Every Spare Nanosecond You have Should be At Least Spent Rubbing their Faces in the Feces of the Dictators, and Rapist in Chief's Minyan -- They Fucking Voted for THEM!

tear from their bloody hands the narrative control, the dirty rotten lies of a cult "religion" and terroristic ideology

Fuck these little libertarians, or whatever the Max Blumenthals and Grayzones and such call themselves.

Read it: LINK.

The work of two Baltimore organizations charged with improving the health of millions of people around the world screeched to a halt this week when they lost their main funding source, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Johns Hopkins University-affiliated Jhpiego and Center for Communication Programs have received stop-work orders, affecting at least 4,400 employees worldwide and programs that treat people with cancer and HIV, train local doctors and ensure the health of newborn babies in poor nations.

Seeming to cement the pause, virtually the entire staff of USAID was told Tuesday night by the Trump administration’s main cost-cutter, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, that they would be off the job by Friday and workers abroad would be brought home.

“It’s frightening,” said a worker at Jhpiego, who did not want to be named. The worker said staff was still reporting to work and were told they’d be paid at least until the end of February.

It’s all Ha-Ha-Ha and yuk-yuk-yuk for these fucking white Jewish boys and girls?

Will all these fascist and illegal and impeachable things going down just end up on the Jewish Night Live, err, Saturday Night Live? Probably.

Trillions for Musk, Google, Palantir, Oracle, and ten thousand other Jewish Fun Factories, including the raping murdering starving lying maiming poisoning Jews of Occupied Palestine, but we are in good hands with Mussolini-Hitler-Franco-Pinochet!

Criminals! DOGE Aides Search Medicare Agency Payment Systems for Fraud

Elon Musk’s allies have been on site at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services offices this week.

Goddamn, the Jews now Genesis? The Spanish? The Aztecs?

Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, is thinking about artificial intelligence – how it interacts with humans, and how it may reshape democracy. Or replace it.

Schmidt coauthored Genesis, with former Microsoft executive Craig Mundie and the late Henry Kissinger, who died in 2023 about a year before the book's publication.

Kissinger, Schmidt says, had been thinking about the nature of reality "since before we were born," and used some of his final years exploring how technology might warp our understanding of reality.

Genesis includes a story from history: the Spanish conquistadors who invaded present-day Mexico in 1519. The ruling Aztecs seem to have mistaken the newcomers for gods. Their emperor first met them, took their advice, and then became their hostage before the conquistadors simply took over.

At the end of his life, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger set out to grapple with AI — a technological breakthrough that dramatically empowers people in all walks of life while also raising urgent questions about the future of humanity. Written with leading technologists Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt, the resulting book, Genesis, charts a course between blind faith and fear as it outlines an effective strategy for navigating the age of AI, both its opportunities and its risks — “a profound exploration of how we can protect human dignity and values in an era of autonomous machines” (Walter Isaacson).

In a special conversation with David Rubenstein, hear Schmidt and Mundie on their collaboration with Kissinger on his final book — why Kissinger chose to spend his final chapter thinking about AI, working with him in his final days, how AI affects not only our everyday lives but tests our relationship with the divine, and much more.

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Rapist in Chief Trump back at his best golden shower days:

A number of sporting governing bodies, including swimming, athletics and golf, have banned transgender women from competing in the female category at elite level if they have gone through male puberty.

• Transgender women banned from top golf tours

• World Athletics bans transgender women

According to White House officials who briefed reporters on Wednesday morning, this latest order empowers the Department of Education to investigate how schools implement Title IX, a US law that bans sex discrimination in federally funded education programmes.

An administration official said that the executive order will reverse the position of the Biden administration which in April last year said that LGBT students would be protected by federal law, although it did not give specific guidance on transgender athletes.

"If you let men take over women's sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding," Trump explained.

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The dirtiest yet in office, for sure. How’s that working out for you fucking retarded blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Muslims, POC who voted for the cocksucker. No votes is a very BIG vote indeed.

Donald Trump's top aides staunchly defended his push to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza and have the U.S. take over the war-ruined enclave, but they also backed away from elements of his proposal in the face of international condemnation.

A longtime New York property developer, Trump drew rebukes on Wednesday from world powers Russia, China and Germany, which said it would foster "new suffering and new hatred." Regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia rejected the proposal outright.

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Nah, this isn’t a fucking racist lynching motherfucking country to the core!

Late last week, a national museum literally papered over history.

Responding to President Trump's order that terminated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government, the National Cryptologic Museum taped sheets of paper over plaques that celebrate women and people of color who had served the National Security Agency, which intercepts overseas conversations and breaks foreign government codes.

The honorees are described as "Trailblazers in U.S. Cryptologic History," and the plaques hang in the museum's Hall of Honor.

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Condemnation? On-line criticizing? FUCK.

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Smart Jewish Bombs:

The destruction in northern Gaza is beyond imagination. On Sunday, I made the journey from my home in Deir al-Balah to Gaza City, my first time north after 15 months of Israel’s genocide. The three-hour, 16-kilometer walk was an arduous trek through debris and dust—that is all that is left. Every block looks like it has been hit with several powerful earthquakes.

The sheer scale of it affected me physically. No building was spared in the Israeli assault. I felt weighed down. My eyes stung from the dust in the air. At various junctures there were chainlink and razor wire fences around ramparts of sand where the Israeli military established checkpoints. I climbed over hills of rubble and took care to avoid what looked like an unexploded ordnance.

When I finally arrived in Gaza City, in the Sheikh Ejleen area near the coastal road, my hair and eyebrows had turned grey with dust. Before me, there were nothing but piles of broken concrete. People were sifting through the rubble, scavenging for anything they could find. The picturesque buildings and cafes along the coastline where I used to go are all gone—they have simply vanished. Al-Aqsa University, where I should have graduated from in 2024, lay in ruins. All that remained were some torn books and broken chairs. The buildings that were still standing were burned and partially destroyed, their foundations fragile. There were no lights anywhere. — Jabaliya Is Now a City of Rubble

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https://youtube.com/shorts/Fn6YGkwwxlw?si=4J4yW8_hW6vh4r41

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https://youtube.com/shorts/rDWQ4_71Uyc?si=yODk3q4zhvQcginU

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https://youtube.com/shorts/Cv6q-rhmMZU?si=369mN52xly35dUZg

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https://youtube.com/shorts/yFOqM7puEEg?si=pzR932iml3h1MCAq

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This is the dirty U$A at its most emblematic, in one fucking movie: Watch Guerras ajenas

From the land of narco-violence to the land of displaced persons. The documentary Guerras Ajenas ('Wars of Others') explores the consequences of the war on drugs in Colombia, and one of its main tools: aerial spraying.

Guerras ajenas is a 2016 documentary with a runtime of 1 hour and 11 minutes.

Fucking White Ghouls and the Fucking Spanish Syphilitic Cunts — Columbia!

A small farmers association in Colombia is suing for damages due to aerial herbicide spraying – known as “fumigation.” Under the rubric of Plan Colombia and with the support of the United States, Colombia has used aerial fumigations since 2000 to eradicate crops of illicit use, in particular coca plants, which are a component of cocaine.

After fumigations take place, local communities report skin, respiratory and gastrointestinal issues. Effects are most severe in children, pregnant women, and the elderly. Sprayed glyphosate, marketed in the United States as Roundup, among other chemicals used in fumigations, has widespread health impacts. Thousands of citizens have been forced to vacate their homes as a result of fumigation chemicals lingering in the air.

In addition to impacts on human health, environmental damages are also rampant. Spraying has led to massive crop loss. Residual spray has led to chemical seepage into groundwater and aquifers. The destruction of non-targeted plants has damaged some of the most biologically diverse regions, jeopardizing their very existence.

The Lawyers’ Collective José Alvear Restrepo (CAJAR in Spanish) represent the small farmers association and call for an end to Colombia’s drug practices of fumigation per its obligations under both domestic and international law to protect human rights and the environment.

In October 2014, CIEL submitted an amicus brief to support CAJAR’s legal arguments. The amicus asserted that the government could not attempt to justify its failed drug policy on international agreements concerning narcotics, since these instruments had to be applied in ways consistent with the State’s legal responsibilities to protect human rights and the environment. The amicus also shows how fumigations have serious impacts on the right to a healthy environment, the right to a healthy and dignified life, the right to property and land, and the right to food.

“As farmers, we reject aerial spraying with glyphosate because we know it brings many consequences in terms of illness, and by just fumigating a coca crop you are fumigating two or three hectares (five or seven acres) of forest,” Gonzalo Toloza, a 48-year-old social leader in the village of Boqueron, told Al Jazeera. “We believe the government should look for other methods to end coca, and that they come through on promises made to rural farmers.”

Pedro Arenas, a former mayor of San Jose del Guaviare, the capital of Guaviare department, now runs Viso Mutop, a think-tank that promotes drug policy reforms. He said he wants the government to suspend aerial fumigation with glyphosate until more advanced studies on the health risks are completed.

Near the small town of Charras, two hours from San Jose del Guaviare, former FARC commander Ricardo Semillas, 34, remembers seeing aerial fumigation when he was fighting deep in the jungle of various Colombian regions a decade ago.

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“We saw farmers who were fumigated with that poison (glyphosate) on top of them,” said Semillas, who still uses his nom de guerre and now lives at a reintegration camp with about 100 other ex-combatants. “They didn’t respect human life, they threw that stuff on top of the crops without even caring if people were there.”

He told Al Jazeera that renewed aerial fumigation could exacerbate conflict in the country’s already violence-plagued rural areas. [Ricardo Semillas holds up a photo of himself when he served as a FARC commander]

“People in the countryside need to be respected. A return to aerial fumigation is going to create conflict, without a doubt … serious conflict,” he said, making reference to FARC dissident groups and other illegal armed groups operating in the region.

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And Gaza, man, Palestine, man:

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Fuck AmeriKKKa. Fuck Klanada. Fucking INBred UnUnited Queendom. Fuck EuroTrashLandia. Fuck Jews.

Snapshots: I spoke with 20 people in Gaza after the ceasefire. My heart broke 20 times

In the aftermath of war, Gaza's people are picking up the pieces—of their homes, their families, and their lives. These 20 snapshots show what survival looks like and what it costs.

Heroes above, versus the stench people, Jews in Israel:

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Versus:

Gender-affirming surgeries took place last week at Galilee Medical Center (GMC) in Nahariya, marking the first time such procedures were done in Israel outside Sheba Medical Center.

The three male-to-female surgeries were led by Dr. Loren Schechter, an expert in gender-affirming surgery from Chicago, together with teams from Sheba and GMC.

Sheba, located in Ramat Gan and Israel’s largest hospital, is currently the only medical center in the country accredited to perform all aspects of the surgery (including genital reconstructive, or “bottom” surgery). A statement issued by GMC indicated that the operations performed last week were an indication that the hospital would soon also be accredited for such complex procedures.

Transgender individuals experience unique health disparities, and transgender medicine, surgery, and mental health outcomes often go unaddressed by providers. Yet the need for this knowledge is ever-expanding in the healthcare field. Recognizing this growing gar in care, Mount Sinai Beth Israel began to concentrate on providing comprehensive care to its transgender population in 2016. Mount Sinai Beth Israel began by amassing a multidisciplinary team of professionals to provide comprehensive care, including primary/preventive care, hormonal therapy, behavioral health, surgical services, and post-transition care. Surgery increased from 130 cases in 2016, the first full year of services, to 282 cases in 2017. An increase in surgery requests led to an expansion of operating room “block time” for Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS) ambulatory and inpatient procedures. A total of 1,300 CTMS patients were seen at the outpatient clinic since March 2016, contributing to further research in transgender medicine and surgery.

- The Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery

- Mount Sinai Beth Israel

Versus:

The War on Hospitals (ONE year ago, written).

Israel’s attacks on health care workers and facilities in Gaza are unprecedented.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached

• December 20, 2023

The face of the ongoing onslaught on Gaza has no doubt been Dr. Hammam Alloh, the thirty-six-year-old Palestinian nephrologist at northern Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate it when it was invaded by Israeli troops. “And if I go, who treats my patients?” he said in an October 31 interview. “We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare,” he added. Two weeks later, Alloh was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with his father, brother-in-law, and father-in-law.

Alloh’s use of the word “animals” was certainly not lost on viewers. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had used that same language on October 9 when he announced a “complete siege” on Gaza, labeling its residents as “human animals.” Hamas’s attacks on October 7 would predictably generate a violent military reaction from Israel. But this Israeli campaign in Gaza, a strip of land where more than 80 percent of its population lived in poverty even before October 7, has been of a different character entirely than any previous ones. This onslaught has featured direct attacks on hospitals and the intentional undermining of the entire health care system: shelling, the killing and arresting of health care personnel, the direct and indirect killing of hundreds of patients, underprovision or complete lack of proper medical care, and unwarranted suffering for thousands of patients due to shortages in basic medications, water, food, and fuel. The attacks have made clear that the repression of Palestinian rights now has a new feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.

The onslaught in Gaza has a distinct feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.

At the time of this writing, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded about 500 attacks on health care in the occupied Palestinian territory in 70 days—an average of a little more than 7 attacks per day. This includes attacks on health care facilities, personnel, ambulances, patients, warehouses, and supplies. The Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations recently reported that 283 health care workers have been killed in Gaza so far. Some have been shot directly; others have been killed during hospital attacks. Doctors Without Bordors/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) itself has lost several of its doctors in direct attacks on either convoys or hospitals. Palestinian medical staff—including many consultant physicians at Gaza’s major hospitals—have reportedly been abducted or detained by Israeli forces (A group called Healthcare Workers Watch-Palestine has tracked over 116 such cases).

The most prominent detainee is the director of Al-Shifa hospital, Muhamad Abu Salmiya, who was arrested on November 23 while evacuating with a WHO convoy (and who remains in custody). His appeal to the global medical community to “condemn the acts against medical professionals” was published in The Lancet a few days later. But many major U.S. medical journals and associations have been hesitant to heed his call. When the American Medical Association (AMA) met in mid-November to draft a call for a ceasefire and the protection of civilians and medical professionals, the effort was shut down. But in 2022 the AMA published a call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine—and didn’t mince words. “The AMA is outraged by the senseless injury and death the Russian army has inflicted on the Ukrainian people,” the AMA president said. “For those who survive these unprovoked attacks, the physical, emotional, and psychological health of Ukrainians will be felt for years.” And while in a November 9 statement the AMA said that it “supports efforts to deliver humanitarian aid and medical supplies to those facing a humanitarian crisis” (note the anonymous “those”), no mention has been made of the unfolding “public health catastrophe” in Gaza that the WHO has been warning about.

Perhaps the most astounding silence has come from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Both released prompt statements in October condemning the “recent attacks and acts of terror in Israel,” but have kept silent regarding the tremendous psychological trauma that decades of occupation, and now indiscriminate bombardment, have unleashed on Gaza’s children and adolescents. How can one comprehend this dissonance if not in terms of a double standard?

Some groups have risen to the moment. The American Public Health Association (APHA), the largest and oldest public health association in the United States, took the lead to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on November 15. MSF and some other NGOs, like Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, have also called for ceasefires. The American Psychological Association was more balanced in its statement, recognizing that “all individuals deserve to live free of fear and violence so that their mental health and well-being can flourish.”

Yet without a broader effort from the medical community, these calls will register as little more than blips on the radar. The destruction of health care in Gaza has triggered alarms about the undermining of the Geneva Conventions, the core of the international law that aims to protect the lives of civilians and their vital infrastructures, like schools and hospitals. In the face of Israel’s broad disregard for these laws, medical professionals might be some of the most crucial dissenting voices against Israel’s mission to render Gaza unlivable.

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Even before the IDF’s ground operations began on October 27, Gaza’s main hospitals, concentrated in the north of the strip, had been the target of indiscriminate attacks and bombardments, including the deliberate use of white phosphorus artillery shells. White phosphorus, banned under international law, is a substance that inflicts horrific skin burns that are difficult to heal or treat in conflict-ridden areas; it damages vital organs causing lifelong injuries (physical and psychological) and triggers extensive fires.

Then the IDF began warning Gaza’s main hospitals—including Al-Shifa (Arabic for “healing,” ironically), the largest hospital and refugee camp—to immediately evacuate. Tedros Ghebreyesus, director of the WHO, repeatedly decried that it was impossible to evacuate hospitals without endangering the lives of thousands of patients, including many in critical condition. For days the world waited anxiously for evidence proving Israel’s claim that Al-Shifa Hospital was a cover for tunnels below it that housed the “command center” of Hamas. In the meantime, Netanyahu’s government, armed with the backing of the United States and the European Union, proceeded with an attack that the WHO condemned as “totally unacceptable” and that all major humanitarian organizations denounced as “a violation of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law and Conventions.” The military operation, which took shape in only a few days, consisted of advancing tanks, bombing, and forced evacuation with no safe route and no ambulances for the thousands of patients and refugees who sought shelter at the hospital.

The Biden administration had hoped the operation would be “targeted” and “precise.” As it turned out, it was neither. And after several failed attempts, the only evidence the IDF managed to provide consisted of a few weapons and some tunnels with no clear military purpose—but no command center.

The product of the Al-Shifa debacle was only widespread death, destruction, and misery. A WHO delegation described Gaza’s main hospital as a “death zone.” They were shocked by what they saw: a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital, only 25 staff left to care for 291 seriously ill patients, premature babies in “extremely critical conditions,” no water, no food, no medical supplies, and no fuel. Patients’ wounds were festering due to an acute shortage of antibiotics. About 2,500 patients—among them many sick and injured, including amputees—were ordered to evacuate south, walking through an apocalyptic landscape of ruined streets and rotting corpses. The hospital has yet to recover: a recent December delegation to Al-Shifa described it as a “bloodbath” and a “hospital in need of resuscitation.”

That the dismantling of Al-Shifa Hospital did not seem to achieve any military objective against Hamas suggests that it is part of a broader strategy: the strategic obliteration of Gaza’s health care system. The Al-Shifa attack was no isolated incident. In November the Al-Rantisi Specialized Hospital for Children, Gaza’s only medical center with a pediatric cancer ward, had to evacuate under catastrophic circumstances after heavy bombing. Nearby, the only psychiatric hospital in Gaza was destroyed at a time when psychosocial support services and mental health support are perhaps more urgent than ever. The Turkish-Palestinian Hospital, the only hospital dedicated to cancer, ran out of fuel and could no longer function. The International Eye Hospital was reduced to rubble. According to the WHO, an Israeli raid on Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital killed several patients and their companions and injured tens of people. When the fourth floor of the hospital was directly targeted with a missile, the solar panels that provided electricity were cut off. The IDF proceeded by shooting patients, interrogating them, and beating a nurse. The hospital is now in ruins and out of service. The October 25 decimation of the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled is laden with disturbing symbolism.

Authorities in Gaza have updated the death toll from Israel’s war on the enclave to 61,709, having added thousands who are missing and now presumed dead.

On December 12 Kamal Adwan Hospital, the only remaining functional hospital in the north of the strip, was put under siege for several days, then bombarded. Its inner courtyard was bulldozed, with allegedly dozens of patients buried under the rubble; its medical staff were stripped and detained (the hospital’s director, Ahmed Kahlot, remains in detention).

As a result of Israel’s onslaught, more than 70 percent of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are now out of service, according to the WHO. The UN has described the current health care situation as a “humanitarian disaster zone.” As of this writing, more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed (not counting the thousands of bodies still buried under the rubble) and more than 50,000 have been injured. The numbers, likely an underestimate according to U.S. officials, include more than 10,000 children and 4,000 women, who amount to about 70 percent of the casualties. According to the NGO Save the Children, more children have been killed in Gaza than in all of the world’s conflicts combined in each of the past three years. Overall, thousands have sustained serious injuries, and over 1.8 million people have been displaced. Thousands of pregnant women lack adequate care, and dozens of premature babies have their lives hanging in balance, not to mention the thousands of chronic patients suffering from the acute shortage of essential medications and life-saving equipment.

Lacking painkillers and sometimes light, surgeons have reported horrific procedures in which they must amputate children’s limbs and dress burns with no anesthetics, using vinegar in lieu of antiseptics, the light of their cell phone screens to see, and ketamine to knock out patients before operating on them. Such circumstances have made two chief tenets of modern medical practice—“standard of care” (the generally accepted procedures that medical professionals are expected to follow when treating patients with certain conditions) and “continuity of care” (the ability to follow up with patients)—not only unsustainable but devoid of any meaning.

On Tuesday UN officials reported that the Nasser hospital, the largest hospital still functioning in Gaza, had been shelled twice in the last two days, stretching an already barely functioning facility to its limits. The victims of Israeli hospital bombings, said a UN spokesperson, now include children recovering from amputations suffered from past bombings.

The situation is so dire that MSF, which typically remains politically neutral, has taken the unusual stance of calling for a ceasefire. The UN secretary-general António Guterres declared that Gaza is in the midst of an “epic humanitarian catastrophe.” The damage to water and sanitation infrastructure, overcrowded shelters, the unburied corpses under the rubble, the deterioration of sanitary conditions, and dwindling access to adequate health care are all contributing to the quick and lethal spread of disease. The number of gastrointestinal and infectious diseases (meningitis, chickenpox, and hepatitis A) have surged in recent days to the extent that Israelis are now concerned that cholera will endanger the health of the hostages and themselves. The WHO has warned that people will now die from diseases and lack of health care than from bombardment.

In earlier centuries, colonizers weaponized contagious diseases, like smallpox or the plague, to decimate native populations. This continues to be used as a strategy of war. It has been even contemplated as an extermination strategy in Gaza. Last month Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich endorsed the genocidal language of the retired Israeli general Giora Eiland, who in a column in the Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth called for causing the spread of epidemics as a way of achieving Israel’s goals in its ongoing campaign. The collapse of the health care system should make us wonder if this is not already happening on the ground in Gaza.

For Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, “What’s happening in Gaza is a litany of violations of international law … not seen since World War II.” Whether or not these acts “verge of genocide” or constitute genocide, as many prominent historians and legal scholars have argued, it should be seen as part of a broader campaign of depopulation and rendering Gaza uninhabitable.

More than a decade ago, a group of 50 international aid agencies, including the WHO, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, called on Israel to lift its illegal and inhumane siege and blockade of Gaza, to no avail. In a 2010 intervention in the House of Commons, David Cameron the then British Prime Minister had even described Gaza as an “open prison.” The inmates of that prison—1.6 million civilians at the time—were kept alive on a minimum caloric diet calculated rationally and meticulously by Israeli authorities to cause malnutrition without causing outright starvation. The latest operations of the long siege of Gaza, especially the decision to cut off water, fuel, medicines and food, while relentlessly and indiscriminately bombing it, goes still further. The starvation of civilians as a method of war is a crime prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute. By bombing Gaza’s last operational wheat mill and restricting access to humanitarian aid, the UN has warned that these deliberate destructions “threaten to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.” But it also suggests that Israel has embraced a common war tactic of rogue states such as Syria or Russia.

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And like any rogue state, Israel has showed little hesitance to flout international law—including the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of International Humanitarian Law, which regulates the conduct of armed conflict and above all seeks to limit its impact.

The carnage of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 served as the catalyst for an international conference in Geneva laying the groundwork for the First Geneva Convention and the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Formally known as the “Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field,” the Convention’s hope was that in wartime, belligerents would declare lazarettos and field hospitals “neutral,” and that similar protection would be extended to army medical staff, voluntary helpers, and wounded soldiers. To mark the persons and objects to be protected, governments would choose a common, distinctive sign: the Red Cross, or, in majority-Muslim countries, the Red Crescent (adopted on the request of the Ottoman Empire).

The First Geneva Convention included provisions for military hospitals but not civilian ones. At the time, wars were primarily fought on the battlefield where armies confronted each other. But after the invention of warplanes, civilian and military hospitals were more frequently and more viciously targeted. During World War I, Germany bombed London hospitals and Great Britain reciprocated. In the mid-1930s, many Red Cross and Red Crescent field hospitals caring for sick and wounded Ethiopian soldiers were attacked by Mussolini’s air force. While the 1907 Hague Conventions contained some provisions on the protection of civilian hospitals, they were first mentioned explicitly only in the Fourth Geneva Convention, whose articles were adopted in 1949. It is worth noting that it was the indiscriminate Allied bombing of German hospitals during World War II, as well as the United States’ dropping of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that prompted international legislation on the protection of civilian infrastructures, including hospitals.

The Fourth Geneva Convention is very clear: hospitals and medical staff are protected as long as they do not “commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.” Article 15 in specific mentions hospitals as “neutralized zones intended to shelter from the effects of war the following persons, without distinction: (a) wounded and sick combatants or non-combatants; (b) civilian persons who take no part in hostilities, and who, while they reside in the zones, perform no work of a military character.” Yet despite the Fourth Convention’s additional amendments, transgressions against the “neutrality” and sanctity of hospitals have continued to occur—which resulted in two additional protocols in 1977 designed to strengthen protections for civilians and those in need of medical care.

And even if hospitals are used for military purposes, there are rules to be followed. According to the Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan, the onus is on those who fire the gun to provide the evidence before attacking. Moreover, “precautions must be taken, including effective warnings, which consider the ability of patients, medical staff, and other civilians to evacuate safely.” None of these were followed at Al-Shifa or other hospitals that were targeted.

Have we gone backward? Any a priori endorsement or encouragement of indiscriminate attacks on civilian health infrastructures, like the disturbing open letter signed by 100 Israeli physicians in support of bombing hospitals presumed to be “terrorist nests,” is a regression to a pre-World War II status quo where lex talionis—the law of retaliation—rather than human rights, was the rule. Doctors’ embrace of violence against civilians is a deliberate violation of the principle of “medical neutrality” and a show of contempt for the Hippocratic oath of “doing no harm.”

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In 1998 the Rome Statute, which was adopted and ratified in 2002, created the ICC, providing it with a permanent authority to prosecute individuals for international crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Article 8 of the Statute specifically names “hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected” as sites which cannot be intentionally attacked. The ICC’s goal is to help end impunity for the perpetrators of these kinds of crimes. Some of the most notable non-ratifying states include the United States, Russia, India, China, Iran, and Israel. Palestine, however, is Party to the Rome Statute and as such, the ICC prosecutor can initiate investigations into alleged crimes falling under the court’s jurisdiction. Both Israel and the United States, nevertheless, are full signatories of the Geneva Conventions.

Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel that killed hundreds of civilians and led to the kidnapping of 240 hostages and alleged sexual atrocities are violations of the Geneva Conventions, of course. The ICC chief prosecutor has vowed to hold both Hamas and Israel accountable. But he failed to mention the systematic and unprecedented nature of Israel’s attacks on hospitals and health care professionals. Whether these crimes will be investigated in courts of international law remains to be seen.

Such crimes are part of a larger pattern. For while Israel has surpassed other countries in terms of the scale, intensity, and lethality of its health care attacks, it is not the only culprit. In recent years, attacks on health care facilities across the world have intensified in scale and frequency. In 2021-2022 alone, there were about 2,500 confirmed attacks on health care, according to the WHO: a 25-fold increase from 2015–2016. This year is set to see the highest ever recorded number of health care attacks since the WHO started compiling the data in 2014. More worrisomely, hospitals and health care infrastructures are increasingly attacked to threaten and demoralize civilian populations. Now, not only are health care facilities no longer considered “neutral” by the belligerents, but they have also become targets for strategic military purposes, and—perhaps more strikingly—their ruins are used as a deterrence against any act of civil resistance or defiance.

Long before Russia’s targeted bombing of health care facilities in Ukraine in 2022, MSF frequently reported the deliberate targeting of its clinics and hospitals in Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen. The Syrian regime and its Russian ally have perfected their ruthless attacks on physicians, hospitals, and clinics, killing, destroying, and pulverizing health care personnel and facilities as a way to punish and deter civilian populations. While Russia has been the worst offender, if we compare the number of attacks on health care by population, Israel far surpasses all other countries. What should alarm us above all is how normal the weaponization of hospitals has become, and—with the silence of professional medical associations—how medicine has been misused as technologies of “not only death but grotesque and premature death” to borrow psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s characterization of the effects of nuclear weapons.

The time has come to critically assess the failure of the Geneva Conventions to protect civilians and civilian infrastructures, especially hospitals. What explains this shift from a time when the rules of law were respected to some extent that marked the post-World War II era to a time when they are entirely dismissed?

Three interrelated elements seem to explain this trend. First is the increasing lethality of modern weapons. Second is the increasing inequality and inequity between lives judged valuable and worth salvaging and protecting at any cost and others treated as cheaply disposable. Recent conflicts in occupied Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, or Ukraine, and especially the Covid-19 pandemic, have unveiled great disparities in the way in which life itself is valued. And the third has to do with a new post-9/11 world order—or rather disorder—where “might is right” has redefined international relations and created a world where the rule of international law applies to some, but not all, countries.

In the aftermath of World War I, many prominent intellectuals abandoned their commitment to universal values in favor of partisan interests. The French philosopher Julien Benda called this desertion “the treason of the clerks” (La trahision des intellectuels), with “clerks” here referring to the medieval definition of a scribe or a member of the intelligentsia. They had become ideologues, he argued, abandoning their role as independent thinkers and defenders of higher universal values. What we are witnessing today is another betrayal: this time by what could be called medical clerks, whose commitment should be first and foremost to the “art of healing.” In these times of crisis, medical doctors must refuse to be blinded by ideology and partisanship. Those who have remained silent in the face of the destruction of human life in Gaza would do well to remember the basic Hippocratic principle: “to use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment.”

Joelle M. Abi-Rached

Joelle M. Abi-Rached is Associate Professor of Medicine at the American University of Beirut and author of Asfuriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East.

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Last fucking Cunt Word. Eugenics, err, ethnic cleansing, err, genocide, err, Useless Eaters, err, Soylent Green!

Professor Anita Say Chan's book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech & Our Fight for an Independent Future ties Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the tech billionaires empowered under Trump to eugenics movement of the 19th and 20th centuries with chilling specificity. She offers two key insights: First, that the focus on "merit" is an effort to convince Americans to give up democracy (in which everyone gets a vote/say/rights on the basis of their humanity) in favor of a system where various qualifications (IQ/race) "qualify" you for rights. Second, she argues that by claiming only they (and their individual genius) can save the world, tech giants are persuading Americans that government should shrink to a "benevolent autocracy" where the rich rule. As Peter Theil has said, "I no longer believe that freedom and Democracy are compatible." Seen through the lens of the eugenics movement, the end goals become shockingly clear, as does the role the left must play.