How Facebook helps Israel hide its crimes

Tamara Nassar

As Israel intensified its killing campaign in the Gaza Strip in May, people across the globe took to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians.

Others used social media to document, condemn and raise awareness of Israel’s crimes.

But Facebook and Instagram users soon noticed their posts being taken down, their accounts suspended and their content receiving reduced visibility.

A new report by Human Rights Watch confirms that the two social media platforms, both owned by Facebook, did indeed suppress and remove content, in many cases erroneously or unjustifiably.

But Facebook’s acknowledgment to HRW of errors and unjustified removals was at best insufficient. It failed to “address the scale and scope of reported content restrictions, or adequately explain why they occurred in the first place,” the watchdog said.

Last week, Facebook announced it was hiring an outside consultancy to investigate accusations that it was censoring content favorable to Palestinians. There is plenty of evidence of suppression for the investigators to look into.

Censorship

In the period 6-19 May – which includes the Israeli attack on Gaza – Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh (pronounced “hamleh”) documented 500 instances of Palestinians’ speech rights being violated online.

They include removing content, account closures, blocked hashtags and altering reachability of specific content.

The vast majority of these violations – around 85 percent – occurred on Facebook and Instagram, including the deletion of stories.

Almost half of takedowns were done without prior warning or notice and another 20 percent did not specify the reason for the removal.

In one instance, Instagram restricted use of the hashtag #alAqsa in English and Arabic – which refers to the al-Aqsa mosque in occupied Jerusalem. After 7amleh challenged the company, the hashtag was reinstated.

7amleh also observed an increase in “geo-blocking” on Facebook – technology that restricts access based on a user’s location.

Some posts that Instagram purged were simply reposts of content from major media organizations that could not remotely be construed as inciting violence or hatred.

But Instagram labeled them as such, suggesting that the platform “is restricting freedom of expression on matters of public interest,” according to Human Rights Watch.

Even when social media companies recognized errors and restored content, the damage was already done.

“The error impedes the flow of information concerning human rights at critical moments,” Human Rights Watch said.

The group called for an external probe into Facebook’s suppression practices.

Facebook’s list of danger

In one instance, Facebook removed a post by a user in Egypt with more than 15,000 followers. The user had shared an Al Jazeera news item about the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.

Initially, Facebook deleted the post under its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Community Standard,” which prohibits specific organizations and individuals from having a presence on the platform.

Facebook later restored the post after the case was reviewed by its oversight board.

The board concluded the post contained no “praise, support or representation” of the Qassam Brigades.

The oversight board also criticized the vagueness of the policy – and demanded that Facebook explicitly define what constitutes “praise, support or representation.”

The oversight board is sometimes critical of company policy and claims to be independent.

But alarms were raised last year when Facebook appointed former Israeli official Emi Palmor as a member. Palmor spent years at Israel’s justice ministry enforcing censorship of Palestinians’ speech.

Human Rights Watch urged Facebook to publish its “dangerous individuals and organizations” list, a recommendation previously made by the oversight board.

But Facebook has consistently refused to do so, claiming it would harm its employees.

Last week, The Intercept published a leaked version of the list.

It names “over 4,000 people and groups, including politicians, writers, charities, hospitals, hundreds of music acts and long-dead historical figures,” The Intercept reported.

The list of those Facebook deems “dangerous” largely coincides with those the United States and Israel regard as enemies.

But it goes much further than that.

“It includes the deceased 14-year-old Kashmiri child soldier Mudassir Rashid Parray, over 200 musical acts, television stations, a video game studio, airlines, the medical university working on Iran’s homegrown COVID-19 vaccine and many long-deceased historical figures like Joseph Goebbels and Benito Mussolini,” The Intercept said.

As well as Hamas and its military wing, the list includes the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a Marxist-Leninist political party founded in 1967. Israel considers virtually all Palestinian political parties to be “terrorist” organizations – a pretext to routinely arrest Palestinians for political activity.

While the list contains at least three Zionist groups – the Jewish Defense League, Kahane Chai and Lehava – these are so extreme that Kahane Chai is even banned by the Israeli government.

Kahane Chai, or Kach, is an Israeli party founded by Meir Kahane, an extremist settler who advocated for the total expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Kahane Chai is designated by the US State Department as a foreign terrorist organization.

Lehava is a racist group that works to prevent mixed marriages between Jews and Palestinians. Its members have repeatedly been filmed rampaging through occupied East Jerusalem chanting “Death to the Arabs.”

But many Israeli politicians, parties and religious leaders who regularly incite hatred and violence – such as interior minister Ayelet Shaked who promoted on Facebook a call for genocide of the Palestinians – are absent.

So is Israel’s army.

Even though the Israeli military regularly commits massacres of entire Palestinian families, crimes against children, extrajudicial executions and forced expulsions, it is not deemed “dangerous” enough to make it to Facebook’s list.

And Israel still regularly uses Facebook to threaten more violence.

For instance, the Israeli military habitually posts direct threats of collective punishment against the two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

In May, Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz used Facebook to threaten more destruction than he ordered in Gaza in 2014.

Back then as Israel’s army chief, he commanded a 51-day assault that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children.

“Gaza will burn,” Gantz said in a video posted on Facebook in May, a direct threat that likely constitutes evidence of premeditated intent to commit war crimes.

“Gaza residents, the last time that we met on Eid al-Fitr, I was chief of staff during Operation Protective Edge,” he says in the video over footage of destruction.

“If Hamas does not stop its violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014,” he promised.

Who decides?

The bigger question is why Facebook – which has nearly a third of the world’s population on its platform – is able to decide what or who is “dangerous”?

It appears, as Columbia University professor Joseph Massad has recently written, that the criteria for who or what is considered “dangerous” or a “terrorist” depends more on a person’s identity rather than what they do.

“It is not the act of ‘terrorism’ that defines the actor as ‘terrorist’ but rather the opposite: It is the perpetrator’s conferred identity as ‘terrorist’ that defines his/her actions as ‘terrorist’ in nature,” Massad says.

Meanwhile, as Facebook cracked down on Palestinians, Israeli Jewish extremists used instant messaging services to organize mob attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel.

This included Facebook groups and the Facebook-owned service WhatsApp.

There is no indication Facebook takes this sort of misuse of its platform seriously, while banning Palestinian political groups, journalists and discussion at Israel’s behest.

Calls for more censorship

Long before Israel’s assault on Gaza in May, Facebook was habitually taking down pages of Palestinian news organizations, often without prior notice or justification.

Last year, Facebook even removed the page of the health ministry in Gaza – a vital source of information for people there. It was restored following inquiries from The Electronic Intifada.

But the censorship does not seem to be enough.

US media and political elites have been demanding increasing government control and censorship of social media platforms in recent years.

The initial pretext was the evidence-free allegations that Russia had used social media, including Facebook, to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to help Donald Trump win.

“Whistleblower”

The leak in The Intercept and the Human Rights Watch report coincide with a recent Wall Street Journal “investigation” supposedly examining leaked internal Facebook documents.

The newspaper claims that the so-called Facebook Files reveal that the company is responsible for a bewildering array of “harm[s]” ranging from the poor self-image and mental health of teenage girls to violence in Ethiopia.

Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, who leaked the documents, has been feted as a “whistleblower” by congressional leaders and mainstream media.

Haugen was brought before Congress to provide fodder for those demanding more censorship and control of public discussion on Facebook under the guise of stopping countries like China and Iran from using the platform for nefarious ends – a repurposing of the same old Russiagate narrative.

Haugen’s call for what The Washington Post termed “expansive and ambitious” government regulation was enthusiastically received by several leading lawmakers.

Journalist Max Blumenthal noted that Haugen’s claims “tracked so closely with imperial US narrative.”

 

Naturally, the same quarters welcoming Haugen’s calls for increased censorship of what people can say online have ignored the reality to which Palestinians can already bear witness: Demanding that Silicon Valley corporations act as arbiters of truth ultimately serves to crush dissent and suppress the most vulnerable and marginalized voices.

That is likely what makes government regulation of online speech so attractive to political elites.

Pandemic spirals out of control in Russia, as officials announce inadequate public health measures

Clara Weiss

On Wednesday, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared October 30 to November 7 a non-working week with paid time off. Over the past month, Russia has continually set new daily records for covid-19 deaths and infections. With over 1,000 succumbing to the virus and 34,000 new cases being registered each day, Russia has the second highest daily death toll after the US and the third largest number of new infections in the world.

Even these horrific numbers are widely considered to be underestimates, and Putin himself urged regions on Wednesday not to underreport their cases. Russian medical scientists are already speaking about a “mega wave” that could last, with no significant reprieve, into the spring.

Putin made clear on Wednesday that the government has no intention of implementing any serious public health measures, declaring “We only have two ways to get through this — get sick or get vaccinated. But it’s better to get vaccinated. Why wait for an illness or its serious consequences?”

The miserable character of the Kremlin’s action is revealed by the fact that the week from October 30 through November 7 already included four days off because of national holidays. In other words, the government simply added another three days of vacation to a long-weekend. In addition, the start date of the “non-working” period is more than a week away, which gives the virus another eight days to consume ever-more victims.

There are many loopholes in the so-called “non-working week” declared by the Kremlin. While schools will close, the government order only “encourages” non-essential businesses to send their employees home while paying their salaries. Many will simply not follow the recommendations.

The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, announced on Thursday that because of a “historic peak” in infections in the capital, the “non-working” week measure will begin on October 28. In addition, 2.5 million unvaccinated residents who are over the age of 60 or immuno-compromised will have to remain at home between October 25 and February 25, unless they are going to work, shopping, or for a walk. Companies in the country’s largest city must introduce remote work for at least 30 percent of their workforce. In the service sector, at least 80 percent of employees must be vaccinated. Concerts and other large public venues will remain open but only be accessible to people with a QR-code that confirms their vaccination status.

Other areas are introducing measures of their own, and reports from across the country indicate that schools are closing or sending kids “on vacation” because of outbreaks. Regions where the situation is particularly bad may introduce the restrictions earlier or extend them beyond November 7.

These limited measures will, at most, result in a temporary dip in infections and deaths.

Since the reopening of schools in September, when deaths were already at all-time highs due to a summer surge, the virus has spun completely out of control in a predominantly unvaccinated population and an environment without any serious mitigation measures. Country-wide, 87 percent of hospital beds are occupied, but in 40 regions, 90 or 95 percent are occupied. In many facilities, patients are already lying in the hallway and ICUs are packed across the country.

As in the US, Brazil and the UK, Russian pediatricians are reporting that children are being much harder hit by this wave of the virus, both because of the nature of the delta variant and the fact that kids are congregating in schools.

While the Kremlin does not publish any figures on child infections, figures from Moscow give an indication of the severity of the situation: As of October 19, out of 6308 people hospitalized, 10 percent were children. Out of these, 45 percent were between 7 and 14 years old, 19 percent were between 15 and 17, and about a third were under 6 years old.

Vaccination rates in Russia continue to be extremely low. Just about a third of the population is fully vaccinated, and roughly two thirds of the population have not received even one jab of the vaccine. Less than 400,000 doses were distributed last week. At this rate, it would take over two months to get another 10 percent of the population vaccinated. More than half the population has repeatedly indicated it is not planning to get immunized.

Mask mandates, if they exist, and social distancing measures, go largely unenforced. Scenes of overcrowded subways with many people either without face coverings or wearing them incorrectly are commonplace in big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Moreover, authorities only recommend wearing surgical masks, which are known to offer poor protection against the delta variant. The much more effective N95 masks are barely known in the population. Costing at least 100 rubles apiece ($1.40), they are also too expensive for most working people, who can only spend an average of 698 rubles (about $9.80) in a visit to a store. There are no disinfectants in many public spaces, and there has never been any effort to introduce any measures for contact tracing.

The current wave will significantly exacerbate what is already a staggering population decline.

Recent demographic data indicate that between September 2020 and August 2021, 2.36 million people died in Russia while only 1.4 million children were born, resulting in a population decline of nearly 1 million—an unprecedented drop outside of times of war. In the first 8 months of 2021, mortality rose by 18.5 percent. While the coronavirus has been a major driver of Russia’s population loss, it comes on top of a long list of social ills that has been exacting a terrible toll on working people—poor medical care, desperate poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction and other health conditions that result from intense deprivation.

In recent weeks, Kremlin officials have been publicly denouncing the population, blaming it for the skyrocketing cases because of the low vaccination rates. These slanders must be rejected. Full responsibility for covid-19’s mass death toll and infection rate lies with the capitalist oligarchy, which emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union three decades ago, and its response to the pandemic.

The outright criminality and constant lies of the government and oligarchy that it represents over the past decades are a major reason for the widespread distrust of the authorities, which, in many cases, lies behind people’s reluctance to get vaccinated.

Distrust of the vaccine is further fueled by the fact that the World Health Organization has not yet approved Russia’s Sputnik V. The vaccine was released late last summer before phase three drug trials had been completed. For reasons that remain unclear, Russia significantly delayed the submission of the full required documentation on the vaccine to the WHO. However, international medical journals such as The Lancet have found that the vaccine is highly effective and has no significant side effects.

At the same time, Western-manufactured vaccines such as Pfizer, AstroZeneca or Moderna are not available in Russia. Those who can afford it —a tiny minority — are increasingly turning to travel to the EU to receive one.

The restoration of capitalism in the former USSR meant a systematic destruction of the Soviet Union’s advanced public health system. Whatever hospitals remain today are often in dilapidated, even outright unhygienic conditions, with completely outdated equipment and an overworked and underpaid workforce. Even as the pandemic hit the country last year, the Kremlin imposed further cuts on health care spending.

This social counterrevolution was accompanied by the systematic promotion of attacks on science and various forms of political backwardness. The Russian Orthodox Church, historically a bulwark of the far-right and obscurantism, has been heavily promoted, including during the pandemic, when Church officials (as well as government officials) publicly ridiculed the virus and denounced any efforts to contain it.

The horrific situation in Russia is mirrored across Eastern Europe, with Romania reporting the highest mortality rate in the world and Ukraine the third highest number of deaths per day (495) and the fifth highest number of daily new cases, globally. An explosion in cases is also happening in Poland and the Baltic States. In Belarus, hospitals are overwhelmed.

A decade of pandemic planning was ignored despite knowing millions could die in UK

Robert Stevens

One of the main lies contained in parliament’s recent inquiry on the UK government’s pandemic response is that no-one in power could have foreseen the COVID pandemic that hit Britain in early 2020. The inquiry claimed that mistakes were made because all previous planning assumed that Britain would face a flu pandemic.

The report by the House of Commons health and social care and science and technology select committees, “Coronavirus: lessons learned to date,” states in the very first paragraph of its executive summary, “The UK’s pandemic planning was too narrowly and inflexibly based on a flu model which failed to learn the lessons from SARS, MERS and Ebola.”

The report cites the testimony of former Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Dame Sally Davies. In paragraph 19 of the chapter “Pandemic preparedness”, Davies states, “We all, in the UK, US and Europe, as experts and in policy, had a bias to flu, and planning for flu and diseases that had already occurred. As I look back, going back to [flu preparedness exercise] Winter Willow [held in 2007], which was well before my time, and the national risk assessment, we underestimated the impact of novel and particularly zoonotic diseases.”

In paragraph 27, Davies states, “Quite simply, we were in groupthink. Our infectious disease experts really did not believe that SARS, or another SARS, would get from Asia to us. It is a form of British exceptionalism.”

Given that the British government had conducted, going backed several decades, numerous exercises to simulate a pandemic, and that many of these were in the public domain, the document cannot just ignore them.

Exercise Cygnus is referred to in the report. It states, “The prospective national response to an influenza pandemic was tested in an exercise which took place from 18–20 October 2016. Exercise Cygnus was led by Public Health England. As part of the exercise, participants considered their capacity and capability to operate at the peak of a pandemic affecting 50% of the population which could cause between 200,000 and 400,000 excess deaths in the UK.”

But alas, goes the inquiry narrative, this exercise predicting hundreds of thousands of deaths, was really a waste of time as, “It is important to note that Exercise Cygnus focused on the treatment and escalation phases of the pandemic response. It did not simulate the detection and assessment phases.”

The document cites the testimony of then Health Secretary Matt Hancock who told the inquiry in November 2020, “The problem with Project Cygnus was […] that it started from the assumption that we were going to have a pandemic flu that was already rampant and widespread. It was an exercise in what you would do in the period at which lots of people were already dying. What it did not ask were the prior questions, What type of pandemic is most likely? What are the different characteristics of different pandemics—flu or coronavirus being two obvious examples—and can we act to stop getting into the position at which Project Cygnus started off?”

These statements are aimed at covering up the fact that extensive planning for a pandemic had been drawn up and large-scale simulations carried out for well over a decade, but also that among these were Exercise Alice.

Exercise Alice was carried out in February 2016 and was specifically simulating a response to a coronavirus pandemic —an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV). The full title of the report into the exercise is “Report: Exercise Alice-Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (Mers-CoV) 15 February 2016.”

The cover page of the partially redacted 2016 report into the coronavirus pandemic planning exercise, Exercise Alice. The document is titled: "Report: Exercise Alice-Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (Mers-CoV) 15 February 2016"

Dame Sally Davies is happy to mention Exercise Winter Willow and Exercise Cygnus as they were preparations for a flu pandemic, but not Exercise Alice. And for good reason.

It was she who commissioned Exercise Alice, the existence of which was kept hidden from the pubic by the government for more for than five years, only finally being acknowledged as having taken place in June this year. Acknowledgement was forced out of the government as the result of diligent efforts of Dr. Moosa Qureshi, backed by Leigh Day solicitors. Qureshi, a hospital consultant, took action after seeing the social devastation caused by the COVID pandemic, to uncover what preparations government had carried out to prepare for such a pandemic.

Freedom of Information requests established in June that officials from Public Health England (PHE) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) were involved in Exercise Alice.

Dr. Moosa Qureshi (credit: Dr Moosa Qureshi)

The requests forced the government to reveal that there had been a total of 11 reports into pandemic planning exercises hitherto unknown by the public in the five years before COVID hit. These included four dealing with an influenza pandemic, three on Ebola, two on Lassa—an acute viral haemorrhagic illness—and three on bird flu.

Along with Exercise Alice, the existence of further reports into pandemic exercises were revealed through pressure from Dr. Qureshi’s legal campaign. These were Exercise Broad Street, Exercise Cerberus, Exercise Northern Light, Exercise Pica, and the Ebola Preparedness Surge Capacity Exercise.

Earlier this month, the government was forced to disclose the partially redacted 23-page report on Exercise Alice, after declaring in August that publication could “lead to loss of public confidence in the government’s and the NHS’ COVID-19 response… based on misinterpretation of the report.”

Their fear was it becoming known that some of the key findings of Exercise Alice revealed the criminal nature of the government’s pandemic response, which has led to the mass infection of nearly 9 million people and over 163,000 preventable deaths.

In an October 7 press release Leigh Day noted, “Exercise Alice was carried out in 2016 and identified 12 specific actions and four key themes that Public Health England should address to make the NHS ready to cope with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV): quarantine versus self-isolation, levels of PPE, community sampling planning and effective and consistent public messaging.”

It added, “The 2016 report [Exercise Alice] identified key issues which needed to be looked at more closely such as quarantine and self-isolation requirements, the level of PPE [personal protective equipment] and the setting up of a proper contact tracing system, yet when the Covid-19 pandemic broke in 2020 the Government discharged positive covid cases into care homes and did not have a contact tracing system which could be brought immediately into action.”

Speaking on the publication of the document, Dr Qureshi said, “The Department of Health argued that Exercise Cygnus was not relevant for COVID-19, because it modelled an influenza pandemic, not a coronavirus. In fact, the disclosure of these [initial] seven reports shows a range of pandemics were modelled in the five years leading up to COVID-19. Disgracefully, the Government covered up Exercise Alice – a coronavirus exercise which predicted the importance of isolating patients, contact tracing, PPE provision, trained personnel and adequate NHS beds.

“The fact that COVID-19 is a novel type of coronavirus is irrelevant—every pandemic is different, but the lessons of Exercise Alice were generally applicable to coronaviruses including COVID-19, they were agreed by general consensus, and both political leaders and NHS England executives failed to implement that consensus. They failed to maintain contact tracing capacity and isolate patients, they failed to provide adequate PPE, and they cut NHS beds. Going forward, future pandemics remain at the top of our national risk register, and we will continue our legal campaign to establish a new paradigm of transparency and accountability for pandemic preparedness.'

The government’s claim that all the planning for a pandemic prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 was essentially a waste of time as it was premised on the main threat being a flu pandemic is also exposed as a contemptible lie based on what was contained in the reports uncovered.

Leigh Day stated that the “most significant” findings in the exercises revealed in August were those relating to Exercise Broad Street and Exercise Pica.

Exercise Broad Street was “a 2018 testing of the UK’s readiness to deal with a high consequence infectious disease, revealed concerns about surge planning for airborne pathogens.”

Exercise Pica, was “a 2018 report on how primary care would deal with a severe pandemic influenza for which there was no vaccine and no immunity.”

Leigh Day noted, “It was based on the premise that there were national stockpiles of PPE in place for healthcare workers to treat half the population and anticipated an upsurge in mental health care demand. It highlighted the need for ‘co-ordinated communications’, remote working by primary care staff and the possibility of fuel and staff shortages.”

In parliament’s “Lesson’s learned to date,” all that is said is the anodyne single sentence comment, “Despite carrying out simulation exercises, we heard that the UK did not adequately learn the lessons of previous pandemics.”

Clinical staff care for a patient with coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, May 5, 2020 [Credit: Neil Hall Pool via AP]

The fact is that none of the planning was put into operation because the government was intent on imposing its homicidal herd immunity strategy from the outset. Dominic Cummings, who is lauded in parliament’s report as an avowed enemy of “groupthink”, was a leading advocate of herd immunity. The Sunday Times reported in March 2020 that at the end of February, Cummings had outlined the government’s strategy at a private meeting, with one observer describing the policy as, “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”

Cumming revealed earlier this year that a Public Health England exercise presented to the government as the pandemic broke out worked out scenarios based on up to 800,000 people dying of COVID-19 in the UK.

Such an agenda informed much of the planning for a pandemic going back years. In a 2011 exercise findings document, a paragraph in a section headed “Business as usual” states, “During a pandemic, the Government will encourage those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives for as long and as far as that is possible, whilst taking basic precautions to protect themselves from infection and lessen the risk of spreading influenza to others… the Government does not plan to close borders, stop mass gatherings or impose controls on public transport during any pandemic.”

On twitter this week, an intervention teacher/special needs tutor commented that this statement “reads like a playbook of the government's pandemic strategy. A focus on saving life is not anywhere in the document. But this is. Notice wording—Any pandemic. They were never going to save us, we are just collateral damage.”

As to the scale of death the government was prepared to ignore, Exercise Winter Willow, dealing with an avian flu pandemic, was conducted in January and February 2007 and involved all the emergency services, local authority officials and Labour government Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and Environment Secretary David Miliband. The Sunday Times reported on January 27, 2007 of the upcoming operation, “The exercise is designed to ensure that the authorities could cope with up to 30% of the population being infected and a possible 750,000 deaths.”

Those in government were acutely aware of the terrible scale of deaths that could result from a pandemic, with the Sunday Times noting, “Government experts have expressed fears that up to 7m Britons could die in an epidemic if bird flu mutated into a form that could readily spread among humans.”

UK parents trying to protect children face fines, imprisonment and safeguarding referrals as school COVID cases soar

Margot Miller

Parents shielding their children by keeping them away from unsafe schools are being threatened with fines, imprisonment or even the threat of having their children taken into the care of social services.

Schools reopening for the autumn term has fueled a surge in cases, spreading into the community and leading to an increase in hospitalisations in children and older age groups.

On October 14, 209,000 children were absent from school for COVID related reasons, including 111,000 confirmed cases. That same day, 1.8 percent of teachers and school leaders and 1.6 percent of teaching assistants were absent due to COVID. On October 19, twitter group Long Covid Kids reported “25 kids hospitalised in the last 24 hours with preventable illness.”

This led to appeals by National Health Service leaders for the Johnson government to implement a Plan B—with the response back: “the government has no plans to bring in any contingency measures yet.”

Government mouthpiece Dr Camilla Kingdon, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), recommended ending the twice weekly lateral flow testing in schools.

Earlier in the month, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi announced the government’s maniacal mission to raise school attendance figures, during a life-threatening pandemic that necessitates school closures. New to the post, he instructed his department to do “a deep dive into what’s happening with absenteeism.” He aims to work with Ofsted (the school inspectorate) to raise attendance figures. “Some of it is Covid-related both in terms of a student may have Covid and is therefore self-isolating… what I would describe as Covid anxiety—whether it be parental anxiety, students’ anxiety.”

Those “anxious” parents are in fact legitimately appalled at the deaths of 96 UK children from COVID and the 11,000 children suffering Long COVID for over a year. But for trying to protect their children, they face the wrath of the authorities.

Mother of three, Sharon, explained to the WSWS how she was forced to deregister her youngest daughter 14-year-old Kelsey from school.

Sharon

“I never dreamt of taking her out of school,” she said. But “her school was one of 200 schools doing trials.”

In March 2021, the government launched a pilot scheme involving 200 schools and colleges, replacing daily lateral flow testing with the need for students in close contact with a positive case to self-isolate.

“We got minimal information,” continued Sharon. “School sent out a [permission] letter to parents. As soon as I read it, I was flabbergasted. The virus is airborne, [it would mean] taking it out to families, into the communities, it will spread. I said to the head teacher, ‘You’re giving me no choice. If my child is sitting next to a child who is positive, everyone is part of the trial.’ The head just said be part of the trial or leave. So, I took my daughter out. Schools are unsafe. But it’s gone way beyond that now, they’re not isolating any contact.”

On July 17, the government lifted all mandatory restrictions and social distancing. In schools, mask wearing and quarantining after close contact with a positive case was no longer advised. This applied to Clinically Vulnerable (CV) and Clinically Extremely Vulnerable (CEV) staff and children. Self-isolation was only recommended after a positive PCR test.

As Kelsey was not provided with any alternative remote provision, Sharon “signed [her] on for online private school because she is doing GCSEs in two years, it’s costing us a fortune.”

“All children should be protected,” she continued, “Vulnerable or not. I cannot believe the corruption, it’s all about privatisation, money. My child is being protected, but it’s tragic, parents saying they could be fined [for not sending their children into school].

“At the very beginning of the pandemic, seeing people dying gasping for air in Italy, I was screaming at the TV, because governments didn’t do anything, they kept the borders open. All this sickness, Long COVID, it’s being ignored.”

Sharon said the media were censoring what leading scientists were advising. The truth about the pandemic is “not getting out there. It’s all misinformation, lobbying groups.”

The government’s murderous policies place the lives of those deemed CV or CEV in heightened danger. The WSWS spoke to Emmy Kelly, founder of twitter advocacy group Fighting 4 Vulnerable Lives.

Emmy Kelly

The group was founded in response to the government’s end to shielding and the removal of CEV/CV status when schools reopened in September. Like all parents who kept children at home for fear of them contracting COVID, parents of CV children faced the stark choice of deregistering and losing their school place, or fines and imprisonment.

“We are hearing of more and more families now being threatened or referred to social services, EWO [Educational Welfare Officers], etc., for unauthorised absence due to schools not being given the power to use the code for Exceptional Circumstances [ Section 7 of Education Act 1996] for all CEV families,” explained Emmy.

“Pre-pandemic, schools were always able to make exceptional teaching arrangements. The Department of Education guidance to schools is breaching the Equality Act, Disability Act and Human Rights of CEV CV.”

Her group worked with the Good Law Project, which challenged the legality of this guidance. The outcome was that the government issued new guidance which, according to the Good Law Project, “conceded that schools need to be sensitive to families’ needs when considering absence due to Covid. This is a big win for clinically extremely vulnerable families, but it is only the first step. Our work will now turn to making sure that schools approve reasonable requests for leave and provide full remote education for children who cannot go to school.”

The new government guidance does not apply to CV/CEV educators. “Teachers can’t work from home, no one can work from home because furlough’s ended,” said Emmy. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”

Leaving individual parents to negotiate access to Section 7 with school also “puts parents into a new battle they didn’t know existed,” explained Emmy. “It erodes relations between home and school. One family we are supporting said school is trying to help and asked for a GP’s (general practitioner) letter. When the doctor checked with Public Health England, however, he was told, ‘GPs can’t write letters [on behalf of CEV/CV children]. The child’s education is more important than health.’

“We’ve got parents, families in suicide crisis because they have been referred to social services, having a safeguarding referral made on them [for keeping a child off school or even trying to deregister]. There is the stigma, people think there’s no smoke without fire, they think child abuse. Once in that area, everything is going on behind closed doors. The parents have to [forgo a legal challenge and] do everything to build a working relationship with the authorities,” for fear their children are put into care.

Without a strategy to eradicate the virus, those who are CEV/CV remain in grave danger, as do all children, from Long COVID or even MIS-C/PIMS (Paediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome).

For their part, the education unions refuse to mobilise their hundreds of thousands of members to demand remote education, knowing they and their pupils to be in danger. The unions maintain the fiction that schools can be made safe with a few mitigation measures, so parents can work to churn out profits.

In a press release, joint National Education Union general secretary Mary Bousted said Tuesday, “We welcome the [government] announcement that vaccination centres will open for 12-15-year-olds over half term… more needs to be done on ventilation in schools and other mitigation measures to stop the virus spreading and putting staff and pupils at further risk as we head into winter.”

Modi government sells off state-owned Air India for a song to kick-start new privatisation drive

Kranti Kumara

India’s far-right Narendra Modi-led government has sold the country’s flagship state-owned airline, Air India, to the Tata Group for a pittance. Led by the suave but rapacious industrialist Ratan Tata, the Tata Group is India’s largest conglomerate with a total market capitalization of $319 billion (Indian Rs. 23.6 trillion).

Air India jet and Narendra Modi (Wikipedia)

The sale of Air India is being touted by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government as the opening salvo in an across-the-board push to privatise virtually all state-owned companies and is being celebrated by Indian big business and international capital as such.

Although the Modi government and the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government that preceded it have pressed forward with “disinvestment,” reducing the government stake in numerous Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) and ensuring that they are operated on “for profit” business lines, Air India is the first central government PSU to be sold off in its entirety in 19 years.

In truth, gifted would better describe what has taken place. To gain sole ownership of one of the world’s premier airlines, Tata Group is making an upfront cash payment of just $365 million (Rs. 27 billion) and assuming $2.1 billion (Rs. 153 billion), or 25 percent, of the airline’s total $8.3 billion (Rs. 616 billion) debt. This leaves the Indian government with the responsibility for the remaining $6.3 billion (Rs. 463 billion), which will be paid off no doubt through diminished social support for, and increased taxation of, working people.

The Tata Group is pocketing not just Air India, but also its budget airline subsidiary, Air India Express, which has a fleet of 24 narrow-bodied Boeing 737-800s used to provide service to and from the Gulf. It is also acquiring the government’s 50 percent stake in Air India SATS, which provides ground handling, food catering and aircraft cleaning services.

Air India has a premier fleet of 117 wide-body jets and employs around 12,000 workers, including highly skilled mechanics and pilots. Its aircraft fleet is alone estimated to be worth anywhere from $5.4 to $6.8 billion (Rs. 400 billion to Rs. 500 billion).

The airline is to be completely handed over to the Tata Group by year end. Under the terms of the deal, Tata has pledged not to lay off any workers for one year. Thereafter, it can be expected to mount a massive cost-cutting drive, targeting workers’ jobs, wages, pensions and working conditions.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has used it financial muscle to promote privatisation around the world, was quick to hail the sale of Air India. Alfred Schipke, a former chief of the IMF India Mission and current director of the IMF’s Singapore Regional Training Institute, called it “an important milestone.”

The head of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), Chandrajit Banerjee, similarly gushed his approval. The “successful privatisation of Air India marks a momentous event,” declared Banerjee, “and sends out a clear message to the markets and global investors that the present government has the political will to bite the reform bullet.”

Numerous corporate media editorials also hailed the privatisation deal. The Indian Express, to cite but one, praised the Modi government for its readiness to make Air India alluring to investors by “tweaking the modalities of the sale agreement,” adding that this “sends an unambiguous message—about its determination to push forward with a privatisation agenda.”

Indeed, the government has served notice that as part of its pandemic “economic recovery” strategy virtually all PSUs are now on the auction block and in all sectors from mining, transport and electricity-generation to banking. Under the government’s plans, only a handful of “strategic” PSUs, such as weapons manufacturers, are not to be privatised.

The Modi government’s privatisation push is aimed at intensifying its drive to make India a cheap labour production-chain hub for global capital, attracting increased foreign direct investment and providing cash infusions to the Treasury to staunch spiraling deficits.

The IMF and the World Bank, along with Washington, have long been pressing for New Delhi to dismantle India’s state sector enterprises.

The government has set a disinvestment and privatization target of $24 billion (Rs. 1.75 trillion) for the current 2021-22, fiscal year. Among the PSUs to be sold off outright are the IDBI Bank, Bharat Petroleum Corp. and Shipping Corp. of India.

At the same time, the government has initiated the partial privatization of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC,) which is estimated to have Rs. 36 trillion ($864 billion) in assets and dominates 60 percent of India’s life insurance market. According to the Reuters news agency, one of the top officials spearheading the privatisation drive, Tuhin Kanta Pandey, said that “the government hoped to complete the valuation exercise of LIC by November-December.” The Modi government aims to raise Rs. 900 billion ($12 billion) by selling 5 to 10 percent of the government’s current 100 percent ownership.

The Modi government announced a whole slew of pro-investor economic “reforms” during the budget session of parliament in February. Modi, who is known for his use of crude and trite phrases, stated at the outset that the Indian government has “no business to be in business.” He then stated that the mantra of the government’s remaining three-year term in office is “Monetise and Modernise.”

Monetisation refers to handing over publicly owned infrastructure such as railways, ports, roads and electricity assets for “management,” i.e., sporadic maintenance, by private companies. These companies would then charge fees to the public, the supposed owners of these assets to use their own facilities, with a small portion of this “income” to be handed over to the Indian government.

Modernization is a codeword for selling off India’s state sector to domestic and international companies so that they can be run “efficiently,” i.e., transforming workplaces into sweatshops by imposing long working hours and low pay and further expanding the use of contract workers who can be hired and fired at will.

The Air India sale to the Tata Group was consummated in short order, with the government offering especially lucrative terms to the buyer, so as to demonstrate to Indian and international capital its determination to kick-start its privatization drive. The BJP government was determined not to repeat what happened in 2018 when its attempt to sell off a 76 percent stake in Air India elicited not a single bid.

Air India was one of the top-class international airlines prior to 2006. At that time the Congress Party-led UPA government forced Air India and also the state-owned domestic Indian Airlines to order a huge fleet of 111 airplanes from US Boeing corporation—68 for Air India and 43 for Indian Airlines. The two airlines, which were subsequently merged by the government, were forced to finance their gargantuan combined $15 billion (Rs. 700 billion) purchase by taking on huge amounts of debt. The UPA government was adamant that the deal go ahead, jettisoning Air India’s plans to buy planes from European-based Airbus, so as to help cement the Indo-US “global strategic partnership” it had struck with Washington the year before. Then US President George W. Bush personally lobbied Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to proceed with the Boeing order.

Although final details of the Air Indian sale are still to be worked out, the Indian government has sent notices to Air India workers to vacate their staff quarters within six months of the sale being formally consummated.

The unions that represent the Air India workers have bleated their opposition but have no intention of making the Air India workers’ struggle the spearhead of a working-class offensive against the BJP’s privatisation drive and, more generally, its rapacious big business agenda.

Both the Stalinist Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM) and the smaller Communist Party of India (CPI) have systematically suppressed the class struggle, diverting workers into futile protest campaigns aimed at appealing to Modi to change course, while trying to politically tie them to the Congress and other right-wing opposition parties.

The CPM’s trade union arm, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions CITU which claims to represent over 5 million workers, has denounced the Air India sale as “anti-national” borrowing a phrase the Modi government has used to criminalize dissent by students, journalists and intellectuals. It accuses the Modi government of handing over “one of the prides of India” to a “private monopoly house ... virtually free of cost,” while toothlessly calling upon its affiliated trade unions to “resist” such “anti-national activities.”

“Fifth wave” of COVID-19 underway in France

Samuel Tissot

Following a continuous fall in cases since mid-August, the last seven-day period has seen an increase of 11.5 percent in new COVID-19 cases in France. After the seven-day average for cases reached a low of 4,172 on October 9 it has since risen to 4,647. On Tuesday, the total number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 rose for the first time in two months by 15 to 6,483. As of October 17, France’s estimated R0 reproduction rate was 1.05.

A paramedic walks out of a tent that was set up in front of the emergency ward of the Cremona hospital, northern Italy [Credit: Claudio Furlan/Lapresse via AP, file]

In the last week, over 200 people have died from the virus, taking the total number of deaths from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic to over 118,000. Across Europe the death toll is now over 1.27 million, according to worldometers.info.

In early September, the Pasteur Institute warned that winter conditions will lead to a renewed surge of the virus in France and a peak of hospitalizations exceeding those witnessed in 2020. This calculation was based on assuming that vaccine efficacy does not diminish over time and does not consider the impact of new variants.

Even before the onset in France of cold weather, which typically favors the spread of respiratory viruses, COVID-19’s resurgence is well underway. Without immediate measures to curb the spread of the virus, within a few weeks daily cases will once again be in the tens of thousands.

The rise in cases, despite increasing levels of vaccination in the population, expose the government’s lie that vaccines alone can contain and end the pandemic. As of October 17, 67.4 percent of the population are fully protected, and 75.5 percent have received one dose. While vaccination is a necessary measure to protect the population from severe infection and reduce transmission, it is not sufficient by itself to stop the virus.

It is highly likely conditions in France will resemble those in the UK within a matter of weeks. Both countries have fully vaccinated around 67 percent of their populations. In the UK, over the last week, average daily cases were 44,251 and nearly 1,000 people died.

The recent decision of the Macron government to remove masks in schools will only further drive the acceleration in infections. Last week, 1180 school classes were closed due to positive COVID cases.

The government’s decision to end free testing on October 15 is set to artificially lower the true level of infection in France in coming weeks. Encouraging people to avoid testing, even when they are symptomatic, will lead to people infected with the virus continuing to go to work, commute and socialize, endangering all those they contact.

The move to end accessible COVID-19 testing, the primary method of tracking of the virus in the population, exposes the ruling class’ determination to jettison all measures to combat the virus.

The decision to reopen schools amid widespread transmission has put millions of children at risk of catching a damaging, and in some cases deadly, virus. It also means that, particularly in primary schools where children are totally unvaccinated, the virus has been able to circulate rapidly before being taken home to parents and families.

Even though the rise in cases after weeks of steady decline proves the pandemic is far from over, it has scarcely been mentioned in the bourgeois press. Where the rise in the rate of infections is acknowledged, the only response has been to dismiss concerns over the increase.

France Info acknowledged the rise in cases but cited France’s high vaccine coverage and the slight fall in deaths over the past week to conclude, “No fifth epidemic wave, like last autumn, for the moment.” 20Minutes asked “is it the beginning of the fifth wave?” before invoking similar arguments to conclude, “it is of course too earlier to say.”

Critically, these publications ignore the delay between rising infections and deaths that has been observed at every other step of the pandemic in France, as well as in other highly-vaccinated countries like Singapore, which has seen a massive spike in infection and hospitalization despite having 82.4 percent of its population fully vaccinated.

Speaking to Le Monde last week, Jean-François Delfraissy, the head of the government’s scientific council, warned: “The other possibility is the emergence of a variant that is even more transmissible or that escapes the immunity conferred by the vaccine.” He added that despite the observed fall in cases observed through September and early October, “In the long term, of course, the crisis is not over.”

The vaccine’s ability to reduce the chance of death and transmission is under constant threat from the development of new variants. While booster shots are essential for added protection, and should be rolled out as widely as possible, they risk being ineffective with the development of new variants. Huge numbers of the population also remain unvaccinated, including all children under 12, 735,000 people aged between 65 and 74, and 638,000 people over 75.

These facts underline the necessity of a scientific policy to eliminate the virus and end the pandemic once and for all.

If capitalist governments across the continent had their way, the virus would have been allowed to circulate freely throughout the pandemic. In March 2020, it was only a wildcat strike movement that began with workers in Italy and spread like wildfire across Europe and in the United States that led to the first, and so far, only, scientific measures to combat the virus.

With the complicity of the corporatist unions, restrictions were ended prematurely in France and the progress that had been made toward eliminating the virus was lost. Since then, various limited lockdowns in France have only been implemented by the government when threatened with social unrest and a renewed movement of the working class.