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.

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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.

Justin Trudeau’s Shame: Extending Carte Blanche to Israel

In addition to the article below, see here, here and here.  

Here’s a Middle-East multiple choice question for you (warning: one of these will get you condemned by the government of Justin Trudeau).

Would you rather that the Palestinian people 1) once again take up armed struggle in order to end Israeli occupation of their land or 2) pursue a non-violent strategy of Boycott, Divestiture and Sanctions (BDS) until such time as Israel recognizes the rights of the Palestinian people?

Advocating a return to the use of violence against Israel may or may not get you condemned by the Prime Minister. But it is definitely not okay to advocate for the non-violent BDS campaign. This was made clear by the government’s support of a Conservative resolution opposing the campaign “which promotes the demonization and de-legitimization of the State of Israel,” and called upon the government “to condemn any and all attempts by Canadian organizations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement, both here at home and abroad.”

This is a sickening violation of Canadians’ basic rights enshrined by Justin’s father 35 years ago. As the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair (who once described himself as an “ardent supporter of Israel”) said, the resolution “makes it a thought crime to express an opinion.” The NDP and the Bloc, joined by three Liberals, voted against the resolution.

That the Liberal government is so in alignment with Israel lobby groups raises a number of questions: Just who actually makes Canadian policy towards Israel? Did Trudeau think this through at all – such as, is this in Canada’s interests? But perhaps more to the point, is it even in Israel’s interests? Does the Trudeau government have some brilliant ideas about how to get Israel to the bargaining table? Or does it believe the current situation doesn’t need resolving? It smacks of political cowardice. It’s as if Stephen Harper still rules the day on this critical foreign policy issue. Indeed the resolution reflects Harper’s declaration that criticism of Israel’s government is the “new anti-Semitism.”

We are left to wonder whether the Trudeau government can imagine any action by Israel that would cause it to “condemn” its government rather than its critics. And to wonder whether it seeks to further polarize the region or help cooler heads prevail. Giving carte blanche to the actions of Israel’s increasingly extremist government simply reinforces its determination to never negotiate and to keep pushing the envelope, whether it’s building new settlements or slaughtering civilians in Gaza.

Against that prospect, how many Parliamentarians have even the slightest clue what the Palestinians are seeking through the BDS campaign? Do they know its origins?

As stated by movement leaders, Israel must: “End its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantle the Wall; Recognize the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and Respect, protect, and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” This latter demand is hotly rejected by Israel even though Jews from literally anywhere in the world have, through the 1950 Law of Return (to Israel and now the occupied territories) the same right.  

The BDS campaign was inspired by the successful boycott and sanctions campaign that finally brought an end to South African apartheid — a campaign, incidentally, given a major boost by none other than then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The BDS campaign was launched in 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society groups representing virtually every sector of Palestinian society “including all political parties, unions, refugee networks, NGOs, and organizations representing Palestinians living under occupation, in Israel, and in exile.”  The decision was rooted firmly in a commitment to non-violence and in international law regarding the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

Israel’s occupation is routinely compared to apartheid by Israelis – and not just critics of the government. Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general from 1993 to 1996, wrote:

“We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories …. We developed two judicial systems: one — progressive, liberal in Israel. The other — cruel, injurious in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture.”

Other senior Israeli political figures agreed. Shulamit Aloni, education minister under Yitzhak Rabin, and former prime minister Ehud Barak both made the comparison. Ehud Olmert, another former PM, declared: “If the day comes when the two state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights…the State of Israel is finished.” With the two-state solution on life-support — and no pressure on Israel from the West to revive it — the situation so feared by Olmert is arguably already here.

In fact, the BDS campaign may be Israel’s best hope to avoid Ehud Olmert’s nightmare. Perhaps that is why Israel’s extremist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so determined to fight BDS. In a 2014 speech to the powerful pro-Israeli US lobby group AIPAC, he referred to the BDS campaign 18 times, calling on American Zionists to “fight back” against BDS advocates.

The BDS campaign might not worry Netanyahu so much if it weren’t for the fact that Israel now ranks near the bottom of pile when it comes to world opinion. A BBC poll  in 2013 interviewed more than 26,000 people in 25 countries and found only 21 per cent of participants had a positive view of Israel, while 52 per cent viewed the country unfavorably. Only Iran, Pakistan and North Korea fared worse. In just the last year, the percentage of Americans viewing Israel favourably dropped dramatically from 70 percent to 59 percent while positive attitudes towards Palestinians jumped from 17 percent to 24 percent.

Justin Trudeau and his government could not be more mistaken if they believe they are doing Israel a favour by supporting the repugnant Conservative thought crime resolution. Every time a Western government turns a blind eye to Israeli apartheid it reinforces that system by signaling to Netanyahu that he can do whatever he pleases.

By steadfastly denying the apartheid reality in Israel successive Canadian governments in fact betray the long term of interests of that country — not to mention, of course, those of millions of Palestinians.

MURRAY DOBBIN, now living in Powell River, BC has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over forty years.  He now writes a bi-weekly column for the on-line journals the Tyee and rabble.ca. He can be reached at murraydobbin@shaw.ca

Nano-Bots, Mind Control & Trans-Humanism – And The Future of Humanity

Besides the article below, see here, here, here, here and here. 

You cannot discuss the nano-technology being used in today’s world without understanding something about the transhumanist movement. Within this tight group of technological autocrats, no pun intended, human beings, as created by God, or evolution, take your pick, can be vastly improved upon. We are meant to be immortal. So while I applaud the technology that allows a veteran to replace a lost limb, I certainly don’t plan on cutting off my right hand to replace it with a cyber-hand. Even the human brain should be reverse-engineered by 2030 according to some. It may sound fantastical, but this is the world that transhumanists imagine. It is at the root of GMO crops, eugenics, and eerily, mirrors the plot of the famous Matrix movies developed by the Wachoski brothers.

In an article published in Discovery magazine, and written by Kyle Munkittrick, seven conditions for becoming trans-human are aptly outlined. This is an immense subject, which could not possibly be covered in a single article, and the technology behind it develops rapidly, and is also heavily guarded. Below is my take on the movement as succinctly put as possible:

1.  Medical modifications (vaccines, nano-bots, organ substitution, etc.) will take the place of human functions, either replacing them or ‘augmenting’ them to better serve an oligarchy.

2.  We will begin to treat aging as a disease instead of a normal function of the cycle of life: i.e., a seed grows into a plant, a plant prospers and grows, a plant dies, it becomes fertilizer for the next generation of plants.

3.  Politicians will remove rights from humans increasingly as they become more like machines. Our sentience is being stolen from us already, and once it is suppressed sufficiently (though true awareness is Universal and cannot be destroyed) we will be easier to control, like remote-control robots.

4.  Neuro-implants and other prosthetics will replace the current biology as a normal and accepted paradigm. Genetic engineering is already altering the human genome drastically. Currently, they are testing out their mad science on animals and plants, but humans, are next.

5.  Artificial ‘intelligence’ will replace human cognition, integrated into our nano-bot matrix within the biological system. This will, in turn, develop into an AR (augmented reality) which can be controlled at the will of persons deciding what is acceptable action and what is not for a trans-human to engage in.

6.  Our average age will exceed 120, but we will take with us the same perceptions of the world that have created the current mess we are in. Without an abrupt halt to these maniacal technological plans --- the subtlety of human personality will be destroyed. While the ego is inflated to serve an elite class, the lesser-cultivated ideals of love, harmony, balance within nature, etc. will be destroyed. So who cares, really if we live longer?

7.  Reproduction will only take place through assisted reproductive technologies. Natural sex, and birthing will become an outdated, historical phenomenon.

8.  Legal structures will be put into place to support “One’s genetic make-up, neurological composition, prosthetic augmentation, and other cybernetic modifications will be limited only by technology and one’s own discretion.”

9.  Our rights as humanity will be completely replaced with the rights of personhood, and then an arbitrary change in the definition of a ‘person’ who can then be treated as a cyber-slave. (Your rights have already been taken away with Bill C-51 in Canada and the Homeland Security laws in the United States.)

So is this something you want to participate in, enthusiastically? To become ‘more than human’? It doesn’t matter if you aren’t on board. You are already being transformed into a cyber-human without your agreement. It starts with forced vaccines through Bill Gates’ and the US military’s technology. Nano-patches are already delivering many vaccines.

The European Coalition Against Covert Harassment estimates that a significant majority of the population has already been infected with nano-technology, to control our minds and behavior. (Also, see here, here and here for more information about bio-ethics and concerns about privacy and mind control.) The ECACH has already put forth a document to the EU Parliament requesting the cessation of:

“. . . weapons systems operating on new physics principles used to torture or inflict other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment including electronic weapons, electromagnetic weapons, magnetic weapons, directed energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, frequency weapons, genetic weapons, scalar weapons, psychotronic weapons, chemtrail aerosol weapons, implant weapons, nanotechnology weapons, high frequency active aural high altitude ultra low frequency weapons,[and] information technology weapons.”

Collectively these are called ‘new physics torture weapons.’ So it seems, the war for your consciousness really is playing out on the world stage. Apparently, nano-bots can ‘identify their host’ via a chemical signature.

“Under development since 1995, the military’s goal is to install microprocessors incorporating gigaflops computer capability into “smart particles” the size of a single molecule. One might ask why are they doing this? The answer maybe as simple as, they can. It’s all about control.  The power to control everything.”

Apparently, these nano-particles are being made of mono-atomic gold particles, and they are just an augmentation of the military’s drone paradigm. This is no joke. As the air is filled with nano-particles of smart fibers, something called BEAGLE – Application Programming Interface and High-Performance Computing Library for Statistical Phylogenetics – which can compute every move you make, and every single bodily function, including your heart rate, breath rate, hormonal activity, and so forth – for what purpose? Well, there is a Gamer video clip which hides the truth in plain sight. Reference at about min 1 and 14 seconds.

You can also see a video that shows nano-bots, though not in their smallest form, here. See here for a full list of information about nanotechnology if it seems unbelievable to you. Our entire DNA has been scheduled for nano-bot overhaul:

“Recently, scientists Anirban Bandyopadhyay and Somobrata Acharya from the National Institute of Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have built the first ultra-tiny, ultra-powerful “brains” for nanobots. The brains – just two billionths of a meter across – act as tiny computer transistors. But instead of carrying out just one operation at a time, like a normal transistor, the new devices can simultaneously perform 16 operations at once. In other words, the devices use parallel processing – like the human brain – rather than serial processing – like a normal computer. The researchers call this ability “one-to-many” communication.

The tiny machines are composed of 17 duroquinone molecules that act as logic gates. The researchers arranged 16 of these molecules in a wheel, and placed the last molecule in the middle, which acts as the control center. The entire wheel was constructed on a gold substrate.”

Just think Minority Report – utilizing  nano-tech BioAPI, where your coherent thoughts are read and sampled by a supercomputer in real time, you can be controlled before you even act on your desire to overthrow a government or host a sit-in outside Monsanto’s annual shareholder meeting.

That is the sort of world we are already living in. It is not the future ---- it is now!

The H+ shift of Google (Part 4/4: Transhumanist shift)

As shown during the three last blog’s article (part 1 on Health, part 2 on Artificial Intelligence, part 3 on Robotics), Google is emancipating from its original core business.

Before 2013, all purchases of Google were intended to develop and optimize services directly related to Internet (its core business), either in the domain of pictures, or data processing, web analytics, map software, ads, blogging…

But till 2013, Google seems to have completely changed its purchasing policy, and companies bought by Google are now related to various domains in addition to robotics, such as neural networks (DNNResearch), natural language understanding (Wavii), renewable energy  (Makani Power), wearable computing (WIMM Labs), movement/facial recognition (Flutter, Viewdle), home automation (Nest Labs), etc…

Larry Page himself, one of the cofounders of Google with Sergey Brin, declared in its Google+ Page: “So you’re probably thinking wow!  That’s a lot different from what Google does today.  And you’re right.  But […] there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives.  So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses.  And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.”

Google’s business is in mutation: this company is not focused on the IT domain only but also in the promising field of NBIC. The Nanotechnologies (N), Biology (B), Information technologies (I) and Cognitive sciences (artificial intelligence and brain-related sciences) (C) are improving and converging, in a sense that discoveries in a domain are serving the others domains, and this synergy allow fantastic advances.

Thanks to huge profits coming from its internet core business in which they are worldwide leaders, this war treasure allows Google to develop with strength many different activities which are all related to a transhumanism ideology.

As seen in part 1, transhumanism (often abbreviated as H+ or h+, as for Human+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with the goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, psychological and perhaps emotional capacities and capabilities, and thus reducing diseases and extending human life. Transhumanists do not consider diseases and death to be a fatality, and they believe that human beings should use all possible solutions offered by sciences and technologies to improve themselves.

Google is becoming one of the main architects of the NBIC revolution and actively supports transhumanism revolution. Some of the most famous Google members are openly and actively promoting this movement, such as Vinton Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist), or Raymond C. Kurzweil (appointed Director of Engineering at Google in 2012, and active member of Singularity University).

By applying Transhumanist ideology as an industrial dogma, Google today is a precursor to a strong trend: The underlying idea of Google is that each individual is an information system, or an ecosystem, of personal data. The advancements of Google are such in the field of IT that Google believes we can improve human beings through technical and technological ways, up to reducing death.

Beyond this Transhumanist ideology –whatever anyone can think of it–working in reducing death is the perfect way to answer to a global common fantasy, and for Google, to capture as large as the whole of humanity market.

This is the ultimate horizon and the ambition of Google in the coming years.

The H+ shift of Google (Part 3/4: Robotics)

See here and here for last articles of this series. 

After years of acquiring companies mainly in the IT domain, Google focused in recent months on robotics domain.

Google has indeed bought the eight major companies in the robotics domain in the world:

• Schaft Inc. (build humanoid robot),
• Industrial Perception inc. (use computer vision to better understand what they are looking at and handle non-standard situations),
• Redwood Robototics and Mekka Robotics (make humanoid bots and robotic arms),
• Holomni (make sophisticated wheels),
• Bot & Dolly and Autofuss (make immersive visuals for movies such as Gravity, and use of assembly line robots).
• The last one was on December 2013: Boston Dynamics, which is known for its robots such as BigDog, a rough-terrain robot that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads, the 29 mile-per-hour fastest legged Cheetah, and an agile anthropomorphic robot known as Atlas.

The engineer at the head of this newly created Robotics Division of Google is M.Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software.

By adding proprietary solutions already owned by Google today to its recent acquisitions, this company could create robots able to interact with humans and react to the real world ecosystem in a few months.

And it is obvious that huge synergies exist between health, artificial intelligence and robotics domains.

To echo all these future projects, Google recently decided to rent a huge military zone of 350.000m² belonging to US Navy, Hangar-One of Mosffett Federal, near Silicon Valley, which is composed of three warehouses and two roads, to have space to test all its future aerospace and robotics projects.

The H+ shift of Google (Part 2/4: Artificial intelligence)

Here is the last article was here

This blog post is the second of a four parts article. Please read the first previous blog article.

Google has been hiring leading researchers in the artificial intelligence space for years (Research at Google), including:

• Ray Kurzweil: Google’s Director of Engineering in 2012 (helping the company improve the accuracy of its search results), and co-founder of Singularity University. (See here for what he says about having our brains hooked up.)
• Sebastian Thrun: Google VP and Fellow,  led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and worked on probabilistic programming techniques in robotics, with applications including robotic mapping,
• Peter Norvig: Google Director of Research -formerly Director of Search Quality-,
• Geoffrey Hinton: Google Distinguished Researcher,  a computer scientist and psychologist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks.
• Or Jeffrey Dean: Google Senior Fellow in the Knowledge Group, working in Deep Learning techniques, and who is going to work closely with a newly acquired “mysterious” company called DeepMind Technologies.

Even if very little information is available on DeepMind Technologies activities, this is a cutting edge artificial intelligence company which combines the best techniques from machine learning (Deep learning) and neuroscience systems to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.

This company might be a huge help in the first primary goal of Google, by enhancing the capabilities of the world famous Google Search engine. The technologies behind search engines has evolved during years: by starting with keywords, then understanding synonyms of keywords as well, a new algorithm was quietly launched in September 2013 called Hummingbird, which was able to analyze queries semantically, trying to understand what the queries were really looking for. It is much more efficient for queries in natural language (conversational search), which is  one of the main missions of Ray C. Kurzweil: “My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google”, wired.

But beyond the will to provide a new generation of search engines able to understand better users and anticipate all their desires and requests, Google’s investments in this area prove that this company wants to offer more and more powerful artificial intelligence technology capabilities to integrate it in their current and future products.

Google and NASA have recently joined forces to launch the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab that will allow researchers at the two organizations to research artificial intelligence using a quantum computer. The lab will use a “D-Wave 2” computer, the world first computer able to manipulate 512-Quantum bits (or Qbits, the quantum analogue of the classical bit), particularly efficient to solve what are known as combinatorial optimization problems, which turn up in everything from genome sequence analysis and protein folding, to risk analysis. And a member of the Google Quantum AI Lab team wrote a paper on Nature on how Quantum computers are going to boost Artificial Intelligence. In addition, Google is also looking to build an artificial brain, aka “The Google Brain”.

Evolution of Artificial Intelligence technologies at Google is a real hot topic, and it will help to operate autonomous cars, improve medical examinations, make reactive robots with human behavior, or fight against death by understanding how our cells and organs function.