ESSENTIAL

STEPHEN KARGANOVIC—The false narrative of “Srebrenica genocide” has been picked apart relentlessly over the last decade and a half, knocking out every one of its propaganda props. As Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, said a few days ago “according to the original definition of genocide, which holds that it is an attempt to destroy an entire ethnic group, the crime committed in Srebrenica cannot be an act of genocide. Serbian forces let go all women and children before executing the men, some of whom were combatants. I do not consider the General Assembly of the United Nations to be competent to determine whether or not an event was genocide.”

HELEN SANTORO‚March-in rights “will result in disincentivizing private sector partners from licensing advancements made through federally funded research,” a group of educational associations, including the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, wrote in response to the draft march-in rights framework proposed by the National Institute of Standards of Technology last December. “We recommend a complete and timely rescission of this framework by the administration.” 

The Bayh-Dole Coalition, a group of research universities and other scientific organizations, also staunchly opposes march-in rights, writing in their comment that the “draft framework is being justified as a weapon to lower drug costs. It is no such thing,” and the “proposed framework violates both the letter and spirit of the Bayh-Dole Act and would cause untold harm to American companies, workers, and consumers if implemented.” 

PEPE ESCOBAR—The key question remains: what will happen to Gaza and the Palestinians. Prof. Hudson’s judgement is ominously realistic: “As Alastair Crooke has explained, there now cannot be any two-state solution in Israel. It has to be either all Israeli or all Palestinian. [Or a single state with equal rights for all faiths but without Zionism. As proposed by various Palestinian leaders, Miko Peled, etc.—Ed]And the way it looks now is all-Israeli – the dream from the outset in 1947 of a land without non-Jewish people.

MICHAEL HUDSON—Well, to prevent this kind of embarrassment, and to prevent the embarrassment of journalists who were doing all this, Seymour Hersh described the [Mai Lai] massacre, and that helped inflame the opposition to Johnson. Well, President Biden, who’s approved Netanyahu’s plan, the first people you have to kill are the journalists. If you’re going to permit genocide, you have to realize that you don’t want the domestic U.S. population or the rest of the world to oppose the U.S. and Israel. You kill the journalists. And for the last, ever since the October 2nd Al-Aqsa event, you’ve had one journalist per week killed in Israel. That’s part of it.

The other people you don’t want, if you’re going to bomb them, you have to start by bombing the hospitals and all of the key centers. That also was part of the idea of the Vietnam War. How do you destroy a population? This was all worked out in the 1970s, when people were trying to use systems analysis to think, how do you work back and see what you need?

ALEKS—It is not feasible to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure during the winter. Moreover, it is not possible or acceptable to destroy the whole nation’s power, because of the civilians. These are Russians, and a total blackout, especially in the winter months, would be the death sentence for tens or hundreds of thousands. Whole supply chains that are designed to keep vulnerable people alive would break. That would be unacceptable.