‘The Treaty is Done’: WHO Pandemic Treaty Defeated, at Least For Now

World Council for Health

Negotiators failed to submit final texts of the WHO’s pandemic agreement and amendments to the IHR before the May 24 deadline, but some critics of the proposals warned against celebrating prematurely.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
Negotiations for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) proposed “pandemic agreement” — or “pandemic treaty” — and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) have failed, for now at least.
The New York Times reported that negotiators failed to submit final texts of the two documents before the May 24 deadline for consideration and a vote at this year’s World Health Assembly taking place this week in Geneva, Switzerland.
The WHO said the proposals are intended to prepare for the “next pandemic.”
But critics called the proposals a global “power grab” that threatened national sovereignty, health freedom, personal liberties and free speech while promoting risky gain-of-function research and “health passports.”
“Sticking points,” according to The Times, included “equitable access to vaccines and financing to set up surveillance systems.”
Instead of considering a full set of proposals from both documents, a more modest “consensus package of [IHR] amendments” will be presented this week, according to the proposed text of the Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (WGIHR).
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The text states:
“The text does not represent a fully agreed package of amendments and is intended to provide an overview of the current status and progress of the WGIHR’s work. …
“The mandate of the WGIHR Co-Chairs and Bureau has now ended but we stand ready to support the next steps agreed by the Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly, including facilitating any further discussions if so decided.”
The final report of the International Negotiating Body (INB) for the “pandemic agreement,” dated May 27, states “The INB did not reach consensus on the text.”
Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), credited global opposition to the WHO’s proposals for shutting them down. She told The Defender:
“It is a huge tribute to civic action that the WHO treaty and regulations have apparently failed. While delegates to the World Health Assembly are still engaged in last-minute negotiations, outside of approved procedures they do not have a consensus to move forward with a legal infrastructure to conduct COVID operations.
“This is great news for the world’s citizens and shows us how powerful we can be when we work together creatively.”
The Times reported that negotiators plan to ask for more time. According to The Straits Times, “Countries have voiced a commitment to keep pushing for an accord.”
Opening the World Health Assembly on Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggested efforts to finalize the two proposals will continue.
“We all wish that we had been able to reach a consensus on the agreement in time for this health assembly and crossed the finish line,” Tedros said, in remarks quoted by The Straits Times. “But I remain confident that you still will, because where there is a will, there is a way.”
Internist Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom — an organization working to defeat the WHO’s proposals — celebrated the news and suggested the WHO’s efforts have failed irreversibly.
“The treaty is done,” Nass wrote on Substack. “Nothing in the treaty can rise from the ashes of the negotiations to be voted on this week.” She characterized the news as a “first round” win “in the war of democracy versus one-world government.
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WHO proposals ‘rolled out through lies and stealth’
Negotiations failed despite efforts by Tedros and others to persuade negotiators and WHO member states to agree on the two texts in time for a vote at the World Health Assembly.
At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in January, Tedros warned of the pandemic threat posed by a yet-unknown “Disease X” and said the pandemic agreement “can help us to prepare for the future in a better way because this is about a common enemy.”
In March, over 100 former world leaders, including former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair — a proponent of “vaccine passports” and digital ID — signed a letter urging WHO member states to finalize negotiations on the “pandemic agreement.”
Biden administration officials negotiating on behalf of the U.S. also pushed for the two documents to be finalized.
Loyce Pace, assistant secretary for global affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told The Times. “Those of us in public health recognize that another pandemic really could be around the corner.”
In December 2023, Pace testified before Congress in support of the two documents. “It’s only a matter of time before the world faces another serious public health threat,” she said, noting the U.S. role in drafting some of the proposed IHR amendments.
But according to Nass, the entire pandemic preparedness project has been rolled out through “lies and stealth.”
“Globalists created legal documents replete with euphemisms and flowery language, always disguised to hide the documents’ true intentions,” she said. “But we saw through them and didn’t let them get away with it.”
Nass wrote that the “consensus” on the IHR proposals delivered to the World Health Assembly are “the flowery language ones, not the meaningful ones.”
There is one exception, Nass said. Referring to Article 5 of the IHR amendments, she noted that “the negotiators were fine telling nations to surveil their citizens and combat misinformation and disinformation.”
“Nearly all governments are already surveilling and propagandizing us,” Nass said. “So, while this provision is odious, it really doesn’t change anything.”
She also noted that while consensus was reached on Article 18, the implementation of “health passports” and other similar documents during a health emergency is now a “recommendation” instead of a requirement. Definite language — such as the word “shall” — has been removed from the text.
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‘They are not going to go away’
Other legal experts and health freedom advocates welcomed the news but said the WHO will likely continue pushing for the two proposals.
Australian attorney Katie Ashby-Koppens, who helped advocate for New Zealand’s rejection of a previous set of IHR amendments last year, told The Defender, “I don’t know that we should be celebrating the failure to reach agreement at this stage as a milestone.”
Journalist James Roguski told The Defender, “Member nations and the WHO have not given up. To the contrary, they have every intention of continuing in their attempts to finalize the negotiations.”
“Now is not the time to celebrate,” Roguski continued. “Now is the time to come together in order to take focused and massive action.”
Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender, “According to my information, if the pandemic agreement fails, then they can continue negotiations later this year, with the view of trying again at next year’s World Health Assembly.”
“Given the WHO/World Health Assembly is a law unto themselves, and they desperately want these treaty reforms to pass, then the mandate to continue and finalize their negotiations may be extended,” Ashby-Koppens said.
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender the WHO’s proposals were “the first time … that globalists spent an enormous amount of time, effort, money and brainpower to construct a worldwide totalitarian police state under the guise of protecting public health.”
Boyle said:
“The WHO won’t back down from its proposals easily. They are not going to go away. They have come this far, and they will keep at it until they get their objective by hook or by crook. The only way to protect ourselves from these globalists is to pull out of the WHO.”
But Nass believes the WHO may encounter difficulty in bringing back its proposals, telling The Defender it would be “unlikely to get far with either document unless they are pared down to what does not actually matter much to any nation.”
“I expect they will patch together a few [proposals] and vote yes and claim victory. But their major desires are all smashed,” Nass said. “They needed secrecy and ignorance, and they lost those advantages.”
Experts told The Defender a key factor in the WHO’s failure to achieve consensus on the two proposals was opposition from several nations — and by people worldwide.
“People and politicians around the world were educated about what was really being negotiated, what was really in the documents,” Nass said.
On Saturday, CHD participated in a rally against the WHO proposals, across from the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Watch Mary Holland speak at the New York rally:

Watch here: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/who-pandemic-treaty-ihr-amendments-defeated/
This article was written by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. and originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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Why So Many Jews Denounce Israel’s War on Gaza

By Prof. Yakov M. Rabkin

Global Research, November 09, 2023

A profound division exists between Zionist advocates of Israel on the one hand, and both secular and religious Jews, on the other, who reject Zionism and thus the very idea of a separate state for the Jews. Most Jews must be somewhere in between. For years, they have cringed at Israel’s actions without, however, questioning the ethnocratic nature of the Israeli state. For them, “Israel’s right to exist” is sacred because they fear that the only alternative is a physical destruction of Israeli Jews. Even though most of them live in liberal democracies, it is hard for them to fathom that Israel may change its nature, like South Africa did a few decades ago, and become a liberal state with equal rights for everyone on the entire territory under Israeli control between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has made many Jews worldwide, particularly the young, to recoil from any association with the state of Israel. But at least just as many refused to remain “Jews of silence” and came to denounce Israel’s vengeful response to Hamas’ attack on its territory on October 7, 2023.

Especially in the United States, Jews have prominently cried out against the violence in Gaza. Hundreds of protesters closed down New York’s Central Station asking for an immediate ceasefire.

A week earlier, Jews wrapped in prayer shawls staged a sit-in at the U.S. Congress in Washington. After demanding an end to the violence, they opened prayer books and began reciting the ancient words that have steadied Jews for generations. Just a few days ago, Jews unfurled banners reading “Palestinians should be free” at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodox Jews have burned Israeli flags at their protests around the world. They believe that the Zionist state is not simply an ‘appropriation’ of their Jewish symbols and identity, but the root cause of a bloody conflict in which innocent Jews and Palestinians suffer.

Indeed, Israel is a Zionist state. Calling it Jewish only creates a confusion because it is hard to define it. Israel embodies European ethnic nationalism shaped in late 19^th century, rather than Judaism that has developed for millennia. From the start, Zionists despised Jews and Judaism as they aimed at breeding a new species: the intrepid Hebrew warrior farmer. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Israel has built a mobilized society and a formidable high-tech war machine. As Israeli society has moved steadily to the right, it has consolidated the support of right-wing extremists and racists, including antisemites, around the world, such as white supremacists in the United States.

Source: Democracy Now!

Israel is the most recent settler colony. Rhodesia and Algeria are now a distant memory. South Africa has freed itself from the official apartheid. While settlers in the Americas and Oceania perpetrated genocide against the aboriginals in the 19^th century, Israel initiated massive ethnic cleansing rather late, only in 1947. Some, like the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who documented it, regretted that the Zionists did not complete the job like the white Americans, Argentines or Australians, who wiped out most of the local populations. Indeed, Israel now has under its control approximately equal numbers of Palestinians and Jews, but most Palestinians don’t have political rights.

Many Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, have been trying to come to terms with the contradictions between the Judaism they profess to adhere to and the Zionist ideology that has taken hold of them. A new variety of Judaism has taken root in Israel: National Judaism, dati-leumi in Hebrew. For some Jews, this new faith assuages these contradictions.

Among its most fervent followers one finds the assassin of prime minister Itzhak Rabin who had attempted to find an accommodation with the Palestinians, and prominent members of today’s Israeli government. National Judaism is also the ideology of many vigilante settlers who, since the onset of the war on Gaza, have intensified the harassment, dispossession, and murder of Palestinians on the West Bank. The vigilantes armed with rifles are proud to complement what the Israeli army is doing with tanks, bombs, and rockets in Gaza.

Quite a few Jews now wonder if this separate state for the Jews chronically generating violence is “good for the Jews.” The tardiness of this questioning reflects the success of Israel’s masquerading as “the Jewish and democratic state”, a theoretical and ideological oxymoron. The bombing of Gaza has punctured that propaganda balloon and exposed Israel’s character as a bellicose settler colony, victim of its own practice of exclusion and oppression.

Many Jews deplore this practice because it contradicts all that Judaism teaches, particularly the core values of humility, compassion, and kindness. They realize that those Jews – in truth, the vast majority of them – who rejected Zionism over a century ago, may have been right. Other Jews also find themselves in an emotional bind. Deeply saddened by Hamas’ attack on Israel and likewise devasted by Israel’s implacable response, they are also worried about the surge in anti-Jewish sentiment all around them.

The deadly Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 shows how Israel’s displacement and oppression of the Palestinians breeds their hatred. Consequently, it physically endangers Jews in Israel. The subsequent killing of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza imperils Jews both in Israel and elsewhere. (Muslims do become targets too, as the tragic killing of a six-year-old American Palestinian shows.)

When Israel claims to be the state of all the Jews it turns them into hostages of its policies and actions. When Jewish community organizations declare “We stand with Israel!” they act as proxies for Israel rather than representatives of Jews. To be more precise, they represent those Jews whose identity has become mainly political: believers in Israel, right or wrong.

Israel and Zionism have long polarized the Jews. While Jews worldwide are largely split between these “Israel-firsters” and those who denounce Israel, neither camp influences Israel’s actions. They are akin to fans, rooting for one or the other side, watching from the outside as the situation unfolds. Blaming and attacking Jews for Israel’s actions is wrong and antisemitic. It also strengthens the core Zionist claim that Jews can be safe only in Israel.

It remains to be seen whether the fracture between those who hold fast to Jewish moral tradition and the converts to ethnic nationalism may one day be repaired. However fateful for Jews and Judaism, this fracture is less important for Israel, which nowadays counts many more evangelical Christians than Jews among its unconditional supporters.

Massive world-wide protests have so far affected neither Israelis’ vengeful violence in Gaza nor the supply of American weapons to support it. There is reason to despair. But Judaic tradition encourages Jews to continue, even in seemingly hopeless circumstances: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it…” (Pirke Avot 2:16) This is why many Jews remain at the forefront of the struggle against Israel’s wanton violence. But when the violence ends, many will realize that their protests have emancipated them from Israel’s emotional stranglehold.

This emancipation from the Zionist state has been observed in very different Jewish communities, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, strictly observant and more liberal. Thus, an ultra-Orthodox critic of Israel, usually antagonistic to Reform Judaism, commends a Reform rabbi for saying that “when Israel’s Jewish supporters abroad don’t speak out against disastrous policies that neither guarantee safety for her citizens nor produce the right climate in which to try and reach a just peace with the Palestinians … they are betraying millennial Jewish values.”

The nuclear armed Israel endangers not only the Palestinians and the Jews. It threatens an Armageddon for the region and the Samson option for the world. These apocalyptic scenarios may be triggered if an Israeli government decides that the country cannot cope with an existential threat. This may mean not only the threat of physical destruction but also the looming end of the institutionalized dominance of Israeli Jews over the Palestinians, the end of ethnocracy.

There is hope. England oppressed Ireland for centuries. France and Germany bitterly fought many wars. What will it take for Israelis and Palestinians to live peacefully side by side? Many Jews and many more Palestinians believe that the apartheid-like structure of the Zionist state, which explains why it has lived by the sword since its inception, must change. They know that only when all the inhabitants of the Holy Land enjoy equal rights and have a stake in whatever political arrangement is reached (one state, two states or something else) will the cycle of death stop.

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This article was originally published on Pressenza.

Yakov M. Rabkin, author of “A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism” and “What is Modern Israel?” is professor emeritus of history and associate of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Montreal (CERIUM). His e-mail is yakov.rabkin@umontreal.ca

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The original source of this article is Global Research

Celebrating Radical Peace

Janet Lynn Rutherford

1942-2013

An original activist bringing the terrible human consequences of war to public awareness, Lynn was a woman who lived her life as a full human being, ignoring every restriction of our culture and times. She used her spirited talents in music and art to communicate her message.

Long before the internet, she organized global conversations by computer and radio transmission on the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki genocide, between friends in Vancouver, California, and Japan as well as Russia. She initiated a walk for peace to Russia and did that, with several friends, by foot and train to Moscow and St. Petersburg, at a time when cold war tensions were high. Her energy for connecting people informed her life.

She connected with me: showed this alienated, conservative person how to go ahead and do what means most to you. My family having narrowly escaped WWII in Europe, with infant me, the trauma of war and displacement has been integral to my being. Her work to connect people and bring messages of healing and action gave me new vistas of possibility. Her untimely death is a great loss to us all.

Peoples’ Search and Rescue was her storefront in Vancouver’s downtown East Side before activism caught hold there. Everyone was welcome to visit, make friends, participate, check the extensive bulletin board for jobs, occasional work, lost dogs and cats, a place to stay. It was there I learned not to fear the disadvantaged: kind people, victims at home of our conflicted, war-torn world.

Throughout her life, her various homes and properties also welcomed whoever arrived, becoming spirited centres of mutual learning. Her music and art encouraged us all to participate whether we knew how or not. She played her guitar there and at demonstrations; sang songs of awareness few of us mainstream folks had heard of. Richard and Mimi Farina’s ‘If somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me…’ still resonates in my mind. Lynn taught me this round song that still speaks of the activist class—‘nouveau pauvre’:

‘Ego sum pauper. Nihil habeo. Cor meum dabo.’

Invited to several of her trips to the San Francisco Bay area, where she partly grew up, I learned radical politics. Informal lectures at the University of Berkeley, initiated by students and innovative professors, blew my straight-laced mind with discussions of the complications of democracy—right in the heart of the institutional beast. The creative counter-culture chaos enriched my imagination with new art and music, and my understanding of proactive organizing.

Lynn was always ready to discuss and argue perspectives; we were both strong-minded and passionate about our opinions, but her persistence in coming to a common appreciation of our differences never faltered. She was my best friend—through an astounding fifty years of working at mutual understanding and empathy. Her spirit informs my work today. She would be right onto this ultimate threat to humanity with all her light energy.

Thank you, Lynn!