Illustrations by Sophia den Breems

”Why Trump’s ties to Russia would be way worse than Watergate”

- Sarah Kendzior, Flyover Country Correspondent, 30 March 2017:

At 5:25 am on Monday, March 20, Donald J. Trump logged onto Twitter and wrote: “James Clapper and others stated that there is no evidence Potus colluded with Russia. This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it!”

Hours later, at a congressional hearing assembled to investigate foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, FBI director James Comey confirmed the FBI probe into Trump’s ties to Russia that same day. Comey confirmed that Trump and “individuals associated with the Trump campaign” had been under investigation for Russian collusion since late July, and that the investigation was still ongoing.

Contrary to Trump’s assertion, this statement was not “fake news,” nor was it news at all to those who had followed the Russian interference story since it broke last summer.

In August 2016, former Democratic Senator Harry Reid implored Comey to reveal information about Russian interference that he said “is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results,” adding that the public had the right to know before the November election. Comey responded, notoriously, not by revealing that Trump was under FBI investigation, but by implying that Hillary Clinton was, in an “October surprise” faux email scandal that was retracted only after the rumor had damaged her campaign.

Reid wrote to Comey again in late October and reemphasized the Russian threat: “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity… and yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.”

After Trump won, calls for an investigation into Russian interference began in late November, led by Republicans like John McCain and Lindsay Graham as well as Democrats like Elijah Cummings, Maxine Waters, and Adam Schiff, the latter of whom led the interrogation of Comey and NSA head Michael Rogers at the March 20 hearings. Though it has falsely been portrayed by both the Trump administration and some media outlets as a Democrat-led witchhunt, Russian interference in the election was always a bipartisan concern. Any threat to both national security and sovereignty is a bipartisan concern, and the reluctance of the Trump administration to cooperate with the investigation has long been an ominous indication of his limitations and loyalties.

Instead of watchdogs, we have lapdogs

If you were the president of the United States, sworn under oath to protect and serve the public, wouldn’t you want foreign interference in your campaign to be investigated – at the very least, to prevent the recurrence of similar actions?

Or would you try to impede the investigation, by smearing those who seek it (among them intelligence officials, legislators, and reporters) and by installing officials who either benefit from the Russian relationship (like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson), seem selected in order to obfuscate the Russian relationship (like Attorney General Jeff Sessions), or both?

Trump chose to assemble an administration designed to cover up and aid his shady dealings with the Kremlin, leading to an administration so spectacularly corrupt and inept it has no corollary in US history.

Here’s where it currently stands:

The President is under investigation for colluding with a foreign power. He is being investigated by an oversight committee, the head of which, Republican representative Devin Nunes, has functioned less as a watchdog than a lapdog, providing information about the investigation of Trump to Trump in a breach of protocol. And this was not Nunes’ only misdeed: he was also present at a January meeting between Turkish officials and Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, who in February resigned in disgrace after being revealed to be working secretly for the Turkish and Russian governments for millions of dollars.

In short, the US has employed a president suspected of treason, an oversight committee head who refuses to do oversight, and a national security advisor who undermined US national security.

The Trump clan and the Russian spy recruiter

Unfortunately, that’s only the beginning. There is also attorney general Jeff Sessions, who has had to recuse himself from the Russia interference investigation because he is implicated due to multiple meetings with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak during the campaign. (Sessions is not alone; Kislyak, rumored to moonlight as a spy recruiter, also met with Flynn, Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner, and Trump, though all have mysteriously foggy memories of these encounters.)

Then there’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, recipient of an “Order of Friendship” medal from Vladimir Putin, who does not seem to know why he is even in office, admitting this week, “I didn’t want this job, my wife told me to do this.” Unfortunately, Tillerson came to that revelation only after inflaming military tensions with North Korea.

On top of that, the Trump administration contains a burgeoning and possibly illegal nepotistic dynasty (Jared and Ivanka, currently getting security clearances and White House office space despite no experience in government)....

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Classical liberals make a two-paragraph declaration of obsolescence

No one ever thought that classical liberals would ever get around to actually acknowledging that they are fine with getting you and your family killed by roving bands of Islamic ‘migrants’ who are permanently conducting hijra for the past 1400 years and are always looking for a new location to park their reactionary socio-economic caravan of rampant misogyny, homophobia, mestizaje and genocide, but here it is:

Charles Johnson / FEE.org, ‘Why Free Immigration is a Right’, 30 Mar 2017:

Well good God, of course it is morally wrong for nations to pursue their “self-interest” in anything, and especially in border control policies. People have self-interests that matter, morally; nations do not. Nations are toxic hellholes of false identity and purveyors of monstrous political violence.

Nations are not rational people; they are not free associations or contractual agreements; they are unchosen, coercively assembled collectives, whose interests are typically an abortion of, if not an outright war against, the moral interests of individual people which actually deserve to be cultivated, practiced and respected. For anyone committed to individual liberty, a nations’ “interests” deserve no notice at all except to trample them underfoot.

So, there is that. That happened. A classical liberal man actually wrote those paragraphs, and he was not intoxicated when he wrote them.

That excerpt really is basically a two-paragraph declaration of ideological obsolescence on the part of classical liberalism.

Apparently if you pre-emptively use force so as to prevent your enemies from pillaging your lands and killing your family, that makes you ‘a bad person’ or something. Crucially though, it also happens to make you a winner, which I think is the most important thing.

Separately, Charles Johnson is indeed correct when he says that nations are ‘coercively assembled collectives’ which wage ‘outright war’ against ‘the moral interests of individual people’. The process of state formation is indeed an inherently violent array of actions from which all other actions of the state cannot be extricated, and the law itself is essentially an opinion with guns and detention facilities behind it. That is completely true.

With that said, though. Does anyone actually care?

Literally nobody even cares, so whatever

When asked to choose between the ‘liberty’ to have some individuals make moral choices in complete chaos and uncertainty, versus the ‘monstrous political violence’ of the state which creates stability and guarantees the safe existence of the people from which actual prosperity flows, the people should always choose the state.

Liberty has to be properly understood as not ‘freedom from’, but rather ‘freedom to’. The task of the state is to steer a course that allows for the flourishing of prosperity without undermining the social-economic position of the dominant class which creates and reproduces state power, and without significantly undermining the ethnic composition of the people within the jurisdiction of the state’s territory, as genes are a productive force and as such are a factor in the creation of the prosperity atop which the state subsists.

Talking to the invaders is useless

If someone virtue-signalled to Arabs through enacting lax border policies and then framed it as an act of kindness in the social media domain in the hopes that this would somehow smooth integration (still a stupid idea, of course, as integration is a stupid idea), it would actually be just liberals signalling to other liberals in a de facto echo chamber, because Arabs actually barely find time to read their own Arabic print media much less finding time to read English language in the social media domain. This is a fact that is known among most security consultants and among almost anyone who has ever been involved in Information Operations in Mesopotamia after 2003. ‘The Arab man in the street’ does not read. The Arab guy in the street has a political understanding gleaned from the oral pronouncements of his local Imam, a surface level understanding of current events from Arab language television, and a tangle of mutually contradictory conspiracy theories shared orally or across social media. In the case where social media is used, engagement-rates among Arabs are low, which is to say, they do not actually click links.

Almost 100% of the hearts and minds ‘messaging’ that classical liberal thinktanks who are trying to ‘defend values’ have engaged in, has actually been sent into an echo chamber of Europeans and Americans congratulating each other for crafting increasingly sophisticated narratives which all point toward strategically stupid conclusions which undermine European security.

Meanwhile, the mostly male Arab Muslim migrant wave has been ignoring it all while sitting in an ideological trash dumpster of misogyny and homophobia, as they despise all the progressive gains that have been made in regions of the world other than theirs. They have no respect for any other ethnic group and they believe that it is their mission to demographically infest the whole planet.

Safe beneath the watchful eyes

Without security there can be no real freedom. Most people know this almost instinctively, and that is for example why the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union delivered up a ‘Leave’ result.

The British people have displayed a revealed preference for the untrammelled full spectrum dominance of the British security state led by Theresa May and Amber Rudd, rather than a European Union which has fallen under the de facto control of Angela Merkel.

We can conclude from this that the British people enjoy actually winning at counter-terrorism more than they enjoy virtue-signalling to a foaming tide of Arab Muslim ‘migrants’ who can barely find time to read their own Arabic print media much less reading English in the social media domain.

The British people don’t actually believe in classical liberalism. They believe in being real people. And that is a reason for optimism.

Classical liberal ‘freedom’ supposes that individuals can be abstracted from their origins, their environment, the context in which they live and where they exercise their choices, that is to say, abstracted from everything that makes them who they are specifically, and not someone else. It supposes that the individual is always prior to her ends. However, there is nothing that can prove that the individual can apprehend herself as a subject completely free of any allegiance, free of any form of determinism. There is no reason why she would prefer that form of ‘freedom’ over any other social good. Such a conception ignores commitments and attachments to clans or spiritual sects, bonds of blood and soil, long-term economic class interests, and the fact that nations are the deepest and most enduring source of political experience. Classical liberal ‘freedom’ is a purely formal conception, which is completely incapable of capturing the rich tapestry of what a real person is.

The real person seeks ‘love’ and ‘eternity’. ‘Love’ is the wish that someone or something should continue to flourish forever, or at least, that they should ‘get the last word’ in the world before the story of humanity ends. In that sense, love is a desire to pursue victory and create a meaning where there was originally none. When standing alone, the individual is always defeated and approaching death alone is the most final of all defeats. But while death is a threshold which must be crossed and can only be crossed alone, it does not have to be approached alone. If the individual can pool her identity with the group, so that she becomes one with the will of the group as it solves the historical tasks which have been placed before it, then she is all-seeing and all-knowing forever and ever—capable of knowing what she is, and what she can become. She is really free and has attained ‘eternity’. 

Victory becomes attainable. We become the gendarmes who protect the actualisation of eternal love so that others can become part of it. We never die because this empire never dies, as it is constructed not only in the physical domain, but is also fortified in the domain of the mind. As such, we are expected to fight eternally for it. 

We are not afraid of the conflicts that lie ahead and we are not sorry about anything. 

Because love will emerge victorious over terror.

African students often complain they are racially abused in India

BBC, “Attacks on Nigerian students shock India,” 28 March 2017:

India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj has promised an “impartial” inquiry into attacks on Nigerian students living in Noida, near Delhi.

The attacks were prompted by the death of a teenager due to a drug overdose. His parents blame Nigerian students for giving him the drugs.

Five Nigerian students were attacked on Monday by crowds, while another was beaten by a mob inside a shopping mall.

Police say five people have been arrested over the attacks.

Ms Swaraj said she had spoken to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and he had assured her of a “fair and impartial investigation into this unfortunate incident”.

- India probes Nigerian student ‘attack’

- India mob strips Tanzanian student

- Being Black in India

The attack on the student inside a popular shopping mall in Noida was recorded on mobile phone cameras by other shoppers and widely circulated on social media.

The victim told Indian reporters he had been beaten with rods, bricks and knives. He said that no one had helped or even called the police.

The reactions have been mostly those of shame and outrage.

Alkahba Solomon, a student in Noida, told the BBC that the situation was not “favourable for Nigerian students”.

“Everybody is indoors. But the problem we are having right now is some of the landlords are telling African students to vacate from their house. These are the problems,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Association of African Students of India, has asked African students in Noida to stay at home and not attend classes on Tuesday.

There was a spate of attacks on African nationals living in India last year, including one in which a Congolese man was beaten to death in Delhi.

BBC Pop Up: Being black in India,  14 April 2016:

What is it like being black in India?

That’s what BBC Pop Up wanted to find out after Benjamin Pratt, a student from Sierra Leone now living in India, told us that many African immigrants are victims of racism and prejudice.

BBC journalists Christian Parkinson and Vikas Pandey joined Benjamin on the streets of Delhi to find out more but ended up in a small village in the western state of Gujarat.

There they discovered a surprising and little-known culture alive and well.

*Important editorial note: Though in this review Alexander Baron refers to Leo Frank as “white” in a few places, Majorityrights does not categorize Jews as “white.”

The Lynching Of A Guilty Man reviewed by Alexander Baron

The Leo Frank Case subtitled The Lynching Of A Guilty Man is the third volume in a massive study The Secret Relationship Between Blacks And Jews. The first volume was published in 1991, so this is no rush job. It is also clearly a book written with an agenda, but even vested interest can speak the truth. And the obvious vested interest of the Nation Of Islam comes as a welcome counterpoint to the concealed vested interest of the rest of the American media which unthinkingly points the finger at a black suspect in spite of the conviction of a white* one.

For those not au fait with this notorious case, it began when the body of Mary Phagan was found in the basement of the Atlanta Pencil Factory on April 26, 1913. The young worker had been murdered quite brutally for no apparent reason. The Negro security man who found the body quickly became a suspect - something that is more or less taken for granted nowadays unless the person who finds a body clearly has no connection with the victim, eg a hiker happening upon a skeleton.

Newt Lee aside, there was no shortage of more promising suspects, and two soon emerged: the factory manager/part owner Leo Frank, and his gofer Jim Conley. Although Conley was linked to the killing by forensic evidence, in particular two ludicrous notes written from the perspective of the victim, the authorities went with the prosecution of the white* man while Conley testified as an accessory after the fact. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, but after extensive failed appeals his sentence was commuted. This led to outraged prominent citizens kidnapping him from the State Penitentiary, driving him back to Atlanta, and stringing him from a tree by his neck.

A century and more on there remain two competing narratives; the official and accepted narrative is that Leo Frank was innocent and Jim Conley the villain of the piece. Some might find that surprising as Conley was never indicted for the crime and Frank was never cleared officially in spite of enormous posthumous lobbying by especially the misnamed Anti-Defamation League. This book adheres to the second narrative, that ridiculous as Conley’s tale may have been, he was in fact totally innocent, an accessory only after the fact, having found himself in a truly invidious position, a man of humble estate - in effect a third class citizen - who was told he must follow the orders of his boss or else.

In the past quarter to half century, quite a few authors have come out in support of this narrative, but none more impressively than the dedicated Leo Frank website and now this minutely documented book.

If anyone believes the fact that the forensic evidence pointing to Conley should have indicted him and him alone, here are two cases from the 1980s that show how wrong this kind of reasoning can be. In March 1984, the black American Sylvester Smith was accused of violating two young girls, cousins. As all the parties involved in this case were black, there was no racial angle. The girls had clearly been interfered with sexually, and unsurprisingly, Smith was convicted. Twenty years later he was cleared on appeal, the shocking truth was that the real perpetrator was a 9 year old boy (who went on as an adult to commit a murder). The girls had been coached by their grandmother to point the finger at Smith to protect him. After her death, they recanted.

An equally shocking case that made international headlines was that of Lindy Chamberlain. In 1980 while camping at Ayers Rock, Australia, her baby daughter Azaria was snatched by a dingo. She was convicted of the murder based largely on forensic evidence, but nearly six years later, more reliable forensic evidence was found - the girl’s matinee jacket near a dingo lair.

In the Mary Phagan case, the forensic evidence against Jim Conley (the notes) was outweighed by the forensic and other evidence against his boss, in particular there was evidence that the girl has been murdered upstairs. Almost all the other evidence pointed to Frank, everything from his demeanour to his willingness to point the finger at everyone else including at first Newt Lee. Conley on the other hand remained cool as a cucumber, so either he was a psychopath and a potential future Oscar winner, or he really was telling the truth, however outrageous or crazy his story may have sounded. But when the facts are all in, it wasn’t that outrageous, it wasn’t that crazy, and justice was done in the Deep South, both for Mary Phagan and for a black man whose word many of Frank’s supporters believed should carry no weight at all.

A few criticisms are in order:

In the Preface, the claim is made that an “unknown posse” lynched Frank, and that he was and remains the only Jew ever lynched in America. The posse was hardly unknown, its members did not bother to hide their faces, and indeed appeared proud of their work. Later in the book it is made clear that their identities were in no way secret. The doubtful honour of being the first Jew lynched in America appears to belong to Samuel Bierfield in 1868, but neither he nor Frank were lynched because they were Jews.

Frank was hardly the most important Jew in the Deep South as claimed; he was certainly far from the wealthiest, and was the New York Times the world’s most important newspaper? The most important in America maybe, but not more important than the London Times. And was World War One raging in 1913?

The reason the crime was committed and how it was committed are both laid out in impressive detail, as are the attempts by Leo Frank to point the finger of suspicion initially at Newt Lee, and then at anyone else without mentioning the fact that Conley was at the pencil factory at the material time. Why would he not do that? The only logical reason is that he didn’t want Conley to open his mouth, and once Conley did, he too had to be accused. The book raises too the interesting speculation that Frank was considering murdering Conley – the only direct witness – as well.

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Jewish Daily Forward, ‘Epshteyn To Leave Trump TV’, 25 Mar 2017:

Boris Epshteyn, a prominent Trump surrogate during the election campaign, is expected to quit his post at Trump TV, Politico is reporting from many sources close to the administration.

The Trump TV project was widely seen as a post-election project if the Republican candidate had failed to win and needed to build yet another alternative to news that would outflank Fox and Breitbart on the right, and give Trump an ongoing political platform.

Epshteyn, a 35-year old attorney from a Russian-Jewish family and a college friend of Eric Trump, is expected to join the administration in an official capacity.

It’s rapidly becoming the case that The Forward is one of the most authoritative mainstream news sources on what is happening inside the Trump administration, because so many of the Trump administration’s most prominent and influential figures are Jewish.

The FBI is now investigating a story that almost everyone intuitively knew was true from the start:

The Hill, ‘FBI probing far-right news sites: report’, 20 Mar 2017:

The FBI is investigating whether far-right news websites contributed to Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to a new report.

The probe is focused on discovering whether Russian operatives used conservative outlets to help spread stories favoring now-President Trump, McClatchy said Monday.

McClatchy confirmed with two people familiar with the inquiry that the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division is driving the investigation.

The sources said Russian operatives seemingly strategically timed computer commands called “bots” to blitz social media with pro-Trump stories.  

The bots were used at times when Trump appeared struggling with 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, they continued.

McClatchy’s sources said the bots mainly created millions of Facebook and Twitter posts linking to articles on far-right websites including Breitbart News, InfoWars and the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News.

The sources added that some of the stories were false or contained a mixture of fact and fiction.

Federal investigators are now examining whether the far-right news organizations took any actions aiding Russian operatives, they said.

The bots could have amplified pro-Trump news on Facebook and Twitter, regardless of the outlets’ knowledge or involvement, the pair of sources noted.

“This may be one of the most impactful information operations in the history of intelligence,” one former U.S. intelligence official told McClatchy, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the matter’s sensitivity.

FBI Director James Comey earlier Monday confirmed the Department of Justice (DOJ) is scrutinizing Russia’s meddling in the 2016 race, including any possible ties between Moscow and officials from Trump’s election campaign.

“As you know our practice is not to confirm the existence of an ongoing investigation,” he said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“But in unusual circumstances where it is in the public interest, it may be appropriate to do so,” Comey added, noting the DOJ had authorized him to break bureau policy and publicly disclose the probe.

“This is one of those circumstances. I can promise you we will follow the facts wherever they lead.”

Comey added the FBI’s investigation began in late July and will include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.

During the campaign itself, Louise Mensch had reported on basically the same thing. You can revisit that at Heatstreet, and I’ll just give you an exerpt from that:

Heatstreet, ‘How Russia’s Twitter Bots And Trolls Work With Donald Trump Campaign Accounts’, 20 Oct 2016:

If you’ve been following the Twitter fiasco that is the Donald Trump campaign, you will be aware of his association with the Alt-right and with Russia bot accounts.
 
Broadly speaking, Trump has two categories of support on Twitter. Alt-right trolls, and Russian bot accounts pretending to be patriotic Americans.*
 
In many cases, these two groups cross over. The altright contains actual humans, such as @prisonplanet, and many, many bots.
 
In this article I shall however examine the way in which Russian bots are created and used to follow and boost Trump online.
 
It is not that Donald Trump does not have widespread support. He does; even at his current polling lows, his support includes millions of Americans. It is, rather, that Trump’s supporters are incredibly unlikely to use Twitter.
 
Broadly speaking ,Trump’s real supporters aren’t on Twitter – and Trump’s Twitter supporters aren’t real.

[...]

Three such bots that I videoed in the act of using this method were @Commander6080, @Sbragusa, and @jamesdgriffin. All have profiles that pretend to be Americans and to live in the USA.
 
How might this affect a twitter trend? What is the point of it? One scientist theorized as follows. It is a “fake trend” theory called “A Handoff”:

Let’s say you had a hashtag you wanted to get trending. You have a thousand bots (or Russian Trolls) and a popular account like Ricky Vaughn. You have the bots start using the hashtag, they start flooding twitter until it gets a high count (but not in the top 20 trends) then have a real person,  Ricky Vaughn, start pitching the hashtag to his followers. Here is where the window of timing kicks in: within minutes, Ricky Vaughn can have something trending, but before he gets the hashtag to the top 15 you have almost all of the bots automatically delete their tweets with the hashtags. You‘ve now started “a trend” quickly and have had it associated with “Ricky Vaughn” and not a 1,000 odd bots or Russian trolls.

[...]

This whole arrangement of social media manipulation is part of the communication operations side of the modern form of Russian Active Measures. The most remarkable thing about this arrangement is how it is tactically innovative and well-timed to exploit a particular weakness in American society specifically, but it is strategically unsophisticated because Russian commanders have also permanently ruined their own country’s reputation among the international journalist community and among most people on social media.

It’s highly abnormal for an entire country to transparently do something like that. Why would they choose to so carelessly and openly abandon even the appearance of any kind of ‘normality’ on national level?

There are a few reasons as to why they would have chosen to behave this way, but all of them seem to be capable of being summarised like this: Russian commanders may have been willing to sacrifice their country’s perceived journalistic integrity in the eyes of most of the world, because they’ve already given up on the idea that they could ever create a narrative that could appeal to a broad audience. Instead, Russia is seeking to cultivate a very particular audience in Europe and North America (excluding the United Kingdom which they seem to be abandoning). They are seeking to cultivate that roughly 20% of the population which is somewhere vaguely in the nationalistic spectrum and is disillusioned about the political situation in their country, but also lacks grounding and experience in how the world actually works. Russian commanders want to shape the media experience through which those people will come to terms with the world around them, and thus, create a long-term ‘following’, even if those followers are not necessarily aware of what it is that they are following.

The utility of this is clear. 20% of a population is enough to seriously impact the operation of political institutions in western democracies which operate in a pluralistic mode. Russian journalism is not seeking to be liked by everyone, or even trusted. Russia just wants 20% of any given European population to be responsive to their input because that is the bare minimum that they need.

Euractiv, “Green NGOs blame Monsanto for ‘buying science’ to save glyphosate”, 24 March 2017:

The authors of the report claim that between 2012 and 2016, the companies sponsored a series of review articles published in scientific journals, all of which conclude that glyphosate and its commercial formulations are not carcinogenic. [Mike Mozart/Flickr]

A new report accuses glyphosate producers of “buying science” in order to secure the substance’s position in the EU market.

According to the Buying Science report published by GLOBAL 2000 (Friends of the Earth Austria member of Pesticide Action Network-PAN) with the support of Avaaz, BUND, Campact, CEO, GMWatch, (PAN) Europe, PAN Germany, and Umweltinstitut München, Monsanto and other glyphosate manufacturers allegedly “distorted scientific evidence” on the public health impacts of the pesticide.

The authors of the report claim that, between 2012 and 2016, the companies sponsored a series of review articles published in scientific journals, all of which conclude that glyphosate and its commercial formulations are not carcinogenic.

Scandalous

“Glyphosate producers have used every trick in the book to enable regulatory authorities around the world to play down the alarming health effects of glyphosate. The fact that the agencies accepted their ‘assistance’ is nothing less than scandalous,” insisted Helmut Burtscher, one of the study’s authors.

Earlier this month (15 March), the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) concluded that glyphosate weedkiller should not be classified as a carcinogen.

Environmentalist NGOs reacted strongly, with Greenpeace saying that the ECHA “sweeps glyphosate cancer evidence under the carpet”.

Glyphosate is not carcinogenic, EU agency says.

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) said today (15 March) that much-discussed glyphosate weedkiller should not be classified as a carcinogen, triggering a strong response from environmentalist NGOs.

The Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL) went further, claiming that the decision contradicted the world’s most authoritative cancer research agency, the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen” in 2015.

Scientific flaws

The NGOs claim that these reviews proving glyphosate is safe contain “fundamental scientific flaws spanning from apparently calculated omissions and the introduction of irrelevant data to the violation of OECD guidance for the evaluation of rodent cancer studies”.

“The reviews also consistently assign greater weight to unpublished industry studies than to studies that were peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals,” the report noted.

The report stressed that regulatory authorities like Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have all drawn on such review articles, which have concluded that glyphosate was not carcinogenic, have actually referred to these industry-sponsored review articles.

“In contrast, IARC refused to consider the unpublished industry studies summarised in industry-sponsored reviews in its assessment of glyphosate, stating that the data presented therein were insufficient and important details were lacking […] IARC generally does not accept unpublished scientific evidence,” the authors of the report concluded.

Europe poised for total ban on bee-harming pesticides.

The world’s most widely used insecticides would be banned from all fields across Europe under draft regulations from the European Commission, seen by EURACTIV’s partner The Guardian.

Positions

European Commission Spokesperson Enrico Brivio recently told EURACTIV that the EU executive “took notice” of ECHA’s opinion, which was “based on scientific evidence”.

“The submission of the final opinion to the Commission is expected before the summer break […] After submission of the final opinion, the Commission Services will re-start their discussions with the member states as regards the approval of glyphosate as an active substance in Plant Protection Products (PPPs).”

“A decision has to be taken within 6 months of receipt of the RAC Opinion from ECHA, or by the end of 2017 – at the latest,” he added.

An EFSA spokesperson said, after this article was published, that “EFSA is the first to defend the importance of reliable science as it forms the basis of all our risk assessments”, adding “from an initial glance at the “Purchased Science” report, it is clear that the majority of mentioned studies were published after EFSA had completed its assessment of glyphosate. In other words, they did not play any role in the EFSA assessment of glyphosate”.

“There are two scientific reviews mentioned in the report (Williams et al 2000, Kier and Kirkland 2013) that were among the 700 references considered in the EU assessment for glyphosate. EFSA and EU member states rely primarily on the original studies and the underlying raw data which they check themselves. The weight given to reviews of scientific studies (like the ones mentioned in the report) is limited,” they added.

“There are no grounds to suggest that reviews of scientific studies, sponsored directly or indirectly by industry, improperly influenced the EU risk assessment for glyphosate,” the spokesperson concluded.

Background

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said in November 2015 that glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer in humans and proposed higher limits on the amount of residue of the weedkiller deemed safe for humans to consume.

The EFSA advises EU policymakers and its conclusion were expected to pave the way for the 28-member European Union to renew approval for glyphosate, which was brought into use by Monsanto in the 1970s and is used in its top selling product Roundup as well as in many other herbicides around the world.

Environmental groups have been calling for a ban after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organisation, said in March 2015 that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

A campaign group said that 1.4 million people had signed a petition calling on the European Union to suspend glyphosate approval pending further assessment.

The EFSA said it had carried out a thorough analysis and taken account of the IARC’s findings. Greenpeace, for its part, called the EFSA’s report “a whitewash”.

The arrest of a second Jewish man for the wave of “anti-Jewish hate crimes” against Jewish Community Centers (JCC) in the U.S. has left Jewish supremacist organizations and individuals scrambling to explain why the single greatest spree of “anti-Semitic” incidents in recent history originated in Israel.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, the second arrest is that of the father of the 18-year-old Jew arrested earlier for over 100 bomb threats to JCCs in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The father’s detention was extended until March 30, on charges that he was “involved in most of the same crimes and many of the threatening telephone calls.”

The suspect’s mother was also questioned, as the unusually large antenna and other extraordinary hardware used by her husband and son in the conspiracy were so unusual that it is extremely unlikely that she would not have been aware of what was going on.

According to a report by the Religion News Service’s Lauren Markoe, as published in the Colorado Gazette, “Jews worldwide uttered a collective gasp” when they found out that the threats to “more than 135 Jewish institutions across North America is Jewish himself.”

The “collective gasp” turned out, however, to be just another outburst of anti-Gentile hatred, as summed up by the article’s quote from Deborah Lipstadt, “who studies anti-Semitism at Emory University,” who said that she didn’t “know if it would be better if we found out if it was a right-wing white Supremacist, Neo Nazi, or follower of ISIS.”

The Gazette report went on to say that “now many worry that the suspect’s identity will lend credence to anti-Semites’ common claim that Jews exaggerate threats and crimes against them.”

This is of course a very valid “worry”—especially because there is a long record of fake hate crimes being perpetrated by Jews.

Fake Jewish hate crimes go back decades: For example, as early as 1963, five Jews were arrested in New York City while painting swastikas on the front of the Israeli Consulate-General building, a building which also housed the Israeli mission to the United Nations.

Source: TNO, 24 March 2017