HOW ONTARIO KEEPS THE TRUE COST OF NUCLEAR POWER OFF YOUR HYDRO BILL
Toronto Star, MARCO CHOWN OVED CLIMATE CHANGE REPORTER, 11 Jan 2026, https://www.pressreader.com/article/282007563777540
Electricity prices in Ontario have long proven to be politically toxic.
Rapid increases between 2009 and 2016 contributed to the downfall of the Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne.
Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives were elected on a pledge to bring hydro bills down, and the rapid increases have since ended — though it’s not because power is cheaper. The true costs are now invisible to the consumer.
For 15 years, Ontarians saw the cost of nuclear power on their hydro bills each month. Between 2002 and 2017, there was a line item called the “debt retirement charge” that enlisted every ratepayer to chip away at more than $20 billion in debt left over from the splitup of Ontario Hydro — debt largely run up by construction overruns at the Darlington nuclear plant, which was completed in 1993. The nuclear debt was removed from bills in 2018 — but it didn’t disappear. Instead, it was added onto the provincial books, where it is now considered part of the general public debt. As of last year, more than 30 years after Darlington went online, there was still $11.9 billion in debt remaining.
The province also brought in the Ontario Electricity Rebate, which subsidizes power bills with taxpayer dollars. While the rebate was introduced under McGuinty, Ford recently nearly doubled it — with an estimated price tag of $8.5 billion annually — to absorb an almost 30 per cent hike to the price of electricity.
The Ford government has blamed rate increases on the previous Liberal government’s Green Energy Act, which paid a premium for renewable energy in an effort to kickstart a domestic wind and solar industry. The domestic renewables manufacturing sector failed to take off in the face of competition from China, but more than 33,000 renewable projects remain on the grid at inflated prices on 20year contracts. Today, these legacy contracts have pushed the cost of solar power up to the point that it’s the highest among all types of generation in Ontario, when measured by kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity produced. Wind isn’t far behind.
But what the per kWh figures hide is that renewables make up such a small proportion of the energy production mix that they cannot be responsible for overall rate increases, according to a Star analysis of Ontario Energy Board and Independent Electricity System Operator data. Even though solar costs threeandahalf times more than nuclear per kWh, it only accounted for two per cent of the total cost of electricity in 2024 — too little to drive overall cost increases. Nuclear, by contrast, accounted for 56 per cent of Ontario’s total cost of electricity last year. And while the costs of legacy renewables are inflated, they’re fixed or even going down as their contracts expire and have been renewed at 30 per cent less than they were paid previously.
In contrast, nuclear costs keep going up. The refurbishment of the Pickering plant will cost three times more per kWh than the refurbishments of Darlington and four times more than Bruce. The costs of these refurbishments will start to be added to hydro bills when they return to service.
Because nuclear makes up such a large part of the electricity mix, even a little increase to the cost of nuclear will affect the price Ontarians pay for electricity — either via monthly bills or taxpayer funds.
Candid Imperialism: Trump, Racketeering and Venezuelan Oil
11 January 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/candid-imperialism-trump-racketeering-and-venezuelan-oil/
It usually takes archival digging, the golden gaffe, an ill-considered remark and occasional spells of candour by those in power, to admit that the United States has, in common with other imperial powers, brutal ambitions. An example of the latter was General Smedley Butler who, at his death in 1940, had become the most decorated Marine in US history. After retiring from active service, he was frank about what his role had been. Professing to being a “racketeer” and “gangster for capitalism,” he went on to explain how: “I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Boys to collect revenues in. I helped the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street.” That was just a selection.
With President Donald Trump in power, we do not need a Butler to give the game away or expose any frightful cabal. The empire is out of the closet, bolshie, bright and more thieving than ever. While the Donroe Doctrine is intended to reprise the Monroe Doctrine, it offers nothing more than imperial rapacity, seizure under pretext. The January 9 meeting with two dozen oil executives at the White House to discuss the fate of the Venezuelan oil market showed Trump to be in full flight as cocky pip and proud procurer of corporate thieving under the cover of government protection.
Representatives from such veteran behemoths as ExxonMobil and Chevron were present to listen to calls from the president that they invest handsomely in modernising and tidying up Venezuela’s tattered oil infrastructure. Problems with the oil itself – heavy, hard to refine and packed with sulphur, not to mention the questionable number of proven reserves – did not blight the conversation. “American companies will have the opportunity to rebuild Venezuela’s rotting energy infrastructure and eventually increase oil production to levels never seen before,” he crowed at the start of the meeting. Our giant oil companies will be spending at least $100 billion of their money.” In the course of this merry investment, Venezuela would “be very successful, and the people of the United States are going to be big beneficiaries.”
The choice of companies involved in the venture would, however, not be determined by free market wiles or any invisible hand. “We are going to be making the decision as to which oil companies can go in, which we will allow to go in.” They would mostly be American, naturally. Forget the Venezuelans, he insisted. “You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela.”
Jeffery Hilderbrand of the oil and gas producer Hilcorp Energy and noted Trump donor, was all salivation and gratitude. He was also pleased with the implausible alibi Trump had offered for controlling and pilfering Venezuelan oil for American interests: finding imagined enemies who might do the same thing. “Thank you for your great, tremendous leadership in protecting the interests in the Western Hemisphere,” he sighed with oleaginous gratitude. “The message that you have sent to China and our enemies to stay out of our backyard is absolutely fantastic… Hilcorp is fully committed and ready to go to rebuilding the infrastructure in Venezuela.”
CEO Bill Armstrong, of the Armstrong Oil and Gas company, also smacked his lips at the plunderous prospects. “We are ready to go to Venezuela,” he declared. “In real estate terms, it is prime real estate. And it’s like West Palm about 50 years ago. Very ripe.” Fracking executive and Trump supporter, Harold Hamm, was tickled by the possibility of adventure, seeing Venezuela as little more than a playground to roam and in and profit from. “It excites me as an explorationist.” The country was “exciting” with its abundant reserves, posing “challenges and the industry knows how to handle that.”
Chevron, which already has a presence in the country in partnership with the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA accounting for 240,000 barrels per day, expects to bolster its production by 50% over the next 18 to 24 months. Those at Repsol are dreaming of tripling the current daily production of 45,000 barrels over the next few years, provided the conditions are appropriate.
Not all the oil companies expressed the same level of glowing confidence. Naked plunder comes with its challenges and logistical tangles, not least the touchy issue of Venezuelan sovereignty. Exxon CEO Darren Woods was, for instance, concerned that much will have to be done to make Venezuela an appropriate recipient of capital. One way was to ensure that whoever was in control in Caracas would be eternally reliable and amenable to US oil interests. “We have had our assets seized there twice and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen and what is currently the state.” As things stood, given “legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place,” Venezuela was “ininvestable.”
That same day, Trump further confirmed the choking of Venezuela by signing an Executive Order to prevent “the seizure of Venezuelan oil revenue that could undermine critical US efforts to ensure economic stability in Venezuela.” The Order prohibits US courts from seizing revenue collected from Venezuelan oil and relevant holds in US Treasury accounts. The customary, absurd justifications follow: to lose control of such funds would “empower malign actors like Iran and Hezbollah while weakening efforts to bring peace, prosperity, and stability to the Venezuelan people and to the Western Hemisphere as a whole.” Were these funds to be tampered with, US objectives to stem “the influx of illegal aliens and disrupting the flood of illicit narcotics” would be compromised.
As for those befuddled figures of the Venezuela opposition thinking that much of their country’s oil revenue will find its way into the coffers of Caracas, they should best think again. “Putting America first,” as the Order makes clear, means just that. The Venezuelan people don’t count, except as props in tawdry oratory.
CIA Played Instrumental Role in Maduro Kidnapping.
In reality, while U.S. and British companies were involved in early oil exploration in Venezuela, Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuela, pursuant to the international law principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources.
Venezuela’s socialist government, meanwhile, has used oil revenues to adopt social programs for the poor and to develop Venezuela’s economy, accounting for its electoral successes.
The financial elite the CIA serves is now salivating over the prospects of U.S. corporations retaking control of Venezuela’s oil industry
Jeremy Kuzmarov, Substack, Jan 05, 2026
The Trump administration welcomed the New Year by ordering a brazen Special Forces raid into Venezuela that resulted in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was brought to the U.S. to face charges for alleged drug trafficking.
Called Operation Absolute Resolve, the kidnapping had been preceded by months of terrorist activities that included bombing a Venezuelan oil tanker and fishing vessels, resulting in the deaths of more than 100 civilians.
On January 3, The New York Times reported that a CIA source within the Venezuelan government had monitored Maduro’s location in the days and moments before his capture, tipping off the Special Forces about his whereabouts. The CIA also produced the intelligence that led to Maduro’s capture with a fleet of stealth drones.
According to a person familiar with the agency’s work, the CIA was able to recruit informants in Maduro’s inner circle because of the $50 million bounty placed on Maduro’s head.
Donald Trump watched the Operation Absolute Resolve from Mar-O-Lago with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. [Source: yahoo.com]
Beginning in August, the informants worked clandestinely to provide the CIA with information about Maduro’s “pattern of life” and daily movements.
The CIA had Maduro so precisely monitored that even his pets were known to U.S. intelligence agents, according to General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former CIA associate director for military affairs.
In late December, the CIA used an armed drone to conduct a strike on a dock that U.S. officials claimed was being used by a Venezuelan gang to load drugs onto boats.
These actions fulfilled a promise of CIA Director John Ratcliffe in his confirmation hearing that he would lead a more aggressive CIA willing to conduct large-scale covert operations.
Despite claiming to be doing battle with the “deep state,” President Donald Trump authorized the CIA to take more aggressive action last fall and openly authorized CIA operations in Venezuela when the CIA normally operates covertly.
To the Victor Go the Spoils
The symbiotic relationship between the CIA and the financial elite intent on profiting from regime change are epitomized by the CIA’s former Venezuelan station chief, Enrique de la Torre, who advertised immediately after Maduro’s kidnapping that his lobbying firm, Tower Strategy,[1] was supporting clients intent on “rebuilding Venezuela’s energy sector.”
De la Torre published a blog post in late November entitled “The Case for Ending Maduro’s Rule………………
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez (1998-2013) and then Maduro (2013-present) had in fact been designed to establish Venezuela’s economic sovereignty, empower the poor and Indigenous people, and revitalize the legacy of Latin America’s great liberator, Simón Bolívar.
It was opposed by the U.S. financial elite precisely because it threatened to inspire other Latin American and Third World countries to take control over their own economies and limit the influence of American corporations.
Donald Trump echoed de la Torre in stating after the announcement of Maduro’s capture that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in and spend billions of dollars and fix the oil infrastructure—the badly broken oil infrastructure—and start making money for the country.”[2]
Similarly, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo told Fox & Friends last week that, in the event of the overthrow of the Maduro government, “American companies can come in and sell their products — Schlumberger, Halliburton, Chevron — all of our big energy companies can go down to Venezuela and build out an economic capitalist model.”
These latter comments combined with de la Torre’s action make clear the agenda behind Operation Absolute Resolve.
Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, openly proclaimed that Venezuela’s oil belongs to Washington, describing the nationalization of Venezuela’s petroleum industry as “theft.”
According to Miller, “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
In reality, while U.S. and British companies were involved in early oil exploration in Venezuela, Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuela, pursuant to the international law principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources.
The Venezuelan government never actually denied the U.S. access to its oil and, as late as 2017, remained the U.S.’s third-largest foreign supplier of energy.[3]
Venezuela’s socialist government, meanwhile, has used oil revenues to adopt social programs for the poor and to develop Venezuela’s economy, accounting for its electoral successes.
During his presidency from 1998 to 2013, Hugo Chávez cut poverty by 20% and extreme poverty by 30%.
Literacy rates in this period also increased, child malnutrition rates declined dramatically, millions of hectares of state-owned land were distributed, and Venezuela’s UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of national income (GDP), access to education, and child mortality—rose from seventh in the region to fourth.[4]
Maduro was continuing the same trajectory as Chávez, though Venezuela’s economy was undermined during his presidency by declining world oil prices, internal corruption typical of South and North American countries and harsh U.S. sanctions imposed by the Obama, Trump I and Biden administrations, whose purpose was to set the groundwork for regime change.[5]
Long War Against Venezuela’s Left
In Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century, I detail how the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations set the groundwork for today’s foreign policy by providing significant police aid to help prop up centrist governments in Venezuela that carried out a dirty war against left-wing movements.
The latter sought to nationalize Creole Petroleum Company, Venezuela’s largest oil company, which was largely controlled by the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil empire.
Run under the cover of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA-led Office of Public Safety (OPS) provided riot-control gear and other repressive police instruments and assisted Venezuelan police in compiling blacklists of left-wing “subversives.”
The OPS’s support for hard-line police tactics was apparent in its push to eliminate the requirement that a policeman who killed a suspect be arrested, paving the way for death-squad activity.
Showing where their true priorities rested, OPS police advisers met monthly with security officials of Creole Petroleum and the major foreign mining companies in Venezuela to discuss “insurgency problems.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://jeremykuzmarov.substack.com/p/cia-played-instrumental-role-in-maduro?publication_id=2091638&post_id=183483325&isFreemail=true&r=3alev&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Why Are Pedophiles the Most Successful Capitalists?
COMMENT. There is so much to interest and value in this article. I’m about 90% in agreement with it.
BUT – it’s just that the author seems to conclude pretty much that captalism is so evil that it just about causes pedophilia.
The glaring gap here is whether or not there are just as many greedy pedophile types in positions of power in communist and socialist regimes?
The same psychological traits that enable billionaires to destroy millions of lives for profit also enable them to rape children—and capitalism rewards both forms of predation.
BettBeat Media, Nov 16, 2025, https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/why-are-pedophiles-the-most-successful/comments
The question haunts every honest observer of power: Why do sexual predators rise to the pinnacles of capitalist society with such disturbing regularity? Why does the same system that rewards the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged child molester Woody Allen, the rapist Harvey Weinstein, and countless other monsters also elevate them to positions where they can inflict maximum damage? The answer reveals the most horrifying truth about our economic system—capitalism doesn’t just tolerate sexual predation, it actively selects for it.
The Epstein case exposes a terrifying pattern that extends far beyond one billionaire’s island of horrors. The psychological mechanisms that drive powerful men to sexually abuse children—the ultimate form of exploitation, the need for absolute dominance, the complete dehumanization of others, the divorce from empathy—are precisely the same mechanisms that capitalism rewards in its most successful practitioners. This is not coincidence. This is selection pressure.
Consider the psychological profile of the successful pedophile: They must be master manipulators, capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerability. They must possess an almost supernatural ability to compartmentalize, maintaining public personas while committing unspeakable acts in private. They must be skilled at reading power dynamics, understanding instinctively who can be victimized and who must be courted. They must be comfortable with the complete objectification of other human beings, viewing them as resources to be consumed rather than people deserving dignity.
Now consider the psychological profile of the successful capitalist: They must be master manipulators, capable of identifying and exploiting market vulnerabilities. They must possess an almost supernatural ability to compartmentalize, maintaining public philanthropy while devastating communities in private. They must be skilled at reading power dynamics, understanding instinctively who can be exploited and who must be courted. They must be comfortable with the complete objectification of other human beings, viewing workers as resources to be consumed rather than people deserving dignity.
The overlap is not accidental—it is systemic. Capitalism rewards psychopathy because psychopathy is useful to capital accumulation. The same emotional architecture that allows a man to rape a child also allows him to foreclose on a family’s home, to dump toxic waste in poor communities, to lobby against cancer treatment funding while profiting from carcinogenic products. The capacity for dehumanization is not a bug in the capitalist system—it is the essential feature.
“They were pedophiles who became wealthy precisely because the psychological traits that enable sexual predation also enable economic predation under capitalism. And because economic power enables sexual power over children”
The Epstein Network as Capitalist Laboratory
Jeffrey Epstein’s operation was not an aberration but a perfect expression of capitalist logic. His island served as both a laboratory for sexual domination and a networking hub for economic domination. The same men who raped children on Epstein’s planes were simultaneously pillaging entire economies through their hedge funds and private equity firms. Bill Clinton, who flew on the “Lolita Express” many times, also championed the financial deregulation that enabled the 2008 economic collapse. Donald Trump, who allegedly raped a 13-year-old girl at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, built his real estate empire through systematic exploitation of contractors and workers.
The connection runs deeper than shared moral bankruptcy. Sexual predation and economic predation require identical psychological tools: the ability to identify the vulnerable, the skill to isolate them from support systems, the capacity to exploit power imbalances, and the willingness to destroy lives for personal gratification. Epstein’s genius was recognizing that men who had perfected these skills in the economic realm would eagerly apply them in the sexual realm.
This explains why Epstein’s client list reads like a who’s who of global capitalism: hedge fund managers, investment bankers, real estate moguls, media executives, and their political enablers. These were not wealthy men who happened to be pedophiles—they were pedophiles who became wealthy precisely because the psychological traits that enable sexual predation also enable economic predation under capitalism. And because economic power enables sexual power over children.
The Israeli Connection: Where Imperialism Meets Sexual Violence
The tentacles of Epstein’s network inevitably lead back to Israel, that laboratory of racist capitalist brutality disguised as ‘democracy’. Multiple sources suggest that Epstein operated as a Mossad asset, using sexual blackmail to control political and economic elites on behalf of Israeli interests. This connection is not surprising—it is inevitable. Israel represents the purest distillation of predatory capitalism combined with colonial violence, a system that requires the complete dehumanization of its Palestinian victims.
The psychological profile of the settler who burns Palestinian children alive in their homes, kidnaps and disappears 8-year-old Palestinian girls, and beats up Palestinian old ladies with laughter is identical to the psychological profile of the billionaire who profits from child labor in his factories: both require the complete severance of empathy, the total objectification of their victims, and the ability to justify any atrocity in service of their desires. The Israeli state that operates the world’s largest open-air prison in Gaza while claiming to be a beacon of civilization operates according to the same logic as the capitalist who imposes starvation wages while lecturing about ‘economic freedom’.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s primary accomplice, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a media mogul with extensive ties to Israeli intelligence. The operation’s sophisticated surveillance capabilities, international scope, and protection from prosecution all bear the hallmarks of state-level intelligence operations. But more than operational support, Israel provided the ideological framework that made Epstein’s crimes possible: the belief that some humans are inherently superior to others and therefore entitled to use inferior humans as objects for their pleasure.
Superior Jewish DNA
The same supremacist ideology that allows Israelis to shoot Palestinian children for sport also allows billionaires to destroy the lives of workers’ children through environmental destruction, healthcare denial, and educational defunding. Sexual predation and imperial predation spring from the same poisoned well of human supremacy that capitalism depends upon for its existence.
Surprisingly yet unsurprisingly, Epstein was a devoted believer in eugenics—the pseudoscientific 19th-century racist ideology that his own Jewish ancestors had been victimized by—and harbored grandiose fantasies of seeding the human race with what he considered his “superior Jewish DNA.” The irony was lost on him: a man who embodied every antisemitic stereotype about Jewish financial manipulation and sexual degeneracy had reinvented himself as the master race. Epstein’s eugenics obsession reveals the final psychological piece of the predator-capitalist puzzle—the megalomaniacal belief that wealth proves genetic superiority, that economic domination justifies any form of human breeding program, and that the right to rape and reproduce flows naturally from the right to buy and sell.
His New Mexico ranch was reportedly intended as a breeding facility where he would impregnate multiple women to spread his “superior” genes—the ultimate fusion of sexual predation, capitalist accumulation, and fascist ideology. The man who trafficked children for billionaire rapists saw himself not as a criminal but as an evolutionary benefactor, using his wealth to “improve” the species through forced reproduction. Capitalism had so thoroughly warped his psychology that he genuinely believed his financial success proved his genetic worth.
The Silence for Capital
The most damning evidence of capitalism’s complicity in sexual predation is not what it does but what it refuses to see. Despite overwhelming evidence of systematic child abuse among the global elite, the mainstream media treats each revelation as an isolated scandal rather than a systemic feature. Despite clear patterns linking economic power to sexual violence, academia refuses to examine the connection. Despite obvious signs that pedophile networks operate at the highest levels of government and finance, law enforcement consistently fails to investigate or prosecute.
This silence is not incompetence—it is self-preservation. Capitalism cannot afford to acknowledge that its most successful practitioners are also its most depraved predators because this would expose the moral bankruptcy at the system’s core. The same corporate media that celebrates billionaire “philanthropy” cannot simultaneously expose billionaire child rape, genocide and theft without undermining the entire mythology of virtuous wealth creation.
The legal system that protects corporate criminals from accountability cannot suddenly develop a conscience about sexual criminals without calling attention to its systematic bias in favor of wealth and power. The political establishment that serves corporate interests cannot prosecute the sexual crimes of their financial backers without severing their own sources of funding and support.
The Fascist Trajectory
The same psychological mechanisms that enable the abuse of individual children also enable the abuse of entire populations. The billionaire who can rape a child with no sense of moral conflict can also engineer famines, fund genocides, and destroy democracies with equal emotional detachment.
This is why every fascist movement in history has been funded and supported by capitalist elites: fascism is simply capitalism with its mask removed, the open acknowledgment that some humans exist only to serve the pleasures and profits of others. The concentration camps of Nazi Germany were built by the same corporate executives who built the factories that exploited workers to death. The genocide in Gaza is funded by the same billionaires who profit from the destruction of Palestinian society.
Sexual predation against children represents the ultimate expression of this fascist logic: the complete negation of another human being’s autonomy, dignity, and right to exist as anything other than an object for consumption. Once this psychological barrier has been crossed—once a person becomes capable of sexually abusing a child—no other moral boundary can restrain them. They become capable of any atrocity in service of their desires.
“Jeffrey Epstein was not a monster who happened to be rich—he was rich because he was a monster”
The connection between pedophilia and capitalist success is not a conspiracy theory—it is an observable pattern that demands explanation. That explanation reveals the most uncomfortable truth about our economic system: it does not reward virtue, innovation, or social contribution. It rewards the capacity for predation, the willingness to treat other humans as consumable resources, and the ability to sever all emotional connection to the suffering one causes.
Jeffrey Epstein was not a monster who happened to be rich—he was rich because he was a monster. His wealth came not from productive economic activity but from his willingness to provide other monsters with access to victims they could not obtain through their own efforts. His clients were not wealthy men who happened to be pedophiles—they were pedophiles who became wealthy because capitalism rewards the psychological traits that enable both sexual and economic predation.
The Epstein network reveals capitalism in its purest form: a system where those most willing to inflict suffering rise to positions where they can inflict maximum suffering. The children destroyed on Epstein’s island are not fundamentally different from the children destroyed in sweatshops, the children poisoned by industrial pollution, the children murdered by American bombs purchased with taxpayer money. All are victims of the same system, sacrificed to the same gods of profit and power.
Breaking this system requires more than prosecuting individual predators—it requires acknowledging that predation is not a bug in capitalism but its essential feature. It requires recognizing that the same system that elevates pedophiles to positions of supreme power will never voluntarily reform itself. It requires understanding that the choice before us is not between different types of capitalism but between capitalism and human survival.
The children crying in Epstein’s dungeons and the children dying in Gaza are calling out with the same voice, demanding that we choose between preserving a system that rewards monsters and building a world where human dignity becomes the foundation of economic and political organization. Their cries echo across time and space, asking the same question that haunts every moment of our historical crisis: How long will we tolerate a system that rewards our destroyers and punishes our protectors?
The answer lies not in reforming capitalism but in replacing it with an economic system based on human cooperation rather than human predation, on shared prosperity rather than concentrated wealth, on the protection of the vulnerable rather than their exploitation. Only when we build such a system will the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world lose their power to turn children into commodities and suffering into profit.
Until then, every day we allow this system to continue is another day we choose the predators over their victims, the monsters over the children, the system over our souls. The choice has never been clearer. The time for choosing has never been shorter. The cost of choosing wrong has never been higher.
58 Years of Occupation — And the Shocking Report Israel Doesn’t Want You to Read
December 26, 2025 , By Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/26/58-years-of-occupation-and-the-shocking-report-israel-doesnt-want-you-to-read/
Inspired by a Common Dreams report today about the ATV attack in the West Bank, I looked into Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli military veterans who speak out against the occupation of Palestine. They’ve described the regional defense units—responsible for numerous attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank—as little more than settler militias dressed in uniform.
I did some digging and found their November report, I’m not sure who else might have missed it, but it’s definitely worth reading. The report is titled: “JOINT SITUATION REPORT: 58 Years of Occupation, The Two-Year War in Gaza.”
The report’s lead writer is Tal Raviv O’Regan, and the steering committee includes Noa Sattath, Ziv Stahl, and Tal Steiner. The translation was done by Maya Johnston, with English editing by Rachel Druck.
They do disclose this, and so will I: the report is the work of thirteen human rights organizations, some of which receive most of their funding from foreign political sources. Even so, they’re proud of the support from those who share our belief that the occupation isn’t just an internal Israeli issue and who are committed to defending human rights.
Some Key Points Noted in the Report Include:
“The occupation, illegal and immoral in itself, has led to widespread human rights abuses, breaches of international humanitarian law, and increasingly entrenched apartheid.”
“Practices Israel employed even before the war have intensified to the point where they have become routine and unprecedented in scale.”
“Most shocking are the creation of mass hunger and a humanitarian crisis, among the worst in the world.”
“Crimes are rarely investigated by military or civilian law enforcement.”
“Settler violence and forced expulsions of Palestinian communities have surged, unchecked by authorities.”
“Israel continued to control many aspects of the residents’ lives… significantly contributing to a chronic humanitarian crisis.”
“To end the war and begin the process of healing… all parties must honor the cease‑fire agreement and fulfill their obligations under international law.”
“Israel must bravely and honestly investigate its actions… acknowledge war crimes and violations of the law, and draw the necessary conclusions.”
“Starving a civilian population is strictly prohibited under international law.”
“Israel has an active duty to ensure regular, uninterrupted flow of food and humanitarian aid.”
about Breaking the Silence from their page: “Founded in March 2004 by a group of soldiers who served in Hebron, Breaking the Silence has since acquired a special standing in the eyes of the Israeli public and in the media because of its unique role in giving voice to the experience of soldiers. To date, the organization has collected testimonies from more than 1,400 soldiers who represent all strata of Israeli society and cover nearly all units that operate in the territories.”
“All the testimonies we publish are meticulously researched, and all facts are cross-checked with additional eyewitnesses and/or the archives of other human rights organizations that are active in the field. Every soldier who gives a testimony to Breaking the Silence is well-aware of the aims of the organization and the interview. Most soldiers choose to remain anonymous, due to various pressures from military officials and society at large. Our first priority is to safeguard the soldiers who choose to testify to the public about their military service.”
Here are some videos [on original] from former soldiers and other contributors from Breaking the Silence. You can find more here
From Democracy Now! interviewing two former Israeli soldiers who are members of Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli army veterans exposing the realities of the occupation. Tal Sagi, the group’s education director, shares his experience growing up in a settlement and joining the military without understanding what occupation meant: “We’ve been told that this is security and we have to control millions of lives and we don’t have other options… We’re trying to say that there are other options.”
Breaking the Silence deputy director Nadav Weiman explains why the group is touring U.S. colleges and advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza: “We stood in checkpoints. We raided homes. We attacked Gaza from the air. We fought from the ground… When you bring reality, you bring real conversation about the occupation, and you bring real conversation about Gaza.”
This is the kind of issue that Hillary Clinton and others refer to when they talk about the TikTok problem in media and the importance of connecting with people around the world quickly and effectively. She, along with Sarah Hurwitz—who dislikes the democratization of information and longs for the era of Old Media where corporations controlled the flow—laments that people now receive less explanation and more video content, such as live-streamed genocide that can be reduced to statistics. Hurwitz acknowledges she may appear a “monster” to viewers and controversially insists that Holocaust education should primarily serve as antisemitism education rather than a lesson for broader human experience.
Because Hurwitz refuses to see the Holocaust as a broad human experience, because then it’s clear that what is happening in Israel today would not pass that test.
Today, we can become knowledgeable and informed in ways that were not possible before the democratization of information—so we must keep our eyes open, even as many try to silence opposition voices with money and power. While there is no end in sight, there is a hopeful continuum: as more people become informed and reconnect with their humanity, change becomes possible. Those in Breaking the Silence have clearly found theirs.
Here is another report from Democracy Now!, from 10 years ago, documenting another time when Israel was killing civilians and Breaking the Silence was speaking out.
Gun vs Keffiyeh. One kills, the other gets you death threats.
by Member of Jews Against the Occupation | Dec 18, 2025 , https://michaelwest.com.au/gun-vs-keffiyeh-one-kills-the-other-gets-you-death-threats/
A Jewish woman wearing a Keffiyeh as well as the Star of David was escorted off Bondi Beach by police. The resulting social media storm led to death threats to her and to her friend.
I am writing this knowing it will likely result in more death threats.
That is not a metaphor. It is a statement of fact, based on what happened to my friend Michelle and me this week, and what happened next when we sought protection from the state.
On Monday, at the Bondi memorial for the victims of the mass killing the day before, Michelle – a Jewish local and member of Jews against the Occupation ‘48 – was surrounded by a hostile crowd shouting “get her off”. She was escorted off the beach to the sound of applause by approximately forty police officers, whilst trying to explain her position to the surrounding reporters, and taken to Bondi Police Station, where she was told she couldn’t go back to Bondi Beach for 6 hours.
Her “offence”? Wearing a Keffiyeh.
Whether one agrees with her politics or not is beside the point. The memorial was dominated by Israeli flags – the flag of a state currently accused of genocide and whose leaders are wanted for war crimes. Michelle wore the keffiyeh because she objected to a moment of mourning being politicised. But it is not a crime. Nor is it a provocation warranting mob intimidation.
What followed should concern anyone who believes the rule of law applies equally.
After video footage of Michelle circulated on X, under a post by journalist Hugh Riminton, the abuse escalated rapidly.
Facts ignored
What was not mentioned – despite Michelle wearing a visible Star of David and explicitly stating to the press that she is Jewish – was that she is a Jewish local who grew up in Bondi. That omission mattered.
I replied publicly on X to clarify that Michelle is Jewish, that she is my friend, and that she is part of JAO48. While those responses received hundreds of supportive comments, they also unleashed some of the most extreme antisemitic, misogynistic, ageist and Islamophobic abuse I have encountered in years of public advocacy.
I can deal with online abuse on social media. The block button is my friend.
Threats arrived in my email inbox – not via social media, but via my direct contact form and messaging linked to my business. One message stated that Michelle was “now wishing she had stayed home” and warned, “I would not want to be her”.
The individual who contacted me used the name “Brenton Tarrant”, the name of the Christchurch mass murderer, writing that I “deserve a bullet in the head”, and that Michelle would be “hunted down”, and that because her address was doxxed, it would make “putting a claw hammer in her skull even easier.”
This was enough intimidation for me to call 000 and for two members of the Chatswood station to attend my home. The expressions on their faces when they read the messages were of shock and disgust.
No police report
More concerning was that Michelle’s home address had been published online in response to Riminton’s post. On Monday night, she went to Maroubra Police Station to report she’d been doxxed.
And nothing happened. She wasn’t contacted the next day or given a case number. Nothing.
When we returned to Maroubra Police Station two days later to ask what action had been taken regarding the doxxing and threats, the attending constable.
‘could not even find a record of Michelle having gone there on Monday night.’
There was a record of the death threats I received from Chatswood Police Station, but that doesn’t help someone whose life is in danger in Maroubra.
A Jewish woman, escorted by dozens of police officers, detained at a police station under threat of violence, had no record in the system days later. Had something happened to her in the intervening period, there would have been no official trace of her presence or vulnerability.
This is not a paperwork error. This is a systemic failure.
Irony of doxxing laws
The irony is sharp enough to cut. NSW’s doxxing laws were introduced following sustained lobbying about online threats directed at Zionist Jews. Those laws were framed as urgent protections against harm.
Yet here we have a Jewish woman who is anti-Zionist, whose address was published, who received death threats, and whose case appears to have been ignored entirely.
Only after I explicitly raised the double standard to a young constable – only after pointing out how differently this would have been handled had Michelle been a Zionist Jew – was a report finally entered into the system. I also demanded that police investigate the instigator of the doxxing. Whether the individual can ultimately be identified is beside the point. The absence of effort is the issue.
This failure is made even more disturbing by the broader amplification of risk.
Identity matters
The omission of Michelle’s Jewish identity among all the abuse matters. Not because her Judaism should confer protection or legitimacy – it should not have to – but because it fuelled a narrative that made her a target. The implication was clear:
‘she was an outsider, an agitator, someone deserving of removal.‘
It should not matter who she is. It should not matter what she believes. Wearing a keffiyeh is no more illegal than waving the flag of a state accused of mass atrocities.
What should matter is this: no one attending a memorial should be threatened with death, have their home address exposed, or be left unprotected by the police.
If that standard only applies to some Jews, then it is not protection at all. It is political preference enforced by the state.
And if writing this results in more threats, then that fact alone tells you how broken our public discourse – and our institutions – have become.
Tragedy should have united the country
Fifteen people are dead. Around forty are injured. Families and communities are grieving. But within hours, the event was weaponised.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the Albanese government. Jillian Segal linked the massacre with the March for Humanity on the Harbour Bridge.
Josh Frydenberg re-emerged, positioning himself as a future Prime Minister on the back of mass death, although suggesting this is the case is “highly offensive” to him.
I guess to Josh, it’s irrelevant that the father in the father/son terrorist team arrived in ’98 when Howard was PM, he gained his gun license in 2015 when Abbott was PM, and the ASIO investigation into the son was dropped in 2019 when Morrison was PM.And now, as a result of this horrific terrorist attack on Sunday, the calls to ban pro-Palestine protests are louder than ever.
If anybody can possibly think that Palestinians, Muslims, indeed even humanitarians who object to genocide had anything to gain from a mass shooting, “they’ve got rocks in their head”, as we say in Australia. If anything, the events of this week
‘show precisely why dissent must be protected.‘
When anti-Zionist Jews can be threatened with death, doxxed, misrepresented as terrorists, and left without protection by the state, the danger is not protest – it is repression.
If writing this results in further threats, that fact alone will confirm the point.
It is not safety for all that is being prioritised in this country. It’s not even safety for all Jews that is being prioritised. What dark days we are living in.
Politicising a Terror Attack | Scam of the Week.
21 Dec 2025
IDF security guards to roam the streets of Sydney? Criticism of Israel to be outlawed? Protests banned, media and universities monitored, the threat of defunding for antisemitism?
This episode examines how the Bondi Beach attacks were rapidly politicised, before the facts were established and while families were still grieving. Instead of restraint, Australia witnessed an immediate rush to blame, agenda setting by foreign leaders, and a media cycle that prioritised outrage over evidence.
We look at how the tragedy was leveraged to justify new crackdowns on protest, expanded surveillance, and policies that blur the line between combating antisemitism and restricting legitimate political speech.
We examine the role of lobby groups, the adoption of the IHRA definition, and the implications for media freedom, public broadcasters, universities, and civil society. There is no justice without truth. Watch the full investigation and read the related reporting at michaelwest.com.au
How reporting facts can now land you in jail for 14 years as a terrorist
Jonathon Cook Blog, 22 December 2025
Starmer’s government has set the most dangerous of precedents: it can now outlaw any political group it chooses as a terrorist organisation – and thereby make it impossible to defend it
The moment the British government began proscribing political movements as terrorist organisations, rather than just militant groups, it was inevitable that saying factual things, making truthful statements, would become a crime.
And lo behold, here we are.
The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt.
Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail.
But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the Act has been largely overlooked, even though it is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.
It is hard to believe this clause was not inserted specifically to target the watchdog professions: journalists, human rights groups and lawyers. They now face up to 14 years in jail for contravening this provision……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
the reality is that social media is awash with posts from people echoing outrageous official disinformation. This spreads unchallenged because to challenge it is now cast as a terrorism offence.
In truth, since proscription, any statements about the political aims of a deeply political organisation like Palestine Action occupy a grey area of the law.
Is it a terrorism offence to point out the fact, as I have done above, that Palestine Action targeted Elbit factories that send killer drones to Israel for use in Gaza. In doing so, may I have “recklessly” encouraged you to support Palestine Action?
Can I express any kind of positive view about the hunger strikers or their actions without violating the law?
The truth is that the law’s greyness is its very point. It maximises the chilling effect on those who are supposed to serve as the public’s watchdogs on power: journalists, human rights groups, lawyers. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-22/reporting-facts-14-years-jail/
The EU’s top diplomat casually rewrites WWII history on her way to WWIII
Kaja Kallas’ striking ignorance – or willful revisionism – is precisely why no one is taking the bloc seriously anymore.
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory 1 Dec, 2025, https://www.rt.com/news/628731-kaja-kallas-ww2-ww3/
Oops. Kaja Kallas, the de facto EU foreign minister already notorious for her chirpy incompetence, has done it again: displayed such elementary ignorance that you have to rub your eyes and double-check before you believe it’s true. But – as always with her – it is. This time, she has informed the world that Russia has not been attacked by anyone for a hundred years.
Those Nazi generals who planned Operation Barbarossa – the 1941 attack on the Soviet Union (and thus very much Russia) that left 27 million Soviet citizens dead – are probably spinning in their graves. Yes, blinded by prejudice and ideology (“values”) they badly underestimated the Russians (sounds familiar?) and lost (catastrophically). But having your whole 3-million-men-150-division operation wiped out Orwell-style?
And what about the many other Europeans who joined the Nazis, either from the beginning or later, with official contingents or as volunteers? The Romanians, Finns, Italians, Spanish, Croatians, Belgians, French, Norwegians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and, last but not least, Balts, such as from Kallas’s native Estonia?
And let’s not even start about those prickly Japanese! They, too, got a drubbing at the 1939 Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol clash (and yes, it took place on the edge of Mongolia, a Soviet client state), but, again, pretending they never even tried?
Being historically illiterate to such an extent seems almost pitiable. Where geometry has made former German Foreign Minister Annalena “360 degrees” Baerbock intellectually immortal, it is history where Kallas reaches peak benightedness.
That is especially disturbing because failing so badly, in particular in the history of last century’s great wars, makes Kallas a very dangerous person. The reason is as simple as 1,2,3: Together, the last two World Wars – both caused by Europeans – cost up to over 81 million lives. We know that a third one would be even worse, whether fought “only” with very advanced and destructive conventional weapons (including AI, of course) or, as is more likely, escalating to the use of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological, and cyber). A Third World War is likely to literally be our last, either forever or for the exceedingly long time it would take the survivors to make their way back from their caves to civilizations sophisticated enough to blow each other up again.
The Ukraine war – in reality, a Western proxy war against Russia and the emerging multipolar order, executed through misled, betrayed, sold-out, and now almost used-up Ukraine – has had the real potential to turn into World War Three. This risk has diminished with the second Trump administration, but it will only be gone once the war ends.
The NATO-EU Europeans, meanwhile, are doing their best to keep this war, its destruction, and its apocalyptic escalation potential going: they provide ever more weapons, cannot stop looking for sleazy ways to steal frozen Russian assets and fleece their own tax payers, urge for more Ukrainians to be thrown into the futile meatgrinder, and, last but not least, embolden the Zelensky regime to continue, no matter how much of its ubiquitous corruption is exposed.
The Atlanticists, i.e., deranged European “elites” that are staying this insane course, are hard to understand, since they do not follow reason, as their suicidal and yet persistent sanctions policy proves; their ethics are also utterly perverse, as their equally persistent complicity in Israel’s ongoing Gaza genocide illustrates.
Yet we can observe facets of their madness. One is that, clearly, to work so obstinately toward World War Three requires never having understood World War Two. That’s the one that ended with the first and only use in wartime of the kind of weapon that may well play a main role in a world-ending World War Three, too: When the US deliberately and entirely without military necessity massacred the populations of the two large Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it did not simply end a war by an enormous, shameful, and never acknowledged crime. It also opened the door to a future we all must pray will never arrive.
Regarding World War Two, EU de facto foreign minister Kallas, as so often, embodies NATO-EU European group-non-think as few others, revealing carelessly what slightly less ham-fisted operators still try to conceal.
Currently, she is doing her very worst to prevent peace from breaking out. While many leaders of NATO-EU Europe display what the Germans now call “Friedensangst” (the fear of peace), Kallas is second-to-none in her denial of reality, Russophobia, and, last but not least, bizarre over-estimation of the EU’s and her own personal influence. Demanding a place in negotiations the EU has deliberately stonewalled and calling for “concessions” from Russia as if the West and Ukraine were winning the war, Kallas has been publicly snubbed by the US.
Yet there is a method to her madness. Kallas’s inability to adequately process the present reflects her unusually pronounced inability to learn from the past. Only recently, speaking at a conference on security studies, she shared her dumb surprise at the fact that Russia and China believe they are among the victors of World War Two. Ironically, for Kallas, this is a dangerous “narrative,” clearly factually false in her eyes, and only successful with those who read little and don’t remember history all that well. She has felt “many question marks” in her head, she has informed us. If only she could grasp why.
In reality, both Russia and China played key roles in defeating the global fascist offensive that was at the core of World War Two. This is not the place for details – Kallas should feel strongly invited to finally read up on them (if she can) – but a few key facts will be enough: In Asia, World War Two started even earlier than in Europe, with Japanese aggression against China; the war also lasted longer.
Kallas is displaying a narrow-minded provincialism and a lousy education by reducing the struggle to that, as she put it, against the “Nazis.” That was the main story in Europe, but not in Asia, where the fight against Japanese fascism cost China an estimated 35 million lives. Kallas’s English is infamously rudimentary. She may want to try to improve it by making her way through, at least, historian Rana Mitter’s ‘Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945’. I am not sure she has ever read a whole book. If not, this would be a good first time. If she has, a second one is clearly required. And, for once, not some neo-Noltean tract by American history mangler and Ukraine War booster Tim Snyder.
The Soviet Union, with Russia at its core, suffered 27 million deaths. And without its staggering sacrifice and equally stunning efforts, Nazi Germany would not have been defeated: the preponderant share of its military forces were destroyed by Soviet soldiers on what the Germans called the Eastern Front. If they had not been ground down there, only two outcomes would have been possible: a Nazi empire would have survived or the US would have dropped atomic bombs on Germany as well.
Germans especially, among whom hating as well as underestimating Russia is all too fashionable again, would do well to remember a simple, little understood fact: it is precisely the Soviet victory over Germany by conventional arms that spared them a continuation of Nazi rule (though many may, of course, have welcomed that) or the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Kallas, in any case, is not one for learning. Clearly combining the worst of bigoted eastern European nationalism and Brussels’s simple-minded hubris, she can’t even sense when she has made a fool of herself. How do we know? Because when challenged, she made things worse again.
Kallas produced her display of incompetence and condescension on the occasion of China’s 80th victory celebrations. Unsurprisingly, its representatives have been clear. Beijing Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun condemned Kallas’s inanities as “full of ideological bias,” “without historical common sense,” displaying “disrespect,” and, last but not least, “harm[ing] the EU’s own interests.” The latter, of course, has never stopped Estonia’s most embarrassing export.
German EU parliamentarian Fabio de Masi, now co-leader of the New-Left BSW party, requested a clarification. In her response, Kallas managed to dig her hole even deeper: She claimed – untruthfully – that “on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia, the EU paid tribute also to the courage of the people of China, who endured immense suffering in defending their homeland and contributing to the end of the war.” In reality, she – and therefore the EU – had just done exactly the opposite: insulted China by explicitly denying its contribution. Kallas’s official job title is, in case she cannot remember, “Vice-President of the Commission/High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.” She speaks and mis-speaks for the EU, even if that is a catastrophe that should never have happened.
Regarding Russia, Kallas did not even make the effort to pretend. Instead, she simply continued her silly attempt to deny its key contribution to defeating Nazism. Accusing Russia of “manipulating” history, she felt this was also the right occasion to also once again repeat the absurdity that the West did not provoke the war in Ukraine.
Clearly, Kallas’s latest sally is shocking but not a surprise. It fits perfectly with her personal record of blithely chattering about breaking up Russia. It also fits with a widespread mood among NATO-EU Europe’s “elites,” where disparaging Russia and Russians is as much de rigueur as a stupid romanticization of Ukraine, its far right, and nationalism. Where Kallas can hold high office, normality is anything but.
The real question is when this nightmare of ignorance, war hysteria, and arrogance will finally end in Europe. Because if it does not, Europeans will only have themselves – or, to be precise, their “elites” – to blame when most of the world will write them off not only as the people who helped Israel commit genocide in Gaza but also as simply very unserious: yesterday’s privileged, now economic lightweights led by political lightweights who are too lazy to notice how silly they look.
Notes On Bondi Beach And Free Speech
Caitlin Johnstone, Dec 22, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/notes-on-bondi-beach-and-free-speech?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=182280999&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The dumbest thing we are being asked to believe today is that pro-Palestinian protests caused the Bondi shooting. It’s self-evidently moronic. No one sincerely believes it. They’re just pretending to believe it to get protests banned and criticism of Israel outlawed.
Nobody actually believes pro-Palestine protests caused the Bondi shooting. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.
Nobody actually believes “globalize the intifada” means “kill all Jews”. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.
Nobody actually believes pro-Palestine demonstrations are “hate marches” or that pro-Palestine speech is “hate speech”. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.
Nobody actually believes there’s a soaring epidemic of antisemitism in our society that is caused by anti-genocide demonstrations. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.
Nobody actually believes opposing the state of Israel is the same as hating Jews. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.
Israel supporters are liars and manipulators. They support genocide and apartheid. Of course they will lie about what they believe, and pretend to think things that they don’t actually think. They’re defending a mass atrocity that can only be defended using lies. They’re bad people. Bad people do bad things
It’s crazy how the Bondi shooters got radicalized by the anti-genocide protests from 2023 to 2025 and then invented a time machine and went back to 2019 to join ISIS.
That’s the claim that’s being made when people say the mass shooting in Sydney was caused by pro-Palestine protests, you know. In 2019 Naveed Akram was on an Australian intelligence watch list because of his ties to an Islamic State terror cell, so the claim that the Gaza protests caused or incited the shooting necessarily requires an element of time travel. Call their story “The Terrorists and the Time Machine”.
We’re being asked to believe that ISIS were a bunch of cuddly wuddly snuggle bears until Australians started protesting an active genocide.
Continue readingIf You’re Not Free To Oppose A Genocide, Your Society Is Not Free
Caitlin Johnstone, Dec 21, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-youre-not-free-to-oppose-a-genocide?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=182228375&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
If the right to free speech does not include the right to oppose an active genocide using strong and unmitigated language, then there is no freedom of speech.
This is exactly the sort of thing that freedom of speech is intended for: times when the government is doing something wrong which needs to be ferociously opposed. That’s the primary reason it’s an enshrined value in our society. Freedom of speech is for holding the powerful to account.
If you only have freedom of speech when you’re agreeing with your government and saying nothing which inconveniences the powerful, then Saudi Arabia has free speech. Every tyrannical regime that has ever existed has had freedom of speech by those standards. You don’t measure a society’s freedom by how much its citizenry are allowed to agree with their government, you measure it by how much they’re allowed to disagree.
And right now we are being told we’re not allowed to disagree. We’re being told the protests need to stop, the anti-genocide chants need to be criminalized, and everyone needs to shut up and obey — all justified by the completely baseless narrative that the words and actions of pro-Palestinian activists were somehow responsible a terrible massacre that was committed in Sydney last week.
And these policies just so happen to serve the interests of the very same western powers whose genocide-enabling actions were being forcefully opposed these last two years. Government officials constantly being protested and questioned about their facilitation of Israel’s genocidal atrocities. Politicians who are consistently confronted by anti-genocide demonstrators during their public appearances. Wealthy arms manufacturers whose profit margins are being harmed by direct action from activist groups. Plutocratic media institutions who are becoming more and more discredited in the public eye as the Gaza holocaust exposes them all. Billionaires whose empires are built upon the political status quo that gave rise to the genocide in question.
If the powerful are shutting down speech rights to advance their own interests in your society, then your society is not meaningfully different than the dictatorships the western world tries to contrast itself with. All our stories about living in a free society have been just that: stories. Fairy tales.
That’s what they’re telling us with this mad rush to stomp out freedom of speech this past week. They are telling us that we do not live in the kind of society we were taught about in school. They are telling us that the only reason we were allowed to speak as we pleased in the years leading up to the Gaza genocide is because we were a bunch of compliant sheep who were not meaningfully challenging the interests of the powerful, and now that we are meaningfully challenging them the facade of freedom and democracy is falling away.
As Frank Zappa once said, “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Hi-tech holocaust: How Microsoft aids the Gaza genocide
| Alan Macleod, MintPress News, 2025-10-27 |
Israel’s genocide is being powered by Microsoft.
From creating a massive digital dragnet, aiding in the production of A.I.-generated kill lists, hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its internal affairs, and suppressing figures opposing the slaughter, the Seattle-based tech corporation has played a key role in the violence.
MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest,leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer tostatethat “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.” MintPress explores the decades-long partnership between Microsoft and Israel, and the employees trying to break that marriage from the inside.
Turning Code Into Carnage
“Among U.S. tech firms,” the Associated Press wrote, “Microsoft has had an especially close relationship with the Israeli military.” That relationship, it notes, massively expanded after the October 7, 2023, attacks.
In the months following October 7, the IDF’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service surged more than 200-fold. The amount of data from surveillance cameras, drones, checkpoints, biometric scanners, phone calls, and intercepted Palestinian personal data stored by the IDF on Microsoft servers doubledin the next nine months,reaching13.6 petabytes by July 2024 – equivalent to 23,000 years of audio, or seven trillion pages of text.
The point of all this was to create an enormous digital dragnet, where Palestinians’ every move, word, and keystroke was recorded in monitored in the greatest and most dystopian digital dragnet ever created. In the words of Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s surveillance division, the plan was to “track everyone, all of the time.”
Sariel argued that big data was the solution to Israel’s problems, envisaging a future where Israel intercepted and stored “a million calls an hour” from Palestine, and used A.I. to search for keywords and identify threats.
There was no way, however, that Israel could do this alone, as it did not possess the expertise or anything like the storage capacity needed for such a project. To this end, Sarieltravelledto Seattle in 2021 to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to pitch him on the surveillance partnership whereby Microsoft would build Unit 8200 a customized and segregated area within its Azure platform.
The Israeli military uses Microsoft Azure to transcribe, translate, and otherwise process intelligence garnered via mass surveillance, which is then linked to Israel’s A.I.-based weapons systems.
The largest and most controversial organization within the Israeli military, Unit 8200 has long been the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech spying operation. The unit is dedicated to surveillance, cyberwarfare, and online manipulation operations. Last year, it carried out the Lebanese Pager Attack, an act that wounded thousands of civilians. Unit 8200 agents were also behind many of the most infamous international spyware and hacking cases, including the Pegasus software, that was used to surveil tens of thousands of the world’s most prominent political leaders, journalists, and human rights campaigners.
Sariel’s policy of mass surveillance changed the internal attitude at Unit 8200. “Suddenly the entire public was our enemy,”said one officer. The gargantuan trove of information compiled in Microsoft Azure amounted to a vast repository on the entire Palestinian population – a giant database of kompromat that is used to extort and blackmail the region’s indigenous people. If a person was secretly gay, or cheating on their spouse, for example, that information was readily available to Unit 8200 agents, who would then use it to turn their targets into informants. One former Unit 8200 member revealed that, as part of their training, they were made to memorize different Arabic slang words for “gay”, so that they could identify them in conversations.
Palestinian man passes through a biometric gate at the Qalandia crossing near JerusalemThe cloud database is also used to provide after-the-fact justification for arrests of innocent peoples. Off-hand, out-of-context comments made years agocan be used to portray anyone as a member of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or another armed resistance force.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….Of course, the vast majority of the deaths have been civilians – around 70% were women and children. But Israeli officials can also go back after the fact and scour their digital dragnet to justify any killing, finding connections or any other incriminating evidence. A senior Israeli military officer described the cloud technology as “a weapon in every sense of the word.” Other officials, however, have gone so far as to raise concerns that Israel’s overreliance on Microsoft as a service is a strategic vulnerability that should be corrected.
Microsoft Sees No Evil, Only Profits
Throughout all this, Microsoft has protested its innocence – and ignorance – of Israeli crimes. A spokesperson for the company stated:
“At no time during this engagement or since that time has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cell phone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned.
“Any allegations about Microsoft leadership involvement and support of this project … are false.”
But leaked documents suggest Microsoft engineers understood exactly what sort of data was being stored in Azure, and what their clients hoped to achieve……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Corporate Zionism: Roots in Israel’s War Economy
The Azure/IDF partnership is the result of a decades-long relationship between Microsoft and the State of Israel, one which has helped both entities. Microsoft established its first branch in Israel in 1989, and two years later, opened a research and development center in the city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv. The first of its kind outside the United States, the center has continued to expand, and now directly employs an estimated 2,700 workers.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Microsoft began signing deals with Israeli firms and government agencies, and, by the 2010s, was an integral part of the Israeli security state. In 2017, it inked a lucrative contract with the Israeli Prison Service, providing cloud services to the entity responsible for jailing tens of thousands of Palestinians without trial. Today, it maintains over 600 active subscriptions with the Israeli military.
The company has also moved to acquire at least 21 Israeli tech firms. Among these include cybersecurity group, Hexadite, purchased for $100 million in 2017, and Oribi, a web analytics business founded by a former Israeli intelligence agent.
sectorEvery CEO in Microsoft’s history has flown to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including Bill Gates, who, in 2016, stated that hi-tech Israeli security was “improving the world.”
In short, Microsoft is a cornerstone of Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector, which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP and more than half of its total exports. Netanyahu himself has showered praise on the corporation, describing the Microsoft/Israel partnership as “a marriage made in heaven.”
Others have been less enthused by this union.In June, Iran deliberately targeted a Microsoft center in Be’ersheva, carrying out a missile strike against it. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard justified their actions, citing Microsoft’s “close cooperation with the Israeli army and its being part of the system supporting aggression, and not just a civilian entity.” “The cyber area that was attacked also includes the residences of people from the espionage and artificial intelligence fields, who operate in direct cooperation with the enemy army and its security apparatus,” it concluded.
Cracking Down on Internal Resistance
A greater threat than Iran to Microsoft, however, is its own employees, hundreds of whom have organized to oppose its role in the genocide. Under the banner of No Azure for Apartheid, workers demand that:
Microsoft terminates all Azure contracts with Israel; disclose all ties to the Israeli national security state; publicly call for a ceasefire, and stop persecuting employees who speak out about the genocide.
This fourth demand is particularly salient, as the corporation has shown little to no tolerance for dissent. In October 2024, it fired two workers for organizing a vigil for Palestinian refugees at its corporate headquarters near Seattle………………………………………………………………………
Targeting Enemies
Company employees are far from the only target of Microsoft’s wrath, however. In May, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court,announcedthat Microsoft had locked him out of his official ICC email account, just as he was formalizing charges against Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders. For many, the timing was not a coincidence, but rather a message.
The British lawyer joined a vast plethora of Palestinians who have complained that Microsoft has terminated their accounts without warning. A BBC investigationfounddozens of Palestinians who, after attempting to use Microsoft services to contact relatives in Gaza, were banned for life. “I’ve had this Hotmail account for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I violated their terms — what terms? Tell me,” one Palestinian-American user said.
IBM’s brand has forever been tarnished by its collaboration with Nazi Germany, aiding Hitler’s slaughter of millions of people. In much the same way, No Azure for Apartheid believe that Microsoft’s name will forever be linked with the destruction in Gaza. Microsoft has enjoyed a decades-long partnership with Israel, which has seen them slowly integrate themselves into the state, becoming a fundamental part of the system of oppression. From servicing the Israeli war machine, to hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its affairs, to cracking down on internal and external dissent against it, Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians is aided by Microsoft, whose technological prowess has helped Israel carry out the world’s first A.I.-powered genocide. https://www.mintpressnews.com/microsoft-israel-surveillance-azure-idf-gaza-genocide/290534/
The Australian Israel Lobby Is Flat-Out Saying They Want A Ban On Criticism Of Israel
Caitlin Johnstone, Dec 19, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-australian-israel-lobby-is-flat?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=182048888&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Australians everywhere should be made acutely aware that the Australian Israel lobby is now explicitly advocating a ban on criticism of the state of Israel.
Not just hate speech against Jews. Criticism of a foreign state. They’re coming right out and saying it.
During a recent public video conference with the American Jewish Committee on the topic of the Bondi Beach shooting, the Executive Manager of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) explicitly says he wants pro-Palestine protests to be banned by the Australian government, and that addressing the problem of antisemitic hate speech in Australia necessarily means stopping opposition to Israel’s actions.
About 40 minutes into the American Jewish Committee’s YouTube video of the conference, AIJAC Executive Manager Joel Burnie demands that the Australian government take much stronger action to regulate freedom of expression regarding Israel and Zionism in Australia, saying the following:
“They need to act swiftly. They need to go to their own arms and their own institutions: no longer can you refuse service to a Zionist. We are going to prosecute people that spew hate speech against your people, and we’re not going to tip toe around the fact that the central problem here is Israel. I for one as Jewish leader will no long talk about antisemitism in isolation from Israel, because it’s the rhetoric and language on Israel that motivates the people to come and kill us. Those two terrorists were motivated by what was going on in Israel, and that’s what motivated them to come and kill us. So if they had Israel on their minds why are we acting as though it has nothing to do with the vitriolic binary nature of the pro-Palestinian advocacy movement?”
Burnie goes on to say that he wants a complete government ban on protests against Israel’s abuses throughout the nation:
“So overnight what we want immediately if you ask any Jew, what do you want, what do you want? No more protests! No more protests! No more no-go zones for Jews. I can’t, for two years, cannot take my kids to downtown Melbourne for two years on a Sunday, because of the pro-Palestinian marches, because of the violent nature of them. No more! Because that is an acceptance of the connection between the two. And until the prime minister is willing to do that, this is gonna happen again.”
Burnie is lying here, for the record. Anyone who has gone to the pro-Palestine demonstrations in Melbourne as I have will tell you that the protests are not even slightly violent in nature, and that there are Jews among the demonstrators who actively make their presence known. Those demonstrations have never been “no-go zones for Jews”; Joel Burnie doesn’t want to take his kids to downtown Melbourne on a Sunday because he doesn’t want to expose them to ideas and information which reveal the depravity of his Israel-supporting worldview.
Australians would probably benefit from watching the entire hour-long video of the conference, whose contents I first saw spotlighted on Twitter by Information Liberation’s Chris Menahan.
Some other highlights:
At 4:20 Burnie says that part of his role at AIJAC is “to take non-Jewish politicians and journalists and diplomats and other Australian officials to Israel.”
At 14:00 Nick Aronson, who is Chief of Staff to Australia’s so-called “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal, regurgitates the bogus propaganda line we’ve been hearing nonstop from Israel apologists throughout the western political/media class, “the words globalise the intifada actually mean globalise the intifada; it means kill Jews wherever they are”. Pro-Israel spinmeisters have been spouting this line with creepy uniformity ever since the Bondi shooting in order to justify government crackdowns on freedom of speech and assembly to protect Israeli information interests.
At 15:00 Burnie says “the gloves are off now” with regard to stomping out free speech in Australia, saying Jews need stop saying “not all pro-Palestinian supporters are antisemitic”, saying “The pro-Palestinian movement, or the things within the pro-Palestinian movement that we all are exposed to in the public, is too binary: you’re pro-Palestinian so you need to be viciously anti-Israel.”
At 16:20 Burnie claims the Bondi shooting “happened because of the protest movements on the streets”, citing no evidence.
At 17:30 Burnie again makes his “no more protests” demand, saying “If I could ask for one thing of the government today: no more protests. If they cannot utilise language that is not inciting violence, that does not marginalise and dehumanise Jews, they have no right to be on the streets.”
At 21:10 Burnie complains that there haven’t been any prosecutions and arrests for antisemitic speech.
At 33:30 Burnie singles out Australian Muslims, saying “there needs to be more monitoring and surveillance of Islamic hate preachers” and an auditing of their education syllabus because of an “antisemitism problem amongst the Australian Muslim community.”
At 36:25 Burnie says Jillian Segal’s notorious speech-suppressing plan for fighting antisemitism in Australia “wasn’t about quashing debate on Israel, it just happens to be that language on Israel invading all of our social spaces in Australia have made this country a very unsafe space and place for Jews.”
At 46:00 Aronson says “there’s absolutely no doubt that people need to go to jail” for antisemitic hate speech in Australia, but says that won’t be enough to fix the problem because “we can always arrest more people, make no mistake, but you can never arrest enough, to be honest.”
At 54:00 Aronson speaks of the need for regulating online speech, complaining that “a number of the online platforms pride themselves on what they call free speech — obviously we would disagree; we would call it hate speech.” At 56:00 he says “we need to continue to put pressure on these platforms to understand the role they have to play in social cohesion, and how far short they are falling of community standards.”
This comes as the Australian government announces plans to ramp up its war on free speech in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack. We can be sure to see more authoritarian measures rolled out in the weeks to come as Israel’s supporters seize on this opportunity to advance the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state.
CLEAN? -WHAT A LIE! NIA welcomes first-ever nuclear appointment to Government’s Clean? Power Advisory Commission.
Sizewell C’s Julia Pyke brings expertise in delivering major infrastructure projects and effective community engagement
The Nuclear Industry Association has welcomed the appointment of Julia Pyke, Co-Managing Director of Sizewell C, as one of the UK Government’s eight new Clean Power 2030 Advisory Commissioners – marking the first time somebody with significant nuclear experience has been appointed to the Commission.
The appointment recognises the vital role nuclear power plays in delivering secure, reliable and low-carbon electricity, and ensures nuclear expertise is at the heart of advice shaping the UK’s clean power future.
Tom Greatrex, Chief Executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, said:
“Julia Pyke’s appointment is a hugely positive step and a clear recognition that nuclear must be central to delivering the UK’s clean power mission. The fact that this is the first time a nuclear leader has been appointed to the Commission ensures that decisions on the UK’s energy future are informed by the realities of building and operating clean, reliable power at scale.”
The Lobby Is Milking the Bondi Beach Attack To Silence Critics of Israel’s Genocide
Jonathon Cook. December 16, 2025
It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate
I, for one, am struggling to stomach the spew of hypocrisy from pro-Israel groups like the Community Security Trust and its policy director, Dave Rich, in the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack.
Establishment media, on the other hand, appear to have a bottomless appetite for efforts by Israel apologists to exploit the genuine fear and grief of the Jewish community to advance a political agenda – one designed to silence criticism of Israel over its two-year slaughter and maiming of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Predictably, the supposedly liberal Guardian once again gave Rich a prominent slot in its comment pages, this time to spin the attack in Sydney into a demand for silencing opposition to Israel’s genocide.
Here are extracts from Rich’s piece in italics, followed by my observations. His all-too-obvious double standards and his glaring misdirection ploys should have disqualified this piece from publication. But the British media simply can’t get enough of this kind of bilge.
Rich: “The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.”
If Rich is so troubled by issues of dehumanisation, why has he remained so steadfastly mute about the long and utterly chilling dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel and by its lobby groups, including his own organisation? Remember, Israeli leaders called the Palestinians “human animals”. It is decades of that kind of dehumanisation that laid the ground for Israel’s genocide. It is precisely because of such dehumanisation that the live-streamed horrors of the past two years made barely any impact on the Israeli public or on opinion among Israel’s supporters.
The truth is it is Rich and his fellow pro-Israel lobbyists who are the ones in the grip of an “ideology of pure hatred” – one that chooses to excuse the mass murder of children when they are Palestinian, blown to pieces and starved for months on end by the very state he identifies with.
Rich: “The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.”
No, it’s not the Bondi Beach attack that has endangered “western liberal democracy”. That was irreversibly hollowed out when western leaders chose to actively collude in Israel’s genocide and defy the rulings of the world’s most respected legal institutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Western liberal democracy was hollowed out when these leaders chose to side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and prioritise his exterminationist agenda over the rule of law………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The real emergency is a rampant anti-Palestinian racism that has utterly normalised genocide and been given institutional support across the West. It is anti-Palestinian racism, not “antisemitism”, that is the consequence of “two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings”. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, people with a conscience are angry at the two-year genocide endorsed by our governments. And they have every right to be. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-silence-critics-israel-genocide/
1 This Month
of the week – Shut Down Drone Warfare!
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
Petition to revoke the licensing of the Near Surface Nuclear Disposal Facility (NSDF) at Chalk River. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7247
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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