ICYM these items on how covid made some folks into millionaires; why the oppressed fight back; how the ICC and the ICJ are fending off attacks on them; the failed coup in the DRC; Billionaires linked to US Universities

 

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/why-i-dont-condemn-hamas-for-october

 

Why I Don't Condemn Hamas For October 7

Caitlin Johnstone

Jun 03, 2024

 

In 1999, a woman named Cindy Hendy was stabbed in the neck with an ice pick by a woman named Cynthia Vigil inside a trailer home in New Mexico. Vigil then fled the scene to a nearby residence, whose owner promptly called the police. 

She was never charged with any crime.

The reason Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any crime despite having stabbed Cindy Hendy in the neck with an ice pick was because Hendy was an accomplice of the serial killer David Parker Ray, also known as the Toy Box Killer. Vigil’s escape from the trailer where Ray and Hendy had been imprisoning and torturing her led to the pair’s subsequent arrest. Ray died in prison three years later, the full extent of his murder spree still unknown. Hendy served 19 years and was released in 2019.

Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any crime because anyone could see that violent force was an entirely understandable and legitimate response to having been kidnapped and subjected to horrific treatment. It never at any time occurred to anyone to say that she should have acted differently, and it most certainly never occurred to anyone to make her single act of desperate violence the major story instead of the fact that there was a serial killer who’d been abducting women and torturing them in his murder dungeon......

 

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https://www.openthebooks.com/substack-breaking-big-pharma-paid-690-million-to-faucis-agency-through-secret-third-party-royalties-during-pandemic-years/

 

By Adam Andrzejewski

Payments to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s agency and colleagues from private pharmaceutical firms under obscure licensing and royalty schemes skyrocketed during the pandemic.

 

The American people started to feel that Big Pharma was very close to Big Government. Thanks to our two federal lawsuits demanding transparency, we know more details and they do not inspire confidence.

 

In 2022 and 2023, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies paid the National Institutes of Health a sum of $710,381,160 in third party royalties. These were payments to NIH, its leadership and scientists by healthcare entities licensing inventions created in federal, taxpayer-paid labs. The two-year average of such payments over the prior decade was less than $5 million, for an increase of more than 175 times.

 

Fauci’s institute, The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) received $690,218,610 of the $710 million, or 97%. In the same period, the other 26 institutes under the NIH received some $26 million in total.

 

It was an extreme cash haul at Fauci’s institute:

 

Between 2009-2021, OpenTheBooks.com, the organization I founded and lead, previously reported that $325 million was paid to all NIH institutes. Fauci’s NIAID received $23.9 million of that – or an average of $2 million per year......

 

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https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-genocide-continue-israel-us-must-destroy-laws-war

 

To continue the Gaza genocide, Israel and the US must destroy the laws of war

Jonathan Cook

31 May 2024

The world's two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities

The world's two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

Separate announcements last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) should have forced Israel on to the back foot in Gaza.

A panel of judges at the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – demanded last Friday that Israel immediately stop its current offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza. 

Instead, Israel responded by intensifying its atrocities.

On Sunday, it bombed a supposedly "safe zone" crowded with refugee families forced to flee from the rest of Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s rampage for the past eight months. .......

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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/23/dkrh-m23.html

 

Failed pro-imperialist coup targets Democratic Republic of Congo

Kumaran Ira

22 May 2024

Early Sunday morning, several dozen heavily armed men attacked the Palace of the Nation, a presidential palace and home of the Minister of the Economy in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Men in fatigues opened fire, killing two of Economy Minister Vital Kamerhe’s 15 guards. The attack lasted about three hours before it was crushed.

 The spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo said the “attempted coup d’état,” involving “foreigners and Congolese,” was foiled. It was “nipped in the bud by the defence and security forces,” General Sylvain Ekenge said in a short message on national television. He said several Americans, including “two whites” and a Congolese “naturalized British” citizen, were involved.

The leader of the attempted coup was identified as Christian Malanga, a Congolese naturalized American. Malanga and three other men were killed after resisting arrest, and some 50 people, including three US citizens, were arrested, according to a Congolese army spokesman. The arrested US citizens include Malanga’s 21-year-old son Marcel Malanga and Benjamin Zalman-Polun, a 36-year-old former cannabis dealer from Maryland.

The coup took place as Washington and its NATO allies wage a bitter struggle for influence in Africa with China and Russia, amid the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. The NATO imperialist powers are dissatisfied with the current DRC regime’s development of economic ties with Beijing and Moscow.

 

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https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/icc-israel-u-s-congress

 

The ICC Takes on Israel and the US Congressional Mafia

Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. are trying their best to throw sand in the wheels of justice with threats of new sanctions against the International Criminal Court after it requested Israeli and Hamas arrest warrants.

Medea Benjamin

May 29, 2024Common Dreams

Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court when he grilled Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a May 21 congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “We are next.”

The audience at the hearing, stacked with CODEPINK pro-Palestine supporters, burst out in applause at the notion of the U.S. being hauled before the world’s highest court. “You can clap all you want,” an angry Graham retorted, “but they tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan.” Graham was thankful that in the Afghan case “reason prevailed” when the case was dropped, adding that the U.S. must level sanctions against the ICC “not only to protect our friends in Israel but to protect ourselves.”

Graham was referring to the 2019 efforts of former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to hold both the Taliban and the U.S. accountable for war crimes in Afghanistan. When Graham said that “reason prevailed,” he really meant that U.S. thuggery prevailed because the Trump administration brazenly imposed sanctions against ICC officials, denying them visas to the U.S. and freezing their assets in U.S. banks. U.S. President Joe Biden lifted the sanctions but did so with the tacit understanding that the court would not resume the probe of U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. The message from both Democratic and Republican presidents was clear: Do not dare hold the U.S. to the same standards you use for others.

While most Republicans and pro-Israel hawks in the Democratic Party will likely join hands to hammer the international court, President Biden may ultimately feel pressured to adopt the position best articulated by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “It is fine to express opposition to a possible judicial action, but it is absolutely wrong to interfere.”

The International Criminal Court was founded in 1998 as the result of a lifetime’s work by an American (and Jewish) international lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz, rooted in his experience as an investigator and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunals after the Second World War. Ben passed away in 2023 at the age of 103, but the universal jurisdiction that the court is exercising in this case is the fruition of his life’s work to hold war criminals accountable under international law, no matter what country they are from or who their victims are.

Enter Israel. The ICC has been building a case against Israel for nearly a decade. A recent blockbuster investigation by TheGuardian and two Israeli-based news outlets revealed a shocking almost decade-long secret campaign against the court by Israeli intelligence agencies, who surveilled, hacked, pressured, smeared, and threatened ICC officials in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries..............

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https://www.mintpressnews.com/follow-money-israel-linked-billionaires-silenced-campus-gaza-protests/287431/

Follow the Money: How Israel-Linked Billionaires Silenced US Campus Protests 

America’s universities are on fire. A protest movement against the violence in Gaza and U.S. colleges’ complicity in them has swept the nation, with encampments on college campuses in 45 of America’s 50 states. The crackdown has been swift; thousands of students have been arrested, charged, fined, lost their degrees, or even deported. Amid corporate media demanding a “Kent State 2.0”, riot police, armored vehicles and snipers have been deployed across the country to terrify those campaigning for justice into silence.

Why have overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against a foreign power’s actions been met with such a heavy-handed response? A MintPress News investigation finds that those same elite institutions have deep financial and ideological ties to the state of Israel, are funded by pro-Israel billionaires who have demanded they take action to crush the student movement, are partially funded by the Israeli government, and exist in a climate where Washington has made it clear that the protests should not be tolerated.

Israel’s Billionaire Backers

The movement began on April 17 at Columbia University, where a modest Gaza solidarity encampment was established. Protestors hardly expected to be welcomed by university authorities but were shocked as university president Minouche Shafik immediately called in the NYPD – the first time the university had allowed police to suppress dissent on campus since the famous 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Shafik’s decision was no doubt influenced by the enormous pressure put on her by the university’s top donors – many of whom have deep connections to the Israeli state and its military.

Robert Kraft

Billionaire businessman and sports executive Robert Kraft, for example, publicly announced he was cutting the university off from his lavish funding over its failure to suppress the protests effectively enough. “I am deeply saddened at the virulent hate that continues to grow on campus and throughout our country,” he said in a statement, claiming that Columbia was not protecting its Jewish students........

 

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