The Faheys couldn’t understand how Braden’s face appeared on the book’s cover, or why his name appeared inside it.
Braden never received the vaccine. His death in August 2022 was due to a malformed blood vessel in his brain. No one ever contacted them to ask about their son’s death, or for permission to use the photo. No one asked to confirm the date of his death — which the book misdated by a year. When the Faheys and residents of their town in California tried to contact the publisher and author to get Braden and his picture taken out of the book, no one responded.
Covid-19 targets certain races and gives others immunity: Kennedy Jr. was caught on camera telling fellow diners that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” according to a video made public in the New York Post, which also shows him saying the U.S. “put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes” and labs in Ukraine collected Russian and Chinese DNA “so we can target people by race.”
Mass shootings are linked to prescription drugs: Kennedy Jr. blamed school shootings on drugs like the antidepressant Prozac in a recent Twitter Spaces discussion, telling owner Elon Musk, “Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events" (there's no scientifically established correlation between psychiatric drugs and mass violence, according to experts cited by PolitiFact).
The 2004 presidential election was stolen: Kennedy Jr. said in a 2006 Rolling Stone article he was “convinced” that voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election allowed former Republican President George W. Bush to steal the victory from Democrat John Kerry, but while a 2005 postmortem by the Democratic Party found a breakdown of the election system in Ohio, it found no evidence of fraud.
The CIA was involved in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy: Reprising the unfounded claim he has made for years, Kennedy Jr. recently made the suggestion to Fox News’ Sean Hannity (though the federal government’s Warren Commission convened to study the killing found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot JFK in 1963).
The wrong person may have been convicted of killing his father: Kennedy Jr. cast doubt on the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan in the 1968 assassination of his father, former U.S. Attorney General and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, to which gunman Sirhan Sirhan confessed days later, though his lawyers have claimed in recent years that he was hypnotized and coerced to kill Kennedy.
The pharmaceutical industry is throwing money at Democrats: After the Affordable Care Act of 2010, “Democrats were getting more money from pharma than Republicans,” Kennedy Jr. claimed on Twitter Spaces, though an analysis by STAT News found 23 of the country’s biggest drug companies and 2 pharmaceutical trade organizations have favored Republicans in 14 of the past 16 elections from 1990-2020, the most recent year STAT studied.
Gun ownership in Switzerland is similar to the United States: While vowing not to “take away anyone’s guns,” if elected president, Kennedy Jr. made the debunked claim, despite data that shows U.S. civilians possess an average of 120.5 firearms per 100 people, the highest per-capita rate in the world, compared to 27.6 in Switzerland, according to the Small Arms Survey by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Covid-19 virus was genetically engineered: “Covid was clearly a bioweapons problem,” he said on Twitter Spaces, repeating a claim promoted by some hard-right lawmakers—U.S. intelligence agencies have said it’s possible the virus originated from a lab accident, but have found no evidence to support the claim that it was deliberately leaked.
Former White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates sought to exaggerate the pandemic, in part, to promote vaccines: Kennedy Jr. accused the pair in his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci of launching "a historic coup d'état against Western democracy" by exercising outsize influence over the media and public health realm, while Kennedy also promoted use of unapproved treatments for Covid-19, such as ivermectin.
Vaccines can cause autism: For years, Kennedy Jr. has promoted the theory that the preservative, thimerosal, which has largely been phased out of modern vaccine formulas, appears to be responsible for a rise in autism diagnoses and that the government knew but “knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children,” he wrote in Rolling Stone and Salon in 2006, despite consensus among a number of certified health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and more that have found no credible link between vaccines and autism.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:
Authorities in Gaza said Tuesday night that an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on a hospital holding thousands of patients, staff, and people seeking shelter from Israel's relentless bombardment killed at least 500 civilians, while IDF officials blamed the deaths on a botched Islamic Jihad rocket attack.
Photos and videos from al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City posted on social media showed bodies and body parts scattered about in the fiery aftermath of the blast. One video shared by senior Al Jazeera
journalist Ali Hashem reportedly shows the moment when a rocket or
missile strikes the Anglican-run hospital, causing a massive,
earth-shaking explosion.
"The death toll right now is more than 500, but we believe that number will reach more than 1000," Ziad Shehadah, a medical doctor and resident of Gaza, told Al Jazeera. "It is a massacre."
Ghassan Abu Sittah, a physician with the international charity Doctors
Without Borders (MSF), said on social media: "We were operating in the
hospital, there was a strong explosion, and the ceiling fell on the
operating room. This is a massacre."
MSF said that "nothing justifies this shocking attack on a hospital and its many patients and health workers, as well as the people who sought shelter there."
"Hospitals are not a target. This bloodshed must stop. Enough is enough," the group added.
Many Gazans had fled to the hospital after Israeli authorities ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee for their lives—an alleged war crime compared to the Nakba ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel—amid a bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,500 people, including over 1,000 children, since October 7.
"What's s happened is terrible because those people, all of them are civilians. They fled their homes and reached a place that they believed was safe—a hospital, which according to international law, is a safe place," Shehadah said. "People left their homes thinking they were more dangerous and they move to our schools and hospitals to be safe. And in one minute, all of them have been killed at a hospital."
Joe Biden's just another War Criminal as his Tweet makes clear.
What about the daily brutal attacks on the Palestinians? What about the children of Palestine? No move to stand with them, no move to defend them. You wasted everyone's time by even going. All you're doing is providing cover for this continued slaughter. It's beyond disappointing, it's shameful.
WSWS calls out the bombing:
On Tuesday, the Israeli military dropped a massive GPS-guided bomb on the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, killing more than 500 medical personnel, patients and refugees. The hospital, operated by the Anglican Christian Church, had been sheltering over 1,000 people who were displaced by the bombing. Doctors and medical staff at the hospital had courageously refused Israeli demands that they relocate further south, stating that there were not enough beds in southern Gaza to accommodate their critically wounded patients.
This atrocity has triggered mass protests by hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East, Europe and America. Thousands rallied outside the White House, with banners accusing US President Joe Biden of genocide.
The Israeli government and US media have launched a campaign to promote the lie that the Palestinians bombed their own hospital. Israel denied responsibility for the bombing, claiming that the attack was caused by a rocket launched from Gaza that misfired. The entire world knows this is an absurd fabrication. This massacre was conducted by Israel, with the support of the US-NATO axis.
There is nothing accidental about the Gaza bombing. It is only the latest, and most heinous, in a string of dozens of attacks on hospitals, residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure over the past 10 days. It is entirely in keeping with Israel’s strategy for the war, which is to terrorize the population by inflicting massive casualties and deaths.
Yet Joe lands in Tel Aviv and immediately issues propaganda statements that it was "the other side." Disgusting and humiliating. Bethan McKernan (GUARDIAN) reports, "The Israeli military said an initial investigation suggested the explosion was caused by a failed Hamas rocket launch, before saying it was the result of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket barrage. Islamic Jihad denied the Israeli allegation, and the scale of the blast appeared to be outside either of the militant groups’ capabilities."
As Amy Goodman noted yesterday, "Biden has so far refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza." At THE NATION, Abdullah Shihipar notes:
The situation in the Gaza Strip is dire. Amid an intense bombing campaign, Israel has shut off water and power and limited essential supplies such as food, medicine, and fuel, creating a massive public health crisis in a region that was already struggling due to a years-long blockade. According to latest statistics, more than 2,750 people have been killed by Israeli strikes, of whom 1,000 are children. Hospitals in Gaza have already been targeted. After repeated threats and calls to evacuate, the Ahli Arab Hospital was bombed on October 17, with early estimates of casualties reporting 500 dead. The hospital was filled with people seeking shelter from the bombings, as are hospitals across Gaza. At Shifa Hospital alone the number of people seeking shelter is estimated to be around 35,000 people. These are ideal conditions for infectious disease to spread. If there is not immediate intervention, thousands of Gazans will die of infections, malnutrition, and dehydration, in addition to the bombardment.
The shutoff of clean water is of particularly grave concern. When people no longer have access to clean, treated water, they will drink water from whatever source there is, including seawater. These sources may be contaminated with sewage, chemicals, and other contaminants, which can lead to water-borne illnesses like cholera and dysentery; outbreaks of such diseases would strain the medical system in Gaza. These diseases also require rapid rehydration, and without a source of water, they can quickly become deadly. Clean water is also necessary for providing proper medical care to people—for one thing, you can’t wash your hands without it. Water is a key component in many medical procedures, such as dialysis for kidney patients. When clean water is no longer available, medical practitioners have to spend crucial moments looking for water in a time when time can barely be spared. Meanwhile, the blockade prevents medical supplies from entering Gaza, and Médecins Sans Frontières has reported that hospitals have run out of painkillers. As people are gravely injured and arrive at the hospital with open wounds, if hospitals are lacking proper medical equipment to stabilize them and prevent infection, many people will die preventable deaths.
The head of the United Nations on Wednesday called for an "immediate humanitarian cease-fire" in Israel and Gaza following a deadly strike on the Palestinian territory's al-Ahli Hospital, where many displaced Palestinians had taken refuge amid relentless Israeli bombing.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said a cease-fire would "provide sufficient time and space" for humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip and hostages to be freed.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We head now to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 55 Palestinians in the West Bank since Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel October 7th. Israeli authorities have also arrested over 700 Palestinians, several prominent lawmakers, including Aziz Dweik, the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
To talk about the situation in the West Bank and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, we’re joined by Sari Bashi, program director at Human Rights Watch, co-founder of Gisha, the leading Israeli human rights group promoting the right to freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza.
Sari, if you can talk about the entire situation, the imminent invasion of Gaza? You just heard Raji Sourani. And also talk about what’s happening in the West Bank. In the last year, approximately — it’s a bit more, but a Palestinian a day has been killed since the beginning of the year.
SARI BASHI: Yes. Thank you.
And I’m sorry to say that since October 7th in Gaza, Israeli airstrikes have killed, on average, 100 children a day. And that’s the statistic that stays with me.
So, this latest escalation began on October 7th, when Hamas-led fighters entered Israel and committed unspeakable war crimes against Israeli civilians. They massacred partygoers at an outdoor dance party. They entered homes, in some cases burning the homes, in other cases shooting families. And they took hostage men, women, older people, children, people with disabilities. Appropriately, the U.S. government and people in the United States condemned those acts, because they were unspeakable crimes against civilians that have no justification.
So the answer cannot be for the Israeli government, with the backing of the American government, to then target and harm civilians in Gaza. I am particularly concerned about the collective punishment of civilians in Gaza. The Israeli military cut food, electricity, water and fuel supplies on October 7th, which is contributing to the humanitarian catastrophe. And the Israeli military is engaging in — is dropping explosive weapons in densely populated areas with wide area effects. So, when you do that, when you drop bombs on crowded urban centers, it is predictable that you will kill civilians. It is predictable that you will kill children. And that’s what’s happening. Gaza is the size — about the size of the U.S. city of Philadelphia. It’s 2.2 million people. Nearly half of those people are children.
And that’s something that we need to see more of the United States government addressing. We’ve heard thus far general comments about the need to respect international humanitarian law. We need very specific directives for the Israeli government to immediately restore food, fuel, electricity and water supplies and to stop dropping weapons in densely populated civilian areas.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sari Bashi, I wanted to ask you — the prime minister, Netanyahu, has urged the Palestinians in Gaza to flee to Egypt if they want to avoid the horrors of the bombing and the invasion. Isn’t this itself a form of ethnic cleansing? After all, Israel is not telling the Palestinians, “Hey, if you want to escape the bombing and the invasion, move into Israel or be transported to the West Bank.” After all, even Putin, in his invasion of Ukraine, ended up admitting 1.2 million Ukrainians into Russia to avoid the worst impact on them of the war itself.
SARI BASHI: So, the first thing to say is that the countries that are neighboring Gaza — Israel and Egypt — have an obligation to open their borders and let people who are fleeing for their lives enter. Not to do that risks violating the principle of non-refoulement. When you have mothers with children who are trying to save their children’s lives, Israel and Egypt need to open their borders and let that happen. But the Israeli evacuation order risks forcible transfer. The Israeli military has called on half the population in Gaza in the north to go to the south, and Israeli military officials have also called on people in Gaza to flee to Egypt.
Now, for people in Gaza, Gaza is — 70% of the people living in Gaza are refugees from what is now Israel. Some of the older people who fled Friday, Saturday from northern Gaza to southern Gaza, they remember fleeing the Israeli army 75 years ago. They remember the homes they left behind in what is now Israel. And they remember that they were never allowed to come back, although international law defends the right of return for all refugees, whether they’re Ukrainians trying to resume — to return to areas that have been liberated from Russian occupation or under Russian occupation, or people from Gaza coming back after the army has left.
My concern is that while it’s acceptable, and in some cases advisable, for warring parties to issue warnings, those warnings are only effective if there are safe ways for civilians to avoid harm. So, when you tell a million people to evacuate but there’s no safe place to go to and no safe way to get there, that’s not an effective warning. And another thing that the United States government should do very clearly is to call on the Israeli government to cancel the evacuation order and to take all measures to protect civilians who remain in the north. There are many people — men, women, children, older people, people with disabilities, hospital patients — who either cannot or will not leave the northern Gaza, and they retain their protections under international law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk to us about how Palestinians in the West Bank are being impacted as a result of the continuing conflict in Gaza?
SARI BASHI: So, here, people are mostly worried. There have been road closures. Workers have not been allowed to enter Israel for their jobs. There have been increased military activity in the West Bank, including incursions and arrests. You mentioned arrests of people who expressed support for the attacks on October 7th. Businesses who engaged in that have been closed at night, with the Israeli army coming in. For the most part, people are worried.
All of this is unprecedented. The attacks that Hamas-led fighters committed against Israeli civilians on October 7th are unprecedented. It was the worst massacre of civilians in Israeli history. And the level of harm, targeted harm, that the Israeli military is inflicting on civilians in Gaza is also unprecedented.
At Human Rights Watch, we’re trying to hold open a narrow space for universal basic principles of humanity. It is never OK to commit unspeakable war crimes against civilians, as was done in southern Israel on October 7th. And that in no way justifies committing war crimes against civilians in Gaza.
And for Americans who are confused by all of what’s going on, I would suggest you just remember that very basic principle that civilians need to be protected, and then encourage your elected representatives to remind the U.S. government of that principle, because the United States government is providing $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel, and it’s rushing even more weapons here right now. It has a responsibility to rein in the attacks on civilians, to call on Israel to cancel the evacuation order and protect civilians in Gaza and to immediately restore humanitarian supplies to civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the difference between your experience on the West Bank, as an Israeli Jewish lawyer, and your husband’s experience, as a Palestinian professor, a resident of Ramallah, for people to understand? And also this issue — you know, Jake Sullivan recently said, just a few weeks ago, Biden’s national security adviser, that it’s been quieter in the Middle East than any time in 20 years. This is the time that at least a Palestinian a day was being killed. And talk about settlers and the army.
SARI BASHI: Yeah. I think part of the concern — and I know Raji was addressing that when he talked about root causes — is that some of the root causes of the violence, including what Human Rights Watch and many other groups have called apartheid, are invisible to U.S. policymakers. We have a situation where U.S. policymakers are very busy brokering normalization deals between the most right-wing Israeli government in history and dictatorial Arab governments, and it’s not paying attention to what’s happening on the ground.
For decades, the Israeli authorities have engaged in systemic repression of Palestinians, including not allowing people in Gaza, refugees in Gaza, to return to their homes in what is now Israel, and including a punishing closure for the last 16 years that has not allowed appropriate supplies to enter and leave Gaza and has not allowed people to travel. And that’s part of the reason why people in Gaza were so vulnerable even before this violence began.
In addition, the Israeli government is privileging Israeli Jews over Palestinians. And that’s the essence of the crime against humanity of apartheid, when you commit inhumane acts and engage in systemic repression in order to privilege one group over another. So, I’m Israeli Jewish, American, as well. My partner is Palestinian. And I can do things that he can’t do. I can travel quite freely. And even though his mother is a refugee from what is now Israel, he can’t pass areas that are off limits to Palestinians. I have excellent rights. I have health. There are cities in Israel being built for Jews only, and also in the West Bank, settlements being built for Israeli Jews only, while Palestinians are hemmed in, unable to build cities, and their homes are being demolished for lack of permits that are almost impossible to get. The Israeli authorities are engaging in forcible transfer, where they remove Palestinian communities in the West Bank to make room for settlements. All of these are part of the root causes of the violence.
And the only thing I can hope is that U.S. policymakers will realize that it’s not quiet here. There’s terrible abuses going on. You just have to listen to what people on the ground are telling you, and adjust accordingly. No U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine will be successful if it doesn’t address the abuses on the ground, first, second and third.
AMY GOODMAN: Sari Bashi, we want to thank you for being with us, program director at Human Rights Watch, co-founder of Gisha, the leading Israeli human rights group promoting the right to freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza.
Next up, we go to a former Israeli peace negotiator. His recent interview on BBC went viral. Back in 20 seconds.
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