018, Kovn moved to al-Hol Camp designated for the families of ISIS mercenaries, where Kovan explained that ISIS mercenaries were threatening her and all the Yazidi women they had kidnapped with death if they did not convert to the Islamic religion, and they were describing them as “infidels.”
When we asked her why she did not reveal her true identity after all these years while she was in al-Hol Camp, Kovan confirmed that she was afraid because she was exposed to threats from mercenaries.
The kidnapped Yazidi woman thanked the Women’s Protection Units for freeing her from the hands of the mercenaries, and called on all Yazidi women kidnapped by ISIS to reveal their identity and return to their homes and families to be saved from the injustice they were subjected to.
She stated that she did not know anything about her family, whether they were still kidnapped by ISIS or if anything had happened to them, but she did not give up hope and hoped to meet them soon.
T/Satt. ANHA
Kovan, the Yazidi woman rescued from ISIS, manages to communicate with her family
The young Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by ISIS mercenaries was able to communicate with her family in Şengal by phone after 9 years.
The Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) , in coordination with the Şengal Protection Units,secured a phone call for the young woman, Kovan Eido, with her family in Şengal, so that she could communicate with them after a separation of 9 years.
YPJ: Liberation of Kovan represents painful blow to ISIS
The Internal Security Forces completed the third phase of the “Humanity and Security” operation, on Tuesday, which the forces launched last January 27, led by the Women’s Protection Units and in support of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
The aim was to eliminate new ISIS cells inside al-Hol camp. After the SDF multi-ethnic Rojava revolutionaries liberated NE Syria from the ISIS Caliphate, backed by international air power the jihadi prisoners and their families were housed in Al Hol Camp and the SDF has had to guard them ever since, with few States willing to repatriate their fighters.
In an interview with ANHA agency the spokeswoman of YPJ’s Media Center Rokan Jamal said : “There was an urgent need and necessity to launch the third phase of the “Humanity and Security” operation, and one of the most prominent results of this operation was the liberation of A Yazidi woman from the mercenaries who kidnapped her many years ago.»
According to a statement by the Internal Security Forces, 85 mercenaries were arrested, including the so-called “first Shari’i in Al-Hol Camp,” nicknamed “Abu Abdul Hamid,”who was the leader directly responsible for spreading Takfiri thought and issuing death fatwas and threats against the camp’s residents.
The Internal Security Forces eliminated the so-called «Abu Sufyan al-Lahibi», the leader of ISIS cells within the camp and its surroundings, and another mercenary accompanying him.
The Women’s Protection Units also managed to liberate a Yazidi woman, «Kovan Edo Khorto», 9 years after she was kidnapped by ISIS mercenaries.
Rokan confirmed that the liberation of the young Yazidi woman named Kovan Edo Khorto from the village of Hardan in Shingal from ISIS mercenaries is a matter of pride for the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ).
Rokan, of the YPJ, explained that the young Yazidi woman who was rescued by the Women’s Protection Units on Sunday (February 4) from the hands of ISIS mercenaries, “had been suffering for 5 years here in al-Hol camp, as the mercenaries were pressuring her not to reveal her identity.»
Rokan touched on the use of women by ISIS mercenaries and cells to spread extremist ideas inside al-Hol camp, and said: “Unfortunately, this role is assigned to women, especially in ISIS women section to spread extremist ideas, and this is a clearly visible danger.
We tried to deter this danger by carrying out such these operations.
Regarding the role of YPJ in the third phase of the operation, Rokan confirmed: YPJ played an effective role in protecting women from the evils of ISIS cells, while the other role was liberation women of oppression.”
Rokan stressed that their struggle will continue to liberate all Yazidi women who are still kidnapped by mercenaries.
Rokan referred to the crimes taking place in Afrin, Sere Kaniye, Azaz, Al-Bab, and occupied Jarabulus, invaded by Turkey and now beibf occupied and ‘ethnically cleansed’ of the Kurdish population by Turkish paid extremist gangs (SNA). She stressed that the units will continue their efforts to free and liberate all women from the dark and occupying forces.»
This Yazidi Womens Brigade joined the multi-ethnic SDF as they closed in on the ISIS HQ in Raqqa in 2018.»We can not remain impassive in the face of the genocide committed by Erdogan and his fascist state against the Kurdish people…«
Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK [Photo by Halil Uysal – Archive of the International Initiative «Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan – Peace in Kurdistan / CC BY-SA 3.0]
On October 10 of last year, 2023, a global campaign was launched in 74 centers around the world under the slogan “Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan, the political solution to the Kurdish issue.”
In this context, a series of events began in northern Kurdistan and Turkey to support this campaign.
Under the same campaign slogan, a number of activists in Turkish prisons in Turkey and northern Kurdistan began a hunger strike last November 27.
In the cities of Wan, Amed, Merdin, Mersin, Adana, Istanbul and Izmir, justice sit-ins continue under the slogan “We will break isolation for justice, and we will be the voice of prisons for peace,” which were organized by the families of the hunger strikers.
The political prisoners are carrying out a rotational hunger strike, calling for the liberation of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and a resolution to the Kurdish predicament.
The hunger strike will end next February 15, according to the strikers. February 15 signifies the day Öcalan was brought to Turkey from Kenya, where he sought refuge after months on the run in 1999.
Öcalan has written a series of works which have directly molded and extended the Kurdish fight against severe repression. He is credited with moving the PKK from Stalinism to a unique horizontally powered communal system called Democratic Confederalism, ending calls for a new state and crucially empowering women at all levels.
Ocalan is lauded as the «Nelson Mandela» of the Kurds, and despite being imprisoned now for 25 years has huge moral support and led the PKK in two long ceasefires and a ‘Kurdish Spring’.
Finally Turkey cracked down on the Kurdish ceasefire, bombing Kurdish cities in Turkey and launching three invasions into Syria, colonizing and ‘ethnic cleansing‘ the Kurdish population of Rojava into internal refugee camps.
The ongoing campaign, mirrored in countries like Germany and France, aims to draw attention to the Kurdish issue, emphasizing the pursuit of a comprehensive solution. (TY/VK)
Reyhan Gök presented a report prepared by the Coordination for Monitoring and Follow-up of Hunger Strikes and listed the demands of the hunger strikers as:
‘1) An end to human rights violations in prisons in Turkey; 2) Fixing of the aggravated conditions of execution; 3) An end to the long isolation of Abdullah Öcalan in İmralı High Security Closed Prison, family and lawyer visits; and 4) A democratic solution to the Kurdish question.’
The Free 
