Photograph Source: Billionaires Success, OnInnovation – CC BY 2.0
Those who are not familiar with how Israel, particularly the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, is actively and irreversibly damaging the environment might reach the erroneous conclusion that Tel Aviv is at the forefront of the global fight against climate change. The reality is the exact opposite.
In his speech at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow, Israel’s rightwing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett pushed the Israeli brand of “innovation and ingenuity” to “promote clean energy and reduce greenhouse gases”.
Israel uses this particular brand to sell everything, whether to promote itself as the savior of Africa, to help governments intercept fleeing refugees, to push deadly weapons in the global market or, as Bennett has done in Scotland, supposedly save the environment.
Just before we hastily dismiss Bennett’s rhetoric as empty words, we must remember that some are actually buying into this Israeli propaganda, one of whom is the American billionaire, Bill Gates.
The day following Bennett’s speech, Gates met with the Israeli Prime Minister on the sidelines of COP26 to discuss the establishment of a “working group” to study potential cooperation “between the State of Israel and the Gates Foundation in the area of climate change innovation,” the Times of Israel newspaper reported.
According to the newspaper, Gates, who had asserted in his meeting with Bennett that only innovation can solve the problem of climate change, said, “That’s really what Israel is known for”.
Gates’ obsession with ‘innovation’, however, might have blinded him from addressing other issues that Israel is also ‘known for’ – namely, being the world’s leading human rights violator, whose horrific track record of racial apartheid and violence is known to every member of the United Nations.
However, there is something else that Gates might also not be aware of – the systematic and purposeful destruction of the Palestinian environment, resulting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv’s insatiable appetite for military superiority, thus constant ‘innovation’.
Every act that is carried out to entrench the military occupation consolidates Israel’s colonial control and expanding illegal Jewish settlements directly impacts the Palestinian environment.
Not a single day passes without a Palestinian tree or an orchard being set ablaze or cut down. ‘Clearing’ the Palestinian environment is, and has always been, the prerequisite of constructing or expanding Jewish settlements. For these colonies to be built, countless trees have to be ‘removed’, along with the Palestinians who have planted them.
Over the years, millions of Palestinian olive and fruit-bearing trees were uprooted in Israel’s constant hunger for more land. The soil erosion in many parts of occupied Palestine speaks volumes of this horrendous ecocide.
But it does not end here, of course. For hundreds of illegal Jewish settlements – hosting a population of more than 600,000 settlers – to survive, a heavy price is being exacted from the Palestinian environment on a daily basis. According to the thorough research of Ahmed Abofou, an independent Legal Researcher with Al-Haq rights group, illegal Israeli settlements “generate around 145,000 tons of domestic waste daily.” Abofou reported that “in 2016 alone, around 83 million cubic meters of wastewater were pumped throughout the West Bank.”
Moreover, Israel has near-total control of Palestinian water resources. It relies on the occupied West Bank’s aquifers to supplant its need for water, while denying Palestinians access to their own water.
According to Amnesty International, the average Israeli receives 300 liters of water per day, while a Palestinian receives a much smaller share of 73 liters. The problem is accentuated when the water usage of illegal Jewish settlers is taken into account. The average settler consumes as much as 800 liters per day, while entire Palestinian communities could be denied a drop of water for days and weeks, often as a form of collective punishment.
The issue with the water is not just that of outright theft, denial of access or unequal distribution of water resources. It is also that of the lack of clean and safe drinkable water, an issue that has been highlighted by international human rights groups for many years.
The result of these unfair policies has forced many Palestinians “to purchase water brought in by trucks” at prices “ranging from 4 to 10 USD per cubic meter,” Amnesty International found, highlighting that, for the poorest Palestinian communities, “water expenses can, at times, make up half of a family’s monthly income.”
As bad as the situation may sound, the plight of besieged Gaza is much worse than that of the occupied West Bank. The tiny and overcrowded Strip is the perfect example of Israeli cruelty. Two million Palestinians live there, while being denied the most basic human rights, let alone freedom of movement.
Since the Israeli military blockade on Gaza in 2007, the environment of the coastal region has been in constant deterioration. With little electricity and with bombed-out sewage plants, Palestinians have been forced to dump their unprocessed sewage into the sea. Gaza’s underground water is now polluted to the extent that 97 percent of the available water is now undrinkable, according to United Nations reports.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. From the destruction of Palestinian wells to the poisoning of trees, to the demolishing of entire ecosystems to make space for Israel’s apartheid wall, to the use of depleted uranium in its various wars against Gaza, Israel has been on an unrelenting mission to ruin Palestine’s environment in all of its manifestations.
In truth, Mr. Gates, this is what Israel is ‘known for’ to anyone who cares to pay attention. Allowing Bennett to present his country as a potential savior of humanity, while validating Israel with massive investments in ‘innovation’, mischaracterizes – in fact, invalidates – the entire global campaign to truly understand the nature of the problem at hand.
Those who are hurting the planet have no right to claim the role of being its saviors. Israel, in its current violent state, is the enemy of the environment, and this is what it truly should be ‘known for’.
COVI-PASS will determine whether you can go to a restaurant, if you need a medical test, or are due for a talking-to by authorities in a post-COVID world. Consent is voluntary, but enforcement will be compulsory.
Through the magic of Internet meme culture, most Millennials will be familiar with the famous opening scene of the 1942 film, “Casablanca,” where two policemen stop a civilian in the “old Moorish section” of Nazi-occupied French Morocco and ask him for his “papers.” The subject is taken away at once after failing to produce the required documents. The cinematic exchange has been used ever since as a popular reference to the ever-encroaching hand of the state, which is now on the verge of attaining a level of control over people’s movements that puts the crude Nazi methods to shame.
A British cybersecurity company, in partnership with several tech firms, is rolling out the COVI-PASS in 15 countries across the world; a “digital health passport” that will contain your COVID-19 test history and other “relevant health information.” According to the company website, the passport’s objective is “to safely return to work” and resume “social interactions” by providing authorities with “up-to-date and authenticated health information.”
These objectives mirror those that Bill Gates has been promoting since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. In an essay written by Gates in April, the software geek-cum-philanthropist lays out his support for the draconian measures taken in response to the virus and, like an old-timey mob boss, suggests the solutions to this deliberately imposed problem. Ironically, Gates begins to make his case for the adoption of mass tracking and surveillance technology in the U.S. by saying that “For now, the United States can follow Germany’s example”; He then touts the advantages of the “voluntary adoption of digital tools” so we can “remember where [we] have been” and can “choose to share it with whoever comes to interview you about your contacts.”
Gates goes on to predict that the ability to attend public events in the near future will depend on the discovery of an effective treatment. But he remains pessimistic that any such cure will be good enough in the short term to make people “feel safe to go out again.” These warnings by the multi-billionaire dovetail perfectly with the stated purposes of the aforementioned COVI-PASS, whose development is also being carried out in partnership with Redstrike Group – a sports marketing consultancy firm that is working with England’s Premier League and their Project Restart to parse ticket sales and only make them available to people who have tested negative for the virus.
VST Enterprises goes viral
VST Enterprises Ltd (VSTE) is led by 31-year old entrepreneur, Louis-James Davis, who very recently stepped down from a “science & technology ambassadorship” in the African nation of Zimbabwe to focus on the company’s role in the UN’s SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) Collaboratory initiative, comprising a series of “cyber technology projects across all 193 member states of the United Nations.”
These will use the same proprietary VCode and VPlatform technologies underpinning the COVI-PASS that will reportedly tackle issues such as illegal mining and counterfeiting. This “third generation” barcode technology overcomes the limitations of older “second generation” versions like QR-codes, according to Davis. “Data and sensitive information scanned or stored in either a QR code and barcode can be hacked and are inherently insecure,” Davis claims, “leaving data and personal details to be compromised.” These, and other flaws of the prevailing “proximity apps” were exploited by VST Enterprises to position itself to land large government and private sector contracts.
By all measures, the strategy has proven wildly successful and VST now enjoys strong favor in the highest circles of the UK government as evidenced by the ringing endorsement of former Prime Minister Theresa May, prominently displayed on the COVI-PASS website. More practically, VST now has a direct partnership with the UK government and has secured contracts to deploy its technology in 15 countries, including Italy, Portugal, France, India, the US, Canada, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands.
In May, VST signed a deal with international digital health technology firm and owner of COVI-PASS, Circle Pass Enterprises (CPE) to integrate VST’s VCode into the biometric RFID-enabled “passports” which can be accessed via mobile phone or a key fob will flash colored lights to denote if an individual has tested negative, positive or is to be denied entry to public locations. Awarded the ‘Seal of Excellence’ by the EU, VCode® technology will ensure that all of our most sensitive personal and health information can be accessed by authorities at a distance, dispensing with messy and potentially dangerous face-to-face encounters with police or other enforcement personnel.
Infusing the narrative
So far, the concerns over the digital health passport’s threat to freedom and privacy have been lukewarm at best and it seems as if the world has already accepted that full-fledged population control methods such as these will simply be a fact of life. While the coronavirus pandemic has certainly done much to bring the public over to this way of thinking, the campaign to normalize this sort of Orwellian power-grab has been ongoing for many years and Bill Gates – who many media outlets have whitewashed out of stories related to these measures – has been at the forefront of its promotion.
The Innovation for Uptake, Scale and Equity in Immunisation (INFUSE) project was launched in Davos, Switzerland in 2016. The program was developed by an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance), which has been calling for a digital health ID for children along with partners in the broader !D2020 initiative like the Rockefeller Foundation and Microsoft.
In a recent interview, the deputy director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Hassan Damluji, derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was in any way subsiding and even warned that, far from receding, the pandemic was “deep into wave three.” His remarks were specifically targeted to the very regions he oversees for the foundation, which include the Middle East and parts of Asia, which he stressed would be the focus of the next wave. Damluji was “most recently involved in a five-year fundraising cycle for GAVI,” an effort led by Saudi Arabia, whose investment he praised as a powerful “signal [that] others had an obligation to follow.”
Gates concludes his editorial with a comparison to World War II, stating that said conflict was a “defining moment of our parents’ generation” as the COVID-19 pandemic is to ours, implying that the changes taking place now are akin to the Allied forces’ defeat of the Third Reich. Except, of course, that immunity passports or digital health certificates sound exactly like what Hitler wished for the most. After all, wasn’t the idea of a superior race based on considerations of superior health and vitality over the ostensibly sick and unfit? Hard to argue against the idea that a universal health passport is nothing less than the ultimate fulfillment of that dystopian nightmare.
Bill Gates — who invests in the same industries he gives charitable donations to, and who promotes a global public health agenda that benefits the companies he’s invested in — has gone on record saying life will not go back to normal until we have the ability to vaccinate the entire global population against COVID-19.1
To that end, he is pushing for disease surveillance and a vaccine tracking system2 that might involve embedding vaccination records on our bodies. One example of how this might be done is using an invisible ink quantum dot tattoo, described in a December 18, 2019, Science Translational Medicine paper.3,4
According to statements made by Gates, societal and financial normalcy may never return to those who refuse vaccination, as the digital vaccination certificate Gates is pushing for might ultimately be required to go about your day-to-day life and business. Without this “digital immunity proof,” you may not even be allowed to travel locally or visit certain public buildings.
Gates has a history of “predicting” global pandemics with vast numbers of deaths,5 and with his call for a tracking system to keep tabs on infected/noninfected and vaccinated/unvaccinated individuals, he’s ensuring an unimaginably profitable future for the vaccine makers he supports and makes money from via his Foundation investments.
Along with Gates, The Rockefeller Foundation is also coordinating efforts in the direction of social control through the implementation of draconian COVID-19 tracking and tracing measures that are clearly meant to become permanent.
National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan
April 21, 2020, The Rockefeller Foundation released a white paper6 titled, “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities.” In the foreword, Rockefeller Foundation president Dr. Rajiv J. Shah writes:
“In the face of an ineffective nationally-coordinated response, insufficient data, and inadequate amounts of protective gear and testing, we need an exit plan. Testing is our way out of this crisis.
Instead of ricocheting between an unsustainable shutdown and a dangerous, uncertain return to normalcy, the United States must mount a sustainable strategy with better tests and contact tracing, and stay the course for as long as it takes to develop a vaccine or cure.
Any plan to do so must win the faith of private and public sector leaders across the country, and of individual Americans that they and their loved ones will be safer when we begin to return to daily life.
The Rockefeller Foundation exists to meet moments like this. In the past two weeks we have brought together experts and leaders from science, industry, academia, public policy, and government — across sectors and political ideologies — to create a clear, pragmatic, data-driven, actionable plan to beat back Covid-19 and get Americans back to work more safely.”
The plan calls for testing and tracing 1 million Americans per week to start, incrementally ramping it up to 3 million and then 30 million per week (the “1-3-30 plan”) over the next six months until the entire population has been covered.
Test results would then be collected on a digital platform capable of tracking all tested individuals so that contact-tracing can be performed when someone tests positive. According to the “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan”:
“Policy makers and the public must find the balance between privacy concerns and infection control to allow the infection status of most Americans to be accessed and validated in a few required settings and many voluntary ones.”
To this end, they suggest using incentives “to nudge the voluntary use” of tracking and contact tracing apps rather than making them mandatory. They also call for the use of “innovative digital technologies” aimed at improving “workforce monitoring and early detection of recurrent outbreaks.”
“When integrated into national and state surveillance systems, such innovations may enable the same level of outbreak detection with fewer tests.
Promising techniques include anonymous digital tracking of workforces or population-based resting heart-rate and smart thermometer trends; continually updated epidemiological data modeling; and artificial intelligence projections based on clinical and imaging data,” the document states.7
Modern ‘Wartime’ Effort That Will Cost Billions
According to the “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan”:8
“Monitoring the pandemic and adjusting social distancing measures will require launching the largest public health testing program in American history … The effort will ultimately grow to billions of dollars per month … But with widespread business closures costing the country $350 billion to $400 billion each month, the expense will be worth it.
This testing infrastructure is intended to tide the country over until a vaccine or therapy is widely available.
Coordination of such a massive program should be treated as a wartime effort, with a public/private bipartisan Pandemic Testing Board established to assist and serve as a bridge between local, state, and federal officials with the logistical, investment and political challenges this operation will inevitably face.”
Don’t Be Naïve About Infectious Tracking Plan
Call me jaded, but this sounds like a plan to surveil Americans so that they can easily be tracked down for mandatory vaccination once a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available. It also creates the necessary infrastructure for vaccination tracking across the board, for all vaccines.
While they give lip-service to privacy and anonymization of data, privacy promises have been repeatedly broken in the past. Besides, the document clearly states that:9
“Some privacy concerns must be set aside for an infectious agent as virulent as Covid-19, allowing the infection status of most Americans to be accessed and validated in a few required settings and many voluntary ones.
The loss of privacy engendered by such a system would come at too high of a price if the arrival of a vaccine early next year was a certainty. But vaccine development and manufacture could take years, and when it comes certain populations may be excluded from receiving it for health reasons.
In the meantime, infection status must be known for people to participate in many societal functions. Legislation protecting people from being fired over infection status must be passed.
Those screened must be given a unique patient identification number that would link to information about a patient’s viral, antibody and eventually vaccine status under a system that could easily handshake with other systems to speed the return of normal societal functions.
Schools could link this to attendance lists, large office buildings to employee ID cards, TSA to passenger lists and concert and sports venues to ticket purchasers. Such connections should be made in a way that protects personally identifying information whenever possible … Whenever and wherever possible data should be open.”
Are You Ready to Give Up EVERYTHING Over a Virus?
“Privacy concerns must be set aside.” Infection status must be “accessed and validated in a few required settings.”
Infection status will be linked to schools, office buildings, places of work, airports, concert and sport venues — in other words, most areas people need or want to frequent, if not daily, then at least occasionally. Infection status must be known “for people to participate in societal functions.” Legislation must be passed to protect people from being fired from their jobs based on their infection status. Are you concerned yet?
Anyone who remembers the tactics employed in Nazi Germany, or anyone familiar with the current surveillance of the Chinese population, will realize where this is headed.
Reading through the plan, it should also be crystal clear that this tracking and surveillance program is not designed to be temporary. You can be strongly assured this will be permanent. It calls for hundreds of thousands of new employees, updating computer systems and new laws that in many ways resemble the implementation of TSA post-9/11.
Not addressed in this report is the question of just how often would you have to undergo testing. A negative test today may not be valid tomorrow, if you happen to come across someone who is infected between now and then. Would you have to undergo testing every single day? Once a week?
If regular retesting is not part of the plan, then the whole system is worthless as your infection status could change at any time.
Other questions not addressed: If you happen to be in the vicinity of someone who tests positive in the near future, would you have to quarantine for two weeks? Will your employer pay for that time off? Will you have a job when you come out of quarantine?
What if you quarantine for two weeks but don’t get sick and test negative for antibodies, then go out and happen across yet another person who ends up testing positive shortly thereafter. Will you be forced into quarantine again? Where does it end?
The tracking system The Rockefeller Foundation is calling for is eerily similar to that already being used in China, where residents are required to enroll in a health condition registry. Once enrolled, they get a personal QR code, which they must then enter in order to gain access to grocery stores and other facilities.10
The plan also demands access to other medical data. According to the “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan”:11
“This infection database must easily interoperate with doctor, hospital and insurance health records in an essential and urgent national program to finally rationalize the disparate and sometimes deliberately isolated electronic medical records systems across the country …
Unfortunately, obtaining the necessary clinical data to bring these powerful analytic tools to bear has been difficult due to information-blocking tactics of electronic health records (EHR) vendors. Among the longtime tactics used by such vendors has been charging unreasonable fees for data access, requiring providers to sign restrictive contracts, and claiming patients’ clinical data is proprietary.
On March 9, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released two long-awaited final rules that would prohibit information blocking in health care and advance more seamless exchange of health care data. But publication in the Federal Register, necessary to activate the rules, has been inexplicably delayed. This delay must end.”
In other words, this plan is far more comprehensive than merely tracking COVID-19 cases. It’s designed to replace the current system of “disparate and sometimes deliberately isolated electronic medical records systems across the country.”
ID2020
While The Rockefeller Foundation’s white paper simply calls for the use of a digital “patient identification number” without indicating exactly how you would carry this ID number on your person, Gates has repeatedly talked about the “need” for some sort of implantable vaccine certificate.
In 1999, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $750 million to set up Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance.12 Gavi, in turn, has partnered with the ID2020 Alliance, along with the Bangladeshi government, to launch a digital identity program called ID2020.13
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also funded the GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab, launched in 2019, the aim of which is to promote access to digital and biometric identity services and systems.14,15
ID2020, which also launched in 2019, is designed to “leverage immunization as an opportunity to establish digital identity.” This digital identity system is said to carry “far-reaching implications for individuals’ access to services and livelihoods,” so to think that Gates’ call for implantable COVID-19 vaccine certificates would be limited to that alone would again be a grave mistake.
Like The Rockefeller Foundation, Gates is not presenting short-term, temporary measures. They’re both aiming to implement a Worldwide control system. It’s not so far-fetched to imagine a future in which your vaccine certificate or “unique patient ID number” replaces personal identifications such as your driver’s license, state ID card, Social Security card and passport, and is tied not only to your medical records in total, but also your finances.
I remain confident that it would be a tragic mistake to trust Gates, Rockefeller, Google or any of the other players that are being brought before us as the saviors of the day. While most people are well-acquainted with the Rockefeller name, few probably know the true history of the Rockefellers’ rise to power. If you fall in this category, be sure to read “How the Oil Industry Conquered Medicine, Finance and Agriculture,” which features an excellent video report by James Corbett.
Those who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it, and if the Rockefeller story tells us anything, it is that unless we realize what has been done, we’ll be deceived again and again, because the oil oligarchy’s end game is yet to be realized — if we let them.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 