The Free

Netherlands has yet to resume funding to the UNRWA five months after ‘pause’, wins our title 0f ‘Biden’s Pet Rat’.

from thefreeonline on 2nd June 2024 .. by Al Jazeera +Agencies/Opinion

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In a stunning display of hypocrisy the far right regime still refuses UN aid contributions as Gaza residents are slaughtered by Israeli genocide

Worse Than You Can Imagine | West plotted with Israel to Starve 2.3m in Gaza! – Craig Murray

An investigation led by French former foreign minister Catherine Colonna concluded last month that Israel had not provided evidence to support its allegations of UNRWA involvement in the assault.

Despite the concerns raised within the upper levels of the Dutch government, the Netherlands has yet to resume funding to the UNRWA five months after announcing a pause in response to Israeli claims that some agency staff participated in Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel.

Displaced Palestinians wait to receive United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid — The UNRWA employs about 30,000 people in the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria [Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

By John Power

In a memo written after the Netherlands joined more than a dozen countries in pausing funding to UNRWA following Israeli claims of links to Hamas, foreign ministry officials stressed the need for the UN agency to continue its work.

The UN agency last week announced it would have to suspend food distribution in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, where Israel’s military is conducting a ground offensive and air strikes, due to a lack of supplies and security risks.

Ongoing famine in the Gaza Strip

“In a stunning display of hypocrisy the far right regime still refuses UN aid contributions as Gaza residents are slaughtered by Israeli genocide. The refusal continues despite most other countries resuming aid because Israel gave zero proof that any UNRWA staff aided the local Hamas government attack.

“The Israeli allegations were suspiciously followed by an instant worldwide media campaign, with the US cancelling UN aid to Gaza within 24 hours and pressuring its allies to instantly follow suit although no proof was ever offered..

“And in any case Gazans have the right (as recognised in Ukraine) to resist an armed military occupation under International Law.

“The result was a spectacle of millions of starving people blockaded by Israel for 17 years and being massacred daily while the West cut off aid agreed by the UN because Israel had herded millions into a tiny area, blockaded them and cut off supplies and services, etc.

‘Scandal’: Israeli Dossier ‘Provides No Evidence’ for Claims Against …commondreams.org

Recently the Netherlands government has veered to the right and supports almost every US sponsored crime including open NATO warmongering now threatening world nuclear annihalation, as well as still denying supply of its share of Gaza aid along with the USA.

The Netherlands still ignores the memo to resume aid

Al Jazeera obtained the memo, which has not been published previously, via a freedom of information request with the Dutch foreign ministry.

“Humanitarian assistance and basic services provided by UNRWA to Gaza and the wider region must be maintained at this stage of the conflict. Other organisations are not adequately equipped for this purpose, including logistical capacities. Further regional destabilisation due to loss of UNRWA capacities must be prevented,” officials in the ministry’s human rights department wrote in the memo to Foreign Minister Hanke Bruins Slot on February 2.

UNRWA staff accused by Israel sacked without evidence, chief admits …

Bruins Slot, a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Appeal party, expressed agreement with her colleagues in a hand-written note.

“Agreed! Touches whole region that is already unstable,” she wrote on the memo.

“Too long a delay or suspension of already committed support could lead to serious disruptions in UNWRA’s operational capacities resulting in considerably great human suffering,” the memo continued, to which Bruins Slot added a hand-written note expressing her agreement.

US led Aid Blockade: UNRWA staffers tortured by Israeli troops to falsely admit ‘Hamas links’ – The Cradle/Reuters

“In addition, high humanitarian needs could lead to social disruption and regional escalation, which also poses a risk to Israel’s security. It is also politically relevant to take into account the ruling of the International Court of Justice on adequate humanitarian aid.”

Dutch Foreign Minister Hanke Bruins Slot expressed concern about the effects of a prolonged pause in funding to UNRWA, documents show [File: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters]

At least half of the 16 countries that suspended funding in response to Israel’s claims, including Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden, have since reinstated their support.

“We consider UNRWA again as an aid channel. So we see them again as legitimate partner to work with,” Bruins Slot said in remarks to parliament. “This government has not made any more money available at this time to give more to UNRWA. I hope that there will still be room to do that in the next cabinet.”

‘No evidence’ for Israeli UNRWA claims in six-page dossiernewarab.com Report says Israel has not provided evidence of widespread militancy …washingtonpost.com

OIOS repeated there is no evidence, saying in an update to its investigation last month that it was probing 14 UNRWA staff members over their alleged links to the October 7 attacks, after dropping inquires into five others due to lack of evidence.

Established in 1949, the UNRWA employs about 30,000 people in the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to provide essential services including food, education and healthcare.

Source: Al Jazeera + Agencies .. see original HERE Netherlands feared ‘great human suffering’ after UNRWA funding pause:

Biden Lets Ukraine Strike Russia With US Weapons While Ukraine Attacks Russian Nuclear Defenses -CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

June 2, 2024 – Posted by Christina Macpherson

Well it finally happened: Biden is now letting Ukraine strike Russian territory with US-supplied weapons. Escalations in nuclear brinkmanship which would have been unthinkable a few short years ago are becoming increasingly common as Ukraine loses more and more territory and runs out of soldiers to fight.

In a new report from Politico titled “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons” which cites multiple anonymous US officials, the article’s authors correctly describe the new White House authorization as a “stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight.”

This report comes shortly after an article by The New York Times titled “From Allies and Advisers, Pressure Grows on Biden to Allow Attacks on Russian Territory,” in which David E Sanger accurately forecast that “Biden is edging toward what may prove to be one of his most consequential decisions in the war for Ukraine: whether to reverse his ban on shooting American weapons into Russian territory.”

Politico reports that the approval for these attacks is limited to “solely near the area of Kharkiv,” but, again, these escalations were once unthinkable even for this administration, and every time a new escalation is authorized the warmongers are already well on their way to pushing for a further one. We will surely see increasing calls for Biden to authorize US-backed strikes deeper into Russian territory in the coming weeks.

This new development comes just after we learned that Ukraine has been repeatedly attacking Russia’s early warning systems for incoming nuclear strikes, with Ukrainian drones targeting Russian radar sites hundreds of miles from Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Just a few years ago if I had told you that a NATO proxy would soon be attacking Russia’s nuclear defense infrastructure, you’d probably have assumed we’d be pretty close to another Cuban Missile Crisis-level nuclear standoff, and that it would be receiving high levels of alarm and attention. But this report is barely in the news, and hardly anyone in the west even knows it’s happening.

This also comes as Reuters reports that France is preparing to send “several hundred” troops to Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, which of course means we may soon be seeing the armed forces of a NATO power getting killed by the Russian military.

Any of these three new developments has the potential to lead to unpredictable events which spiral out of control into a nuclear war between NATO and the Russian Federation, which would be the single worst thing that could possibly happen on planet Earth. There is no excuse for anyone to be playing around anywhere remotely close to such a precipice, and yet here we are.

As we discussed last year, the terrifying thing about the west’s pattern of continually escalating against Russia every time it doesn’t get a nuclear ICBM in the kisser for the last escalation naturally incentivizes Russia to attack NATO directly in order to re-establish its credibility for deterrence.

So far Russia has been content to respond to NATO’s escalations by just tearing into Ukraine with greater and greater ferocity, but if the western empire keeps interpreting every time Russia doesn’t attack NATO forces directly as a sign that it’s safe to keep escalating, at some point Russia’s going to have to hit NATO.

It is not sane or acceptable that any of this is happening. The empire knowingly provoked this war, and now it’s getting more and more casual about risking the life of everyone on this planet as its proxy runs out of lives to throw into its gears.

And it’s so hard to draw attention to this, because there are so many other horrible things happening in the world which the western empire is also directly responsible for.

The empire is increasingly acting like a wounded, cornered animal as China rises and the US slowly sinks into post-primacy, the only major difference being that wounded, cornered animals have teeth and claws instead of weapons of armageddon.

Biden Lets Ukraine Strike Russia With US Weapons While Ukraine Attacks Russian Nuclear Defenses

Presidents Who Gamble With Nuclear Armageddon – Common Dreams

Each of the last five presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have brought us closer to the brink. We desperately need leaders with a knack for peace who can steer the nation, and the world, toward a more secure and less dangerous future.

JEFFREY D. SACHS, May 29, 2024, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/nuclear-armageddon

The overriding job of any U.S. president is to keep the nation safe. In the nuclear age, that mainly means avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Joe Biden’s reckless and incompetent foreign policy is pushing us closer to annihilation. He joins a long and undistinguished list of presidents who have gambled with Armageddon, including his immediate predecessor and rival, Donald Trump.

Talk of nuclear war is currently everywhere. Leaders of NATO countries call for Russia’s defeat and even dismemberment, while telling us not to worry about Russia’s 6,000 nuclear warheads. Ukraine uses NATO-supplied missiles to knock out parts of Russia’s nuclear-attack early-warning system inside Russia. Russia, in the meantime, engages in nuclear drills near its border with Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg give the green light to Ukraine to use NATO weapons to hit Russian territory as an increasingly desperate and extremist Ukrainian regime sees fit.

These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by President John F. Kennedy, one of the few American presidents in the nuclear age to take our survival seriously. In the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy told us, and his successors:

Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.

Yet this is exactly what Biden is doing today, carrying out a bankrupt and reckless policy.

Nuclear war can easily arise from an escalation of non-nuclear war, or by a hothead leader with access to nuclear arms deciding on a surprise first strike, or by a gross miscalculation. The last of these nearly occurred even after Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev had negotiated an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a disabled Soviet submarine came within a hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo.

Participants in the Easter march at Büchel Air Base (Cochem-Zell district) in Germany walk along the outer fence of the military facility where U.S. nuclear weapons are said to be stored on April 1, 2024. The banner reads: “Give Peace A Chance.”

The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.

Most presidents, and most Americans, have little idea how close to the abyss we are. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was founded in 1947 in part to help the world avoid nuclear annihilation, established the Doomsday Clock to help the public understand the gravity of the risks we face. National security experts adjust the clock depending how far or how close we are to “midnight,” meaning extinction. They put the clock today at just 90 seconds to midnight, the closest that it’s ever been in the nuclear age.

To Avoid Nuclear War, Putin Needs to be a Little Crazier, by Mike Whitney

Russia is being attacked by NATO and Putin knows it. It’s time to do something about it, and don’t think Putin won’t pull the trigger. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

President Putin’s press conference on Wednesday in Uzbekistan might have been the most unusual and extraordinary event in his 24-year political career.

After addressing the Constitutional issues surrounding Ukrainian President Zelensky’s decision to remain in office beyond his four-year term, Putin delivered a brief but disturbing statement on NATO’s plan to fire long-range weapons at targets inside Russia. Putin made it clear that Russia would respond to these attacks and that the countries that provided the weapons systems would be held responsible.

He also gave a very detailed description of how the systems work and how they require contractors from the country-of-origin be directly involved in their operation.

What is so remarkable about Putin’s comments is not the fact that they bring the world closer to a direct confrontation between nuclear-armed adversaries, but that he had to remind political leaders in the West that Russia is not going to sit back and be their punching bag. Here’s part of what Putin said:

With regard to the strikes, frankly, I am not sure what the NATO Secretary General is talking about. When he was the Prime Minister of Norway, (we had good relations) and I am positive he was not suffering from dementia back then. If he is talking about potentially attacking Russia’s territory with long-range precision weapons, he, as a person who heads a military-political organisation, even though he is a civilian like me, should be aware of the fact that long-range precision weapons cannot be used without space-based reconnaissance. This is my first point.

My second point is that the final target selection and what is known as launch mission can only be made by highly skilled specialists who rely on this reconnaissance data, technical reconnaissance data. For some attack systems, such as Storm Shadow, these launch missions can be put in automatically, without the need to use Ukrainian military. Who does it? Those who manufacture and those who allegedly supply these attack systems to Ukraine do. This can and does happen without the participation of the Ukrainian military. Launching other systems, such as ATACMS, for example, also relies on space reconnaissance data, targets are identified and automatically communicated to the relevant crews that may not even realise what exactly they are putting in. A crew, maybe even a Ukrainian crew, then puts in the corresponding launch mission. However, the mission is put together by representatives of NATO countries, not the Ukrainian military. Putin Presser in Uzbekistan, Kremlin…….

continues HERE…To Avoid Nuclear War, Putin Needs to be a Little Crazier, by Mike Whitney

Mega Anti-War demo against Nuclear Destruction of Europe by Attacking Russia

As NATO okays deep strikes with US Missiles and even bombs Russia’s Anti Nuclear Missile Radars we must WAKE UP or kiss our families goodbye

from the freeonline on 2nd June, 2024 by Home World /banned in Europe

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Huge anti-war rally in NATO member’s capital (VIDEOS)

Hungarians don’t want to “shed blood” for Ukraine, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a large crowd in Budapest

Hundreds of thousands participated in a peace march in Hungary’s capital, Budapest on Saturday, denouncing the EU’s policy of escalating tensions with Russia. The event culminated with a speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who accused Brussels of bringing Europe closer to a global conflict.

The gigantic“peace march,” brought supporters from all over Hungary and neighboring countries. They marched along the Danube River in Budapest from the city’s iconic Chain Bridge onto Margaret Island, waving flags and signs reading “No War.”

Many carried flags, chanted pacifist slogans, and held signs reading “No war” and “Give us peace, Lord.”

“Never before have so many people lined up for peace. We are the biggest peace corps, the largest peacekeeping force in Europe,” the prime minister said, as quoted by Reuters. “Europe must be prevented from rushing into war, into its own destruction.”