Episode 4 Cyrus and Cambyses

The Persian Empire (2012)

Dr John W I Lee

Film Review

The Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus II (son of Cambyses I) of the ancient Elamite kingdom of  Anshan.*  Cyrus was heir to a long (several centuries) Elamite royal tradition known for written language and effective administration.

Cyrus II began his military adventures by liberating the old Elamite city of Susa from occupying Medes. In the resulting peace, he married the daughter of the king of Medes and Median warriors joined his army.

The Conquest of Lydia

Seeking to expand his empire into Cyrus’s territory, King Croesus of Lydia (560-546 BC) led a massive army into former Median territory but was forced to retreat. Cyrus II and his warriors pursued Croesus into Anatolia and conquered the kingdom of Lydia in 546 BC.

Taken alive, Croesus also became part of Cyrus’s entourage.The king invited the Ionian Greek cities on the west coast of Anatolia to join the Persian empire but they declined. The governor of Sardis subsequently allied himself with the Greek cities to rebel against Persian rule, but Cyrus crushed the rebellion.

Conquest of Neo-Babylonian empire

When Cyrus invaded the Neo-Babylonian empire, many Babylonians allied with the Persians owing to efforts by the Babylonian king Nabonidus to replace the Babylonian god Marduke with the moon goddess Sin. It took two years of battle and siege, but In 539 BC Cyrus took Nabaonides alive, asserting he was doing the will of Marduke in capturing Babylon.

After moving the Persian capitol to Pasagardae, Cyrus spent the rest of his life at war. He died in 530 BC in a battle against the Masagetae nomads. There seems to be consensus on the part of ancient historians that he was a brilliant military and political leader. 

Cambyses II (530-522 BC) Assumes Persian Throne 

After succeeding his father, Cambyses II (530-522BC), who learned military tactics accompanying his father into battle, married his three sisters and preemptively invaded Egypt (before they could attack Persia). In addition to the Medes and Ionian Greeks in Cambyses’s army, former Egyptian allies Cyprus, Samos, Phoenicia (who gave the Persians 40 triremes**) and some of Egypt’s Greek mercenaries also joined the Persian side. Cambyses also formed an alliance with desert Arabs, who helped him cross the Sinai desert by showing him how to set up water depots using leather pipelines.

Ancient Egyptian papyri reveal the Persians took over and successfully managed the Egyptian government, with Cambyses dressing as a traditional pharaoh and honoring the Egyptian gods.

In 522 BC, Cambyses attempted to return to Persia to put down a revolt and died on the trip home.

*Located in Persis, a historical region corresponding to modern Fars province in Iran.

**The trireme was a Greek warship propelled by armies of rowers nd used to ram enemy fleets.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/15372393/15372409

By Toby Rogers

I. Junk Science Clinical Trials as the Basis for FDA Licensure of Hepatitis B Vaccines in the U.S.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will discuss hepatitis B vaccines at their meeting on December 4 and 5. In this article I will lay out the case for removing hepatitis B vaccines from the CDC childhood schedule altogether.

As the Informed Consent Action Network has demonstrated, the hepatitis B vaccines Recombivax and Engerix — injected into the vast majority of American children at birth, one month, and six months of age — never should have been licensed by the FDA in the first place.

The clinical trials for Recombivax and Engerix:

• did not include a proper saline placebo control group;
• were too small to detect uncommon adverse events; and
• were too short to detect the majority of harms (the Recombivax trials monitored safety for just five days, the Engerix trials monitored solicited adverse events for just four days).

II. Hepatitis B Vaccines Are Associated with Autism

The real world data that are available on the safety of hepatitis B vaccines are horrifying. When autism rates in the US exploded in the 1990s, the CDC looked into the possible role of vaccines. They assigned one of their senior scientists, Thomas Verstraeten, at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, to do the analysis. At the time, hepatitis B vaccines had mercury (thimerosal) in them. Dr. Verstraeten found that children in the highest exposure group had an 11.35x increased relative risk of autism.

Then, because the CDC works for the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Verstraeten did four additional rounds of data manipulation, that were not scientifically warranted, to try to make the signal go away. We have Dr. Verstraeten’s emails and the five different rounds of analysis because SafeMinds did a FOIA request to get all of Dr. Verstraeten’s communication about the study (see SafeMinds Powerpoint presentation here). The corrupted data were used in the final published paper and the original findings were covered up.

The CDC had this information in 1999 and has lied about it for 26 years (which I mentioned in my recent Senate testimony). In 2001, Dr. Verstraeten was scheduled to present his findings to the Institute of Medicine but he quit on the morning of the presentation to go work for vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline in Belgium (see Evidence of Harm).

Mercury was eventually taken out of hepatitis B vaccines; however aluminum adjuvants remain. CDC/ACIP subsequently added several more aluminum containing vaccines to the childhood schedule. What we see in the autism prevalence data after the removal of mercury, together with the increase in total aluminum in the schedule, is that autism rates keep rising (owing to the increased aluminum) but the proportion of severe autism cases as a percentage of the total declined somewhat (owing to the removal of thimerosal which is even more toxic than aluminum).

III. Hepatitis B Vaccines Have Killed an Astonishing Number of Children in the US

I asked the warrior mamas at OpenVAERS (who are doing the work that the CDC should be doing) to calculate the total number of deaths from hepatitis B vaccines from 1990 to the present. The results that came back show that hepatitis B vaccines are a crime against humanity.

Hepatitis B is a component in many combination vaccines including Twinrix, Pediarix, and Vaxelis. When one looks at VAERS reports in the US for all vaccines containing a hepatitis B component there are 1,320 deaths in children age 5 and younger and 82,980 total reports of harm across all ages.

Just looking at Recombivax and Engerix, US reports, in children age 5 and younger, there are 620 deaths and 15,110 total injuries. There are 52,281 total reports of injury in the US across all ages for Recombivax and Engerix.

Remember that VAERS reports are a significant undercount of harms. The Lazarus and Klompas study for HHS in 2011 estimated that VAERS undercounts actual harms by a factor of 100x. More recent scholarship by Steve Kirsch, Mathew Crawford, and Jessica Rose in 2021 calculated a VAERS Under-Reporting Factor of 41x.

A similar estimate by VAERS Analysis (necessarily anonymous because whistleblowers are hunted by Pharma) in 2021 shows an Under-Reporting Factor of 44.64x for deaths. If that Under-Reporting Factor is correct, then an estimated 58,925 children age five and younger have been killed by all vaccines with a hepatitis B component over the last 35 years in the US; of that total, an estimated 27,677 children age five and younger have been killed by Recombivax and Engerix in the US over that same time period.

OpenVAERS also calculated the “days to death post vaccine” for all VAERS reports of death associated with hepatitis B containing vaccines and for Recombivax and Engerix. There we have a causal smoking gun as the largest numbers of deaths are on the day of vaccination or one or two days after.

IV. Conclusion: Hepatitis B Vaccines Must Be Removed Entirely from the CDC Childhood Schedule

The members of the ACIP are under tremendous pressure from the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex to simply delay the timing of hepatitis B vaccines to day 30 or to 12 years of age. However, the fact remains that there are no data proving the safety and efficacy of hepatitis B vaccines on day 1, day 30, or 12 years of age.

If one wants to return to “Gold Standard Science” one must conduct proper double-blind randomized controlled trials, with an inert saline placebo in the control group, a large enough sample size (at least 60,000) to detect rare events, and long enough post-vaccination monitoring (10 years) to capture non-specific effects.

No “Gold Standard” hepatitis B vaccine safety and efficacy studies in pediatric populations exist right now and so hepatitis B vaccines must be removed altogether from the CDC childhood schedule.

Hepatitis B vaccines were developed for IV drug addicts and prostitutes because those are the high risk groups. If hepatitis B vaccines are to be used at all, they should be properly tested and returned to that original purpose and that intended market. If prison guards want to get them as well because they are dealing with a high risk population that’s fine. Also, the benefits of hepatitis B vaccination appear to outweigh the risks for children born to mothers who are hepatitis B positive (and we know exactly who those children are because all pregnant women are tested for hepatitis B in the hospital prior to giving birth). However, the idea of administering hepatitis B vaccines to nearly the entire childhood population is self-evident madness.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/hep-b-shot-not-proven-safe-or-effective-for-kids/

 

by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Human biodistribution study shows Pfizer mRNA penetrates fetal and reproductive tissues, persists long-term in the body, and presents clear evidence of shedding.

For years, the public was told a simple story: the mRNA “stays in the arm,” degrades within hours, never enters the bloodstream, never crosses the placenta, never reaches the reproductive system, and certainly

METHODS: WHY THIS STUDY SUCCEEDS WHERE OTHERS FAILED

One of the strongest aspects of this paper is the methodology. Where previous studies failed to detect vaccine mRNA, the authors explain exactly why: they were using qPCR, which lacks the sensitivity to detect low-abundance RNA months after injection. The new study instead used nested PCR, a two-step amplification technique that dramatically increases sensitivity and specificity, followed by Sanger sequencing, which literally reads the amplified sequence and confirms it matches the Pfizer construct. Each positive result was only considered valid if it appeared in at least three of four independent technical repeats, further reducing any chance that background noise or accidental contamination was driving the findings.

This approach is also fundamentally different from the PCR tests used during the pandemic to diagnose “COVID cases.” Those tests relied on single-step qPCR run at extremely high cycle thresholds—often 35–45 cycles—where background noise, trace contamination, and harmless RNA fragments can generate false positives. The method used in this new study, by contrast, requires two successful rounds of primer binding and amplification, reproducibility across multiple repeats, and then an independent sequencing confirmation to verify the identity of the product.

In other words, the COVID diagnostic PCR could detect any fragment of viral RNA and label it a “positive,” while this study’s nested PCR plus sequencing can only detect one thing: the exact Pfizer mRNA sequence, verified letter-by-letter.

This means the researchers were not detecting “noise”—they were detecting true, molecularly confirmed vaccine mRNA. It is the most definitive approach yet applied to this question.

Vaccine mRNA detected in the placenta

88% of women vaccinated within 100 days of delivery had detectable mRNA in both blood and placenta. Even after 230–251 days, vaccine RNA was still found in some placentas.

This directly contradicts every official statement claiming mRNA “does not reach the placenta.”

mRNA detected in sperm and seminal fluid

Of the four vaccinated men tested:

• Three produced viable sperm—and 100% of them had Pfizer mRNA in their sperm cells.
• Two had detectable mRNA in seminal plasma.
• One man vaccinated 168 days earlier still had mRNA present in sperm.

This raises profound questions about male fertility, germline exposure, and the possibility of transmission.

Long-term persistence

Across blood and placental tissue:

Half of individuals tested more than 200 days after vaccination still had detectable Pfizer mRNA.

This is far beyond what Pfizer, regulators and public health authorities have claimed.

mRNA detected in unvaccinated pregnant women

Perhaps the most shocking finding:

50% of unvaccinated pregnant women had detectable Pfizer mRNA.

Two unvaccinated pregnant women had Pfizer mRNA in both their blood and placenta.

A third unvaccinated woman had mRNA in her blood alone.

The authors state plainly: “The source of this RNA has yet to be investigated.”

This appears to be the first direct evidence of mRNA vaccine shedding.

CONCLUSIONS

These results carry enormous implications. They confirm that the mRNA does not stay at the injection site; it does not rapidly degrade; it does reach the placenta; and it does enter the reproductive organs.

This verifies the biological mechanism behind delayed serious adverse events and also explains transgenerational adverse events—why babies born to vaccinated mothers are now dying at high excess rates even years later.

BREAKING: CDC Child Death Records Indicate Severe Transgenerational Harm of Mass mRNA Vaccination

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

·

22 Aug

by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Read full story

And beyond these concerns, the unvaccinated positives raise the specter that shedding is indeed real.

In conclusion, this study demonstrates:

• Long-term persistence
• Systemic distribution
• Reproductive system exposure
• Placental exposure
• Possible shedding to unvaccinated individuals

This should immediately trigger market withdrawal and apologies to the public for inflicting grave harm based on fraudulent assumptions.

As more evidence accumulates each week, the legal ramifications for allowing these products to remain on the market become ever more severe.

[…]

Via https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-study-pfizer-mrna-found

Zero Hedge

Cole began identifying as a boy during adolescence and sought physical changes to match.

Doctors readily consented to medical intervention. They prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone at age 13. At 15, surgeons performed a double mastectomy, she told The Epoch Times.

But doctors didn’t address her neurological issues first. The same gender specialist who referred her for breast surgery later referred her for autism screening. Cole has described herself as being on the autism spectrum, but said she was never formally diagnosed.

Cole is now a leading campaigner against interventions to transition children with gender dysphoria.

She said many of those she knew personally when she was involved in the transgender community, as well as many of the detransitioners she knows, “are either somewhere on the autism spectrum, or they have been diagnosed with similar conditions, like ADHD.”

Her observations are increasingly supported by research. For at least a decade, studies have reported links among transgender identity, autism, and other neurological conditions. These connections have recently gained greater public attention.

Growing evidence of an autism–transgender link is already prompting some nations to recommend neurological screening before intervention. In America, the treatment model remains unchanged, and the predominant “affirmation” model makes the link difficult to investigate.

Autism and Gender Dysphoria

A report published this month by the British think tank Centre for Social Justice showed that autism and ADHD were “overrepresented,” or disproportionately high, among youth with gender dysphoria.

​The report, citing data from the UK’s National Health Service, showed 32.4 percent of gender dysphoria referrals had an autism diagnosis, and 11.7 percent had an ADHD diagnosis. ​

Those numbers were 16 times higher than the national population averages for autism, and more than twice as high for ADHD. The population-wide averages for autism and ADHD in the United Kingdom are estimated at 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

“Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are far more likely to identify as transgender,” Joseph Nicolosi Jr., a licensed clinical psychologist and researcher in California, told The Epoch Times via email.

A pair of studies conducted in 2016 and 2019 indicate that autistic children are between four and seven times more likely to experience gender dysphoria or gender variance, he said. A 2019 study was conducted by researchers at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and a 2016 study was conducted at New York University.

Nicolosi said there are several reasons for the connection, including “rigid thinking.”

​For example, if a boy with autism lacks stereotypical male interests, he may doubt he is a boy and assume he must be a girl. Reading social cues is often hard for those with autism, so they may perceive same-sex peers as getting along better than they do.

​“This heightens their sense of alienation from their peers,” Nicolosi said.

Cole recalled having difficulty coping with her body beginning to mature around the fourth grade, younger than most of her peers.

“The older I got, the less I associated with femininity, and I didn’t really feel like I fit in—especially with my female peers—but with my peers in general,” she said.

“It’s a common sentiment amongst people who have either ADHD or autism.”

Erin Friday, who gained national attention for successfully steering her ADHD daughter away from identifying as a transgender male, said she knows many detransitioners who are on the autism spectrum. A detransitioner is someone who had previously taken steps to transition to the opposite gender.

But most of the medical community doesn’t recognize transgender identity as a maladaptive coping mechanism, she told The Epoch Times.

They view autism and transgender identity as complementary and natural, instead of looking at causality, she said.

“This is the intersection of autism and transgenderism, like peas and carrots, it goes together,” Friday said. “They’re not even looking at … what is the causality?”

She observed that some hospitals offering pediatric transgender care have integrated autism and gender dysphoria services.

“It’s a feeder,” she said. “So it gives an endless stream of patients.”

Children’s National Hospital in Washington runs a Gender and Autism Program that treats autistic patients with gender dysphoria, illustrating the recognized connection between the two, she noted.

“We do not understand why autism and gender expansiveness often occur together, but we do know that this co-occurrence can be complex to navigate for young people and their families,” the website states.

The hospital did not respond to a request for comment.

Neurological Screening

In the UK, a seminal report released last year on how the country has handled treatment of children with gender dysphoria suggested screening children for neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism and mental health issues.

That review, led by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, sparked a wave of reforms, and the UK’s National Health Service all but halted the prescription of puberty blockers because there was a lack of evidence that the treatment was beneficial.

The Cass report found that young people distressed about their gender often have complex problems contributing to that distress, including mental illness, neurodiverse traits, and a variety of social problems.

Sweden and Finland recommend that neurodevelopmental conditions such as Autism and ADHD be addressed as part of the evaluation process for the treatment of pediatric gender dysphoria.

In the United States, however, psychological organizations prioritize “gender-affirming care” without recommending neurological screening.

Instead, most follow the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care, which call for individualized, age-appropriate care to “improve health and wellbeing” of youth who identify as transgender.

The organization says assisting gender dysphoric patients “may include gynecologic and urologic care, reproductive health, voice and communication therapy, mental health services (e.g., counseling, psychotherapy), and/or hormonal or surgical treatments, among others.”

WPATH does not believe an autism diagnosis should prevent “gender-affirming care.”

“There is no evidence to suggest a benefit of withholding [gender affirming medical and surgical treatments] from [transgender] people who have gender incongruence simply on the basis that they have a mental health or neurodevelopmental condition,” according to WPATH.

Likewise, a 2023 commentary appearing in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics said that autistic youth deserve “gender-affirming care, and an [autism spectrum] diagnosis should not prevent youth and families from providing informed consent to gender-affirming care.”

The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network said in its June newsletter that the government shouldn’t interfere with an autistic person’s decision to transition.

“They think autistic people cannot really know if we are transgender. They say we are being tricked or we are confused. They think we should not be allowed to get gender-affirming care,” the newsletter stated.

Republican lawmakers in many states have enacted bans against gender-related medical treatments on minors, with corresponding federal actions to restrict funding for such practices.

Shortly after taking office earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that the federal government will not fund or promote transition-related care for children who identify as a different gender.

This spring, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a 409-page review of medical procedures used for gender dysphoric children. The report advocates for psychotherapy as a “noninvasive alternative to endocrine and surgical interventions,” since the benefits of hormones or surgery have not been established.

“Many of these children and adolescents have co-occurring psychiatric or neurodevelopmental conditions, rendering them especially vulnerable,” the executive summary for the report states.

[…]

Via https://www.zerohedge.com/political/link-between-transgenderism-and-autism

Episode 3 The World Before Cyrus

The Persian Empire (2012)

Dr John W I Lee

Film Review

The Persian empire would form in the 6th century BC from an alliance of Median, Elamite and early Persian chieftains following the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires.

Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian Empires

Named for the god Ashur, the the kingdom of Ashur formed in 3500 BC, dominating Mesopotamia and Babylon until its collapse at the end of the Bronze Age (around 1100 BC).* Effectively recovering by 950BC, the Assyrians built an infantry, cavalry, chariot brigade and siege engines. Following the will of their god Ashur, the conquered Babylon, Samaria, Medes and Elam to form the Neo-Assyrian empire. Known for excellent administrative skills, road building and libraries, it collapsed in 612, when Babylon organized a joint revolt with Medes.

Neo-Babylonian Empire

The Neo-Babylonian empire was founded by an Assyrian general Nabopolasser in 626 BC. Conquering all of Mesopotamia, his son Nebuchadnezzar marched west, conquering Judah in 587 BC and deporting its Jewish inhabitants to Babylon.

Kingdom of Medes

Median nomads from the Asian steppes arrived in the Iran’s Zargos mountains during the third millennium. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Medes began building a powerful kingdom in 700 BC. However after allying with Babylon to conquer the Assyrians, they became despotic and were conquered by the Persians.

Following their conquest of Medes, Persians widely adopted Median dress. There were many Median priests and soldiers in the Persian empire. The English word “paradise” is of Median origin.

Persian Tribes

Persian tribes arrived in Iran (from Central Asian steppes) in the third millennium BC and intermarried with local tribes. By 1000 BC they had settled two separate areas of western Iran: Parsua (in the Zagros mountains) and Ansham (a Median name) in Farsham province (now known as Shiraz). As the Assyrians put more pressure on Medes and Elam, the Persians gained control of splintered Median kingdoms. Between 750-645 BC, they came to dominate Medes and saw themselves as heirs to the Achaemid chiefdom, a very powerful role in the Median Pasargadae tribe.

Greece

It took the Greek city-states around 250 years to recover from the Bronze Age collapse. Around 750 BC the Greeks rediscovered written language, resumed trade and began hiring themselves out as mercenaries.

Lydia

In Anatolia, the Hittite empire also collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age. It was replaced by the extremely wealthy kingdom of Lydia, the first Middle East state to use coins.

Egypt

In the 7th century BC, Egypt expelled their Assyrian occupiers with the help of Greek mercenaries.

The Levant

The Levant saw the increase of independent borderline states, as both the Hittites and the Egyptians lost ability to defend their claims in the region. Tyre (Phoenician state) and Israel were the most prominent of the new states.

*For some reason civilization collapsed across the entire Middle East at the end of the Bronze Age around 1100 BC.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/15372393/15372389

By Rima Najjar

How Israel Became the Palestinian Tax Collector

The fiscal trap Palestinians live under today did not arise organically; it was engineered, codified, and then left untouched for thirty years. Its blueprint is the 1994 Paris Protocol, the economic annex to the Oslo Accords, which was marketed at the time as a temporary framework for a transitional period leading toward Palestinian sovereignty.

In reality, it created a one-way customs union in which Israel retained full control over borders, ports, import channels, and the taxes generated from nearly all goods entering the West Bank and Gaza. Under this arrangement, Israel collects VAT, customs duties, import taxes, port fees, and fuel excise charges on behalf of Palestinians, aggregates them into “clearance revenues,” and then transfers them to the Palestinian Authority — minus whatever deductions it unilaterally decides to impose. These revenues now make up the majority of the PA’s budget and are the financial core around which Palestinian governance has been forced to revolve.

[…]

Even highly restricted aid shipments, routed through layers of Israeli bureaucracy, pass through the same fiscal machinery that treats Gaza not as a humanitarian catastrophe but as a taxable market. The perversity deepens: Israel has frozen Gaza’s entire share of its own clearance revenues, diverting or withholding funds generated from imports destined for the Strip. Gaza’s hospitals run out of fuel while the taxes generated from that very fuel accumulate under Israeli control or sit in foreign escrow.

[…]

The same mechanism operates in the West Bank, only with less visible violence. A factory in Hebron importing machinery from China pays Israeli customs duties. A supermarket in Jenin stocking Israeli dairy products generates VAT for Israel before any share is transferred to the PA. Fuel purchases — one of the largest revenue sources — are taxed entirely at Israeli rates. In each case, Palestinians do not control their tax base.

They receive it as a monthly allowance, released or withheld depending on Israel’s political calculations. For decades, Israel portrayed this as administrative necessity: because it controlled the borders, it had to collect the taxes. But over time, the mechanism became a political pressure tool.

[…]

Since October 2023, the situation sharply deteriorated. Israel froze Gaza-related revenue outright, dragging out clearance transfers for weeks or months, and withholding far larger sums from the West Bank portion. The PA’s fiscal capacity collapsed; salaries became partial, delayed, or split into unpredictable installments.

Ministries cut services. Municipalities closed departments or deferred maintenance. Universities and hospitals sank into debt spirals. The PA could not plan more than thirty days ahead because it no longer knew if or when Israel would release the funds. By early 2024, the Authority had become a government whose operational budget was effectively determined in Jerusalem — in the Israeli Ministry of Finance, not in Ramallah.

But the structural dependency designed by the Paris Protocol runs even deeper than monthly cash transfers. Because Palestinians are locked into the Israeli VAT system, they inherit Israeli prices without Israeli incomes. They pay Israeli fuel tariffs that inflate transportation and electricity costs.

Their banks rely on Israeli clearinghouses. Their imports are routed through Israeli ports that impose fees at every stage. The customs union acts as an economic occupation layered beneath the military one: Palestinians must purchase within an Israeli cost structure even as they are denied sovereign tools — monetary policy, customs borders, independent import regimes — to shape that structure to their needs.

The PA has no control over its external borders, no independent central bank, no control over its main revenue streams, and no authority to regulate the cost of the goods on which its own tax revenues depend. It survives only if the colonizer transfers the funds it collected from the colonized.

This is the tax cage: a colonizer that collects your taxes; a government that depends on the colonizer to survive; and a public that pays the cost through inflated prices, weakened purchasing power, and delayed salaries. The extraordinary part is not that this architecture was built in the 1990s, but that it was kept in place for three decades — even as the PA’s political legitimacy eroded, even as Israel hardened its control, and even as the system cannibalized itself after October 2023.

[…]

The West Bank in Slow-Motion Strangulation

Gaza reveals the tax cage at its most lethal extreme. The West Bank reveals the same mechanism running in slow motion — less spectacular, but no less suffocating.

Salaries alone consume between half and nearly two-thirds of the PA’s entire budget, a figure considered unsustainably high by international standards but inevitable in an economy fragmented by occupation and denied sovereign revenue sources. Because Israel-controlled clearance revenues — VAT, customs duties, and import taxes collected at Israeli ports — constitute about 60 to 70 percent of the PA’s total income, even a single delayed transfer can jeopardize payroll. There are no sovereign reserves to fall back on, no independent monetary policy, and no ability to borrow internationally without Israel’s permission. The result is a fiscal architecture designed for permanent fragility.

A fourth layer is now emerging: the Trump-Netanyahu strategic blueprintfor the West Bank and post-war Gaza. Under this vision, the PA is not meant to be strengthened. It is meant to be preserved precisely in its current weakened state — an administrative entity that manages civilian affairs but lacks the fiscal or political autonomy to challenge Israeli control. The PA is expected to be strong enough to administer, too weak to resist; responsible for civilians, irrelevant to national strategy; sufficiently functional to relieve Israel of direct governance, perpetually dependent on Israel’s tax transfers to survive. This is not a new architecture. It is the existing system, fortified.

Yet even inside this tightening structure, cracks have widened — cracks born of necessity, crisis, and improvisation. Communities have developed survival economies anchored in family networks, zakat committees, cooperatives, and local production. Municipalities have learned to rely on local revenue when Ramallah cannot deliver.

Universities, hospitals, and large NGOs have built financial ecosystems that bypass the PA entirely. Boycotts and shifts in consumption patterns have begun to weaken Israeli-taxed imports. And the PA itself retains dormant legal and administrative tools it has never mobilized: challenging the Paris Protocol, demanding third-party oversight of clearance revenues, devolving power to municipalities, restructuring its security posture, and cultivating alternative revenue streams.

What Palestinians Are Already Doing: Cracks in the Cage

[…]

The first and most immediate site of autonomy is at the community level, particularly in the production and consumption of food. Every time a Palestinian family buys a locally made staple instead of an Israeli or imported one, VAT and customs revenue shrink along the Israeli-controlled pipeline.

This is not an ideological aspiration but a documented trend, especially since 2019.

In Qabalan, a women-led agrifood cooperative that received technical support from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization upgraded its facilities and now produces freekeh, wheat products, pastries, and frozen sambousek distributed in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin.

In Dura, south of Hebron, a cooperative of twenty women has built a two-story production facility with an annual operating budget of roughly two million shekels, supplying the West Bank with maftoul, mulukhiyah, jams, and grape molasses.

In nearby Tafuh, the al-Nahda cooperative runs a bakery generating about 25,000 shekels in monthly sales, while in al-Aqbabah the Beit Emmaus cooperative increased its frozen vegetable output fourfold between 2019 and 2021 and now employs twenty-five women who each earn about 1,500 shekels per month — providing a local alternative to heavily taxed imported frozen goods.

In Kufr al-Deek in the Salfit governorate, the al-Zaytouna cooperative produces bread, pickled vegetables, olives, herbs, and maftoul for school canteens and supermarkets, replacing products that previously passed through Israeli wholesalers and customs posts. These examples are not boutique experiments. They are manufacturing and processing operations producing the everyday staples — bread, dairy, freekeh, vegetables, jams — that form the core of Palestinian diets.

The wider food manufacturing sector confirms that these cases are part of a larger structural trend. A 2017 survey by the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy found that local producers already supply about 57 percent of dairy consumed in the West Bank, more than half of processed fruits and vegetables, and roughly 80 percent of all bakery products. The sector includes over 560 registered enterprises and comprises nearly a fifth of the entire Palestinian manufacturing base.

These numbers demonstrate that Palestinians already dominate essential food categories — and that scaling up the cooperatives emerging across the West Bank would further shift consumption away from Israeli-taxed products.

After October 7, 2023, this shift accelerated. Boycotts of Israeli and U.S.-linked brands produced measurable market changes: the Palestinian soft drink “Chat Cola,” produced in Salfit, reported more than a 40 percent surge in sales; two KFC branches in Ramallah closed after demand collapsed; and supermarkets in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin noted significant increases in sales of local snacks, beverages, and household goods.

Palestinian Customs Authority data cited by Al-Jazeera showed declines in Israeli imports in categories like chips, soft drinks, and cleaning products. Academic work from 2023 analyzing the relationship between boycott campaigns and import patterns confirmed statistically that periods of intensified boycott correlate with reduced Israeli imports and increased local production in key food sectors. Together, these trends form a quiet but material form of economic resistance: local production plus coordinated boycotts equals a shrinking taxable frontier.

The second domain where cracks in the tax cage appear is at the level of institutions and municipalities, which have long operated with degrees of autonomy simply because they have had to. When the PA cannot pay salaries or transfer funds, many municipalities continue functioning by relying on local revenue streams that never pass through Ramallah. Nablus has repeatedly used water-billing income to cover operational costs during PA liquidity crises.

[…]

Major Palestinian institutions also function largely outside the PA’s fiscal architecture. Universities such as Birzeit, An-Najah, Bethlehem, and Hebron depend primarily on tuition, international grants, and diaspora donations — not PA transfers.

Hospitals such as Al-Ahli, St. Joseph, and Augusta Victoria are funded by church networks, international NGOs, and community fundraising.

[…]

A third layer of autonomy is the network of parallel services that emerges during Israeli raids and curfews. In Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, and parts of Ramallah and Bethlehem, communities have repeatedly organized ad hoc medical response teams, field clinics, food distribution networks, neighborhood patrols, and transportation arrangements. These systems spring up because the formal ones are incapacitated or barred by the occupation. That they work — improvisationally but effectively — underscores a deeper truth: Palestinian society already governs itself under stress, and often does so more coherently than the PA can when dependent on Israeli revenue flows.

[…]

What ties all these examples together is that none are speculative.Palestinians already have functioning micro-economies that operate outside Israeli tax capture; institutions already bypass the PA’s revenue shortages; municipalities already keep essential services running when Ramallah is insolvent; and the PA already possesses legal and administrative levers it has simply never used. The autonomy Palestinians need is not a distant aspiration. It already exists in embryonic form across the West Bank. The task is to expand and coordinate these structures into a deliberate strategy — not as a substitute for liberation, but as its foundation.

These practices are impressive, but they are usually treated as mere “coping.” History shows something far more radical: every time the formal fiscal pipeline has been completely cut, Palestinian society has not collapsed — it has reorganized itself.

[…]

The most severe test came after October 7, 2023, when Israel froze Gaza’s entire share of the clearance revenues and delivered only fragments of the West Bank’s portion. For over a year, the PA lurched between partial salaries, delayed salaries, and no salaries. Yet the West Bank did not descend into chaos.

What emerged instead was what many Palestinians have begun to call a “shadow social economy”: neighborhood funds that purchased food for the poorest; agricultural collectives that distributed produce directly; youth groups that organized emergency medical response during raids; and diaspora remittances that surged quietly into family accounts.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/palestinians-can-recover-autonomy-under-occupation/5907445

Dave DeCamp | December 2, 2025

The US Department of War insisted on Tuesday that it’s not waging a “forever war” in Somalia despite the fact that the Trump administration has shattered the record for annual airstrikes in the country.

Liam Cosgrove, a reporter for ZeroHedge, noted during a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday that the US has launched 101 airstrikes (now 102) in Somalia and that US troops reportedly conducted a recent ground raid, and asked why the US military is still in the country.

“I can assure you this is an America First Department of War and president, so we aren’t conducting forever wars in Somalia, we aren’t seeking regime change, and we’re not nation building,” Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said in reply.

The Trump administration has dramatically escalated the US war in Somalia, launching more than 10 times the number of airstrikes that the US conducted in 2024, and more than the combined total of airstrikes launched during the 12 years that Presidents Obama and Biden were in office. Despite the unprecedented scale of US strikes, Kingsley described the campaign as “narrowly scoped.”

She told Cosgrove, “I will say that this Department’s narrowly scoped, intelligence-driven, counterintelligence operations in places like Somalia, alongside our partners, allow us to protect the American homeland from terrorist threats and to protect our interests.”

US airstrikes this year have targeted a small ISIS affiliate based in caves in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region and al-Shabaab in southern and central Somalia. The US has been fighting al-Shabaab since it backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, which ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Muslim groups that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the capital from CIA-backed warlords.

Al-Shabaab was the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union and claimed its first attack in 2007, which targeted Ethiopian troops occupying Mogadishu. In 2012, al-Shabaab declared loyalty to al-Qaeda, after years of fighting the US and its proxies. The ISIS affiliate in Somalia first emerged in 2015 as an offshoot of al-Shabaab, and is believed to have only a few hundred members.

[…]

Via https://news.antiwar.com/2025/12/02/us-war-department-claims-its-not-waging-a-forever-war-in-somalia-despite-record-airstrikes/