Politico Does Journalism: “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”
By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA
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The Israeli savagery in Gaza has reached such levels of sociopathy that Western media—loyal tools of the imperialist oligarchy—are having trouble hiding the truth, as they usually do, and cracks are appearing in their coverage. This is one example. The reasons why they are doing this are complicated and belong in a separate article, which we hope to do in the near future. In any case, we are glad that Politico decided to run this material. It is desperately needed. And, of course, speaking for our audience, our gratitude and admiration for Drs Perlmutter and Sidhwa is beyond measure. —The Editor
PUBLISHED UNDER US COPYRIGHT FAIR USE STATUTES
None of this would have happened if the corporate media had been doing journalism instead of disinformation from the start.
We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.
American surgeons who witnessed the [Palestinian] civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Illustration by Erin Aulov/POLITICO (source images via Mark Pearlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa)
GAZA — In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.
external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.
“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”
The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.
None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.
“the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”
We have always gone where we were most needed. In March, it was obvious that the place was the Gaza Strip.
The two of us had never met before this trip. But we both felt called to serve, so we packed our bags, leaving our lives behind in California and North Carolina.
We landed in Cairo around midnight and met up with the rest of our group of 12: an emergency nurse, a physical therapist, an anesthesiologist, another trauma surgeon, a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, two cardiac surgeons and two pulmonary and critical care intensivists. All of us had volunteered to work with the World Health Organization through the Palestinian American Medical Association.
We find it instructive that the Gaza atrocities have reached such a level that, as expressed elsewhere, leading members of the Western mainstream media, including POLITICO, are now slowly publishing stories reflecting much of the truth about Gaza. CNN, usually a reliable megaphone for Zionist, imperial/warmongering propaganda, has done this already regarding Gaza (but not the Ukraine), and CBS, also a longstanding and highly reliable platform for hegemonist status quo lies, recently ran a segment that was certainly an example of what good journalism should be. (Please see: Children of Gaza (CBS Sunday Morning—Jul 21-2024)). We don't know if this trend will continue. Or how deeply this new, however sporadic, serious journalism phenomenon will go. The largely invisible powers that be have a huge investment in the current unipolar status quo, so narrative control is indispensable for the sustenance of their regime. They will surely find ways to keep manipulating this narrative to insure the perpetuation of their legitimacy.
who grew up in a Parsi household in Flint, Michigan and worked with a Palestinian-Jewish cooperative in Haifa after graduation from college. Neither one of us is religious. Neither one of us has any political interest in the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — other than wanting it to end.
The Rafah Crossing functions like a rural American airport: one baggage scanner, odd procedures and minimal facilities. Scanning the medical and humanitarian supplies from the dozens of aid teams one bag at a time was inefficiency defined. But it was the only reliable way to bring anything into Gaza. noted on the Senate floor, the process for clearing aid with the Israeli authorities is opaque and inconsistent. “Items that are allowed in one day can be rejected the next….” For this reason, everyone simply brought whatever they could as personal luggage — even surgical equipment — paying exorbitant airline baggage fees instead of bulk shipping rates. Now that Rafah is closed, even this route for resupplying Gaza’s hospitals has been cut off. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shown no signs of backing off, is scheduled to address the U.S. Congress on Monday. He will also meet with Vice President Kamala Harris.) famous “road of death.” ineffective process called “deconfliction.” The fact that “deconfliction” is so unreliable explains why “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker,” according to the International Rescue Committee. It works something like this: COGAT — the office of Israel’s Defense Ministry that coordinates between the Israeli armed forces and humanitarian organizations — agrees it will not attack traffic on a specific route for a specified period. This coordination is done through — what else? — a smartphone app. When the road turns green on the app you have 15 minutes to get on and off the specified route, and you can only request deconfliction of a particular route every three hours. After a 40-minute wait, we got the go-ahead and our drivers floored it, dodging foot and donkey traffic all along the road. all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, we could hear Israeli drones humming overhead. We headed to our living quarters — half of our team slept in one room in the adjacent Palestine College of Nursing, while the other half slept in one of the hospital’s outlying patient-care areas — and spent our first night sleeping under continuous, room-shaking bombardment. For our entire time there, we lived in constant fear that Israel would invade the hospital. Thankfully we never saw a single combatant, Israeli or Palestinian. had been destroyed, while the remaining partially functioning hospitals operated at 359 percent of their actual bed capacity. The World Health Organization describes them as “partially operational.” city of 419,000 people in southern Gaza. Now it functions as the only trauma center for well over 1.5 million people, an impossible task even under the best of circumstances. It is likely the safest and best-resourced city block in the entire Gaza Strip — and yet its horrors defy description. We first noticed the overcrowding: 1,500 people were admitted to a 220-bed hospital. Rooms meant to hold four patients typically had 10 to 12, and patients were housed in every possible space: the radiology department, the common areas, everywhere. Next, we noticed the 15,000 people sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hospital — lining and even blocking the hallways, throughout the wards, in the bathrooms and closets, on the stairs, even in the sterile processing and food preparation facilities and the operating rooms themselves. The hospital itself was a displaced persons camp. It’s what we imagine the first weeks of a zombie apocalypse would look — and smell — like. left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit. Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter. We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces. (The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”) acute hepatitis A infection in such overcrowded conditions.
Graffiti in the pediatric wing of Gaza European Hospital. Pearlmutter and Sidhwa quickly learned that their Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in the Strip. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa 500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October. After his home was destroyed and his family threatened, European Hospital’s director fled to Egypt, leaving an already overburdened hospital without its longtime leader. This sense of helplessness and disorientation was made worse still by the constant spread of hearsay about kidnappings, troop movements, food shipments, water availability and everything else of importance to survival and safety in a land under siege. Cut off from the outside world and unable to access reliable information about the forces controlling whether they live or die, eat or starve, stay or run, rumors spread and amplified. Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die, and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later. Images of Tamer from his Facebook feed that show him after he was shot and operated on (left), after he was released from Israeli custody (center) and after he was treated at Gaza European Hospital (right). one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. When Israel raided Indonesian Hospital last November, he was assisting the orthopedics team in the operating room. He refused to leave his anesthetized patient. He said Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg, breaking his femur. His own orthopedic team cared for him, placing an external fixator to stabilize his shattered leg. Next, Tamer told us, the Israelis came to his hospital room and took him, where exactly he doesn’t know. He told us he was strapped to a table for 45 days, given a juice box every day — sometimes every other day — and denied medical care for his broken femur. During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, he developed osteomyelitis — infection of the bone itself — in his broken femur. Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital. detainee abuse and torture at Sde Teiman. In it, the IDF denied mistreating detainees.) When we met Tamer at the hospital for treatment, all that was left of him was the disfigured outline of a human being, his body crippled by violence, his eye surgically removed and his mind haunted by torture. A man who once healed others was reduced to constantly begging for pain medications, reliant on others for everything — and wondering if his wife and children were even alive. Nearly all our patients arrived during mass casualty events. Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, had been under siege and bombardment since December. By the time we arrived on March 25 the town was inhabited by a combination of displaced persons from the north and locals who had not fled south to Rafah despite Israel’s threats against them. (Israeli forces frequently drop flyers or send texts demanding that Palestinians in Gaza leave their homes or shelters.) Extended families often concentrate themselves in as few buildings as possible. They told us they hoped that gathering in numbers would keep them safe — or at the very least, that dying together was preferable to dying separately. We noticed that bombing seemed to peak at iftar when families were gathered together to break the fast during Ramadan with whatever food they had available. We took Israa to the operating room. In the United States or Israel this would have been a 5-minute transition, but in the most functional hospital in Gaza it took more than one hour to get her there — working in such a severely compromised space, there was simply no way to get a trauma patient into surgery quickly. During her surgery, we realigned her broken femur, tibia and ankle in external fixators, explored an injured artery, cut chunks of dead tissue out of the massive wound in her thigh and her burned hands (a procedure known as debridement) and stopped her bleeding. It took three experienced surgeons almost four hours to do all of this. For the next 24 hours we were at her bedside almost continuously, knowing the traumatized and exhausted local staff couldn’t be expected to care for her properly. After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four, told us how she was injured: Her home was bombed without warning. She saw all her children die in front of her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was buried under the rubble of their home. We didn’t have the heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night. One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza. Two days later, while we waited in the preoperative area, one of the nurses pointed to a slight and clearly sick little girl. “Can you operate on her?” she asked. “Who is she? We’ve never met her before.” “Debridement,” the nurse said, shrugging and walking away. That’s how we met Juri, the 9-year-old girl with the horrific injuries. After washing away the maggots, we positioned her on her right side and got to work. We cut away four pounds of dead flesh, washing her wounds as aggressively as we could. Then we bandaged her up and booked her for another debridement the next day. He’ll come soon, we assured her. “You’re lying,” she told us, calmly. “He must be dead.” As it turns out, Juri’s father wasn’t dead. We found him waiting for her in the pediatric ward of the hospital. He was a loving and gentle man who spent all day every day scouring a land in famine for anything his precious daughter would agree to eat. He told us how Juri was maimed: The family evacuated from Khan Younis to Rafah, as Israel demanded. He and his wife left their seven children with their grandparents while they desperately searched for food and water. They came back to the house bombed and destroyed, their children all severely injured or killed. Juri’s surviving siblings were at another hospital with their mother. no longer exists in Gaza. And for Juri, “full recovery” means a lifetime of severe and permanent disability. famine and. disrupted cellular services be damned! <...> Gaza European Hospital and the surrounding territory to be evacuated. European Hospital is now empty, and has been looted by desperate people trying to survive. SOURCE: POLITICO
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- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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China has achieved escape velocity: it is now unstoppable
Pepe Escobar
scf
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The four-day, twice-a-decade plenum of the Communist Party of China that took place last week in Beijing, designing an economic road map all the way to 2029, was a stunning affair in more ways than one.
Let’s start with continuity – and stability. There’s no question after the plenum that Xi Dada, or The Big Panda, will stay on the helm until 2029 – the end of the current five-year economic drive.
And if Xi is healthy enough, he stays up to 2035: the fateful and uber game-changing target year for China to exhibit a GDP per capita of $30,000, with massive around-the-world reverberations.
Here we see the confluence between the progression of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the defining contours if not of a Pax Sinica, at least of the non-Hegemon-centric, multi-nodal world (italics mine).
The proverbial U.S. Think Tankland/Sinophobia axis has been hysterical on China not being able to sustain a 5% a year growth rate for the next few years – the target once again stressed at the plenum.
A Russian analysis by the Center for Geopolitical Forecasts makes a crucial point: “The Chinese themselves have not bothered about the growth rate for a long time, since in 2018 they switched to a strategy of so-called qualitative development, that is, not at the expense of traditional industries, but on the basis of high technologies and the creation of new areas, such as the production of new energy sources and artificial intelligence.”
Pres. Xi
Made in China 2025 – which is being implemented at breakneck speed: high-tech development leading the way towards a “high-level socialist market economy”, to be consolidated by 2025 and fully constructed by 2035.
The next step will be to attain the status of “modernized socialist power” by 2049, at the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The plenum proved once more that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – or, for the recalcitrant, Chinese-modified capitalism – is “people-centric”. The supreme values are national interest and the people’s interests – attested by the fact that large private corporations remain under the strategic control of the CPC.
It’s idle to try to find in the final communique at the end of the plenum any restrictions on private capital on the path to “universal prosperity”. The key point is that the role of capital should always be subordinated to the concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
Watch the reform ship steadily sailing
Everything is explained here in nearly didactic terms, chronicling the birth of the “Decision of the CPC Central Committee on further comprehensive deepening of reforms to promote Chinese modernization”.
What is now already referred to colloquially all across China as “The Decision” spreads across 15 parts and 60 articles, divided into three main sections, proposing more than 300 important reforms.
Take a look, for instance, at this passage:
“To ensure that the reform ship sails forward steadily, the ‘Decision’ proposes that further comprehensive deepening of reform must implement the “six principles”: adhere to the party’s overall leadership, adhere to the people-centered approach, adhere to the principle of maintaining the integrity and promoting innovation, adhere to system building as the main line, adhere to the comprehensive rule of law, and adhere to a systematic approach.”
Most of the “Decision” – 6 parts in a total of 13 – is about economic reform. Will China pull it off? Of course it will.
Just look at the precedents. In 1979 the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping started to transform a nation of farmers and peasants into a well-oiled machine of efficient industrial workers. Along the way, GDP per capita was multiplied by no less than 30 times.
Now the ramifications of Made in China 2025 are turning a nation of factory workers into a nation of engineers. Of 10,5 million university graduates a year, a third are engineers.
The emphasis on AI has led, among other examples, to the automobile industry being able to produce a $9,000 EV in complete automation and make a profit. China is already a global leader in EVs (BYD building plants in Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, Hungary), solar power, drones, telecom infrastructure (Huawei, ZTE), steel, shipbuilding – and soon, also semiconductors (thank you, Trump sanctions).
While the Hegemon spent at least $7 trillion – and counting – on unwinnable Forever Wars, China is spending $1 trillion in an array of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects across the Global South: the emphasis is digital/transportation connectivity corridors. Geoeconomic imperatives intertwined with rising geopolitical influence.
Hegemon hysteria aside, the fact is the Chinese economy will grow by a whopping $1.7 trillion only in 2024. That is more than in all but the last three years – because of the Covid effect.
Researcher Geoff Roberts has compiled a very useful list of what China is doing right.
And when it comes to the nitty-gritty, the numbers are staggering. Here are just a few, apart from GDP growth:
- Foreign goods trade is up 6.1% to $2.9 trillion year-on-year.
- The trade surplus is at $85 billion, up 12% compared to 2023.
- China had a record crop, 150 million tons, of cereal grains.
- The courier sector handled 80 billion parcels, up 23% year-on-year.
- SMIC is the world’s number two pure-play foundry, after Taiwan’s TSMC.
- China Telecom paid $265 million for 23% of QuantumCTek, patenter of Micius, the world’s first quantum communications satellite.
- Commercial aerospace launched 39% of China’s 26 rockets.
- Invention patents rose 43% to 524,000. China is the first country with 4 million domestic invention patents in force.
- Baidu’s 1,000 robotaxis in Wuhan will break even in Q4, and will be profitable next year.
- China has 47% of the world’s top AI talent. It added no less than 2000 AI courses to school and college curricula since 2019.
- On world-class institutions doubling as research leaders, 7 out of 10 are Chinese, including the top one: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ahead of Harvard.
Exceptionalist China “experts” believe their own fantasy that the U.S. allied with occupied Japan, Germany and South Korea would be able to match and surpass China’s pull with the Global Majority, because they have more resources and more capital.
Nonsense. Even more nonsense is to believe that the Hegemon’s NATO “partners” – as in vassals – will follow the leader in creating cutting edge technology.
The high-speed train that matters has already left the station. The 21st century is shaping up to be the Asian, Eurasian, Chinese century.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Noura Erakat: During Netanyahu Speech, Congress Cheered “What Is Essentially a War on Children”
Democracy Now!
Guest: Noura Erakat
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Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de... We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress, in which he defended Israel's brutal war on Gaza, lied repeatedly about the dire humanitarian conditions on the ground and refused to talk about how to reach a ceasefire to end the bloodshed. Although more than 100 Democrats skipped the speech, Erakat says the jubilant reaction from lawmakers in attendance showed U.S. leaders cheering "for what is essentially a war on children."
In a massive act of treason, congress invited indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to brag about his war crimes and insult Americans
Netanyahu and Zionists want your children to fight and die for Israeli wars
— Revolutionary Blackout Network🥋 (@SocialistMMA) July 25, 2024
The US will lecture the world about international law and order then greet a genocidal war criminal with ovation and applause. This is US hypocrisy on full display. pic.twitter.com/fqZXySNDDB
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) July 24, 2024
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Let’s Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu When He Arrives in Washington! He’s an international war criminal and also helped steal American nuclear technology
Philip Giraldi
OpEds
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America’s highly esteemed president who should be called Doodle-Head every time he opens his mouth came out with a beauty last Tuesday, claiming that if it weren’t for the existence of Israel “every Jew in the world would be at risk.” No Joe, you got it wrong. The reality is that Israeli behavior is precisely what fuels anger directed against what might be referred to as the “International Jewish Conspiracy,” whereby the wealthy and powerful Jewish diaspora enables Israel to literally get away with war crimes and mass murder without any consequences. Joe has also said the he has done more for the Palestinians than anyone, which means that he finds some benefit in watching them die under relentless bombardment by Israel with US provided munitions.
spoke Tuesday at the RNC, providing the standard line about poor suffering American Jewry, saying “President Trump will bring back law and order so that American Jews can once again wear a kippah and walk the streets without fear,” while waving a kippah with Trump’s name embroidered on it. This playing the perpetual victim is true in the United States most particularly, but it also works in Britain, France, Canada and Germany where fundamental rights like freedom of speech are under attack to protect the state of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a monster, even regarded as such in his own country due to his corruption and that of his wife. He knows that if the Gaza war were to end, he might quickly wind up impeached and in jail. Interestingly, one of his major crimes involved receiving $250,000 as a bribe from Israeli film maker Arnon Milchan, who made his fortune in the United States and was also involved in espionage directed against US nuclear technology to enable the Jewish state to develop its own secret – and illegal – nuclear weapons arsenal. Milchan and Netanyahu were together involved in illegally obtaining the nuclear triggers needed to detonate the nukes.
Milchan earned his fortune, estimated to be in excess of $3 billion, in part by spying for Israel to the detriment of the United States which is the country that has provided him with the opportunities to become rich and relatively famous. The Milchan tale is just one part of the successful effort by Israel to obtain the technology and raw materials for its secret nuclear arsenal. Preventing nuclear proliferation was a major objective of the US government when in the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy learned that Tel Aviv was developing a nuclear weapon from a CIA report. He told the Israelis to terminate their program or risk losing American political and economic support but was killed before any steps were taken to end the project. Many believe that Israel may have had a hand in the killing of both Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the American public is still waiting for the US government to release all the reports detailing what was obtained in the investigation of the deaths.
Israel accelerated its nuclear program after the death of President Kennedy. By 1965, it had obtained the raw material for a bomb consisting of US government owned highly enriched weapons grade uranium obtained from a company in Pennsylvania called NUMEC, which was founded in 1956 and owned by Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, head of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. NUMEC was a supplier of enriched uranium for government projects but it was also from the start a front for the Israeli nuclear program, with its chief funder David Lowenthal, a leading Zionist, traveling to Israel at least once a month where he would meet with an old friend Meir Amit, who headed Israeli intelligence. NUMEC covered the shipment of enriched uranium to Israel by claiming the metal was “lost,” losses that totaled more than six hundred pounds, enough to produce dozens of weapons. Such was the importance of the operation that in 1968 NUMEC even received a private incognito visit from Israeli top spymaster Rafi Eitan. In spite of all the evidence that something extremely shady had taken place at NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro was never charged with any crime.
With the uranium in hand, the stealing of the advanced technology needed to make a nuclear weapon is where Milchan and later Netanyahu come into the story. Arnon Milchan was born in Israel but moved to the United States and eventually wound up as the founder-owner of a major movie production company, New Regency Films. In a November 25, 2013 interview on Israeli television Milchan admitted that he had spent his many years in Hollywood as an agent for Israeli intelligence, helping obtain embargoed technologies and materials that enabled Israel to develop a nuclear weapon. He worked for Israel’s Bureau of Science and Liaison acquisition division of Mossad, referred to as the LAKAM spy agency.
personally recruited MILCO’s president Richard Kelly Smyth as an agent before turning him over to another Heli Trading employee, none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, for handling. Smyth was eventually arrested in 1985 and cooperated in his interrogation by the FBI before being sentenced to prison, which means that the Federal government knew all about both Milchan and Netanyahu at that time but did not even seek to interview them and ultimately did nothing about them, a cover-up to protect Israel that persists to this day.
Assuming that the statute of limitations on the crime has not run out it should still be possible to arrest and try the perpetrators, which would include both Milchan and Netanyahu. And there should be plenty of evidence if one were to look for it. An exhaustive investigation was carried out on both the thefts given their role in “nuclear proliferation,” though the complete reports have not to this day been made public as the Jewish state’s friends in government and the media have scrambled to cover up the direct Israeli government role insofar as possible. Also, there was physical evidence relating to the diversion of the uranium. Refined uranium has a technical signature that permit identification of its source. Traces of uranium from NUMEC were identified by Department of Energy inspectors in Israel in 1978. The Central Intelligence Agency has also looked into the diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant and has concluded that it was part of a broader program to obtain the technology and raw materials for a nuclear device for Israel.
Milchan initially retained his US visa even though his role in the trigger thefts had been exposed in the media. The multi-year residency visa was restored to him in 2016 through the intervention of Prime Minister Netanyahu with Secretary of State John Kerry, perhaps predictably, though Milchan has not traveled to the US recently and is believed to be living in Europe and is in poor health. He is also avoiding visiting Israel due to pending charges relating to his bribery of Netanyahu. The issue of Israel’s nukes is regarded as particularly sensitive both in Washington and Jerusalem as, under the Symington Amendment, the US is forbidden from providing military aid to any government that has secret or undeclared nuclear weapons. If the law were applied as written, US arming and funding Israel in its slaughter of the Palestinians would have to stop, but the deference to Israeli interests in this case is just one more example of how the Jewish state is above the law in the reckoning of American government officials and the media.
The tragedy is that spying for Israel appears to be regarded as something like a victimless crime, but in the case of Milchan it was dead serious, involving as it did nuclear proliferation on behalf of a nation that might generously be described as aggressively paranoid. And note that Benjamin Netanyahu, the very “statesman” who received 29 standing ovations from the US Congress, was also involved in the major Mossad operation to steal critical technology from the United States. In fact, even though the Israelis and their “friends” continue to rob America blind it is extremely difficult to be punished for doing so even after being caught red handed.
Prosecutions for Israeli spying are so few because of Department of Justice unwillingness to pursue them, according to a retired FBI agent who claimed that hundreds of potential prosecutions were rejected for political reasons. The actual convictions involve crimes so egregious that they cannot be ignored or covered up, like overheard conversations over lunch, as when Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin provided intelligence on Iran to American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffers Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen as well as to officials in the Israeli Embassy. Franklin went briefly to jail and was subsequently reported to be waiting on tables in West Virginia. US Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, America’s most damaging spy of all time, stole enough top secret codeword secret material to fill a room before he was arrested and convicted. He obtained Israeli citizenship while in prison and is now living in Israel and is celebrated there having been freed of his parole conditions by President Donald Trump. Apart from that, nada! Time to change all that.
Netanyahu, Milchan and the others are not friends of the United States, quite the contrary, and deserve to be treated like any other spies caught in flagrante. The American people should demand that the government begin to recognize that fact and act accordingly. Putting Arnon Milchan and his colleague Benjamin Netanyahu in jail, or even sanctioning them to strip them of their assets, as has been done to numerous Iranians and Russians by Joe “Mumbles” Biden, would be a great start. Arresting Netanyahu on his upcoming celebration trip to address the Joint Session of Congress and visit Biden in the White House would really send a message to the Israelis about proper deportment and would be even better. One can only imagine what it would look like to see Netanyahu in an American prison! Hard labor, please!
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Tiny Donkey Thinks He’s Actually A Dog | The Dodo
Solidarity with the poor and the weak includes our moral duty of protection and compassion toward animals, the most helpless sentient beings of all.
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Many donkeys have suffered immensely in Gaza, along with their humans and other animals. That's why we keep them on our minds.
The Dodo
Tiny Donkey Is Pretty Sure He's Actually A Dog | This tiny donkey’s so small he lives in the house — he even knows how to go outside with his dog siblings to pee! For more video of Tiny Tim, check him out on YouTube: http://thedo.do/tinytim. Love Animals? Subscribe:
/ @thedodo Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.
The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged with chains to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer any reason for this enormous senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.
