Israel, the United States, and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror

From September 11, 2001, to October 7, 2023 (and Beyond)

by Maha Hilal and Tom Engelhardt Posted onFebruary 02, 2024

I was uptown in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I still remember the distant smoke that you could see over the Hudson River. If you had told me then that, thanks to those four hijacked planes and a tiny group of al-Qaeda operatives, my country would launch a 20-plus-year “Global War on Terror” — with two full-scale disastrous invasions of distant lands — and that, even today, it’s never quite ended, I would have thought you mad. Yes, I remember the shock of seeing a plane plow into the World Trade Center tower on television and how it felt as if it were all too literally happening out of the blue. As TomDispatch regular Maha Hilal makes clear today, 9/11 has unfortunately remained an out-of-the-blue event for most Americans (justifying so much).

Who even remembers how the CIA, while pouring money into the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, would indirectly support a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden? Chalmers Johnson would later call him “a former protege of the United States” in his classic book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (published before 9/11). Who remembers how bin Laden had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group he would call al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army? Who even remembers that, as Johnson wrote so long ago, this country played a significant role in luring the Soviet Union into that very war, in the end sending the Red Army home in defeat and leaving the Soviet Union at the edge of dissolution? As President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly put it so long ago, “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the [Afghan] mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.”

So, yes, there was a long history leading up to 9/11 (of which I’ve only mentioned a part) that was conveniently forgotten or ignored after al-Qaeda struck so devastatingly. Today, Hilal, author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim, reminds us of the ways Israel has used 9/11, when it came to launching devastating wars, and of the similarities between that country’s response to its own 9/11, the Hamas attacks of October 7th, and the earlier American one. ~ Tom Engelhardt

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Israel, the United States, and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror

by Maha Hilal

In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not only eagerly embraced by Israel in 2001, they also lie at the heart of that country’s justification of the genocidal campaign that’s been waged against the Palestinian people since October 7, 2023.

On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered a speech to Congress in which he shared a carefully constructed storyline that would justify endless war. The United States, he said, was attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In that official response to the 9/11 attacks, he also used the phrase “war on terror” for the first time, stating (all too ominously in retrospect): “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

“Americans are asking,” he went on, “why do they hate us?” And then he provided a framework for understanding the motives of the “terrorists” precluding the possibility that American actions prior to 9/11 could in any way have explained the attacks. In other words, he positioned his country as a blameless victim, shoved without warning into a “post-9/11 world.” As Bush put it, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” As scholar Richard Jackson later noted, the president’s use of “our war on terror” constituted “a very carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse… specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inherently ‘good.’”

Your Fight Is Our Fight

The day after the 9/11 attacks, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a televised address to Israelis, saying that “the fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life. Together, we can defeat these forces of evil.” Sharon, in other words, laid out Israel’s fight in the same binary terms the American president would soon use, a good-versus-evil framework, as a way of rejecting any alternative explanations of those assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City that killed almost 3,000 people. That December, Sharon responded to an attack in Jerusalem by two Palestinian suicide bombers by saying that he would launch his own “war on terror… with all the means at our disposal.”

On the day of Bush’s September 20th speech, Benjamin Netanyahu, then working in the private sector after holding various positions within the Israeli government, capitalized on the president’s narrative by asserting Israel’s enthusiastic support for the United States. In a statement offered to the House Government Reform Committee, emphasizing his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism, Netanyahu stated, “I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say today, we are all Americans — in grief, as in defiance.”

Israel’s “9/11”

Just as the 9/11 attacks “did not speak for themselves,” neither did Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. In remarks at a bilateral meeting with President Biden 11 days later, however, Prime Minister Netanyahu strategically compared the Hamas attacks to the 9/11 ones, using resonant terms for Americans that also allowed Israel to claim its own total innocence, as the U.S. had done 22 years earlier. In that vein, Netanyahu stated, “On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, maybe more. This is in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. That’s 20 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy.”

But 9/11 doesn’t live in infamy because it actually caused damage of any long-lasting or ultimate sort to the United States or because it far exceeded the scale of other acts of global mass violence, but because it involved “Americans as the victims of terror, not as the perpetrators” and because of the way those leading the country portrayed it as uniquely and exceptionally victimized. As Professor Jackson put it, 9/11 “was immediately iconicized as the foremost symbol of American suffering.” The ability to reproduce that narrative endlessly, while transforming 9/11 into a date that transcended time itself, served as a powerful lesson to Israel in how to communicate suffering and an omnipresent existential threat that could be weaponized to legitimize future violent interventions. By framing the Hamas attacks on October 7th similarly as a symbol of ultimate suffering and existential threat, Israel could do the same.

Giving Israel further license for unfettered state violence under the guise of a war on terror, in remarks in Tel Aviv President Biden stated that “since this terrorist attack… took place, we have seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s. The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have tapped into… some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States.”

It bears noting that while Israel quickly deployed the rhetoric of the War on Terror on and after October 7th, weaponizing the language of terror was not in and of itself novel in that country. For example, in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Terrorism: How the West Can Win that spoke to themes similar to those woven into the U.S. war on terror narrative. However, in responding to Hamas’s attacks, Israel’s discursive strategy was both to capitalize on and tether itself to the meanings the U.S. had popularized and made pervasive about the 9/11 attacks.

“Surprise” Attacks

The power of that “primal feeling” was intensified by the way both the United States and Israel feigned “surprise” about their countries being targeted, despite evidence of impending threats both were privy to. That evidence included a President’s Daily Brief that Bush received on August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” and the possession by Israeli officials of a Hamas battle plan document detailing the potential attack a year in advance.

Just as Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a surprise, despite several years of conflict with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who clearly stated that U.S. violence in Muslim-majority countries was the motivation for the attacks), Netanyahu claimed the same after the Hamas attacks, ignoring Israel’s longtime chokehold on Gaza (and Palestinian areas of the West Bank). Addressing Israeli citizens on the day of the attack, Netanyahu asserted that “we are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens.”

By portraying terrorism as a grave, unparalleled, and unpredictable danger, both the United States and Israel framed their brutal wars and over-responses as necessary actions. Even more problematically, both tried to evade accountability for future acts by characterizing themselves as coerced into the wars they then launched. Netanyahu typically asserted on October 30th that, “since October 7th, Israel has been at war. Israel did not start this war. Israel did not want this war. But Israel will win this war.”

All of these tactics are meant to create and perpetuate “an extremely narrow set of ‘political truths’” (or untruths, if you prefer). Whether ingrained in the public consciousness by the United States or Israel, such “truths” were meant to dictate just who the “terrorists” were (never us, of course), their irrational, barbaric, uncivilized nature, and so, why intervention — full-scale war, in fact — was necessary. An additional rhetorical goal was to position the dominant narrative, whether American or Israeli, as a “natural interpretation” of reality, not a constructed one.

Israel has relied on such a framework to consistently peddle a depoliticized narrative of Hamas, which roots any violence committed in a fundamental and irrational opposition to the state of Israel and inherent hatred of the Jewish people as opposed to the longstanding regime of occupation, apartheid, and now genocide of Palestinians. Hamas and other non-state actors are, of course, always portrayed as “driven by fanaticism,” as Scott Poynting and David Whyte note, while state violence, in contrast, is “presented as defensive, responsible, rational, and unavoidable — and not motivated by a particular ideological bias or political choice.”

The Threat of Terrorism and Moral Equivalencies

Terrorist violence in these years has regularly been weaponized in the service of state violence by conceiving of its threat as almost unimaginably dangerous. Both the United States and Israel have represented terrorism as “catastrophic to democracy, freedom, civilization and the American [or Israeli] way of life,” and “a threat commensurate with Nazism and Communism.”

As with Bush’s argument that the 9/11 attackers were the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century” and that “they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism,” Netanyahu urged a mobilization of countries across the world to eliminate Hamas on a similar basis. To this end, he asserted that “just as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis and united to defeat ISIS, the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas.”

American officials regularly frame U.S. violence as a function of the country’s inherent goodness and superiority. For example, in September 2006, responding to criticisms of the moral basis for the War on Terror, Bush said at a press conference: “If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic… I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

By the time Bush made those remarks, the invasions of and wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other “counterterrorism” operations across the globe, had been underway for years. Given the staggering number of civilians already killed, drawing a demarcation line between the United States and “Islamic extremists” based on the slaughter of innocent women and children should hardly have been possible (though when it came to those killed by Americans, the term of the time was the all-too-dehumanizing “collateral damage”).

No stranger to weaponizing the language of moral equivalencies, Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted the victims of Hamas’s attacks in order to distinguish them from Israel’s. For example, he described Hamas as “an enemy that murders children and mothers in their homes, in their beds. An enemy that kidnaps the elderly, kids, youths. Murderers who massacre and slaughter our citizens, our kids, who just wanted to have fun on the holiday.” But like the United States, Israel has killed women and children on a strikingly greater scale than the non-state actors they were comparing their violence to. In fact, in the last 100 days of Israel’s war, it is believed to have killed more than 10,000 children (and those figures will only rise if you include children who are now likely to die from starvation and disease in a devastated Gaza).

Birds of Violent Rhetorical Feathers Flock Together

In a White House briefing a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden said, “These guys — they make al-Qaeda look pure. They’re pure — they’re pure evil.” Then, nearly three weeks after those October 7th attacks, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu asserted that his country was in “a battle” with “the Axis of Evil led by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their minions.” More than two decades earlier, President George W. Bush had uttered similar words, referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” who were “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

In each case, the “evil” they were referring to was meant to communicate an inherent and innate desire for violence and destruction, irrespective of the actions of the United States or Israel. As the saying goes, evil is as evil does.

As scholar Joanne Esch has noted, “If they hate us for who we are rather than what we do, nothing can be gained from reexamining our own policies.” In other words, no matter what we do, the United States and Israel can insist on a level of moral superiority in taking on such battles as the harbingers of good. And it was true that, positioned as a battle of good versus evil, the all-American war on terror did, for a time, gain a kind of “divine sanction,” which Israel has used as a blueprint.

In response to the recent International Court of Justice complaint submitted by South Africa charging Israel with genocide, a defiant Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted that his country would continue its Gazan war until it was over. He also mentioned a meeting he had with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which he told him, “This is not just our war — it is also your war.”

If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring. This has enabled both states to make use of specific schemas that were constructed and deployed in Washington to explain the 9/11 attacks — and now to justify a genocidal war in a world where “terror” is seen as an eternal threat to “liberal democracies.”

In his book Narrative and the Making of US National Security, Donald Krebs argues that, when it comes to politics, language “neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power politics.” In this vein, it remains critical to subvert such destructive and pervasive narratives so that countries like the United States and Israel can no longer maintain “necropolitical” rule domestically or globally — that is, in the words of Cameroon historian and political theorist Achille Mmembe, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Dr. Maha Hilal is the founding Executive Director of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab and author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11.  Her writings have appeared in Vox, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, the Daily Beast, Newsweek, Business Insider, and Truthout, among other places.

Copyright 2024 Maha Hilal

Terrible Tragedies Continue in Unjust War

by John J. Duncan, Jr. Posted onFebruary 02, 2024

The CBS national newscast on Jan. 20 showed the terrible anguish of a father holding a photograph of a little girl who had been killed a few days short of her first birthday by an Israeli bomb in Gaza.

This father and another little daughter had just been pulled out of the rubble, fortunate to still be alive.

Unfortunately, the dead little girl’s mother, brother, another sister and three of her uncles had all been killed in Israel’s massive bombing campaign.

According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel dropped 25,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip in the first month of the slaughter, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.

As of Jan. 21, the Health Ministry said 25,105 Palestinians have been killed and 62,681 have been wounded. Reuters reported that 178 were killed on the 21st, which it described as “one of the deadliest days of the war thus far.”

The U.N. estimated that 16,000 of the deaths have been women and children. The head of the U.N. called the killing of civilians and mass destruction in Gaza “unprecedented.”

Israel’s bombing campaign has been so massive, so extensive, that it has now gone far beyond anything that could possibly be justified under any concept of just war.

Columnist Patrick Foy wrote on the Lew Rockwell website, www.lewrockwell.com, on Jan. 19: “You don’t hear any objections from the U.S. Senate regarding whatever Israel does, no matter how outrageous.”

He added: “The U.S. Senate has been bought and paid for by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is a front organization. AIPAC should logically be registered as a foreign agent, a lobbying agent for foreign government.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a press conference a few days ago that Israel must have a prime minister who “needs to be capable of saying no to our friends…,” rejecting the U.S. policy of a two-state solution. The U.S. gives Israel $3.8 billion in no-strings attached foreign aid every year and billions more in other bills, in spite of the fact that Israel has been in much better financial shape than the U.S. for many years.

Many foreign policy experts over the past few months have said Israel could not continue this war without U.S. assistance.

The conservative Judge Andrew Napolitano, on his podcast “Judging Freedom”, has been leading a fight against this war and has had several experts on his program who have said President Biden could stop the fighting with one phone call.

However, Biden is just too weak. While Netanyahu said Israel needs a prime minister who can say no to the U.S., what this world needs now is a U.S. president strong enough to say no to Israel.

The only president who ever has was President Eisenhower when he rejected Israel’s demand for the U.S. to go to war with Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. And Eisenhower was courageous enough to do it on national television one week before the 1956 election, saying he would end U.S aid to Israel if it did not withdraw its troops.

Now, even 15 Jewish Democrats in the House and four in the Senate have criticized Netanyahu’s rejection of the two-state solution.

When Netanyahu said, as he did in his press conference, that Israel had to have complete control of all land “from the river to the sea,” he was saying the same thing that some pro-Palestinian students have been kicked out of school for saying.

It is sad to me that all Congressional Republicans except for Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie have been too afraid of the Israel Lobby to even criticize all this bombing of little children.

The late great conservative columnist Charley Reese wrote in 2004: “I harbor no ill feelings toward Israel. In many ways it is an admirable country, but it is a foreign country, and the U.S. should treat Israel the same as it treats every other foreign nation. We should make it clear, for example, that Israel’s enemies are not our enemies… but we will go on spending treasure and blood in (the Middle East) until the American people elect some politician brave enough to face down the Israeli lobby.”

Reprinted with author’s permission from The Knoxville Focus.

John James Duncan Jr. is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Tennessee’s 2nd congressional district from 1988 to 2019. A lawyer, former judge, and former long serving member of the Army National Guard, he is a member of the Republican Party. He is a member of the Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board.

 

Sick to Death: Unhealthy Food and Failed Technologies

by Colin Todhunter / February 5th, 2024

The world is experiencing a micronutrient food and health crisis. Micronutrient deficiency now affects billions of people. Micronutrients are key vitamins and minerals and deficiencies can cause severe health conditions. They are important for various functions, including blood clotting, brain development, the immune system, energy production and bone health, and play a critical role in disease prevention.

The root of the crisis is due to an increased reliance on ultra processed foods (‘junk food’) and the way that modern food crops are grown in terms of the seeds used, the plants produced, the synthetic inputs required (fertilisers, pesticides etc) and the effects on soil.

In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas noted a precipitous change in the USA towards convenience and pre-prepared foods often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives, including colourings, flavourings and preservatives.

He noted that between 1940 and 2002 the character, growing methods, preparation, source and ultimate presentation of basic staples have changed significantly to the extent that trace elements and micronutrient contents have been severely depleted. Thomas added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health.

Prior to the Green Revolution, many of the older crops that were displaced carried dramatically higher counts of nutrients per calorie. For instance, the iron content of millet is four times that of rice, and oats carry four times more zinc than wheat. As a result, between 1961 and 2011, the protein, zinc and iron contents of the world’s directly consumed cereals declined by 4%, 5% and 19%, respectively.

The authors of a 2010 paper in the International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development state that cropping systems promoted by the Green Revolution have resulted in reduced food-crop diversity and decreased availability of micronutrients. They note that micronutrient malnutrition is causing increased rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis in many developing nations. They add that soils are increasingly affected by micronutrient disorders.

In 2016, India’s Central Soil Water Conservation Research and Training Institute reported that the country was losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides over the years.  On average, 16.4 tonnes of fertile soil is lost every year per hectare. It concluded that the non-judicious use of synthetic fertilisers had led to the deterioration of soil fertility causing loss of micro and macronutrients leading to poor soils and low yields.

The high-input, chemical-intensive Green Revolution with its hybrid seeds and synthetic fertilisers and pesticides helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which, in turn, have adversely affected human health.

But micronutrient depletion is not just due to a displacement of nutrient-dense staples in the diet or unhealthy soils. Take wheat, for example. Rothamsted Research in the UK has evaluated the mineral concentration of archived wheat grain and soil samples from the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. The experiment began in 1843, and their findings show significant decreasing trends in the concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in wheat grain since the 1960s.

The researchers say that  the concentrations of these four minerals remained stable between 1845 and the mid 1960s but have since decreased significantly by 20-30%. This coincided with the introduction of Green Revolution semi-dwarf, high-yielding cultivars. They noted that the concentrations in soil used in the experiment have either increased or remained stable. So, in this case, soil is not the issue.

A 2021 paper that appeared in the journal of Environmental and Experimental Botany reported that the large increase in the proportion of the global population suffering from zinc and iron deficiency over the last four decades has occurred since the Green Revolution and the introduction of its cultivars.

Reflecting the findings of Rothamsted Research in the UK, a recent study led by Indian Council of Agricultural Research scientists found the grains eaten in India have lost food value. They conclude that many of today’s crops fail to absorb sufficient nutrients even when soil is healthy.

A recent article on the Down to Earth website reported on this study that found that rice and wheat, which meet over 50% of the daily energy requirements of people in India, have lost up to 45% of their food value in the past 50 years or so.

The concentration of essential nutrients like zinc and iron has decreased by 33% and 27% in rice and by 30% and 19% in wheat, respectively. At the same time, the concentration of arsenic, a toxic element, in rice has increased by 1,493%.

Down to Earth cites research by the Indian Council of Medical Research that indicates a 25% rise in non-communicable diseases among the Indian population from 1990 to 2016. Estimates show that India is home to one-third of the two billion global population suffering from micronutrient deficiency. This is because modern-bred cultivars of rice and wheat are less efficient in sequestering zinc and iron, regardless of their abundance in soils. Plants have lost their capacity to take up nutrients from the soil.

Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet and specifically micronutrient deficiency.

The large increase in the proportion of the global population suffering from zinc and iron deficiency over the last four decades has coincided with the global expansion of high-yielding, input-responsive cereal cultivars released in the post-Green Revolution era.

Agriculture and policy analyst Devinder Sharma says that high yield is inversely proportionate to plant nutrition: the drop in nutrition levels is so much that the high-yielding new wheat varieties have seen a steep fall in copper content, an essential trace mineral, by as much as 80%, and some nutritionists ascribe this to a rise in cholesterol-related incidences across the world.

India is self-sufficient in various staples, but many of these foodstuffs are high calorie-low nutrient and have led to the displacement of more nutritionally diverse cropping systems and more nutrient-dense crops.

The importance of agronomist William Albrecht should not be overlooked here and his work on healthy soils and healthy people. In his experiments, he found that cows fed on less nutrient-dense crops ate more while cows that ate nutrient-rich grass stopped eating once their nutritional intake was satisfied. This may be one reason why we see rising rates of obesity at a time of micronutrient food insecurity.

It is interesting that, given the above discussion on the Green Revolution’s adverse impacts on nutrition, the paper “New Histories of the Green Revolution” (2019) by Prof. Glenn Stone debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity: it merely put more (nutrient-deficient) wheat into the Indian diet at the expense of other food crops. Stone argues that food productivity per capita showed no increased or even actually decreased.

With this in mind, the table below makes for interesting reading. The data is provided by the National Productivity Council India (an autonomous body of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry).

As mentioned earlier with reference to Albrecht, obesity has become a concern worldwide, including in India. This problem is multi-dimensional and, as alluded to, excess caloric intake and nutrient-poor food (and sedentary lifestyles) is a factor, leading to the consumption of sugary, fat-laden ultra processed food in an attempt to fill the nutritional gap. But there is also considerable evidence linking human exposure to agrochemicals with obesity.

The September 2020 paper “Agrochemicals and Obesity” in the journal Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology summarises human epidemiological evidence and experimental animal studies supporting the association between agrochemical exposure and obesity and outlines possible mechanistic underpinnings for this link.

Numerous other studies have also noted that exposure to pesticides has been associated with obesity and diabetes. For example, a 2022 paper in the journal Endocrine reports that first contact with environmental pesticides occurs during critical phases of life, such as gestation and lactation, which can lead to damage in central and peripheral tissues and subsequently programming disorders early and later in life.

A 2013 paper in the journal Entropy on pathways to modern diseases reported that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup) and the most popular herbicide used worldwide, enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. The negative impact is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body, resulting in conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite these findings, campaigner Rosemary Mason has drawn attention to how official government and industry narratives try to divert attention from the role of glyphosate in obesity (and other conditions) by urging the public to exercise and cut down on “biscuits”. In a recent article, Kit Knightly on the OffGuardian website notes how big pharma is attempting to individualise obesity and make millions by pushing its ‘medical cures’ for the condition.

To deal with micronutrient deficiencies, other money-spinning initiatives for industry are being pushed, not least biofortification of foodstuffs and plants and genetic engineering.

Industry narratives have nothing to say about the food system itself, which sees ‘food’ as just another commodity to be rinsed for profit regardless of the impacts on human health or the environment. We simply witness more techno-fix ‘solutions’ being rolled out to supposedly address the impacts of previous ‘innovations’ and policy decisions that benefitted the bottom line of Western agribusiness (and big pharma).

Quick techno-fixes do not offer genuine solutions to the problems outlined above. Such solutions involve challenging corporate power that shapes narratives and policies to suit its agenda. Healthy food, healthy people and healthy societies are not created at some ever-sprawling life sciences park that specialises in manipulating food and the human body (for corporate gain) under the banner of ‘innovation’ and ‘health’ while leaving intact the power relations that underpin bad food and ill health.

A radical overhaul of the food system is required, from how food is grown to how society should be organised. This involves creating food sovereignty, encouraging localism, local markets and short supply chains, rejecting neoliberal globalisation, supporting smallholder agriculture and land reform and incentivising agroecological practices that build soil fertility, use and develop high-productive landraces and a focus on nutrition per acre rather than increased grain size, ‘yield’ and ‘output’.

That’s how you create healthy food, healthy people and healthy societies.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture. You can read his new e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order for free here. Read other articles by Colin.

 

Don Quixote Challenges the Gun Industry

by Vern Loomis / February 5th, 2024

When the chaos subsided after the Columbine school tragedy in 1999 and investigators were given opportunity to review law enforcement’s conduct in a calm and clear-headed manner, it was determined that police tactics had been inappropriate. Had police rushed in more quickly towards the sound of gunfire, it’s likely that some of the 12 students (and one teacher) killed that day would have been rescued.

In the solemn aftermath of the Parkland school massacre in 2018, charges were brought against school resource officer Scot Peterson, alleging that he had failed to confront the gunman. Had he been more directly confrontational, investigators concluded that some of the 17 lives lost on the day of the shooting could have been saved. Peterson was publicly shamed by onlooking officials, including then President Donald Trump who labeled him a coward. He was tried for negligence and perjury, but was found innocent of the charges brought against him.

It’s now clear that in 2021, had the parents of a deranged teen been more responsible, and had Oxford High School officials been more observant, the murder of four students and the injuries to six others would likely have been averted.

In 2022, 19 young students and 2 teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas by an 18-year-old gunman. After the massacre, it appeared obvious to investigators that proper protocol had not been followed. Had responders reacted with what was thought to be a previously established strategy, surely some lives would have been saved. Much of the blame for system breakdown fell upon Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief. Similar to the blame levied on Scot Peterson at Parkland, Arredondo received the brunt of public condemnation for what appeared to be his hesitant and indecisive action.

The violent shootings in our schools unfold in chaotic minutes. In their aftermath, investigators review the disasters in quiet settings void of gunshots, pressured by calendars rather than clocks. The Justice Department spent 11 months putting together a 600-page study showing how the tragedy at Robb Elementary School could better have been handled. With ample time, at comfortable desks, examiners were able to peruse every facet of the 90-minute ordeal from every possible angle. Like the conclusion made earlier by Columbine examiners, the Justice Department determined that a quicker, more forceful, and confrontational approach would most likely have saved some lives at Uvalde.

There were 886 school shootings (383 deaths, 805 injuries) between the years 2000 and 2021, and of course more shootings and casualties have occurred since then. Had each emergency been handled perfectly, some of those casualties would have been avoided. But in the heat of the moment, how often is chaos handled perfectly? And what if it is? How many fewer children will then die? A perfect response doesn’t ensure a no-casualty result, it simply means that perhaps fewer children will be killed or maimed compared to a less-than-perfect response.

It’s almost as if we are tilting at windmills when assigning blame for the tragedies that befall our schools. We spend days or even months examining police and faculty response during a school shooting to determine who screwed up the most. The blame is then piled on to responders like Peterson and Arredondo for their less-than-perfect reaction to chaos. Yes, if responders react perfectly, some lives might be saved, but the imperfect responders we tilt at are windmills and not the real foe. Attacking windmills provides the appearance of doing something rather than nothing, but if we truly wish to save children rather than merely projecting blame, the real foe needs to be confronted.

There are several recognized categories of murder and manslaughter: first degree murder, second degree murder, felony murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, and so on. The various categories address intent and culpability. A shooter who enters a school and kills children and teachers with a gun will be charged (if still alive) with some form of murder. Likewise, someone who aids or abets a shooter will likely face charges.

The parents of Ethan Crumbley, the shooter at Oxford High School, have been charged with involuntary manslaughter because they irresponsibly provided his weapon and failed to recognize or react to their son’s warning signs. Some Oxford parents are also urging that criminal charges be brought against school officials for gross negligence. Obviously, the Crumbly parents should have possessed better judgment and acted more responsibly; obviously, Oxford school officials should have been more observant, but are they the real foe? Isn’t the real foe those who have made Oxford, Uvalde, Parkland, and all of our school massacres so statistically foreseeable, but nearly impossible to prevent? Isn’t the real foe those who knowingly perpetuate the conditions that ensure evermore school massacres in our future?

In the 8 years since Greg Abbott became governor of Texas, the state has suffered 7 mass shootings. Rather than proposing or supporting meaningful firearm restrictions that would make mass shootings less likely, Abbott has done just the opposite. The governor has pleased the NRA and its constituency by signing 22 bills that will reduce or eliminate gun restrictions in Texas. Greg Abbott didn’t sign the bills in a chaotic setting where his better judgment might have been impinged. He calmly signed his name in front of cameras rather than guns, and was fully aware of the ramifications. He knew that while his signatures would ensure NRA based political support, the signings would also make future mass shootings more likely. Perhaps in his mind he is able to portray himself as guilt-free; it’s only the crazed shooters who are responsible for killing school kids – how could anyone hold him responsible? He won’t be the one holding the gun that spews bullets; he’s only just making it available. Abbott does not yet know the names of all the children that will be shot due to his signing, but he will learn them by and by. When he does, the Governor will publicly grieve over the unfathomable tragedy and pompously pray for both the victims and their families.

Ethan Crumbley’s parents face involuntary manslaughter charges because they should have foreseen what would happen and did nothing to stop it. Governor Abbott can foresee what will happen due to his actions, but will face no charges. The mayhem that again unfolds will be down the road and not directly tied to his actions. It will take bad parenting or a lone crazed gunman enabled by the governor’s signature to come along and deliver the massacre. In its aftermath, an investigation will likely take place to determine if better police response would have saved some lives. The governor will probably demand it.

Governor Abbott and Texas are not lone wolves. 27 states have enacted permitless-carry laws that help proliferate the presence of guns in nearly all public places. 16 states have declared themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuary States” to block or restrain attempts at gun-control measures. Politicians all across the nation are pressured or supported by gun-rights groups such as The National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of America (GOA), The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA). The persuasive force they wield over politicians comes not through membership dues alone; more than half of the NRA’s revenue comes directly from gun industry companies.

Not so long ago, through seductive advertising, the tobacco industry convinced nearly half of the adult U.S. population that smoking was both glamorous and healthy. Today, the gun industry promotes its product in much the same way: gun ownership is boldly attractive and a life-sustaining necessity (there’s a difference though; cigarettes are most apt to kill the user; guns are most apt to kill someone else). As Americans buy into the gun hype, their voting power adds to the industry’s persuasive power with law-makers and makes meaningful gun regulation less and less likely.

With every school massacre, the anguish and heartache are real to the parents and those most close to the victims, but for the rest of us … maybe not so much. The grieving masks are good for public show and self-exoneration, but hide our true priorities: the gun industry values money more than the lives of children; lawmakers value votes more than the lives of children; gun owners value the warm feeling of holding a deadly firearm more than the lives of children. Were it otherwise, they (and we) would do what needs to be done to curtail the endless carnage.

After a shooting, it’s convenient to challenge the windmills. We look for a Peterson, an Arredondo, or even a Crumbley on which to affix some blame. If only our police and law-enforcement officials had reacted to chaos like the heroes in a movie, a few more of our children would have been saved. If only the parenting had been perfect and school officials more observant, a shooting might have been averted (or maybe just delayed). If police, parents, and school officials always reacted perfectly when facing danger and uncertainty, it would be a good thing; some lives would be saved amidst the chaos. But the responders are never always perfect, they can’t save all the lives, and they are not the source of the killings.

It’s the guns; the proliferation of guns; the proliferation of guns designed to kill human beings. It’s the ease of obtaining and carrying a gun (even a gun specifically designed to kill a lot of humans in a short amount of time) that turns our schools and neighborhoods into killing fields. The gun industry promotes their deadly merchandise as if it were an attractive, patriotic, and life-enhancing necessity. Too many American citizens have found purpose in the hype. Too many American lawmakers have found careers through the hype. Years ago, when citizens and politicians challenged the tobacco industry, meaningful rules and regulations were incorporated that have actually prolonged the lives of millions of Americans. If we truly wish to minimize the senseless shooting deaths and injuries that now plague our nation, we need to convince our lawmakers that gun proliferation is a priority issue; they need to find that our continued support (vote) is tied to meaningful gun regulation. The power of an electoral vote is the only thing potentially more powerful than an industry’s financial and lobbying power. If it’s not wielded effectively, the gun industry and our politicians will continue to comfortably enable school and neighborhood massacres for nothing more than money and political security. If we surrender our votes to those beholding to the gun industry, we are just as guilty as Greg Abbott; if we cast our votes in support of the gun industry, we are just as responsible as the parents of Ethan Crumbley. Rather than seeing meaningful legislation from our lawmakers that could prevent a tragedy, we will continue doing studies after each rampage to determine if a more perfect law-enforcement response could have saved just a few more lives. The studies will serve their purpose. We’ll find someone else to blame for something, and nothing much will change.

Vern Loomis lives in the Detroit area and occasionally likes to comment on news and events that interest him in whatever capacity available. Some of his other musings can be found at Transcend Media Service, ZNetwork, CounterPunch, The Humanist, and The Apathetic Agnostic. Read other articles by Vern.

 

Not All of the Genocide is Being Livestreamed

by Paul Larudee / February 5th, 2024

The Palestinian victims of genocide in Gaza are vastly underreported. The figure commonly used will soon top 30,000. But these are only the verified and named victims killed directly by Israeli weaponry. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is perhaps the only authoritative source that reports more than 35,000, by adding a (conservative) estimate of those missing and presumed dead, most of them under the rubble of the roughly 300,000 destroyed buildings. But even the Euro-Med estimate does not include many of the delayed deaths among the more than 67,000 wounded, or the deaths from starvation, disease and exposure due the weaponization of food, medicine, sanitation, potable water, shelter, fuel, and all other conditions necessary to life.

Part of the result of bombing the hospitals and destroying the communication networks is to eliminate the means of even tabulating the deaths. Untabulated deaths necessarily go unreported in the totals, and yet their numbers are obviously growing, as rainstorms and floods spread sewage into the makeshift tents of up to 2 million refugees without toilets or sewage infrastructure. How many have died in such circumstances, uncounted and buried in common graves on the roadside, dug by starving volunteers in an attempt to preserve some dignity and sanitation among the filth and the stink? Does it equal or exceed the numbers killed directly by bombs or bullets?

If not now, it soon will. The fact is that we will never know the true number killed by Israel in Gaza. Perhaps the closest we will come is by counting the survivors and comparing the population total prior to October 7th. I suspect it will be a sobering figure, gleaned far too late to be of use to anyone but historians and criminal prosecutors.

The already sobering reality is that at least sixteen countries are helping Israel to commit the crime of genocide. This is the number that have withdrawn their financial support of UNRWA, the UN agency that has been the lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees since the 1948 expulsion and genocide of Palestinians, which the current reprise seems certain to exceed in impact, as intended.

Will a ceasefire prevent the worst? Some think it’s just around the bend. I can’t imagine it. Hamas and its allies will never accept anything less than freedom, and Israel will not accept anything less than total control.  Furthermore, if one of the sides is losing, it’s not Hamas. Israel is a patient receiving a continuous transfusion from the US, all the while bleeding out from the rest of its body. Nobody knows the real statistics of Israeli casualties except that nearly all of them are soldiers, apart from the civilians killed on October 7 (mostly by Israeli soldiers executing the “Hannibal Directive”, as Israeli reports now admit). On the other hand, the Israeli military casualties are not necessarily Israeli. It is estimated that 5000 to 6000 are foreign mercenaries, one-third American, supported by US and other foreign money, which also sustains the economy and the military. (Putting foreign mercenaries on the front line helps to reduce the number of Israelis killed.)

Not all of Israel’s casualties are military, either, but also not civilian, except in an abstract sense. At least half a million have left the country, and 300,000 are refugees from the north and south. The economy is in tatters, despite the pocket money provided by the US to keep it going. Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall, and while the pieces are all there, no one will be able to put Humpty together again.

Gaza, of course, is also bleeding profusely, vastly more among its civilians than its combatants. In fact, Israel’s war is not so much against Hamas as it is against the civilian population, at least 70% women and children. The resistance effort is actually showing no sign of diminishing or becoming less effective. The effect of this is to prolong the genocide, but this does little to dim the popularity of the fighters, who are widely regarded as heroes, even among the population making the great sacrifices. None want to return to the oppressive status quo ante.

The sacrifices are, of course, horrific, and progressively moreso, dating from October 8. The resources are scarcer with every passing day, by genocidal design. But so are the statistics. Many more Palestinians will die and be buried in anonymity, partly because the reporting network is being sabotaged and degraded, but also because many victims will not seek medical help, when the hospitals have no food to provide, nor blankets, nor tents, nor potable water, and because the hospitals mostly don’t exist anymore, also by design. The ratio of child deaths will rise, then possibly fall due to attrition, depending on the length of the holocaust. Perhaps a day of remembrance for the unknown casualties will be set aside, especially when it becomes clear that they vastly outnumber the known casualties, even if we can’t count them.

Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization. Read other articles by Paul.

 

Darién Gaps and Injun Country

by T.P. Wilkinson / February 5th, 2024

by T.P. Wilkinson

A recent X post from Tucker Carlson featured biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse) to talk about the US immigration crisis after a visit to the Darién Gap. The gap is a jungle in the Panamanian isthmus where the Pan American Highway is interrupted on its way to South America. There, at the incitement of weblogger and US Special Forces officer Michael Yon, Weinstein went to see the immigration camps and learn how people from all over the world are trekking to the Rio Bravo border to enter the US.

His detailed description was rational and cautious, yet it raised a specter which was clearly alarming. Weinstein described the conditions and the character of two camps that he saw. One fit the description of a classic refugee camp. It was visibly managed by a number of NGOs as well as US government agencies. The other appeared to be full of Chinese. He was able to talk to numerous migrants in the first camp but was unable to enter the one which appeared to be Chinese.

The “Chinese” camp seemed to be full of military age young men who when addressed outside the camp were reluctant to talk.

After discussing the discrepancies, Carlson asked if he had any explanation. Weinstein was exceptionally cautious and only uttered hypotheses. However, the direction implied the possibility that China was sending men to the US behind the migrant screen.

Then Weinstein shifted to the possible relation between a Chinese contingent and Covid with the mRNA injections that the US government (along with nearly all Western governments) forced on much of the population. Although Weinstein was very explicit that his hypotheses were not facts and that he did not know if there was any relationship to verify, the discussion proceeded to cover possible motives and objectives of both policies supported by the US regime.

The speculation is provocative and not to be easily dismissed. Nonetheless, it also revealed how little many people seem to understand about how covert operations can work. Michael Yon can be recognized as a special operations professional. While popular imagination continues to portray these men as mere super soldiers, the reality is that Special Forces are the armed cadres of the CIA and other covert action (state terrorism) agencies. A quick look at Yon’s website shows him as a super-soldier or soldier of fortune who has been a dedicated operator in all the CIA managed wars of the past three decades. That alone ought to raise suspicions about his coverage and why he was so interested to show a biologist and popular podcaster the frontier of what are undoubtedly covert operations. Weinstein was taken into Yon’s confidence much like the journalist character in John Wayne’s notorious The Green Berets film, promoting the war against Vietnam.

Allowing that Weinstein reported what he honestly saw, the question remains whether he saw what he was supposed to see. That returns us to the question “why Chinese?” The ensuing discussion raised legitimate questions about connections between US immigration policy and the Covid War. However before considering them it is necessary to return to the first camp. Weinstein named several organisations supporting the migrant camp. He identified USG agencies and the UN agency IOM. What he either did not know or did not recognise is that the International Organization for Migration is run by the US national security bureaucrat Amy Pope.¹There is general confusion about how the UN and its specialized agencies are run. The WHO is essentially an arm of the Gates Foundation and the international pharmaceuticals (pharmaments) cartel. It would not be unreasonable to suppose Ms Pope assures that the IOM complies with the policies set by those who rule the US. Weinstein’s conclusion is that such policies as those articulated by the Biden administration reflect corruption on a global scale. However that does not answer the question who benefits from those policies and how?

To return to the compulsory mass injection, especially of the military and other health and safety services, Weinstein and Carlson both expressed their bewilderment and shock that the compulsion was so rigorous in what might be called the public services sector. Then more speculation returned to COVID and mRNA injections and what these were doing to people in the US. Consensus prevailed that this was biological weaponry deployed. While there is no reason to doubt that assertion, the next step was to repeat the half truth that China was the source of the raw material both for the pathogen and for the injections since the latter were based on the former. Neither Weinstein nor Carlson could recall that the actual origin was Eco-Health Alliance, a cutout for US bioweapons development and Ralph Baric at UNC-Chapel Hill, the principal investigator commissioned for the DoD gain of function (weapons) development. Weinstein is probably not savvy enough to understand how cut-outs work or the details of false flag operations. Carlson probably does know but rarely if ever discusses such details. The accuracy of the media depictions of COVID in China were accepted as debunked. Yet the sources of that “information” were not examined. Thus, Chinese authorship was implied.

While discussing the implications of the migration crisis + “Chinese”, the hypothesis was aired that both the managed “uncontrolled” migration and the covid/mRNA weapons aimed to weaken the US from within. This might serve the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by mass infiltration of potentially militarized immigrants who would then create the conditions most favorable to alleged Chinese expansionism. This it was suggested might be due to China having essentially bought the US government. This hypothesis has been peppered by regular reports of bribes paid to inter alia the Biden family by Chinese interests.

Striking in the discussion is the absence of two considerations: a) the complex of US anti-China war propaganda which naturally compromises any reporting about China in the West as a whole and b) the interests of the Western oligarchy in redesigning the West as a neo-feudal regime. Leave that eyesore, the CIA-founded WEF, aside for a moment. There are purely national phenomena which provide a far more efficient explanation.

As a matter of record Mr Gates is now the largest private owner of farm land in the US. There is no indication that he has stopped buying. Since the 2008 mortgage crisis, the hedge funds like Black Rock have become the largest owners of rental property (residential and commercial). This feat was accomplished by the massive derivatives fraud that forced millions of mortgagees to forfeit their real property. The economic devastation continued this process. Sane economists, of which Michael Hudson is one of the few, have charted this conversion of home ownership to rental tenancy and its acceleration. The Anglo-American finance oligarchy is aggressively pursuing through the banking, tax and monetary system an unparalleled expropriation of rank and file Americans.

During the mass incarceration, I wrote several times that COVID was political-economic warfare using biological agents and financial terror. My argument, then and now, was that this is atomic grade social engineering. In the worst case — for the oligarchy — this neutralization of the country’s majority was a clearing of the decks for open world war. Masses who might, under pressure of extermination — especially in the military and armed citizenry — actually rebel and mutiny leading to an October scenario. However, there is another scenario compatible with the history of North American conquest. In the 19th century, the tiny oligarchy was incapable of fulfilling its manifest destiny by stealing the whole continent. So bonded labor and massive immigration were used to take and hold everything between the Allegheny and the Pacific. Poor immigrants were granted the freedom to fight and die in battle against the indigenous population. Afterwards the land won was handed to railroads, finance, miners and ranchers. Successive economic crises bankrupted smallholders regularly. They abandoned their homes and moved westward. “Indians” and Chinese-bonded labor kept those settlers busy while the usual suspects seized all the land and loot, selling it back to successive suckers. Forced displacement was fundamental to the business model that “won the West”. Even to this day, the oligarchy represented in Washington understates the use of biological agents to eradicate the indigenous peoples. Few 19th century immigrants admit how they were used to enrich East Coast elites. Perhaps that is the policy followed today, the one at home which bears examination. The immigrants are driven by plane and on foot from the South. Meanwhile, mRNA injections provided the same comfort as smallpox-treated blankets.

ENDNOTE

It is after all just a hypothesis, but with tradition.

• 1
  IOM mission statement
  Harnessing the Power of Migration
  
  Comprehensive solutions to the world’s biggest challenges – from poverty and inequality to climate change, and conflict – are all inextricably linked to migration. IOM knows that migration has the power to transform the lives of individuals, their families, their communities and societies for the better. It is clear that the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be reached without safe, orderly and regular migration. For this reason, our vision is: to deliver on the promise of migration, while supporting the world’s most vulnerable.