In words and deeds: the genesis of Israeli violence
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | January 16, 2018
Not a day passes without a prominent Israeli politician or intellectual making an outrageous statement against Palestinians. Many of these statements tend to garner little attention or evoke rightly deserved outrage.
Just recently, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, Uri Ariel, called for more death and injuries on Palestinians in Gaza.
“What is this special weapon we have that we fire and see pillars of smoke and fire, but nobody gets hurt? It is time for there to be injuries and deaths as well,” he said.
Ariel’s calling for the killing of more Palestinians came on the heels of other repugnant statements concerning a 16-year-old teenager girl, Ahed Tamimi. Ahed was arrested in a violent Israeli army raid at her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.
A video recording showed her slapping an Israeli soldier a day after the Israeli army shot her cousin in the head, placing him in a coma.
Israeli Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, known for his extremist political views, demanded that Ahed and other Palestinian girls should “spend the rest of their days in prison”.
A prominent Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, sought yet more punishment. He suggested that Ahed and girls like her should be raped in jail.
“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”, he wrote in Hebrew.
This violent and revolting mindset, however, is not new. It is an extension of an old, entrenched belief system that is predicated on a long history of violence.
Undeniably, the views of Ariel, Bennett and Caspit are not angry statements uttered in a moment of rage. They are all reflections of real policies that have been carried out for over 70 years. Indeed, killing, raping and imprisoning for life are features that have accompanied the state of Israel since the very beginning.
This violent legacy continues to define Israel to this day, through the use of what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe describes as ‘incremental genocide.’
Throughout this long legacy, little has changed except for names and titles. The Zionist militias that orchestrated the genocide of the Palestinians prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948 merged together to form the Israeli army; and the leaders of these groups became Israel’s leaders.
Israel’s violent birth in 1947- 48 was the culmination of the violent discourse that preceded it for many years. It was the time when Zionist teachings of prior years were put into practice and the outcome was simply horrifying.
“The tactic of isolating and attacking a certain village or town and executing its population in a horrible, indiscriminate massacre was a strategy employed, time and again, by Zionist bands to compel the population of surrounding villages and towns to flee,” Ahmad Al-Haaj told me when I asked him to reflect on Israel’s past and present.
Al-Haaj is a Palestinian historian and an expert on the Nakba, the ‘Catastrophe’ that had befallen Palestinians in 1948.
The 85-year-old intellectual’s proficiency in the subject began 70 years ago, when, as a 15-year-old, he witnessed the massacre of Beit Daras at the hands of Jewish Haganah militia.
The destruction of the southern Palestinian village and the killing of dozens of its inhabitants resulted in the depopulation of many adjacent villages, including al-Sawafir, Al-Haaj’s home village.
“The notorious Deir Yasin massacre was the first example of such wanton killing, a model that was duplicated in other parts of Palestine,” Al-Haaj said.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the time was orchestrated by several Zionist militias. The mainstream Jewish militia was the Haganah which belonged to the Jewish Agency.
The latter functioned as a semi-government, under the auspices of the British Mandate Government, while the Haganah served as its army.
However, other breakaway groups also operated according to their own agenda. Two leading bands amongst them were the Irgun (National Military Organization) and Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang). These groups carried out numerous terrorist attacks, including bus bombings and targeted assassinations.
Russian-born Menachem Begin was the leader of the Irgun which, along with the Stern Gang and other Jewish militants, massacred hundreds of civilians in Deir Yassin.
‘Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue this until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest,” Begin wrote at the time. He described the massacre as a “splendid act of conquest.”
The intrinsic link between words and actions remain unchanged.
Nearly 30 years later, a once wanted terrorist, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. He accelerated land theft of the newly-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, launched a war on Lebanon, annexed Occupied Jerusalem to Israel and carried out the massacre of Sabra and Shatilla in 1982.
Some of the other terrorists-turned-politicians and top army brass include Begin, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan and Yitzhak Shamir. Each one of these leaders has a record dotted with violence.
Shamir served as the Prime Minister of Israel from 1986 – 1992. In 1941, Shamir was imprisoned by the British for his role in the Stern Gang. Later, as Prime Minister, he ordered a violent crackdown against a mostly non-violent Palestinian uprising in 1987, purposely breaking the limbs of kids accused of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers.
So, when government ministers like Ariel and Bennett call for wanton violence against Palestinians, they are simply carrying on with a bloody legacy that has defined every single Israeli leader in the past. It is the violent mindset that continues to control the Israeli government and its relationship with Palestinians; in fact, with all of its neighbours.
We Need a Martin Luther King Day of Truth
By Edward Curtin | January 15, 2018
As Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 – people will be encouraged to make the day one of service. Such service does not include King’s commitment to protest a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resist the U.S. warfare state that he called “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”
Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest, the promotion of individualism at the expense of a mass movement for radical institutional change.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Dr. King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know.
The word service is a loaded word, a smiley face word. It has also become a vogue word over the past 35 years. Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, or delivering meals to the elderly, activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s radical message. After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.
The Assassination
King was not murdered because he had spent his heroic life promoting individual volunteerism. To understand his life and death – to celebrate the man – “it is essential to realize although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for a long overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.” Those are the words of William Pepper, the King family lawyer, from his comprehensive and definitive study of the King assassination, The Plot to Kill King, a book that should be read by anyone concerned with truth and justice.
Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects. And King’s message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and then urging Americans to make it “a day of service.” The vast majority of those who innocently participate in these activities have no idea who killed King, or why. If they did, they might pause in their tracks, and combine their “service” activities with a teach-in on the truth of these matters.
Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth,” he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.
Educating people about the fact that U.S. government forces conspired to kill Dr. King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.
William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against the alleged assassin James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures.
The Trial
This shocking truth is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty day civil trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried by the media in cahoots with the government.
Pepper not only demolishes the government’s self-serving case with a plethora of evidence, but shows how the mainstream media, academia, and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation. Another way they have accomplished this is by convincing a gullible public that “service” is a substitute for truth.
But service without truth is a disservice to the life, legacy, and radical witness of this great American hero. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people that they are serving the essence of MLK’s message while they are obeying their masters, the very government that murdered him.
It is time to rebel against the mind manipulation served by the MLK Day of Service. Let us offer service, but let us also learn and tell the truth.
“He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery,” King told us, “Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth.”
Monbiot Is a Hypocrite and a Bully
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | January 15, 2018
It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one.
Turning a blind eye to his behaviour, or worse excusing it, as too often happens, has only encouraged him to intensify his attacks on dissident writers, those who – whether right or wrong on any specific issue – are slowly helping us all to develop more critical perspectives on western foreign policy goals than has ever been possible before.
I do not lightly use such strong language against Monbiot, someone I once admired. But his column this week drips with hypocrisy as he accuses the right wing media of being the real villains when it comes to “no-platforming”. Monbiot writes:
But perhaps the real discomfort is that the worst no-platforming of all takes place within our newspapers. In the publications most obsessed with student silliness, there is no platform for socialism, no platform for environmentalism, no platform for those who might offend the interests of the proprietors. …
I believe that a healthy media organisation, like a healthy university, should admit a diversity of opinion. I want the other newspapers to keep publishing views with which I fiercely disagree. But they – and we – should also seek opposing views and publish them too, however uncomfortable this might be.
What free speech advocate would disagree with that? Except it is Monbiot himself who has been using his prominent platforms, at the Guardian and on social media, to discredit critical thinkers on the left – not with reasoned arguments, but by impugning their integrity.
Denied a platform
It started with his unsubstantiated claim that scholars like Noam Chomsky and the late Ed Herman, as well as the acclaimed journalist John Pilger, were “genocide deniers and belittlers”. It now focuses on childish insinuations that those who question the corporate media’s simplistic narrative on Syria are Assad apologists or in Vladimir Putin’s pay.
But worse than this, Monbiot is also conspiring – either actively or through his silence – to deny critics of his and the Guardian’s position on Syria the chance to set out their evidence in its pages.
The Guardian’s anti-democratic stance does not surprise me, as someone who worked there for many years. I found myself repeatedly no-platformed by the paper – even while on its staff – after I started taking an interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict and writing about the discomforting issue of what a Jewish state entails. My treatment is far from unique.
Now the paper is denying a platform to those who question simplistic and self-serving western narratives on Syria. And Monbiot is backing his employer to the hilt, even as he professes his commitment to the publication of views he fiercely disagrees with. That’s the dictionary definition of hypocrisy.
‘Selfless’ White Helmets?
The latest installment of the Guardian and Monbiot’s long-running battle to silence Syria dissidents arrived last month when Olivia Solon, the paper’s technology writer living in San Francisco, developed a sudden and unexpected expertise in a controversial Syrian group called the White Helmets.
In the western corporate media narrative, the White Helmets are a group of dedicated and selfless rescue workers. They are supposedly the humanitarians on whose behalf a western intervention in Syria would have been justified – before, that is, Syrian leader Bashar Assad queered their pitch by inviting in Russia.
However, there are problems with the White Helmets. They operate only in rebel – read: mainly al-Qaeda and ISIS-held – areas of Syria, and plenty of evidence shows that they are funded by the UK and US to advance both countries’ far-from-humanitarian policy objectives in Syria.
There are also strong indications that members of the White Helmets have been involved in war crimes, and that they have staged rescue operations as a part of a propaganda offensive designed to assist Islamic extremists trying to oust Assad. (Solon discounts this last claim. In doing so, she ignores several examples of such behaviour, concentrating instead on an improbable “mannequin challenge”, when the White Helmets supposedly froze their emergency operations, in the midst of rescue efforts, apparently as part of a peculiar publicity campaign.)
Guardian hatchet job
Whatever side one takes in this debate, one would imagine that Monbiot should have a clear agenda in support of hearing evidence from all sides. One might also imagine that he would want to distance himself from Solon’s efforts to tie criticism of the White Helmets to a supposed “fake news” crisis and paint those critical of the group as Putin-bots. According to Solon:
The way the Russian propaganda machine has targeted the White Helmets is a neat case study in the prevailing information wars. It exposes just how rumours, conspiracy theories and half-truths bubble to the top of YouTube, Google and Twitter search algorithms.
Those are the same algorithms that have been changed in recent months to make sure that prominent leftist websites are increasingly difficult to find on internet searches and their writers’ views effectively disappeared.
Yet Monbiot has been using social media to promote Solon’s cheerleading of the White Helmets and her hatchet job against on-the-ground journalists who have taken a far more critical view of the group.
As set out by Prof Tim Hayward, the Guardian’s response to criticism of Solon’s piece has been typical. The comments section below the article was hastily closed after many criticisms were voiced by readers. The journalists who were singled out for attack by Solon were denied a right of reply. A group of concerned academics led by Hayward who submitted their own article, which detailed publicly available evidence to counter Solon’s simplistic account of the White Helmets, were ignored. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s editors and the reader’s editor have ignored all efforts by these parties to contact them.
Given his claim to be an uncompromising defender of free speech and a fierce advocate of providing platforms to those who can back up their arguments with evidence, however discomforting, one might have assumed that Monbiot would at the very least have lobbied on behalf of Hayward and his fellow scholars. But not a bit of it. Yet again he has joined the dogs of the corporate media baying for blood. Instead he turned to Twitter to claim Hayward and Piers Robinson, an expert on propaganda, had “disgraced” themselves.
Undermining climate concerns
The many tens of thousands of leftists who defend Monbiot, or turn a blind eye to his hypocrisy, largely do so because of his record on the environment. But in practice they are enabling not only his increasingly overt incitement against critical thinkers, but also undermining the very cause his supporters believe he champions.
Climate breakdown is a global concern. Rewilding, bike-riding, protecting bees and polar bears, and developing new sustainable technologies are all vitally important. But such actions will amount to little if we fail to turn a highly sceptical eye on the activities of a western military-industrial complex ravaging the planet’s poorest regions.
These war industries fill their coffers by using weapons indiscriminately on “enemy” populations, spawning new and fiercer enemies – while often propping them up too – to generate endless wars. The consequences include massive displacements of these populations who then destabilise other regions, spreading the effect and creating new opportunities for the arms manufacturers, homeland security industries, and the financial industries that feed off them.
A true environmentalist has to look as critically at western policies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and many other areas of the globe as he does at UK policy in the Welsh hills and the Lake District.
All indications are that Monbiot lacks the experience, knowledge and skills to unravel the deceptions being perpetrated in the west’s proxy and not-so-proxy wars overseas. That is fair enough. What is not reasonable is that he should use his platforms to smear precisely those who can speak with a degree of authority and independence – and then conspire in denying them a platform to respond. That is the behaviour not only of a hypocrite, but of a bully too.
What’s Wrong with Liberal Jews?
Progressive except for Palestine
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • January 16, 2018
Jerry Seinfeld, the Jewish American comedian, who was performing in Tel Aviv Israel at the Menora Mavtichim Arena at the end of December, recently made the news over his real live adventure at an anti-terrorism tourism camp. The so-called Counter Terror and Security Academy named Caliber 3 is a tourist training camp near the Efrat settlement south of Bethlehem, which means it is, appropriately enough, actually built on land stolen from the Palestinians. The camp’s website commemorated the Seinfeld visit by posting notice of the participation of “the legendary Jerry Seinfeld and his family,” plus photos, in a vignette that has since been removed.
The Caliber 3 website describes itself as “the leading counter terror and security training academy, run by active members of the IDF.” The day visit includes a “shooting adventure” involving a simulated suicide bombing in a Jerusalem marketplace as well as a terrorist knife attack. The package, which costs $115 per adult and $85 for children, includes sniper training and a demonstration of the use of attack dogs against a terrorist suspect.
The bad guys in the scenarios were inevitably the Palestinians, invariably described as “terrorists,” and the heroes were the Israeli army and police who were, of course, protecting innocent Jewish civilians. Jerry was photographed grinning and his entire entourage cheered and waved to demonstrate what a wonderful time they were having.
Now Jerry Seinfeld is not just a funny man, he is also a hard-core Hollywood-by-way-of-New York liberal and he may actually believe nonsense like Benjamin Netanyahu really wants peace or that a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine would work just fine, not recognizing that that ship has already sailed. Most of his peers in the heavily Jewish entertainment industry are also politically liberal, though they would likely choose to be called “progressive,” the preferred nomenclature since Ronald Reagan made liberal unfashionable.
Jerry is probably full of warm and fuzzy feelings about racial injustice, illegal immigrants and voting rights in America but he is either unaware or indifferent to the fact that a fundamentally racist Israel is preparing to expel or imprison forty-thousand African asylum seekers and that hundreds of thousands of Arabs who are under the life-and-death control of the Israeli security services have no rights whatsoever apart from being tried by military tribunals where the conviction rate is 99%. Nor is Jerry or any of his Hollywood friends likely to stage a benefit for 16 year old Ahed Tamimi, who is in prison in Israel facing a possible life in prison sentence for having slapped an Israeli soldier from a patrol that had invaded her family home in her West Bank village shortly after shooting her cousin in the head.
I have to believe that Jerry doesn’t obsess much over his Israeli hosts having stolen someone else’s land and killing them if they resist. But I also have to believe that if Jerry were to witness a training camp like C-3 in the United States where the shooting of black people or illegal Mexicans were simulated he would no doubt be both outraged and disgusted, even though somehow shooting simulated Arabs and grinning while doing so does not appear to bother him one bit.
Unfortunately, Jerry the Jewish liberal is not that unusual. American Jews, who are the key to the continuing blank check American support of Israel, balk at recognizing the evil that the self-defined Jewish state represents even though both opinion polls and voting patterns suggest strongly that they are predominantly reliably liberal regarding both social and political issues. Israel does, in fact, reject the values of most diaspora Jews while also contradicting the moral and ethical tradition of Judaism itself, which it claims to uphold. It is the antithesis of what many American Jews believe to be the right way to behave.
As a theocracy that acts like every other theocracy, including neighboring Saudi Arabia, Israel exists to promote the interests and well-being of its own co-ethnoreligionists, which means that the concerns of other religious groups or citizens are basically of no interest whatsoever. And Israel is not only a theocracy, it is also a prime model of a national security state where the military and police have a relatively free hand. In its interaction with the indigenous Arabs, Israel is a settler colonial state that regards the original inhabitants as inferior creatures only fit to be ethnically cleansed or, at best, to do menial work for their Jewish masters.
Israel has consequently been called an “apartheid state,” but some observers who actually experienced South African apartheid believe that what is practiced in Israel, where Palestinians are harassed at numerous military checkpoints and are routinely denied building and residency permits to force them to leave their homes, is far, far worse. “Liberal Zionist” Michelle Goldberg, writing recently in the New York Times, put it succinctly: “Supporters of Israel hate it when people use the word ‘apartheid’ to describe the country, but we don’t have another term for a political system in which one ethnic group rules over another, confining it to small islands of territory and denying it full political representation.”
Recently Israel has demonstrated its essential thuggishness by taking advantage of the Trump Jerusalem decision to legalize the expansion of its borders farther into the West Bank while also approving the building of more than 1,100 new houses. It has banned travel to Israel by representatives of twenty international organizations that have been critical of its behavior, including the Quaker American Friends Service Committee that saved many Jews during the Second World War as well as the largely Jewish Code Pink and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
And the predominantly liberal highly educated and assimilated American Jews who choose to hold their noses and look the other way when Israel misbehaves exact a price on every other American. Lockstep support for Israel costs billions in U.S. Treasury provided and tax-exempt dollars annually, but does even more damage in terms of bad foreign policy choices and loss of respect from other nations due to Washington’s constant protecting of the murderous and corrupt Netanyahu government, defending the indefensible in a client state which contributes absolutely nothing to the well-being of Americans.
And then there are the wars fought at least in part on behalf of Israel, supported enthusiastically by the U.S. media and political class. Most recently, the White House and Israel have entered into a secret arrangement to destabilize Iran, which does not threaten the United States. Such pointless interventionism by Washington in the Middle East derives from the corruption of American politics and politicians due to Jewish money, a process that is currently working its way through various legislatures in seeking to define any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism while also driving the same, labeled “hate speech,” from the internet. At the local level, government job seekers and those applying for public grants must actually agree in writing in some states not to boycott Israel, incredibly imposing rules relating to a foreign government on American citizens.
The recent bad decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem came about mostly due to the millions of dollars that Israeli/American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson pumped into the Trump election campaign. Adelson, who regrets having once served in the U.S. Army instead of that of Israel, once claimed that the Palestinians exist “to destroy Israel.” He has his Democratic Party counterpart in Hollywood’s Haim Saban, the principal donor to the Hillary Clinton campaign, who has claimed that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel.
Indeed, liberal Jews understand perfectly well, just as do most other observers, that the Israel story is a tale of follow the money, even if it is not considered polite to say so. The Jewish oligarch billionaires club – Adelson, Saban, Bernard Marcus, Paul Singer, Larry Ellison – who are to a man obsessed with protecting Israel, work together with major Jewish organizations to dominate the American political class through their largesse. Inevitably, they expect a quid pro quo and they almost always get what they want.
And then there are the venal bootlicking politicians who wallow in Israel-love for tribal reasons, my favorites being Senators Chuck Schumer and Ben Cardin. Schumer has designated himself the “shomer” or defender of Israel in the U.S. Senate, leading one to ask how is it possible that the voters in New York elect someone who says openly that he will protect the interests of another country rather than the United States? And how does such a reptile become Senate Minority Leader? More money assiduously applied to the Democratic National Committee, one suspects.
Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism describes the situation with considerable clarity. He says Judaism is a religion and Israel is a country. The two should never be confused and active or tacit support for the bad behavior by Israel actually damages the ethical basis of Judaism. American Jews are first and foremost Americans and that is where their loyalty should lie, not with a foreign country.
Gilad Atzmon has a somewhat different take on the dilemma confronting diaspora Jews who are somewhat befuddled, if not completely convinced, by the Israeli government claims that it represents all Jews worldwide. He writes “if Israel defines itself as the Jewish State and decorates its F-35s with Jewish symbols, we are entitled to ask who are the Jews, what is Judaism, what is Jewishness and how all these terms relate to each other! Evidently these questions terrify some Jewish ethnic activists.”
Some would argue that there is growing sentiment among liberal American Jews, particularly the younger ones, to dissociate from Israel and to condemn its behavior. To be sure this would appear to be true, and there are also numerous Jewish dominated “progressive” organizations that are highly critical of Israel’s current government. Many of them are astonishingly ineffective, suggesting that there is a certain ambivalence among the critics. This arises in part, I suspect, because they ultimately want to protect Israel as a Jewish state, only demanding that it somehow behave better and be nice to the Palestinians, but there is no likelihood that that will happen in the foreseeable future given the lack of any significant political party in Israel that would support such a development.
This process of rationalizing ultimately contradictory theses has been described as working from inside the Jewish bubble and is related to the politics of Jewish identity. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) do not really see themselves as Americans speaking to other Americans about the impact of Israel on the United States. Instead, they identify as Jews addressing worldwide Jewry over the issue of how to support Jewish supremacy in Israel/Palestine as a sine qua non of Jewish identity while doing what is necessary to avoid unpleasant consequences. The effect of this ambivalence from inside is corrosive, leading some to believe that Jewish gatekeepers will successfully misdirect grassroots movements like Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to make sure that they do no real damage to the Jewish state just as they have already hamstrung groups demanding an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
It has also been observed that Jewish liberals who oppose Israeli policies frequently have more pity for themselves than for the people under Netanyahu’s jackboot and their proposals frequently defer to Israeli interests. And sometimes there are personal interests at stake. Rebecca Vilkomerson of JVP, who was blacklisted by Israel and will be unable to travel there, is married to an Israeli Jonathan Lebowitsch, who is a Solution Architect at Checkpoint, a cybersecurity company with ties to the Israeli military. She is now for the first time living with a reality imposed by the Israeli government that is analogous to what many Palestinians have experienced since 1948, i.e. being unable to go back to the homes that their families have lived in for generations. And she is a Jew who has broken no law, dealing with a Jewish state that is proclaimed to be the “only democracy in the Middle East.”
Other groups like J-Street veer even further in the direction of compromise with Israeli interests, basically wanting a Jewish state that is less offensive to the international audience, with some kind of fantasy concordat with the Arabs that will make the issue of what kind of place Israel really is less visible. Some time ago, I attended a J Street sponsored talk by a retired Israeli general who was supposed to be of the “peace” party. His message: “Iran must be destroyed.”
I used to believe that educating the American public about what is really going on in the Middle East would bring about a change in policy. I don’t believe it any longer because Jews control the media and the message. As Peter Beinart puts it, “In part that’s because establishment Jewish discourse about Israel is, in large measure, American public discourse about Israel. Watch a discussion of Israel on American TV and what you’ll hear, much of the time, is a liberal American Jew (Thomas Friedman, David Remnick) talking to a centrist American Jew (Dennis Ross, Alan Dershowitz) talking to a hawkish American Jew (William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer), each articulating different Zionist positions.”
And beyond the media there is the heavy hand of the agitprop being disseminated by the Trump Administration. U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who recently tried to expunge the word “occupation” from the State Department language describing Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, claimed falsely last week that the Palestinians and their leadership are to blame for the lack of a peace deal with Israel. The statement by Friedman denounced Hamas for praising a drive-by shooting that killed an Israeli Rabbi in a West Bank attack. “An Israeli father of six was killed last night in cold blood by Palestinian terrorists. Hamas praises the killers and PA laws will provide them financial rewards.” Friedman said. “Look no further to why there is no peace.” Friedman supports the fanatical settler movement and has never expressed any sympathy for the far more numerous Palestinian children killed in the past two months by Israeli security forces.
It is undoubtedly true that an increasing number of Jewish American liberals have been troubled by the Israeli police state, which politically has tilted increasingly hard right. Even with an accommodating media, the Israeli refusal to end the occupation of the West Bank and the strangling of the open-air prison that is Gaza have been very visible and have made many question the state’s democratic pretensions. The military domination of a subject population also has a demographic downside in that the land controlled by Israel includes over 6.2 million Palestinian Arabs and about 6.5 million Jews. The Palestinian birthrate is higher than the Jewish birthrate and, in twenty years, Arabs will outnumber Jews in what might be described as Greater Israel, but it is now clear that Israel as it currently sees itself will never grant those Arabs equal rights or give up its attempt to completely dominate the region from the Jordan River to the sea.
Why is all this obsessing over the paradoxical behavior of Jewish liberals important? It is important because American Jews are hugely over-represented in the places that matter: in the media, in entertainment, in politics, in financial services, in the professions, in the arts and in education. It has been my own personal experience that some prominent Jewish critics of Israel resent identical criticism coming from non-Jews and tend to use their resources to marginalize it, frequently alleging that it is motivated by anti-Semitism. That means that the goyim will never be able to shift the press or congress or the White House about how awful the connection with Israel really is, no matter what we say or do, but as soon as Jewish American liberals get on board and convince themselves that they cannot stand any more of the lying about Israel change will come. It is all about Jewish power in America, but this time as a potential positive force. Guys like Jerry Seinfeld will have to figure out that performing in Israel and playing around for a laugh at their counter-terrorist indoctrination centers that simulate shooting Arabs is not exactly acceptable. We might even get Hollywood on board to produce an honest movie about the plight of the Palestinians.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Statin Drugs – The Real Reason Official Guidelines Still Demonize Fats Despite the Evidence?
By Gabriela Segura, M.D. | Sott.net | January 15, 2018
Nina Teicholz, investigative journalist and author of the International bestseller The Big Fat Surprise, wrote an article for the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) in September 2015, which makes the case for the inadequacy of the scientific advice that underpins the Dietary Guidelines (Teicholz, 2015). The title of the article was “The scientific report guiding the U.S. dietary guidelines: is it scientific?” Ian Leslie writing for The Guardian reports that the response of the nutrition establishment was ferocious: 173 scientists – some of whom were on the advisory panel, and many of whose work had been critiqued in Teicholz’s book – signed a letter to the BMJ, demanding it retract the piece (Leslie, 2016). Prominent cardiovascular and nutrition scientists from 19 countries called for the retraction. However, to this day, the article remains published. The BMJ has officially announced that it will not retract the peer-reviewed investigation after stating that two independent experts conducted formal post-publication reviews of the article and found no grounds for retraction (Sboros, 2016).
Yet, behind every mainstream medical practice, strict questionable guidelines are still followed faithfully every day. Doctors are still following cholesterol targets that are often unattainable without cholesterol lowering drugs, but many do try to achieve their targets with extremely low fat diets recommended irresponsibly in dietary guidelines.
Unfortunately the rest of the world has followed suit on these dietary changes. Traditional high fat foods have been given up for the low fat scam. Promoters of the highly touted Mediterranean diet, with its olive oil and ‘low animal fat’, fail to mention the fact that there are still fat loaded recipes that were passed from generation to generation among the Mediterranean people. Lardo di Colonnata with its cured strips of fatback and herbs and spices; Greek barbecue which often involves an entire lamb roasted on a spit; or the kokoretsi which is made from the internal organs of the lamb – liver, spleen, heart, glands – threaded onto skewers along with the fatty membrane from the lamb intestines, all of these are foods of the long-lived Mediterranean people. Yet the ‘American style Mediterranean Diet’ selectively picks foods from the diet of the Mediterranean people to give the picture they desire. Ironically, many of the Mediterranean people have adopted this Americanized version of the ‘Mediterranean Diet’.
The truth is that cholesterol is a substance our bodies make naturally, and it’s absolutely essential to our health. Cholesterol is so crucial that the body produces some 1000-1400 milligrams of it each day, mainly in the liver. Cholesterol is also synthesized to a smaller extent in the adrenal glands, intestines, reproductive organs, etc.
We are told by the “Official Thought-Control Institutions” to limit consumption to less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol per day, but our liver’s production of cholesterol is controlled by a feedback mechanism based on how much we eat. If we eat a lot of cholesterol, we produce less, leaving much needed liver energy for other important tasks. If we eat little cholesterol, replacing it with carbohydrates and vegetable oils, then the body will produce the cholesterol from these dietary raw materials. However, a high-carb and vegetable oil diet yields a very bad cholesterol profile even when the cholesterol is in normal range. If we hardly eat any cholesterol and we block its production with lowering cholesterol drugs, then we are limiting the supply of something the body desperately needs for its proper function. Yet statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs, are among the most profitable drugs in the history of the world.
Restricting or eliminating cholesterol in the diet overburdens the liver, which now has to overproduce it through its enzyme HMG-CoA reductase from food in our diet. This enzyme is the one that is blocked by statin drugs for the purpose of lowering the amount of cholesterol the body produces. But, as with all pharmaceuticals, it comes with a price. HMG-CoA reductase is also the enzyme needed for the creation of coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which is a key nutrient for energy production in our cells. CoQ10 is also a major antioxidant. People complain of muscle cramps or aches while on statins drugs. Keep in mind that your heart is a muscle as well. Coincidence or not, the incidence of congestive heart failure has spiked during the time statins have been a top selling drug. Even when statin drugs are not at fault for the increased prevalence of congestive heart failure during the last decades, we don’t necessarily want to decrease CoQ10 levels in a failing heart.
Coenzyme Q10 – also called ubiquinone, which means ‘occurring everywhere’ – plays an important role in the manufacture of ATP, the fuel of our cells. It is present in every cell of our bodies, especially in the very active cells of our hearts. Depriving the heart of CoQ10 is like removing the spark plug from an engine. It just won’t work. Low levels of CoQ10 are involved in practically all cardiovascular diseases including angina, hypertension, cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure (Sarter, 2002). It is ironic that statins, for “heart health”, block coenzyme Q10.
Statins’ many potential side effects include depression, confusion, memory problems and inability to concentrate. It hinders our body’s ability to fight microbes, increases liver damage, increases risk of cancer, fatigue, impotence, kidney failure, rhabdomyolysis (destruction of muscle cells) and shortness of breath among other things (for a database on statin adverse effects, see here). Cholesterol levels that are below 150 mg/dL may increase the risk for cancer, hormonal imbalances, depression, sexual dysfunction, memory loss, Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, suicide, and violent behavior.
As scientists are beginning to understand the intricacies of cholesterol’s role in the function of our trillions of cell membranes, including the details of nutrient transport across membranes, they are starting to realize what a bad idea this whole statin business is. Well, some of them are, anyway. According to some researchers:
Current guidelines encourage ambitious long term cholesterol lowering with statins, in order to decrease cardiovascular disease events. However, by regulating the biosynthesis of cholesterol we potentially change the form and function of every cell membrane from the head to the toe. As research into cell morphology and membrane function realises more dependencies upon cholesterol rich lipid membranes, our clinical understanding of long term inhibition of cholesterol biosynthesis is also changing.” (Wainwright, Mascitelli, & Goldstein, 2009, p. 289)
We make highly unstable and dysfunctional cell membranes when we restrict organic animal fats. This harmful effect has far reaching consequences. And doctors, unfortunately, don’t seem to be receiving this information.
The past decade of research has shown the importance of cholesterol-rich membranes and their fundamental implications for our brain and nervous tissue, immune system and all areas where lipoproteins are created, secreted, delivered and utilized. Cholesterol is so vital to the formation and correct operation of the brain that neurons require additional cholesterol to be secreted by brain cells. No wonder some people lose their memories with statin therapy!
Statin drugs also impair the secretion of new myelin, the fatty coating that covers the nerve cells and facilitates their firing. The connection between cholesterol and its fundamental role in the immune system and in the cell membrane should also be kept in mind when it comes to autoimmune diseases.
Modern guidelines say that it is desirable to have a level of total cholesterol of less than 200 mg/dL. When I was in medical school, which was not that long ago, the upper limit was 240 mg/dL. Once upon a time, it used to be 280 mg/dl. Apparently, in 1970, the rule-of-thumb for a healthy serum cholesterol was in the 200 plus range. Now most doctors try to keep cholesterol below 200, which most people find very difficult (if not impossible) to achieve through diet and lifestyle changes alone. Since then, statin drugs like Lipitor became one of the all-time top-selling drugs in history (Angell, 2005).
The European guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention in clinical practice (Piepoli et al., 2016) recommends that very high-risk patients lower their LDL cholesterol to less than 70mg/dL (<1.8 mmol/L) or “a reduction of at least 50% if the baseline is between 70 and 135 mg/dL (1.8 and 3.5 mmol/L).” (Ibid., p. 2331) Conveniently, pharmaceutical companies have the drug just for such a drastic reduction. For example Orvatez by Merck which combines ezetimibe (blocks the absorption of cholesterol) and atorvastatin (a statin drug) can bring LDL cholesterol down to 50 mg/dL. Merck highlights in a chart made for doctors that if a patient has a baseline LDL cholesterol of 70 mg/dL, target LDL should be of 35 mg/dL! And I’m not the only one who sees a problem with this. As the Mayo Clinic shyly puts it:
“There is no consensus on how to define very low LDL cholesterol, but LDL would be considered very low if it is less than 40 milligrams per deciliter of blood… very low levels of LDL cholesterol may be associated with an increased risk of cancer, hemorrhagic stroke, depression, anxiety, preterm birth and low birth weight if your cholesterol is low while you’re pregnant.” (Lopez-Jimenez, 2015, para. 2-3)
The above-mentioned European guidelines include a disclaimer where we read the following:
“[the] Guidelines do not override, in any way whatsoever, the individual responsibility of health professionals to make appropriate and accurate decisions in consideration of each patient’s health condition and in consultation with that patient and, where appropriate and/or necessary, the patient’s caregiver. Nor do the ESC Guidelines exempt health professionals from taking into full and careful consideration the relevant official updated recommendations or guidelines issued by the competent public health authorities, in order to manage each patient’s case in light of the scientifically accepted data pursuant to their respective ethical and professional obligations. It is also the health professional’s responsibility to verify the applicable rules and regulations relating to drugs and medical devices at the time of prescription.” (Piepoli et al., 2016, p. 2315)
Since I have first hand experience of the way research is done in Europe, most specifically Italy, I decided to have a look at the disclosure forms of the experts involved in the development of these guidelines. As it happens, there is no direct hyperlink to the disclosure from the electronic version. I found it hyperlinked in a smaller font as the last section of the menu on a separate page at their escardio.org website. After a while you get good at digging for these details that very few are trained to look for and/or are interested in. The declaration of interest is a PDF file of 35 pages and it specifies that “the report below lists declarations of interest as reported to the ESC by the experts covering the period of the Guidelines production, from Task Force creation to publication.” (Available at https://www.escardio.org/static_file/Escardio/Guidelines/DOI_CVDPrevention.pdf)
That is, the declaration of interest only covers 2014 and 2015, and it is not given by a third party. Most of the authors have so many links to Big Pharma that their declaration of interest can take an entire page. The reader can have fun searching for Big Pharma sponsoring for the years not covered for both the sponsored and the few authors who had nothing to declare in 2014 and 2015. I challenge anyone to find at least one author who chose to attend only conferences that were not financed by Big Pharma as a general rule for his entire career.
As Marcia Angell, Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine states:
If drug companies and medical educators were really providing education, doctors and academic institutions would pay them for their services. When you take piano lessons, you pay the teacher, not the other way around. But in this case, industry pays the academic institutions and faculty, and even the doctors who take the courses. The companies are simply buying access to medical school faculty and to doctors in training and practice.
This is marketing masquerading as education. It is self-evidently absurd to look to companies for critical, unbiased education about products they sell. It’s like asking a brewery to teach you about alcoholism, or a Honda dealer for a recommendation about what car to buy. Doctors recognize this in other parts of their lives, but they’ve convinced themselves that drug companies are different. That industry-sponsored education is a masquerade is underscored by the fact that some of the biggest Madison Avenue ad agencies, hired by drug companies to promote their products, also own their own medical-education companies. It’s one-stop shopping for the industry.[…]
It’s easy to fault drug companies for much of what I’ve described, and they certainly deserve a great deal of blame. Most of the big drug companies have paid huge fines to settle charges of illegal activities. Last year Pfizer pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $2.3 billion to settle criminal and civil charges of marketing drugs for off-label uses-the largest criminal fine in history. The fines, while enormous, are still dwarfed by the profits generated by these activities, and are therefore not much of a deterrent. Still, apologists might argue that, despite its legal transgressions, the pharmaceutical industry is merely trying to do its primary job-furthering the interests of its investors-and sometimes it simply goes a little too far.
Doctors, medical schools, and professional organizations have no such excuse; the medical profession’s only fiduciary responsibility is to patients and the public. (emphasis added) (Angell, 2010, para. 35-36, 39-40)
If only health care professionals at large would take a stand against the massive conflict of interests from pharmaceutical and food industries and their role in the corruption of the medical science, it wouldn’t have come to the point where there are guidelines advising the reduction of cholesterol to levels never seen before in medical records. Another line of research would have been followed where dietary and environmental factors and their role in inflammation and our health would play a greater role. Hopefully we will wake up soon, otherwise we risk a guideline recommending zero levels of LDL cholesterol. It sounds absurd, but then, I thought that an LDL target 35 mg/dL would shock conventional practitioners to realize the absurdity of these recommendations, and that doesn’t seem to have happened.
Statin drugs are among the most profitable drugs in the history of the world. Those profits buy a lot of propaganda: lobbyists, advertising and marketing to doctors, and free continuing medical education. Think of what even a small percentage of their massive profits could do for prevention if it were invested in public education towards a truly health promoting diet. Think of all the diseases that would essentially disappear from the face of the planet. But expecting a corporation to willingly cut off its main source of profit is a pipe dream. Even if they knew the truth about diet, it would be kept as the most tightly guarded secret in history.
It’s really not in the drug-maker’s’ best interest to have people making healthy dietary choices. So instead of promoting prevention strategies, cholesterol drugs continue to post record-breaking profits and create poor health and side effects in the people taking them. Those people in poor health can then be treated with more drugs. How many people do you know on multiple medications for various ailments? Whether the cause if malfeasance or ignorance is largely irrelevant because the result is the same.
It is only your own awareness that can turn things around. The public is gradually awakening to the fact that statins are virtually useless for the vast majority of people who take them, and yet they carry significant risks.
A group of eminent doctors including the President of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Richard Thompson, argue in a declaration letter that a doctor making a case for these drugs can quite easily look ill-informed, biased or just plain stupid in the eyes of their patients. According to one of the letter’s signatories, Dr David Newman, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of clinical research at Mount Sinai School of Medicine:
I am always embarrassed when I have to tell patients that our treatment guidelines were written by a panel filled with people who stood to gain financially from their decisions. The UK certainly appears to be no different to that of the United States. The truth is, for most people at low risk of cardiovascular disease, a statin will give them diabetes as often as it will prevent a non fatal heart attack – and they won’t live any longer taking the pill. That’s not what patients are looking for. (Briffa, 2014, para. 20)
The letter was addressed to the chair of NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the United Kingdom. In the letter, the proposition to reduce the threshold for prescribing statins to those with a 10% risk of cardiovascular disease is rejected by addressing six major concerns (letter available at www.nice.org.uk/Media/Default/News/NICE-statin-letter.pdf):
- The medicalization of millions of healthy individuals
- Conflicting levels of adverse events
- Hidden data
- Industry bias
- Loss of professional confidence
- Conflicts of interest
So again we see guidelines being written to favor the industry and the over-medicalization of millions of people.
Ironically, the very same experts for some of these guidelines disagree, calling for expert groups such as the Adult Treatment Panel (ATP) IV to “abandon the paradigm of treating patients to LDL targets” (Hayward & Krumholz, 2012).
Blinded by the numbers, doctors will see LDL levels at 70 and say their patients are doing well. They could fail to see what might actually be in front of their eyes – an ill-looking and nutritionally deficient person. Cracking skin, plunging libido, muscle wasting, memory problems, blood sugar imbalances, premature aging – but hey, cholesterol numbers are right on the money! It is astounding to see how we as doctors do so little critical thinking, focusing only on arbitrary guidelines dictated by the same companies selling the drugs that are the only things that make the numbers possible. Talk about a collective blind spot facilitated by decades of programmed schooling. Even when a patient points out, ‘but I eat no fats and no salt and I’m getting worse!’, we might fail to connect the dots.
As if this weren’t enough, here’s another bit of irony. In one study, the use of statin drugs was associated with microalbuminuria (Van Der Tol et al., 2012). Microalbuminuria is a marker of poor endothelial function and it’s endothelial function which determines cardiovascular disease risk. Microalbuminuria is also a marker of kidney problems.
Similarly, in a study of nearly 26,000 beneficiaries of Tricare – the military health system in the United States – those taking statin drugs to control their cholesterol were 87 percent more likely to develop diabetes. The research confirmed past findings on the link between statins and diabetes risk, but it is among the first to show the connection in a relatively healthy group of people. The study included only people who at baseline were free of heart disease, diabetes, and other severe chronic disease (Veterans Affairs Research Communications, 2015).
In this same study, statin use was also associated with a very high risk of diabetes complications. Among 3351 pairs of similar patients–part of the overall study group–those patients on statins were 250 percent more likely than their non-statin-using counterparts to develop diabetes with complications (Mansi, Frei, Wang, & Mortensen, 2015). Statin users were also 14 percent more likely to become overweight or obese after being on the drugs. The study also found that the higher the dose of any of the statins, the greater the risk of diabetes, diabetes complications, and obesity. Ironically, it is those who have had a cardiovascular disease event who are prescribed higher doses of statin drugs.
Moreover, more frequent statin drug use is associated with accelerated coronary artery and aortic artery calcification, both of which greatly contribute to cardiovascular and all-cause mortality (Saremi, Bahn, & Reaven, 2012). An evaluation of thousands of individuals with no known cardiovascular disease and undergoing a coronary CT angiography which visualizes atherosclerosis, concluded that statin use is associated with an increased prevalence and extent of coronary plaques possessing calcium (Nakazato et al., 2012). So doctors might be prescribing a medicine that contributes to onset of the very thing they are trying to prevent.
In the meantime, people are getting increasingly high levels of calcified hearts. During heart surgery, the surgical instrument known as the ‘bone eater’ ends up being used to replace valves that should have remained silky and smooth. I know what I speak after witnessing and conducting thousands of open heart surgeries in three different countries.
Two top vascular surgeons have summarized statins in a damning report called “The Ugly Side of Statins. Systemic Appraisal of the Contemporary Un-Known Unknowns“. In the report they state: “The statin industry is the utmost medical tragedy of all times,” and that “statins are associated with triple the risk of coronary artery and aortic calcification.” (Sultan & Hynes, 2013, p. 180, 183)
The picture isn’t pretty. The decades of massive anti-fat propaganda has brainwashed all of us without exception. Upon being questioned about their dietary habits, a patient might guiltily recall all the fats they ate and think that those are to blame for their health woes. Never mind that they eat mostly carbs, or that most of the fats they do eat are of the processed, plastic and vegetable oil variety. On doctors orders, they remove the animal fat from their diets, thereby increasing the carbs and vegetable oils, the very two steps that will deteriorate their health. When and if cholesterol targets are not reached by these measures, then the doctor has ‘no choice’ but to put them on a statin drug.
There is, however, a small percentage of people out there who genuinely have a true genetic predisposition to high blood cholesterol called familial hypercholesterolemia, which is a condition which is characterized by an impaired or even lack of ability to metabolize cholesterol. This condition can have serious health consequences and sufferers may need medical interventions to bring their cholesterol levels down. But that doesn’t mean this can be extrapolated to all people who don’t have this genetic problem.
Medical research has not proven that lowering (or low) cholesterol in and of itself reduces risk of death from heart disease across a population (Siri-Tarino, Sun, Hu, & Krauss, 2010; Chowdhury et al., 2014). Men with very low cholesterol levels seem prone to premature death. Below 160 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl), the lower the cholesterol level, the shorter the lifespan. These men die of cancer, respiratory and digestive diseases, and trauma (Smith, 1997). As for women, if anything, the higher their cholesterol, the longer they seem to live (Teicholz, 2014).
Despite these facts, it is estimated that by 2020, revenues from statin drug sales will reach 1 trillion dollars. Never mind that most people taking these drugs are not at risk for heart disease.
References
Angell, M. (2005). The truth about the drug companies: How they deceive us and what to do about it. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Angell, M. (2010, May 1). Big Pharma, Bad Medicine. Retrieved from http://bostonreview.net/angell-big-pharma-bad-medicine
Briffa, J. (2014, June 18). Prominent doctors declare their opposition to the planned expansion of statin prescribing. Retrieved from http://www.drbriffa.com/2014/06/18/prominent-doctors-declare-their-opposition-to-the-planned-expansion-of-statin-prescribing/
Chowdhury, R., Warnakula, S., Kunutsor, S., Crowe, F., Ward, H. A., Johnson, L., . . . Angelantonio, E. D. (2014). Association of dietary, circulating, and supplement fatty acids with coronary risk. Annals of Internal Medicine, 160(6), 398-406. doi:10.7326/m13-1788
Hayward, R. A., & Krumholz, H. M. (2012). Three reasons to abandon low-density lipoprotein targets: An open letter to the adult treatment panel IV of the National Institutes of Health. Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, 5(1), 2-5. doi:10.1161/circoutcomes.111.964676
Leslie, I. (2016, April 07). The sugar conspiracy | Ian Leslie. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
Lopez-Jimenez, F. (2015, October 30). Cholesterol level: Can it be too low? Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-cholesterol/expert-answers/cholesterol-level/faq-20057952
Mansi, I., Frei, C. R., Wang, C., & Mortensen, E. M. (2015). Statins and new-onset diabetes mellitus and diabetic complications: A retrospective cohort study of US healthy adults. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 30(11), 1599-1610. doi:10.1007/s11606-015-3335-1
Nakazato, R., Gransar, H., Berman, D. S., Cheng, V. Y., Lin, F. Y., Achenbach, S., . . . Min, J. K. (2012). Statins use and coronary artery plaque composition: Results from the International Multicenter CONFIRM Registry. Atherosclerosis, 225(1), 148-153. doi:10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2012.08.002
Piepoli, M. F., Hoes, A. W., Agewall, S., Albus, C., Brotons, C., Catapano, A. L., . . . Verschuren, W. M. (2016). 2016 European Guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention in clinical practice. European Heart Journal, 37(29), 2315-2381. doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehw106
Saremi, A., Bahn, G., & Reaven, P. D. (2012). Progression of vascular calcification is increased with statin use in the Veterans Affairs Diabetes Trial (VADT). Diabetes Care, 35(11), 2390-2392. doi:10.2337/dc12-0464
Sarter, B. (2002). Coenzyme Q10 and cardiovascular disease: A review. The Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, 16(4), 9-20. doi:10.1097/00005082-200207000-00003
Sboros, M. (2016, December 10). Victory for Teicholz in battle of butter. Retrieved from http://foodmed.net/2016/12/04/victory-teicholz-battle-of-butter-bmj/
Siri-Tarino, P. W., Sun, Q., Hu, F. B., & Krauss, R. M. (2010). Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 91(3), 535-546. doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.27725
Sultan, S., & Hynes, N. (2013). The ugly side of statins. Systemic appraisal of the contemporary un-known unknowns. Open Journal of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases, 03(03), 179-185. doi:10.4236/ojemd.2013.33025
Teicholz, N. (2014). The big fat surprise: Why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Van Der Tol, A., Van Biesen, W., Van Laecke, S., Bogaerts, K., De Lombaert, K., Warrinnier, H., & Vanholder, R. (2012). Statin use and the presence of microalbuminuria. Results from the ERICABEL trial: A non-interventional epidemiological cohort study. PLoS ONE, 7(2). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031639
Veterans Affairs Research Communications. (2015, May 07). Strong statin-diabetes link seen in large study. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150507145328.htm
Wainwright, G., Mascitelli, L., & Goldstein, M. R. (2009). Cholesterol lowering therapies and membrane cholesterol. Stable plaque at the expense of unstable membranes? Archives of Medical Science, (5), 289-295.
Dr. Gaby was born into a mixed Eastern-Western family in Costa Rica and she is a countryside family medicine doctor and former heart surgeon. Her research in the medical field, the true nature of our world and all things related to healing have taken her to Italy, Canada, France and Spain. Gaby is co-host of the ‘Health and Wellness’ show on the SOTT Radio Network and her writings can be found at The Health Matrix.
Denmark wants huge hike in military budget ‘to deter Russia’
Press TV – January 16, 2018
The Danish government aims to increase its military spending to counter an alleged security threat from Russia in Eastern Europe.
During a visit to the Danish Air Force team in Lithuania on Monday, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said his center-right minority government needed to persuade the Danish parliament next month to back a proposed, whopping 20-percent hike in Denmark’s military budget over a five-year period.
“We want to look at ourselves as a core NATO member. And in order to behave like such a member, we need to increase our expenditures,” Rasmussen said.
An agreement made in 2006 calls on NATO member countries to have a military spending of at least two percent of their GDP. While many members of the military alliance have refused to allocate that percentage of their GDP to the military, some have recently been invoking the agreement in an ostensible attempt to deter Russia.
The Danish prime minister said his country’s military budget needed a “substantial increase.”
“Five years ago we thought that the defense line, so to speak, would not be in Europe, but would be international operations. Now we realize that we need to have the capability to do both,” he added.
The brandishing of a “Russian threat” comes while NATO member states have significantly increased their military activities near Russia’s western borders in recent years.
Last week, Denmark deployed 200 troops to a UK-led NATO mission in Estonia, citing the alleged threat from Russia. NATO has deployed around 4,000 troops, consisting of four battle groups, to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland — all near Russian borders — in recent years.
Russia, realizing that security threat under its nose, has held several military drills to maintain preparedness. The NATO countries have then referred to those drills as signs that Russia has aggressive and not defensive intentions.
NATO — largely made up of Western European countries — also accuses Russia of having a hand in the crisis in Ukraine, which Moscow denies.
Eastern Ukraine has been the site of a conflict since 2014, when the government in Kiev started a crackdown on pro-Russia protests in the country. Earlier that same year, the Crimean Peninsula, then Ukrainian territory, voted in a referendum to separate from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Western countries branded the subsequent unification as an “annexation” of the territory by Russia, and Ukraine soon confronted pro-Russia protests elsewhere — in its eastern Donbass region — with a heavy hand.
The crisis in the Donbass soon turned into an armed conflict, which has so far left over 10,000 people dead and more than a million others displaced. Western countries have blamed Russia, which denies any involvement.
“Russia’s behavior has created an unpredictable and unstable security environment in the Baltic Sea region,” Lokke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, said at a joint news conference with Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis in the capital, Riga.
“Given the Russian aggression and what happened in Crimea, I think we simply have to be realistic about things and invest more in our security,” he said.
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Book Excerpt
World War Two Was Not a Just War
By David Swanson | September 20, 2016
Excerpted from the just released book War Is Never Just.
World War II is often called “the good war,” and has been since the U.S. war on Vietnam to which it was then contrasted. World War II so dominates U.S. and therefore Western entertainment and education, that “good” often comes to mean something more than “just.” The winner of the “Miss Italy” beauty pageant earlier this year got herself into a bit of a scandal by declaring that she would have liked to live through World War II. While she was mocked, she was clearly not alone. Many would like to be part of something widely depicted as noble, heroic, and exciting. Should they actually find a time machine, I recommend they read the statements of some actual WWII veterans and survivors before they head back to join the fun.[i] For purposes of this book, however, I am going to look only at the claim that WWII was morally just. … continue
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- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
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