So many journalists have been murdered since the Mexican government acquired the NSO malware, Pegasus.
From The Daily Beast
We were essentially picking up reporting threads left unfinished by a handful of brave Mexican journalists who had been killed, most likely by assassins from the local drug cartels whose violent and criminal activities the reporters had been investigating. Outside of active war zones, Mexico was and remains to this day the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist committed to telling the truth about bad guys. More than 120 journalists and media staffers had been killed in Mexico in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Another score or so had simply disappeared without a trace.
‘Pegasus’ by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud.
UNESCO.org have maintained a list of all journalists killed globally since 1993.
Mexico’s constitution of 1917 established economic and political principles for the country, including the role of its president. The president today is popularly elected to a single six-year term and has the power to select a cabinet, the attorney general, diplomats, high-ranking military officers, and Supreme Court justices (who serve life terms). The president also has the right to issue reglamentos (executive decrees) that have the effect of law. This is a chronologically ordered list of the presidents, from the earliest to the most recent.
Since Mexico launched a war on the cartels in 2006, the United States has provided it with billions of dollars in security and counternarcotics assistance.
Felipe Calderon was President at that time. His government were enthusiastic about Pegasus.
The following quote gives a flavour of the misery endured by the population during Calderon’s time in power:
This macabre, barbaric execution, in November 2008, took the number of murders in the anarchic city of two million people to about 1,300 that year. The toll would cap 1,700 before the end of December. The national figure of those killed across Mexico reached over 5,400 in 2008. In 2009, despite successive waves of military re-enforcements and a promise by Mayor José Reyes Ferriz on 1 January that Juárez ‘cannot have another year like that’ the toll was even higher: 2,657 people murdered, making Ciudad Juárez the world’s most murderous city, with 192 homicides per 100,000 citizens. The total of those murdered across Mexico in 2009 reached 7,724.1 This means that by the end of that year, more than 16,000 people had been killed since Mexican president Felipe Calderón launched a military offensive against the cartels in December 2006, with many of the victims mutilated, like this man, horribly and carefully, then exhibited to convey some message or threat. By summer 2010, the total killed since December 2006 had exceeded 24,000. The killing is everywhere across Mexico, but concentrated along the border with the USA – 2,100 miles long, the busiest border in the world and a place that belongs to both countries, and yet to neither. Ciudad Juárez lives cheek by jowl with the United States and its ‘twin city’ El Paso, on the other side of the frontier. Sometimes the proximity is surreal: from the campus of the University of Texas in El Paso, one sees, in the foreground, the diligent enjoyment of life – students strolling to and fro. Across mid-distance, less than half a mile away, runs the border in two forms: an articulately harsh wall decorated with barbed wire and the trickle of the Rio Grande. And beyond the boundary, one of the poorest barrios – or colonias as they are called here – in Mexico: a bleached, ramshackle shanty town called Anapra, thrown up out of wood and corrugated iron on the edge of a burgeoning city. The desert dirt and dust on which Anapra is built are criss-crossed by outlaw electricity supply cables to the barrio huts. El Paso and Juárez form the heart of, and midway point along, this singular strip of land conjoining two countries. The borderland is a place of paradox: of opportunity and poverty, promise and despair, love and violence, beauty and fear, sex and church, sweat and family. Even the frontier itself is a dichotomy, simultaneously porous and harsh. The US border patrol recognises the contradiction in its recruiting billboard on Interstate 19 north of Nogales, Arizona, advertising ‘A Career in Borders, But No Boundaries’. The frontier itself can be brutal. In 1994, the United States initiated ‘Operation Gatekeeper’ in San Diego, ‘Operation Hold the Line’…
US President during the time of Calderon was Republican President George Bush from 2001 to 2009, followed by Democrat Barak Obama. Pegasus was launched 2010.
On 2 March 2017, Cecilio Pineda Birto made a broadcast about alleged corruption. Hours later he was dead….
Another courageous journalist, Cecilio Pineda Birto, had been killed because of his quality reporting on drug cartels, how they kidnapped locals and ransomed them for cash. The deployment of NSO spyware infecting his phone tracked him down.
The global story is encapsulated in the dire situation in Mexico, it is Exhibit A of
What happens when spyware like Pegasus flies wild, for years, without necessary safeguards in place…..that a private company in Mexico was using Pegasus to perform unwarranted surveillance on people who were neither criminal nor criminal suspects.
……August 5, 2020, from somebody in senior management at the NSO Group. Cherie Blair, former First Lady of the United Kingdom, longtime barrister, noted advocate for women entrepreneurs in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, a prominent voice for human rights worldwide, was obliged to pick up the phone. Mrs. Blair had recently signed on as a paid consultant to the Israeli firm NSO to help “incorporate human rights considerations into NSO activities, including interactions with customers and deployment of NSO products.” This was a delicate high-wire act, ethically speaking, because NSO’s signature product, cybersurveillance software called Pegasus, was a remarkable and remarkably unregulated tool—extraordinarily lucrative to the company (NSO grossed around $250 million that year) and dangerously seductive to its clients. Successfully deployed, Pegasus essentially owns a mobile phone; it can break down defenses built into a cell phone, including encryption, and gain something close to free rein on the device, without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. That includes all text and voice communications to and from the phone, location data, photos and videos, notes, browsing history, even turning on the camera and the microphone of the device while the user has no idea it’s happening. Complete remote personal surveillance, at the push of a button.
From ‘Pegasus’ Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
Pegasus spyware group blacklisted by the US government
American companies are restricted from exporting their goods and services to NSO Group, the company that built Pegasus
Here are some extracts from the current book I’ve begun reading about the spread of an evolved spyware application, Pegasus. The authors describe earlier spyware consequences and now believe each and every one of us who has a phone is going to be losing their democratic rights if we don’t act in time to prevent the looming threat. This book was published in 2021. I have only now come across it. I hope I am in a minority who have not found it earlier.
The authors provide some history of Spyware in recent historic context, such as:
Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, installed a monitoring center for Gadhafi….
that allowed his agents to monitor the emails, chats, and messages of anybody in Libya. The Gadhafi regime was able to identify and track the dictator’s many political opponents almost at will. “Whereas many Internet interception systems carry out basic filtering on IP addresses and extract only those communications from the global flow (Lawful Interception),” read an Amesys-produced poster hanging in the office in Tripoli, “EAGLE Interception system analyzes and stores all the communications from the monitored link (Massive Interception).”
Book, ‘Pegasus’, Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
Consequences:
According to the testimony of several detainees in a French court in 2013, Gadhafi’s interrogators were able to quote back to them—verbatim—their emails, SMS exchanges, Facebook threads, chat-room conversations, even private phone conversations. The security agents usually demanded from their captives the identities behind the various user names they had been communicating with online or on the phone. If threats, beatings, electric shock, and other torture weren’t enough to convince the detainees to reveal the names of otherwise anonymous comrades, Gadhafi’s agents would ship them off to prison. Threats and beatings continued there, along with brief field trips to a courtyard to witness the executions of other prisoners. When these revelations started to come out in France, Bull SA made the prudent business move. They simply off-loaded the technology that ran the Eagle system to another French company, Nexa Technologies—which continued to make it available on the open market. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who seized power following the chaos of the Arab Spring, became one of the French cyberweapon’s most enthusiastic end users. (The surveillance system was reported to be a $12 million gift from al-Sisi’s friends in the United Arab Emirates.) “The grave human rights violations committed to this day by the various branches of the [Egyptian] security services include arbitrary mass ararrests, with the incarceration of at least 60,000 political prisoners since 2013; extrajudicial executions; enforced disappearances . . . and the systematic use of torture,” the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights had noted in a recent report, Egypt: A Repression Made in France. “This modus operandi of the security forces, aimed at eliminating all possibility of dissent, has become everyday reality for all Egyptians, and it specifically targets political opponents and civil society: members of political parties, the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters, activists in revolutionary movements and of all stripes, human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, writers, researchers, in addiaddition to LGBTQ people or those perceived as such.” The Bull/Amesys/Nexa axis was hardly alone in selling spyware systems to questionable regimes—regimes that had nevertheless been designated by France as “a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism,” according to the report. “The enormous increase of arms sales beginning in 2013 and al-Sisi’s arrival in power in Egypt in 2014 have proven profitable for at least eight French companies that have sold equipment—both conventional weapons and surveillance equipment—to Egypt.”
Book, ‘Pegasus,’Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
It is maybe helpful to remind yourself which French President was in power during these Spyware sales:
Thanks to covert licensing of spyware, thus allowing it to pass into the administrations of dictators, the thousands of would be magnificent contributors to their country have been silenced. For example:
1933: the stirrings of WWII and opportunities for lucrative trade emerging.
I refer you to the book (published 2001) by Edwin Black ‘IBM and the Holocaust’.
It is a magnificent piece of work and reveals the integral aspect of trade and profit during wartime, where holding high moral standards is excluded from the process.
As a child born a couple of years after the war ended, I have been curious about the era before I was born and ever since.
I read books like this which have shocked yet enlightened me about how minority discontent can overturn majority complacency and turn day into never ending night for so many.
I looked up the summary as it best covers this startling piece of work.
IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany — beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
Only after Jews were identified — a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately — could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.
But IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company’s custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.
IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.
IBM and the Holocaust takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries — all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction.
Just as compelling is the human drama of one of our century’s greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit.
Only with IBM’s technologic assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust. Edwin Black has now uncovered one of the last great mysteries of Germany’s war against the Jews — how did Hitler get the names?
About the author (2001)
The son of Polish survivors, Washington-based writer EDWIN BLACK is the author of the award-winning Holocaust finance investigation, The Transfer Agreement, and is an expert on commercial relations with the Third Reich.
And then I refer you to another book by Gordon Thomas, ‘Gideon’s Spies’, (last update published 2009) in which he describes how Robert Maxwell became involved with PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information System) which was created by a US company, Inslaw. According to federal documents, PROMIS was misappropriated by the Dept of Justice after a visit to Inslaw by an Israeli Mossad representative, Rafi Eitan in 1983.
There were two key players linked to the PROMIS software leaving the US:
Rafi Eitan, an Israeli soldier during the War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (1948 – 49). He became Mossad’s deputy director of operations.
and his US friend:
Dr. Earl Brian, a young American physician who, when he knew Rafi Eitan, was working for Governor Ronald Reagan in California. Earl Brian was known to have close business ties with Ronald Reagan.
PROMIS was then given or sold to, at profit, Israel and was later licensed to as many as 80 countries by Earl Brian.
Israeli LAKAM programmers rearranged the various components of PROMIS in a such a way that no one could relate it back to Inslaw as their creation. Yet Eitan chose to keep the name for marketing purposes. They streamlined the software to amass and correlate data at a speed and scale beyond human capability.
They also used it to track Palestinians.
Brian Meese, another close friend and business associate of Earl Brian and who had become Presidential counsel to President Ronald Reagan, is thought to have profited from sales of the stolen PROMIS software.
Then this article online explains:
The implications continue: that Meese profited from the sales of the stolen property. That Brian, Meese’s business associate, may have been involved in the October Surprise (the oft-debunked but persistent theory that the Reagan campaign conspired to insure that US hostages in Iran were held until after Reagan won the 1980 election, see sidebar). That some of the moneys derived from the illegal sales of PROMIS furthered covert and illegal government programs in Nicaragua. That Oliver used PROMIS as a population tracking instrument for his White House-based domestic emergency management program.
Gordon Thomas describes how the final PROMIS was not ready for sale until someone had programmed a trapdoor, so they could track all activities by licensed users in their various countries. To do this, Ben-Menashe was asked by Rafi Eitan if he knew anyone who could do that work. Indeed he did. He was at school with a northern California whizz kid, who had been a child genius and who was likely to take on such a project. Once approached, this person was offered $5,000 for the work (cheap at the price) and this person accepted. Once ready, the software had to be tested.
Jordan was selected as the site, not only because it bordered on Israel, but because it had become a haven for the leaders of the Intifada. From the desert kingdom, they directed the Arab street mobs on the West Bank and Gaza to launch further attacks inside Israel. After an atrocity, PLO terrorists would slip across the border into Jordan, doing so often with the connivance of the Jordanian army.
Consequently, long before the Intifada, Jordan had become a proving ground for Mossad to develop its electronic skills. In the 1970s, Mossad technicians had tapped into the computer IBM had sold to the country’s intelligence service. The information gained had supplemented that provided by the deep-cover Kate’s Rafi Eitan had placed inside King Hussein’s palace. Promis would offer much more.
P.201 Gideon’s Spies
Earl Brian used his company to sell Promis to Jordan and once installed in Amman’s military HQ, ‘they discovered the Jordanians had a French-designed system to track the movement of PLO leaders. Promis was then secretly wired into the French system which PLO leaders the Jordanians were tracking.’ (Gideon’s Spies)
The next sale of PROMIS was to Arafat. Only one person could make that sale, and that was Robert Maxwell.
Maxwell needed little convincing and, in his usual ebullient manner when there was a deal to be profited from, said he had a computer company through which to sell Promis. Degem Computers Limited was based in Tel Aviv and was already playing a useful role in Mossad’s activities. Maxwell had allowed Mossad operatives, posing as Degem employees, to use the company’s suboffices in Central and South America. Now Maxwell saw an opportunity not only to make a healthy profit from marketing Promis through Degem, but to further establish his own importance to Mossad and ultimately Israel.
Trade has played a major role in human benefits where mutual agreements occur.
The expansion of the Roman Empire created great wealth and power through trade. Military prowess protected gains more for the Romans than those who traded under Roman rule since being conquered.
Military might tied to trade ensured new lands could be explored, conquered and ruled over during this brief existence of such human endeavour. (See previous blogs regarding how we exist due to a fluke of creating emissions which warmed the earth and prevented an every 10 thousand years ice age!).
We evolved to conquer all before us, and thought ourselves to be highly intelligent, above all other living things.
Technological prowess in military applications have become a major part of the arms trade. No longer just hardware, but now spyware.
I read a book, ‘Gideons Spies’ by Gordon Thomas, published in the early 2000s, and in it I was introduced to spyware called Promis.
Now, in 2024, having had coverage of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell become part of the Maxwell dynasty epic story, I link what I read decades ago to present spyware abuses.
the British East India Company owed much of its success to their intelligence operation, right up until the Napoleonic Wars when Nathan Rothschild’s intel operatives got him news of Napoleon’s defeat far ahead of anyone else. Rothschild parlayed this information into owning a controlling share of British war bonds, which he bought up for pennies on the dollar after using his information to leverage panic selling. Rothschild, for all intents and purposes, had control of the British economy and used it to garner an immense amount of political control. His intelligence services evolved into MI-5 and MI-6 and subsequently Mossad — remember Rothschild effectively bought Israel with the Balfour Declaration (1917). WWII brought about OSS, an offshoot of MI-6, that turned into the CIA in 1946… these are all controlled by the Rothschild/Rockefeller diaspora, the CIA through the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFA).
1600 Queen Elizabeth 1 founded the East India Company.
1777 – 1836 Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild (rothschildarchive.org) and his brothers helped the British Government to finance military operations against Napoleon. He used his reliable strong family ties and unsurpassed communication network to build a business plan as a banker to pull together the funds needed to assist Wellington on the battlefield.
1941 Baron Victor Rothschild was head of the counter-sabotage unit of MI5. The German-British Jewish family had been contributing to the various war efforts since Nathan Rothschild. Victor Rothschild had an obvious personal interest in obtaining information on British Fascists such as Oswald Mosley, believing they might form a “5th column” and found sympathisers among the British public. So he ran a ‘fifth column’ himself to attract such people. Then he drew up a list of these sympathisers, and spread information amongst them so they thought they were part of a Nazi spy ring. Unknown to this group, they ended up providing useful information for MI5.
The importance of gathering reliable information has proven vital to success in war, trade, global innovation.
Surveillance is big business. In the hands of ‘bad actors’ it can result in terrible consequences for opposition to dictators, which I will cover in a later blog.
Needless to say, Israel has expanded mutually satisfying trade relations, particularly with countries who can perhaps future protect it from Iran. Thus, human rights is always low on the list of suitable partners to trade with when Israeli military sales are on the bucket list of dictators.
Israeli Mossad has been in charge of building diplomatic connections with the regimes where none previously existed. Mossad would not share its own military Unit 8200-level spyware, but could offer the privately owned NSO Pegasus package covertly. To keep everything appearing to be compliant against claims of misuse, a London-based hedge fund, Novalpina, took on the role and became a majority owner in the NSO group.(They bought out Francisco Partners in early 2019) and helped NSO refurbish the company image after concerns of the Mexico and Kashoggi debacle (See later blogs).
As we humans covet what fossil fuels still lie in the ground, we literally battle to obtain them, no matter what doom laden messages COP28 might proclaim about incurring a planet on fire. Apparently we are now ‘transitioning’ away from oil, yet investing heavily in locating it wherever it lies.
You don’t have to look far to find world banks are funding this race to exploit every opportunity to obtain supplies of gas, oil and even coal.
The following is from a protesting campaign group:
Yet JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of Americaare carrying on with business as usual, pumping trillions into dirty energy even AFTER they promised to slash emissions. The companies they shower with loans, investments, and insurance are responsible for 71% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
If banks just defunded fossil fuels, it could literally reset our global economy – and the fight against climate change.
And here are some links to journalistic coverage of banking activity in this area:
It seems to me, if we follow the money, that all the intense misery of climate change disasters brought on by excessive emissions are clearly a plan of action of oil producers working with the banking industry. All leaders of the world appear to be complicit, no matter how many pledge to reduce emissions. All wars, all land grabs are surely just a mighty push to keep the wheels of industry turning despite knowing we are accelerating the end of our existence on this earth.
I cannot help but view world events in this way. An example is Gaza:
I read this 2019 article (link below) and it made me think maybe, just maybe, all the death and misery today in Gaza and the West Bank is really to allow Israel and Egypt, but not Palestinians, clear access to the oil being drilled in the Mediterranean:
Discoveries of natural gas reserves in the Mediterranean Sea around Egypt, Cyprus, Israel and Greece are shaking up Europe’s energy politics. Traditionally, Russia has been Europe’s main supplier of gas, giving it significant influence over Europe. But this influence is under threat from various gas discoveries in the eastern Mediterranean and a tussle is taking place to control the region’s resources. Here are the key players:
So the IDF are pounding the land which will soon to be ‘once Gaza’ and fragmenting what is left of the West Bank, in order that oil will be piped to oil hungry Israel?
They have been given the green light by the US, who have vetoed all calls for a ceasefire. What other reason can there be for this inhumane destruction, for it certainly must be to ensure no Palestinian is given the rights to the oil on their shores!
Isn’t this the action of land grabbing, oil exploiting leaders of the world, just as in the horrific ‘shock and awe’ strikes on the innocents in Iraq?
Is Genocide a deliberate policy of military support in corporate adventures? Is that why it has not been properly addressed since 1948? Is military immunity guaranteed so war crimes no longer get prosecuted?
Is it now about finite resources and a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to ‘go for broke’ and may the ‘best man win’ until emissions accelerate to the point where all life is incinerated?
Well, a final thought….read this written in 2015 by a group of ‘concerned scientists’ who detail the types of oil extraction now taking place due to the desperate search to keep it supplying the ever greater demand:
I recently read in the World Atlas that before the region now known as China, it was the Qing dynasty (1636 to 1912) in power and they constantly used military strength to expand over lands around them with a dream of unification, just as the British Empire (1607 – 1997) and Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1922) were doing.
The Qing found the Dzungar, a nomadic tribe who roamed the land between Kazakhstan and southern Siberia, troublesome. The Qinglong emperor described these people as ‘barbarians’, just as the Romans had described the Visigoths.
They were of Mongol Oirat tribes who formed and maintained the Dzungar Khanate in the 17th and 18th centuries. They adopted Buddhism in the 17th century.
They refused to become a vassal of Qing.
So the emperor planned the pre-mediated genocide that sought to eradicate the Dzungars clearing the way for greater Han and Manuch migration into these coveted territories.
The Qing military and Uyghur troops combined attacked and butchered 80% of this, the last greatest tribe in the region.
Dzungar Khanate
The Uyghurs were motivated to fight with the Qing since they had been pushed off their land by the Dzungars. Here is an extract about these people which covers their history to the present day:
From the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Dec 27, 2023 • Article HistoryTable of Contents
Uyghur, a Turkic-speaking people of interior Asia. Uyghurs live for the most part in northwestern China, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; a small number live in the Central Asian republics. There were some 10,000,000 Uyghurs in China and a combined total of at least 300,000 in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in the early 21st century.
Category: Geography & TravelChinese (Pinyin): Weiwu’erAlso spelled: Uygur or Uighur
The Uyghur language is part of the Turkic group of Altaic languages, and the Uyghurs are among the oldest Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia. They are mentioned in Chinese records from the 3rd century CE. They first rose to prominence in the 8th century, when they established a kingdom along the Orhon River in what is now north-central Mongolia. In 840 this state was overrun by the Kyrgyz, however, and the Uyghurs migrated southwestward to the area around the Tien (Tian) Shan (“Celestial Mountains”). There the Uyghurs formed another independent kingdom in the Turfan Depression region, but this was overthrown by the expanding Mongols in the 13th century.
Until recent years the Uyghur have remained a presence, unlike the obliterated Dzungar.
Now their existence is receding as they fought and failed to retain independence, fighting like many vulnerable minorities globally, in the face of would be genocidal aggressors.
The Uyghurs have lacked political unity in recent centuries, except for a brief period during the 19th century when they were in revolt against Beijing. Their social organization is centred on the village. The Uyghurs of Xinjiang are Sunni Muslims.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Gradually, as Chinese Han became the majority living and working on what was their land, matters worsened:
Over time economic disparities and ethnic tensions grew between the Uyghur and Han populations that eventually resulted in protests and other disturbances. A particularly violent outbreak occurred in July 2009, mainly in Ürümqi, in which it was reported that nearly 200 people (mostly Han) were killed and some 1,700 were injured. Violent incidents increased after that and included attacks by knife-wielding assailants and by suicide bombers. Chinese authorities responded by cracking down on Uyghurs suspected of being dissidents and separatists. The authorities’ actions included shootings, arrests, and long jail sentences until 2017, when the Chinese government initiated a thorough crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Encyclopedia Brittanica
And to bring us up to date, read this recent article about how China pushes fleeing Uyghurs as they try to find safety in other parts of the world:
Over history, various national leaders have formed alliances to strike against those they label as enemies to their own way of life. This has often resulted in historical genocides:
But ‘he who is not guilty, let him throw the first stone’.
We repeat these horrific slaughters continually. Each death is of a human being who came into this world with hope to grow and contribute to humanity. Yet as they die amongst thousands, even millions of others, they become a statistic, and their life is exterminated like so many other life forms which have inhabited this earth.
Genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”), was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born jurist who served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of War during World War II.
And if we didn’t kill animals and other creatures with such ease and thoughtlessness maybe we wouldn’t have killed each other so extensively.
The Genocide Convention is an international treaty approved in 1948 with the intent to prevent genocides in the future. It defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
The Genocide Convention, which was enacted in 1948, has not been updated in order to take developments in warfare or society into account.
Human rights have historically not applied to women. As Sondra Hale ( Hale, Sondra, “Rape as a Marker and Eraser of Difference: Darfur and the Nuba Mountains.” in Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via eds. Gender, War, and Militarism, Feminist Perspectives, (Praeger Security International Ser., 2010), p.109) rightly points out, the eternal paradox regarding women in warfare is that violence against women is normalised yet women are highly visible as victims.
Furthermore, as Catharine Mackinnon (see MacKinnon, Catharine A., “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 17 (1994), p.6) points out, crimes committed against women and crimes committed against human beings have historically been seen as separate or even mutually exclusive, which is crucial in this context.
The patriarchal religion of Yazidis placed women in a targeted situation. It is known that their men reject them from their community if they have been captured and subjected to rape. Gender Based Violence is a common weapon of war, and was used by ISIS or Daeth to eradicate the Yazidis.
“Despite our suffering, nobody cares about us. We have shared our stories but even then, they have not done anything for us.”
And still the battle goes on today, with Human Rights Lawyer, Amai Clooney working with Yazidi women survivors to sue French Lafarge Cement Company for its part in funding ISIS during their murderous campaign in Northern Iraq.
Still have not been held accountable for their relationship with ISIS which led to GBV against the Yazidis.
That corporates have historically funded genocidal acts is nothing new. That GBV has still not been listed as a genocidal intent in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is a crime in itself.
Countries that benefit from profits from mining and agricultural produce grown in the deforested Amazon should be prosecuted for Ecocide. But the momentum of destruction goes on to provide a short lived benefit of maintaining quality living standards for those who live thousands of miles from the epicentre of damage in remaining Rainforests regions.
Canadian mining company Belo Sun has filed a lawsuit against community leaders and environmental rights defenders, including members of Amazon Watch and International Rivers, for their alleged support or involvement in the illegal occupation of company-owned land.
A coalition of environmental lawyers and human rights activists say the lawsuit is an intimidation tactic part of a pattern the company uses to silence and weaken those who speak against its operations near the biodiverse Xingu River.
Belo Sun denies persecuting or threatening environmental defenders and says it is only acting to preserve its rights, preserve the rights of the protesters and stop criminal activity.
The lawyers of those accused have started to provide their defense in court and plan to present a complaint of the lawsuit to the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the U.N.
Canadian mining company Belo Sun plans to build the largest open-pit gold mine in Brazil on the banks of the Xingu River, destroying precious ecosystems and forcefully displacing indigenous and traditional communities.
The region already struggles with the devastating effects of one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world. And now, Belo Sun, wants to add deforestation and water contamination to the mix while threatening to sue the very people suffering from its reckless greed.
But, Belo Sun is not acting alone. The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) bankrolls it to the tune of US$ 14 million, fueling destruction and suffering in the region. RBC is one of Belo Sun’s largest institutional investors, so we need to cut the money to stop the project:
According to experts, Belo Sun’s mining project has an “unacceptably high risk” of rupture that could flood the surrounding area with up to 2.4 billion gallons of cyanide toxic sludge within minutes. It could contaminate an invaluable ecosystem already on the brink of collapse, and yet the Royal Bank of Canada is still pouring money into this disastrous project.
With RBC’s complicity, Belo Sun has forced its operations and land grabbing on the communities by ignoring the UN Convention requiring Free Prior and Informed Consent from traditional communities. But to its shareholders, Belo Sun claims to have done its due diligence, downplaying the project’s socio-environmental, legal, and financial risks.
To add insult to injury, Belo Sun is now suing land defenders who are giving everything to protect their land. The people of Xingu are trying to protect what’s left of their livelihoods. This massive corporation thinks it has the right to exploit and poison their land and their water, and the Royal Bank of Canada supports it. All in the name of profit.
Whilst we still have time to save such important biodiversity, vulnerable communities and our future, add your name and let’s come together ……..
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Many of my blogs have revealed the scars on the land left from mining and the ruination of all life which once existed in those areas, e.g.:
Mining built South Africa, but the country’s mining industry is dying. Pale yellow mounds of gold mine waste dot Johannesburg—called eGoli in Zulu, meaning Place of Gold—attesting to the promise of fortune, which built and now threatens the country. The country’s former breadwinner is manifested in 6,000 derelict and ownerless gold, coal, diamond and other mines scattered across South Africa.”
Also “Mining production in South Africa shrank 1.5 percent from a year earlier in May 2019, the seventh consecutive month of decline and compared to market forecasts of a 2.5 percent slump. The largest negative contributors were: gold (-24.4 percent), diamonds (-30.7 percent), iron ore (-5.2 percent), and other metallic minerals (-9.8 percent). On the other hand, output growth was recorded for coal (8 percent), PGMs (6.8 percent), and manganese ore (29.3 percent). On a seasonally adjusted monthly basis, mining output increased by 3 percent, reversing a 1.8 percent fall in April. Mining Production in South Africa averaged -0.10 percent from 1981 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 23.20 percent in October of 2013 and a record low of -17.40 percent in March of 2016.” https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/mining-production
And yet major western mining companies continue to plunder pristine lands for short term gain. The loss is to all of us as the destruction accelerates all death of all life on earth.
This research was carried out when President Obama was in office. Here is an extract from an article in The Guardian newspaper:
Obama and Netanyahu had a testy meeting at the White House where the president said he wanted a freeze in Jewish settlement construction and Israel to take peace talks with the Palestinians seriously.
Some Obama administration officials wanted him to set a deadline for Netanyahu to agree to talks or face the US coming up with its own plan for a Palestinian state. But that determination fell away as the Israeli leader mobilised political support in the US, particularly among Republicans happy to bash Obama.
Netanyahu also openly opposed the US deal with Iran to contain its nuclear programme as a “historic mistake” that would allow Tehran to develop atomic weapons. The Israeli leader took the unprecedented step of openly criticising White House policy in an address to Congress.
Obama fired a parting shot in his last month in office when the US unusually declined to veto a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction. Netanyahu responded by saying he was looking forward to the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House.
borderslynn 
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