Veterans For Peace Chapter 111
  • Home
  • Tipping the Scale Blog
  • Events and Announcements
  • CO Program
  • Media
  • Contacts
  • Mission
  • Chapter Minutes
  • Chapter Bylaws
  • Charter
  • Newsletters

Conspiracies of Silence and Blackmail

5/30/2025

0 Comments

 
The DOJ's investigations on the Epstein Files and Trump's shooting are a bad joke.

Ohio Barbarian
May 29, 2025

After Trump was re-elected, he promised to release the Epstein Files. They have been reviewed by his pretty blond Attorney General, his crazy-eyed FBI Director, and his podcaster cum Deputy FBI Director, and they all assure us they have read every line of the official reports and the only possible conclusion is that Epstein committed suicide.

It must be true. How can you not believe anyone with eyes like this?
Picture
Nope, nothing to see here. Move along. The problem is that not a single Trump-supporting podcaster or influencer who is not now on the Federal payroll believes it. Not Tucker Carlson, not Alex Jones, not anyone with an even partially functioning brain.

Then there’s this little thing that happened on my birthday last year.
Picture
Patel promised Fox News “complete transparency” less than two weeks ago, but so far nothing has been presented with any transparency at all, except for the cellphone camera images that were livestreamed that day.

As far as I can tell, there has been no investigation into how the Secret Service allowed a young punk with a rifle on to the roof of a building with a clear shot at the stage, or into Biden’s Secret Service Director herself, or the organization in general in spite of its obvious failure to do its job here.

In fact, there are Democrats out there saying the shooting was faked, never mind the fact that a man standing behind Trump died. This guy. Fireman Corey Comperatore, who took the bullet intended for Trump only because Trump turned at the last second to admire himself on the Jumbotron.
Picture
This man is dead, murdered, but we and his family still don't know all the reasons why, and Trump's own FBI and Secret Service seem none too interested in finding those reasons.  

Neither does the press. It is as if we are supposed to forget Corey Comperatore ever existed, or maybe that he managed to shoot himself at long range, just as Jeffrey Epstein “unquestioningly” hanged himself as Patel and his steroidy-looking sidekick now tell us to believe.
Picture
When was the last time you saw a story on either of these two Unexplained Events? When was the last time you thought about either one? If your answer is “I don’t know,” then you are in the majority, and now you know that our Powers-That-Be, and that most definitely includes the Trump Dept. of Justice, want you to forget about both.

Don’t.

We are supposed to forget that Epstein was a Mossad asset who owned an island and stocked it with young girls for both the entertainment and blackmail of some of the most powerful people on the planet.

We are supposed to forget there is a strong possibility one faction of our kleptocracy tried to assassinate a major presidential candidate just last summer.
And we aren’t supposed to notice that the same people who were calling for full investigations of both incidents last year are now in charge of those same investigations and claiming there just isn’t anything to see in either case.

It’s almost as if they were threatened or bribed, or both. It’s almost as if there is a conspiracy of silence.

It’s almost as if, since Trump was elected, that nothing has fundamentally changed.
0 Comments

US Veterans Fast Against Israel’s Starvation of Gaza

5/30/2025

0 Comments

 
Fasters are demanding full humanitarian aid to Gaza under U.N. authority and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, Marjorie Cohn reports.
Picture
Members of Veterans For Peace begin the first week of a 40-day fast in support of Gaza on May 27. (Veterans for Peace via X)
As the death toll of Palestinians continues to rise and more than a half a million people in Gaza are on the brink of starvation, U.S.-based Veterans For Peace and several allied organizations have launched a 40-day “Fast for Gaza.”

From May 22 to June 30, 600 people in the U.S. and abroad are fasting and demanding full humanitarian aid to Gaza under U.N. authority and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel.

Mary Kelly Gardner, a teacher from Santa Cruz, California, told Truthout she joined the fast in memory of her late father, a service member in Vietnam who “staunchly opposed U.S. militarism.”

He opposed “the so-called ‘war on terror’ and ongoing U.S. violence against Middle Eastern countries,” she said. Gardner is limiting herself to 250 calories for the first 10 days of the fast. “Then I will switch to fasting during daylight (as Muslims observing Ramadan do).”

Palestinians in Gaza are being forced to survive on 245 calories per day; 250 calories daily is considered a starvation diet, as the body breaks down muscle and other tissues. Prolonged fasting can cause dehydration, heart problems, kidney failure and even death.

Gardner is distressed because her “tax dollars are being used to fund this horrific violence” (which, she noted, constitutes genocide) “in the form of weapons shipments.” She feels the need to speak out.
Picture
Jabalia camp destruction by Israel in Gaza, October 2024. (Al Jazeera/Wikimedia Commons)
Gardner said her goals are to “get people’s attention with a meaningful action” and “engage in a practice that challenges me to be more personally present with the human suffering taking place in Gaza.” She is “intentionally causing myself some discomfort and inconvenience,” yet “not harming myself.”

For 11 weeks, using starvation as a weapon of war, Israel has blocked all food, medicine and other relief from entering the Gaza Strip, home to 2.1 million Palestinians. Now aid is trickling in under the auspices of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a delivery system established by the U.S. and Israel to bypass the U.N., provide a fig leaf of aid and blunt global outrage at Israel’s starvation tactics.

Risk of famine comes even as Israel intensifies its military campaign. On May 27, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported at least 54,056 people killed, including at least 17,400 children, and at least 123,129 people injured in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

Read on Consortium News.
0 Comments

Why Did Burning Girls Matter in Vietnam but Not in Gaza?

5/29/2025

0 Comments

 
The 'Napalm Girl' photo shocked the world and helped end the Vietnam War – but a viral video of a child surrounded by flames and other similar images in Gaza can't even provoke a ceasefire.

Jehad Abusalim
May 27, 2025
Picture
Left: Phan Thi Kim Phuc runs screaming after the South Vietnamese army dropped napalm in 1972. Photo by Nick Ut/AP/Public domain; Right: Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil attempts to escape the flames after Israel bombed a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot via Twitter
When the ‘Napalm Girl’ photo appeared in US and international media in 1972, it shocked the world. The image showed a young Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running naked, screaming in agony, her body burned by napalm dropped by the US-backed South Vietnamese army. The photo captured the raw, inescapable truth of war, and it forced people, especially in the United States, to confront the human cost of their government’s actions in Vietnam. It became a catalyst, a turning point, a symbol of a war that had lost its moral justification.

Now, more than 50 years later, the world is again seeing images of children burned alive. But this time, the response is different. This time, the images don’t seem to pierce through power in the same way. The pain in Gaza is undeniable, the evidence overwhelming. But the accountability is missing.
Just on Monday, footage emerged from Gaza after an Israeli airstrike hit the Fahmi al-Jirjawi school in Gaza City. The school was sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinian families, many sleeping in makeshift tents in the courtyard and classrooms. At least 36 people were killed in the bombing, according to Al Jazeera, and many of them (nearly half) were children. Dozens more were critically wounded, with bodies burned beyond recognition.

One clip in particular shook many. It showed a 5-year-old child, Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil, trying to escape a burning classroom, her tiny silhouette surrounded by flames. The 11-second video, shot from a distance, spread quickly on Telegram and other platforms. You could barely see her form against the fire. Somehow, Ward survived. But her mother and at least five of her siblings were killed. Her father is in critical condition. 


When I saw that clip of Ward, I immediately thought of Kim Phuc. Like Ward, Kim survived a fire meant to kill. She survived the war that burned her, and later became a
peace activist, a UNESCO ambassador, and recipient of prestigious prizes. Her suffering, her survival, and her transformation were all given meaning in part because her pain was seen and believed.


But what about Ward?

Today, scenes like Ward’s are not rare; they are daily. In Gaza, there are dozens of “Napalm Girl” moments each day, and they don’t come filtered through distant photo wires or delayed coverage. They come live. This genocide is being live-streamed by Palestinian journalists and by ordinary people who refuse to let their suffering go unseen. Burned children, screaming fathers, headless infants – these images are not just real, they are relentless.

So why won’t the world react the same way? Why did one photo of a burned child help end a war, while hundreds of clips showing burned Palestinian children can’t even provoke a ceasefire?
0 Comments

'Children ask why they survived': Doctor's Gaza testimony shocks UN Security Council

5/29/2025

0 Comments

 
In a searing address to the UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East and Gaza, American trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa delivered a first-hand account of Gaza's collapsing healthcare system, drawing from his two medical missions to Khan Younis.
0 Comments

This Dystopia Would Never Be Accepted Without Extensive Indoctrination

5/28/2025

0 Comments

 
Caitlin Johnstone
May 26, 2025

Picture
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

I am not a politically complicated person. I think genocide is bad. I think peace is good. I don’t think anyone should be struggling to survive in a civilization that is capable of providing for all. I think we should try to preserve the biosphere we all depend on for survival.

To me these are just obvious, common sense positions, no more remarkable or profound than believing I should refrain from slamming my nipple in a car door. I do not think these views should put me on the political fringe. I don’t think they should cause me to be seen as some kind of radical. It’s not outlandish that I hold these views, it’s outlandish that everyone else does not.

But that’s the kind of society we find ourselves in today. The obvious is framed as freakish while the freakish is presented as obvious. Health is framed as sickness while sickness is presented as health. The moderate is framed as extremism while extremism is presented as moderate.

We live in a twisted, backwards dystopia where everything is the opposite of the way it should be, and we’re conditioned to think it’s normal and acceptable. It’s not until some degree of insight dawns in you that you look around and realize you are living in the nightmare of a madman. Until then you spend your time here thinking, speaking, voting and behaving as though the demented status quo we are living under is the moderate and expected reality.
All our lives we are trained to believe this hellscape is the healthy and expected circumstance for our species. Our parents and teachers tell us that it’s normal for things to be this way. Our pundits and politicians assure us that there’s no other way things could be and that we are living under the best possible system.

A big part of it is just growing up in a society that’s been diseased since long before you were born, being raised and taught by people who also grew up in a society that’s been diseased since long before they were born. We show up here, we don’t know anything, and then the big people teach us about war and money and jobs and politics, and assure us that our initial horrified reaction to the things we are learning is just immature naivety to something fine and normal.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to explain war to a child, then you know how insane this civilization looks when perceived by a pair of fresh eyes. I’ve never had to explain the genocide in Gaza to a young child, but I am sure it would be met with even more shock and grief. Kids have a natural, healthy revulsion toward such things, and it is only by sustained indoctrination that we are able to twist their minds into seeing them as normal.

It takes a lot of education to make us this stupid. Our minds require a whole lot of training to accept this horrific dystopia as the baseline norm. That’s why the empire we live under has the most sophisticated domestic propaganda machine that has ever existed.

In order to have clarity, we need to learn to look with fresh eyes. Uninitiated eyes. Eyes that have not been educated out of their initial healthy impulse to weep at what we are doing and how we are living here. We need to get in touch with that intuition within us which rejects the sickness of our society as though it was meeting it for the very first time.

Learning to meet life afresh in each instant is good practice anyway; it makes living a lot more enjoyable and beautiful, and it helps us move in a much wiser way since we’re not constantly reacting to old patterns and expectations in an ever-changing world. But as an added bonus it also peels away the tolerance we have built up for the backwards lunacy of this empire we are living under.

The less healthy this civilization feels to you, the healthier you are getting. Everything about this nightmare looks appalling through clear eyes.

Read Caitlin Johnstone.
0 Comments
<<Previous
    The VFP-111 Tipping the Scale blog is not an elite space, reserved for experts or professional bloggers. This is a blog for real people who are willing to share themselves honestly and vulnerably.

    Archives

    November 2025
    October 2025
    September 2025
    August 2025
    July 2025
    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

Proudly powered by Weebly