IRAQI SANCTIONS AND AMERICAN INTENTIONS: BLAMELESS CARNAGE? PART 2

See here for the previous article in this series. Plus, here and here for other additional articles about Iraq. 

by James Bovard

While Pentagon officials bluntly admitted in 1991 that sanctions aimed to punish the Iraqi people, candor evaporated as the death toll rose. The State Department’s website announced in June 1999,

Sanctions are not intended to harm the people of Iraq. That is why the sanctions regime has always specifically exempted food and medicine.

This was false. Banning exports of oil effectively also banned imports of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. Some of the worst impacts of the sanctions dissipated after the oil-for-food program was launched, but by that time, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis may have already perished.

Denis Halliday, the UN administrator of the oil-for-food program, resigned in 1998 to protest the ravages the sanctions were continuing to inflict on Iraqis. Halliday complained, “We are in the process of destroying an entire country” and denounced the sanctions as “nothing less than genocide.” Hans von Sponeck, his replacement, served two years before resigning in protest in early 2000, denouncing the sanctions as a “criminal policy.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned in a report in December 1999 that the oil-for-food program “has not halted the collapse of the health system and the deterioration of water supplies, which together pose one of the gravest threats to the health and well-being of the civilian population.” Seventy members of Congress sent a letter to President Clinton in early 2000 denouncing the sanctions as “infanticide masquerading as policy.”

While sanctions were maintained after the Gulf War allegedly to compel Iraq to disarm, the U.S. government long pursued a different goal. Secretary of State James Baker declared in May 1991, “We are not interested in seeking a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” President Clinton decreed in November 1997 that “sanctions will be there until the end of time, or as long as he [Saddam Hussein] lasts.” At the end of the Clinton era, Defense Secretary William Cohen bragged,

We have been successful, through the sanctions regime, to really shut off most of the revenue that will be going to rebuild [Saddam Hussein’s] military.

Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, spent three years researching the effects of the UN sanctions programs on Iraq. Gordon obtained many confidential UN documents that showed that

the United States has fought aggressively throughout the last decade to purposefully minimize the humanitarian goods that enter the country,

as she reported in a November 2002 Harper’s article.

After the first Gulf War, the UN Security Council set up a committee to administer sanctions on Iraq. The U.S. government vigorously exploited its veto power on the committee by placing holds on contracts. The Economist declared in early 2000 that Americans and British on the sanctions committee were “abusing their power to block suspicious imports.” The United States blocked the importing of ambulances, tires, and soap. Imports of children’s pencils were restricted “because lead could have a military use.” The United States vetoed allowing car batteries and forklifts to be included on a list of humanitarian goods that could automatically be sent into Iraq. The Associated Press summarized controversies around U.S. vetoes of imports:

Most of the disputed contracts are for equipment to improve Iraq’s dilapidated oil industry, power grid and water sanitation infrastructure.

The U.S. government routinely and perennially vetoed delivery of goods that UN weapons inspectors had certified as posing no military benefit to Saddam. As of September 2001, the United States was blocking “nearly one-third of water and sanitation and one quarter of electricity and educational — supply contracts were on hold.” Gordon noted, “As of September 2001, nearly a billion dollars’ worth of medical-equipment contracts — for which all the information sought had been provided — was still on hold.”

In early 2002, the United States blocked contracts for the delivery of “dialysis, dental, and fire-fighting equipment, water tankers, milk and yogurt production equipment, printing equipment for schools.” Gordon reported,

Since August 1991 the United States has blocked most purchases of materials necessary for Iraq to generate electricity…. Often restrictions have hinged on the withholding of a single essential element, rendering many approved items useless. For example, Iraq was allowed to purchase a sewage-treatment plant but was blocked from buying the generator necessary to run it; this in a country that has been pouring 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers.

Sanctions and political games

Gordon observed that the U.S. government “has sometimes given a reason for its refusal to approve humanitarian goods, sometimes given no reason at all, and sometimes changed its reason three or four times, in each instance causing a delay of months.” She noted,

The United States found many ways to slow approval of contracts. Although it insisted on reviewing every contract carefully, for years it didn’t assign enough staff to do this without causing enormous delays.”

Large shipments of humanitarian aid were delayed “simply because of U.S. disinterest in spending the money necessary to review them.”

The U.S. government played politics with its holds, turning Iraq into a pork barrel for wheeling and dealing on the UN Security Council. In 2001, the United States proposed a reform called “smart sanctions” that would have automatically slowed down many more imports into Iraq — while removing the United States from culpability for blocking the relief. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the U.S. government was confident that the revised sanctions system would be

able to keep the box as tightly closed as we have the last 10 years, without receiving on our shoulders all the baggage that goes with it.

When Russia refused to support “smart sanctions,” the United States responded by slapping holds on almost all the contracts that Russian companies had to deliver goods to Iraq. After Russia agreed to support a revised sanctions reform in April 2002, U.S. government holds on three-quarters of a billion dollars in Russian contracts for Iraq suddenly vanished in what one diplomat told the Financial Times was “the boldest move yet by the U.S. to use the holds to buy political agreement.”

Gordon concluded that “U.S. policy consistently opposed any form of economic development within Iraq.” As of mid 2002, the importation of almost $5 billion in humanitarian goods was blocked — almost entirely because of holds imposed by the U.S. and British governments.

Blaming Saddam

President Bush sought to blame all the suffering of the Iraqi people on Saddam’s lust for weapons. In an October 7, 2002, speech Bush declared,

The world has also tried economic sanctions and watched Iraq use billions of dollars in illegal oil revenues to fund more weapons purchases, rather than providing for the needs of the Iraqi people.

While Saddam did use some of the revenue from “illegal” (i.e., not authorized by the UN) oil sales to Syria and elsewhere to purchase weapons, the United States never presented any evidence that such purchases amounted to “billions of dollars.” The U.S. position appeared to be that as long as Saddam spent a single cent on weapons, the United States was blameless for the devastation from its “siege warfare” tactics.

After human-rights advocates had harshly condemned sanctions on Iraq for almost a decade, the sanctions suddenly morphed into a causus belli. At a March 27, 2003, joint press conference for Bush and Britian’s prime minister, Tony Blair, Blair declared,

Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living. Now, that is why we’re acting.

Progressive editor Matthew Rothschild observed that Bush and Blair “refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for those deaths and instead seize upon them simply to justify their war of aggression.”

After the war started, the suffering caused by sanctions became further proof of Saddam’s depravity. In a March 25, 2003, press conference announcing plans for humanitarian aid after the Iraq War, Andrew Natsios, administrator for the Agency for International Development, declared,

There has been a water issue, and I am not sure everybody entirely understands this. It predates the war. Water and sanitation are the principal reasons children have died at higher rates than they should have for a middle-income country…. It is a function of a deliberate decision by the regime not to repair the water system or replace old equipment with new equipment, so in many cases people are basically drinking untreated sewer water in their homes and have been for some years.

In reality, the United States government perennially blocked the importation of the necessary equipment and supplies to repair the water system — as if it were a “dual use” because of the possibility that Iraqi soldiers would get glasses of water from the repaired systems.

From 1991 through the end of 2002, 8,924 people were killed in attacks by international terrorists, according to the U.S. State Department. The sanctions on Iraq may have killed more than 50 times as many civilians as did terrorists during a time when terrorism was supposedly one of the gravest threats to humanity.

During the 2000 election campaign, Bush criticized the Clinton administration for failing to keep sanctions as tight as possible. In the lead-up to the war, he frequently relished recounting the details of Saddam’s brutality, especially the alleged gas attacks against Kurdish villages that, according to Bush, “killed or injured at least 20,000 people, more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September the 11th.” (It is unclear whether it was the Iraqis or the Iranians who actually carried out the gas attacks.)

But far more Iraqi children were killed by sanctions after Bush’s inauguration on Janu ary 20, 2001, than Saddam killed in his alleged gas attacks on the Kurds. If the estimate of 500,000 dead as a result of sanctions is correct, that would be the equivalent of snuffing out the lives of all the babies and young children in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

The fact that bin Laden greatly exaggerated the sanctions death toll does not absolve the U.S. government. Within a year or two after the end of the Gulf War, it should have been obvious that sanctions would neither turn Saddam into a Boy Scout nor bring him to his knees. The U.S. government knew the sanctions were scourging the Iraqi people. Three U.S. presidents escaped any liability for the Iraqi deaths caused by U.S. policy. The people who worked in the World Trade Center may not have been so lucky.

Rather than continue to pirouette on the world stage as a great benefactor, the Bush administration should open the files and let everyone learn what the U.S. government knew — and when it knew it — about the devastation sanctions wreaked upon Iraq. This information could provide a healthy antidote against future salvation manias by American presidents.

IRAQI SANCTIONS AND AMERICAN INTENTIONS: BLAMELESS CARNAGE? PART 1

Please see here and here for additional articles.


by James Bovard

President Bush’s advisers assured Americans that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators — with flowers and hugs — when the United States invaded Iraq. That promise turned out to be one of the biggest frauds of the Iraqi debacle.

One major reason for the animosity to U.S. troops is the lingering impact and bitter memories of the UN sanctions imposed on the Iraqis for 13 years, largely at the behest of the U.S. government. It is impossible to understand the current situation in Iraq without examining the sanctions and their toll.

President Bush, in the months before attacking Iraq, portrayed the sufferings and deprivation of the Iraqi people as resulting from the evil of Saddam Hussein. Bush’s comments were intended as an antidote to the charge by Osama bin Laden a month after 9/11 that “a million innocent children are dying at this time as we speak, killed in Iraq without any guilt.” Bin Laden listed the economic sanctions against Iraq as one of the three main reasons for his holy war against the United States.

Most Western experts believe that bin Laden sharply overstated the death toll. A United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report in 1999 concluded that half a million Iraqi children had died in the previous eight years because of the sanctions. Columbia University professor Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist and an expert on the effects of sanctions, estimated in 2003 that the sanctions had resulted in infant and young-child fatalities numbering between 343,900 and 529,000.

Regardless of the precise number of fatalities (which will never be known), the sanctions were a key factor in inflaming Arab anger against the United States. The sanctions were initially imposed to punish Iraq for invading Kuwait and then were kept in place after the Gulf War supposedly in order to pressure Saddam to disarm.

Sanctions wreaked havoc on the Iraqi people, in part because the Pentagon intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water-treatment systems during the first U.S.-Iraq war:

• A January 22, 1991, Defence Intelligence Agency report titled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” noted,

Iraq depends on importing specialised equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline…. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease…. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.

• The U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency estimated in early 1991 that “it probably will take at least six months (to June 1991) before the [Iraqi water treatment] system is fully degraded” from the bombing during the Gulf War and the UN sanctions.

• A May 1991 Pentagon analysis entitled “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” noted,

Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps. Further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation.

• A June 1991 Pentagon analysis noted that infectious disease rates had increased since the Gulf War and warned, “The Iraqi regime will continue to exploit disease incidence data for its own political purposes.”

George Washington University professor Thomas Nagy, who marshalled the preceding reports in an analysis in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive, concluded, The United States knew it had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis.

Pentagon intent

A Washington Post analysis published on June 23, 1991, noted that Pentagon officials admitted that, rather than concentrating solely on military targets, the U.S. bombing campaign “sought to achieve some of their military objectives in the Persian Gulf War by disabling Iraqi society at large” and “deliberately did great harm to Iraq’s ability to support itself as an industrial society.”

The bombing campaign targeted Iraq’s electrical power system, thereby destroying the country’s ability to operate its water-treatment plants. One Pentagon official who helped plan the bombing campaign observed,

People say, “You didn’t recognise that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.” Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.

Col. John Warden III, deputy director of strategy for the Air Force, observed,

Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity. He needs help. If there are political objectives that the UN coalition has, it can say, “Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.” It gives us long-term leverage.

Another Air Force planner observed,

We wanted to let people know, “Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”

The Post explained the Pentagon’s rationale for punishing the Iraqi people:

Among the justifications offered now, particularly by the Air Force in recent briefings, is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear,” said a senior Air Force officer, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. “They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country.”

A Harvard School of Public Health team visited Iraq in the months after the war and found epidemic levels of typhoid and cholera as well as pervasive acute malnutrition. The Post noted,

In an estimate not substantively disputed by the Pentagon, the [Harvard] team projected that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the bombing.

The U.S. military understood the havoc the 1991 bombing unleashed. A 1995 article entitled “The Enemy as a System” by John Warden, published in the Air Force’s Airpower Journal,discussed the benefits of bombing “dual-use targets” and noted,

A key example of such dual-use targeting was the destruction of Iraqi electrical power facilities in Desert Storm…. [Destruction] of these facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.

The article concluded that the U.S. Air Force has a “vested interest in attacking dual-use targets” that undermine “civilian morale.”

Infant mortality rates

In 1995, a team of doctors (including a representative of the Harvard School of Public Health) visited Iraq under the auspices of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization to examine the nutritional status and mortality rates of young children in Baghdad. They concluded that the sanctions had resulted in the deaths of 567,000 children in the previous five years. (Most subsequent studies implicitly concluded that this study sharply overestimated the mortality toll in the first years of the sanctions.)

CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl relied on this estimate in 1996 when she asked U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright,

We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Albright answered,

I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.

Albright’s words echoed like thunder through the Arab world in the following years.

At the behest of the United States and Britain, the United Nations maintained a de facto embargo on Iraq through 1996, when an “oil for food” program was approved. Saddam and the UN had wrangled for five years over the conditions under which Iraq would be permitted to resume oil exports. The “oil for food” program gave the UN Security Council veto power over how every cent of Iraqi oil revenues would be spent. The de facto blockade on the Iraqi people made many common illnesses far more lethal.

The Detroit News noted, “Many diseases — including cancer — cannot be treated in Iraq.” TheWashington Post noted in December 2002, shortly after the Bush administration proposed new restrictions on antibiotic imports by Iraq,

As a practical matter, the most modern and effective medicines already are hard to come by here, even some of those used to treat routine illness.

One Baghdad pharmacist groused that he “cannot get atropine or inhalers for asthmatics or insulin for diabetics.”

The infant/young-child mortality rate in Iraq rose from 50 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 133 per 1,000 in 2001 (meaning that more than 13 percent of Iraqi children die before the age of five). Iraq had by far the sharpest rise in infant/young-child mortality of any nation in the world during that period, according to UNICEF. Professor Garfield declared,

It is the only instance of a sustained increase in mortality in a stable population of more than 2 million in the last 200 years.

Sanctions advocates claimed that the punitive policy would spur discontent and eventually undermine Saddam’s rule. However, a Harvard International Review analysis noted,

Sanctions seem to have bolstered Saddam’s domestic popularity. He uses the sanctions to demonize the West and to rally support for his leadership; they have been a convenient scapegoat for internal problems. The rations system he has established in response to the sanctions has tightened his control of Iraqi citizens’ everyday lives, making them totally dependent on the government for mere survival and less likely to challenge his authority for fear of starvation.

What Was Life Really Like in Saddam’s Iraq?

See here for a previous article on this topic. 

Henry Kissinger & Madeleine Albright - Two Zionist War Criminals That Should Be Put to Rest

See this documentary on Henry Kissinger and the book from Christopher Hitchens. Also, see these YouTube videos. Henry Kissinger was also an important player in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with Kissinger Associates. As for Madeleine Albright, she was instrumental in imposing the crushing sanctions on the Iraqi people in the 90's that were unbelievably unethical. These policies were the continuation of a strategy to bring Iraq from a secular first world country to a third world country where a sectarian government is now in power. 

Seriously! How many of you know that Iraq used to be a first world country and one of the most powerful countries in the middle east? Though Sadam Hussien was not perfect, he kept the sectarian and religious fanatics at bay, while allowing women to become educated. Contrary to popular imagination, Iraqi women enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist government than women in other Middle Eastern countries. In fact, equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq’s Constitution in 1970, including the right to vote, run for political office, access education and own property. Today, these rights are all but absent. There were even gay bars in Iraq under Sadam Hussien! Plus, men could own guns and buy Playboy magazines. 

Prior to the devastating economic sanctions of the 1990s, Iraq’s education system was top notch and female literacy rates were the highest in the region, reaching 87 percent in 1985. Education was a major priority for Saddam Hussein’s regime, so much so that in 1982 Iraq received the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) award for eradicating illiteracy. But the education system crumbled from financial decay under the weight of the sanctions pushing over 20 percent of Iraqi children out of school by 2000 and reversing decades of literacy gains. Today, a quarter of Iraqi women are illiterate, more than double the rate for Iraqi men (11 percent). Female illiteracy in rural areas alone is as high as 50 percent.

Women were integral to Iraq’s economy and held high positions in both the private and public sectors, thanks in large part to labor and employment laws that guaranteed equal pay, six months fully paid maternity leave and protection from sexual harassment. In fact, it can be argued that some of the conditions enjoyed by working women in Iraq before the war rivaled those of working women in the United States.

It wasn’t until the 1991 Gulf War and U.S.-led economic sanctions against the regime that women’s rights in Iraq began to deteriorate. The sanctions, in particular, had devastating consequences for the one million Iraqi civilians who slowly starved to death, over half of them children.

Women and girls were disproportionately affected by the economic consequences of the U.N. sanctions and lacked access to food, health care, and education. These effects were compounded by changes in the law that restricted women’s mobility and access to the formal sector in an effort to ensure jobs to men and appease conservative religious and tribal groups.”

Then came the invasion.

What “Liberation” Looks Like

The U.S.-led invasion in 2003 exacerbated the desperation of Iraqi women and girls to unprecedented levels. It left them vulnerable to an underground sex industry and subject to severe methods of punishment by an increasingly religious post-invasion government.

A comprehensive examination into sex trafficking by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) explains, “Ousting the government and all systems of security left Iraqi cities vulnerable in the following months to gangs of men who kidnapped women and girls and assaulted them sexually.”

Many of the kidnapped were sold to nearby countries, as demonstrated in 2004 when houses used to “store” girls before they were purchased were uncovered. Though it is difficult to determine exactly how many women have been victims of sex trafficking, OWFI estimates that in the first seven years after the invasion, 4,000 Iraqi women and girls went missing, twenty percent of whom were under the age of 18.

As the country’s leadership took a turn toward religious fundamentalism – several mass killings of prostitutes and suspected sex workers followed. As the occupying power at the time, the United States was legally responsible for protecting and upholding the human rights of Iraqi civilians. It failed miserably.

Widows and Orphans

The loss of husbands and fathers over the last decade has left 2 million Iraqi women widowed. Furthermore, estimates put the number of orphaned Iraqi children at 5 million, most of whom are growing up without an education. As a result, says OWFI, there are now “more than 3 million women and girls with no source of income or protection, thereby turning them into a helpless population” and making them vulnerable to “trafficking, sexual exploitation, polygamy, and religious pleasure marriages.” (These numbers are from 2013.)

OWFI’s President Yanar Mohammed said the greatest tragedy has been the impact on the youngest generation. “We’ve lived through two decades of war,” she said. “Eventually we reached a point where the young ones have no good memory of life in Iraq.”

Women’s Rights Set Back 70 Years

Unsurprisingly, most U.S. media outlets have failed to accurately cover the deterioration of women’s rights in Iraq. More often than not, they point to a post-invasion constitutional quota, which reserves 25 percent of Parliament seats for women, as proof that Iraq is on the path to gender equality. But, as Haifa Zangana put it in the Guardian, “this token statistic has repeatedly been trotted out to cover up the regime’s crimes against women.”

Nadje Al-Ali, author of the book “What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq” is also critical of the quota. She argues that the women who benefit from it are “the sisters, daughters, and wives of the male conservative leaders” who vote just like them and do not represent ordinary Iraqi women. Al-Ali argues that the Iraq War set women’s rights back 70 years. 

More Wisdom of the Jewish Sages Part 2

Here is my last wisdom of the sages quotes. Also, see here and here. Are these some of the enlightening mantras that Jews sit around meditating on?

I frequently get Judaism and Jainism mixed up because they are both so full of wisdom and peace. Here are two quotes from the sages of Judaism.

I recommend that the Israeli airport enshrine these poetic pieces of literature and display them in a place that all the visitors can see so they know they're in the "only free democracy in the middle east."

This way they won't mistake themselves for being in a place like Canada, (a place that promotes that pesky "multiculturalism" that anti-racist Hitler is talking about in this video.)

The first thought that ran through my mind after reading the quotes below.... are these Zen Koans? The wisdom they contain is priceless. Drink them in. Namaste.

The Zionist Takeover Of Canada

Besides the article below, see here for more about the Bronfman family. They have played a strong role in Canadian politics. Also, see here to see the unbelievable control of the media in Canada and to learn about the fight for the control of the Bank of Canada.

============================================================================

IT ALL BEGAN with Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who ruled as Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1984. The year “1984″ which saw the summation of Trudeau’s policies—namely the Zionification of Canada—is an apt metaphor for the police-state grip that Jewry now wields on the once sovereign nation of Canada, currently a vassal of the global Zionist beast.

Although some argue that Pierre Trudeau showed himself as an anti-Semite and pro-Palestinian, in reality, he bowed to Zionist pressure both from American and Canadian Jewry. With the rise of the Jewish Lobby in Canada after Israel’s Six Day War, it was the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canadian Zionist Organization, and B’nai B’rith, that established the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) to act on behalf of Jewish interests in all of Canada’s domestic and foreign affairs.

Today under the Justin Trudeau administration, the Jewish Lobby has expanded its influence which enjoys almost complete control over the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, through the intelligence agencies of Canada. CSIS was started in 1984 by a Zionist Jew, and nothing has changed since then. If anything it has only become worse. The CSE is no better. These organizations are literally above the law and it is through them that the RCMP receives their intelligence information.

This is why you have activities like this happening and the strong connections between Israel and Homeland Security. See here for the Canada-Israel “Public Security” agreement. See here for a collection of posts about the connections between Homeland Security and Zionism.

Whatever Justin Trudeau says about Israel, actions speak louder than words, and when he takes actions such as this and this, it shows what he truly believes and who he is taking orders from.

Trudeau’s “moral” fixation on Israel and disregard of Israel’s “immoral” genocide of the Palestinians notwithstanding, one is inclined to believe that Jewish money and votes are the “obliging” motive behind Trudeau’s avowals to his most favored constituency.

And with such groups as the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee; the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (Canada’s counterpart to America’s AIPAC); the Jewish Federations of North America; and the Jewish Defense League, (see here for more about the JDL,) the stranglehold of Jewry on Canada’s national policies is secure. View here and here.

BEATING TRUDEAU INTO SUBMISSION

BOWING TO THE THREAT to cut off funding to Trudeau’s Liberal Party by Canadian Jewry, the former Prime Minister found himself in a position of humiliation and political compromise.

Due to his sympathies for the plight of the Palestinians after the Six-Day War, the Jewish Lobby reacted by pressing Trudeau into departing from the policies of his predecessor, Lester Pearson, who was averse to supporting Jewish causes so strongly in the government.

Trudeau now entered into a new realm of Canadian politics, namely, catering to Jewish interests over popular sentiment.

During this period, Trudeau appointed the first Jewish Cabinet minister (Herbert Gray), the first Jewish Supreme Court Judge (Bora Laskin), the first Jewish Secretary to the Prime Minister (Jack Austin), the first Jewish Envoy to the Hague Court of Justice (Maxwell Cohen), and the first Jewish Under Secretary of External Affairs from 1977 to 1981 – Alan Gotlieb - who then became Canada’s first Jewish Ambassador to Washington.

A swarm of Zionist Jews, who were incredibly biased toward Israel and the Zionist cause, soon infested Trudeau’s personal staff with high profile names such as H. Carl Goldenberg, Simon Reisman, Bernard and Sylvia Ostrey, Jerry Grafstein, and Mickey Cohen.

And ever since, Canada has been under the tyranny of Zionist rule. (Here I define Zionism as it traditionally is, those who support the cause for a "so-called Jewish" state in the middle east called Israel.) To learn more, view this book here, See this article and this newspaper article.

JEWRY SOUNDED THE DEATH KNELL
of free speech in Canada in 1975

When Trudeau’s invitation for a UN conference on international crime with PLO participation (holding observer status at the UN) to be held in Toronto was opposed by the Canadian Jewish Lobby, Trudeau caved into the intense pressure. (See here for how Zionism went against the UN.)

This was against the advice of his then Secretary of External Affairs, Allan McEachen, who wished to separate Canadian interests from Israel’s.

The Toronto Star, then under the auspices of the Joseph Atkinson Foundation, a Gentile entity, decried the cancellation as a “humiliation” to Canada in “abandoning” principle and “giving into” threats.

The Zionist issue came to a boil when Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachim Begin, was invited by the Canada-Israel Committee to speak at Toronto’s Beth Zedek Synagogue.

In a provocative speech, Begin called on Canadian Jews to press Trudeau to move the Canadian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. If Trudeau refused, Begin urged his fellow Jews that they were to deny Trudeau’s Liberal Party their votes and support the Conservative Party instead.

Trudeau did refuse, noting that Jerusalem was “defined by the United Nations as one of the occupied territories.” As far as Trudeau was concerned, Begin’s visit amounted to an interference in Canada’s domestic affairs, resulting, (in what one minister observed), Trudeau harboring a “passionate hatred” for Begin and undergoing a “thorough exasperation” with “Zionist pressure groups.”

But Jewry’s interference with Canada’s policies and its threat to free speech was not to be stopped. Since 2003, Izzy’s son, Leonard Asper, has been running the show, (literally), in Canada’s propaganda dissemination, in which all budding journalists’ attempts to present a balanced view of Israel’s activities and policies were censured.

With Canada’s Press and its most popular Television Network, Global, then owned and controlled by the Jewish “Izzy” Asper family, (fierce Zionists, whose media empire began in 1975), any exposure of views critical of Jewish interests at the expense of Canada’s, was not permitted. (Today it is owned by the conglomerate Corus, and absolutely nothing has changed as Canadian media has become more and more centralized and biased towards the cause of Zionism. See here for more about the concentration of power and centralization of media in Canada.)

THE FINAL BLOW

FREE SPEECH IN CANADA received its final blow in 1977, when, via fervent lobbying by the Canadian Jewish Congress and efforts by Toronto Jewish lawyer, Mark Freiman, the Canadian Human Rights Act was enacted into law.

The Canadian Human Rights Act made it a criminal offense to communicate by phone or via the internet any material that “exposes a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

The Canadian Jewish thought police, led by the Bnai Brith (who the ADL is a part of,) and the Canadian Jewish Congress, have enforced this law through various harassments, prosecutions. and lately, assaults on academic freedom and YouTube videos. This also happens because of the strong links between the intelligence community and Silicon Valley companies like Microsoft, Skype, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.

Take this along with Bill C-51 and the other information I am talking about. All of this is information that is very relevant for Canadians who think they are living in a "free country."

Israel Passes Law Targeting Human Rights Groups

Charlotte Silver

Israel’s parliament has approved a law that will require more than two dozen Israeli human rights groups to prominently declare that they receive over half their funding from foreign governments.

Known as the “transparency bill,” critics say the law is in fact meant to brand human rights groups as illegitimate.

After a lengthy debate on Monday night, the law received final approval by 57 to 48 votes.

In response, the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, issued a timid admonishment.

“Israel enjoys a vibrant democracy, freedom of speech and a diverse civil society,” the European Commission claimed. “This new legislation risks undermining these values.”

In June, the justice ministry released the list of organizations that would be affected by the law. The Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported that 25 of the 27 listed organizations worked on human rights or social justice issues.

They include well-known organizations such as B’Tselem, Who Profits, Breaking the Silence and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

By applying only to non-governmental organizations funded by foreign governments, the law shields right-wing and settlement groups in Israel that are lavishly funded by wealthy individuals and private groups from abroad.

For instance, a Haaretz investigation found that US private donors funneled $220 million worth of tax-deductible donations to West Bank settlements between 2009 and 2013.

A recent lawsuit filed in the US alleges that a coterie of wealthy Americans, including Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, Hillary Clinton backer Haim Saban, the recently deceased bingo king Irving Moskowitz and Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison, have sent $1 billion to fund the Israeli occupation, with $104 million going to the Israeli army in 2014.

After the law passed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the measure would help “prevent an absurd situation, in which foreign states meddle in Israel’s internal affairs by funding NGOs without the Israeli public being aware of it.”

Public records of Netanyahu’s last three election campaigns show that 90 percent of his contributions came from the United States, of which half was given by just three families.

Adalah, the Palestinian legal rights group based in Haifa in present-day Israel, described the law as a “grotesque game” that is “intended to persecute and incite against human rights organizations, a practice which is characteristic of dark regimes both past and present.”

Israeli justice minister Ayelet Shaked, who sponsored the bill last November, has stated that she does not believe that foreign governments should fund any political NGOs in Israel.

Redundant

The law requires groups to report their source of funding to Israel’s registrar for nonprofits, publish the information on their websites, and state it in official documents, including letters to government officials.

Initial versions had required that representatives of the targeted organizations wear special tags when speaking at Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

Israeli NGOs are already required to report their sources of income to the registrar’s office, which makes the information publicly available.

“It is therefore clear that the purpose of the law is to mark human rights groups that offer alternative positions and critique government policy,” Adalah said.

UN human rights experts have expressed concern that the law will chill speech of human rights group in Israel by subjecting them to unique penalties and requirements.

Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint Arab List, told The Guardian the law aimed to “intimidate and wipe away the few organizations that act and fight in the public sphere for equality to the Arab public.”

Israeli opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, denounced the law, telling reporters that it is “indicative, more than anything, of the budding fascism creeping into Israeli society.”

The law will go into effect on the first day of next year.