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Screen capture from David Duke video on YouTube promoted in emails by Drs. Paula Manduca and Swee Ang.

Background

  • Two of the main authors of An Open Letter for the People of Gaza (July 23, 2014), which appeared in The Lancet medical journal in July 2014, promoted a video made by American white supremacist David Duke. The two are Drs. Paola Manduca and Swee Ang Chai. (The other authors are Drs. Mads Gilbert, Iain Chalmers and Derek Summerfield.) The Lancet is a UK-based medical journal. Richard Horton has served as Editor in Chief since 1995.
  • In December 2013, an Italian court ruled in favor of expelling Duke from Italy where he “was allegedly trying to establish a pan-European neo-Nazi group” from a village in northern Italy. The court called him “socially dangerous for his racist and anti-Semitic views.”
  • On August 14, 2014, Dr. Paola Manduca forwarded an email from Dr. Swee Ang with the subject line “CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix” to the Italian Google group Sempre Contro la Guerra. The email contains a link to a Duke video of the same title.
  • Ang wrote in her email, “This is shocking video please watch. This is not about Palestine – it is about all of us!”  The email also contained, in bold red lettering, “SEE THIS VIDEO BEFORE IT IS REMOVED FROM CIRCULATION – Please do pass on to others who you think would be interested and would pass on>>>The whole world needs to know.”
  • In February 2017, when asked about the antisemitic video at the University College of London Union, Swee Ang responded that she doesn’t “think it’s entirely anti-Jewish.”
  • The video is described on Duke’s YouTube page as “reveal[ing] how the Zionist Matrix of Power controls Media, Politics and Banking and how each Part of this Tribalist matrix supports and protects each other!”  The video labels the Federal Reserve Bank as “the Zio Club FED,” calls NBC News anchor Brian Williams a “good Shabbez goy Zioscript reader,” identifies U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan as a “Zio tribalist,” and states, “Zios invaded and took over Walt Disney Corp. just as they invaded and took over Palestine.”
  • Manduca also posted many other emails on the Sempre Contro la Guerra group with extremist and often antisemitic themes, demonstrating a pattern.

Further Information and Context

Sempre Contro la Guerra Google group

The Sempre Contro la Guerra group contains many other postings with extremist and often antisemitic themes demonstrating a pattern.

  • On September 9, 2014 Manduca posted an article by Paul Larudee with the subject line “israel and parassites” (sic).  The article’s main theme is that Israel, through the American Jewish community, is a “parasite” feeding off the host/victim nation – the United States – by controlling key U.S. institutions.  This “Jew as parasite” theme was prominent in Nazi ideology.  Larudee wrote:
    • “the Israel Lobby has grown with few constraints, fed by its domination of the American Jewish community, extensive control of publishing and the media…”
    • “Israel now controls US policy in the Middle East…”
    • “Israel has thus constructed a strangler fig network of roots and vines that is feeding itself from the resources of world’s most powerful nation while gradually starving that nation… if a strangler fig is allowed to thrive, its host will wither and die, and only its form will remain as an empty shell for as long as the parasite continues to survive.”
  • Manduca posted an email on May 1, 2014 titled “Egyptian ruler General Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi is a Jew.” In it, Manduca describes Judaism as a “‘blood determined’ religious group with ethnic and racist background and imperialist and genocidal in the context of Palestine.” (sic)
  • On August 24, 2014 Manduca posted an article by Gilad Atzmon, who is described by the Anti-Defamation League as an “anti-Semite.” In the article uploaded by Manduca, Atzmon wrote, “America is not the first or second super power to be brought down by Jewish power.” He also wrote, “I think that a ‘goyim defense league’ is a necessary development. I have come to believe that resistance to Jewish politics and power is the only thing that can save world peace as well as the Jews.”
  • On April 16, 2013 Manduca forwarded an email that provided a conspiracy theory behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing: “There is no mention of billions made by investors with inside knowledge; no mainstream media tried to investigate the short selling and the US stock market collapse that happened hours BEFORE the bombings (who profited?)…  Let us hope that someone in the FBI is smart enough to look more carefully at the clues in Boston and find the real culprits behind these bombings instead of buying the Zionist spin.”
  • On June 21, 2014 Manduca forwarded an email sent to the Coordination List of Italian BDS that contained an appeal from the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).  The appeal “urgently call[ed] on all the supporters and friends of Palestine, the Palestinian people in the world, to our communities and to the Palestinian people throughout the world in exile and in the Diaspora to take to the streets and to act in response to attacks by the occupation and the ongoing atrocities against almost all the cities, villages, refugee camps and villages in the West Bank and Gaza.” The PFLP is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Canada.  (emphasis added)
  • Throughout the war with Hamas, Manduca frequently posted press releases from the Ministry of Health in Gaza, an arm of the Hamas-led government.  On August 30, she posted “the final statistical report on the July-August Israeli offensive against Gaza.”  The “report” consists of a one page infographic.
  • On August 25, 2014 Manduca posted a lengthy Lettera aperta “Frontiere aperte per Gaza” (Open Letter “Open borders to Gaza”). The letter falsely describes the three Israeli teenagers kidnapped and murdered by Hamas members as “3 young Israeli reservists” (3 giovani riservisti Israeliani) thus erasing the fact that the three were non-combatants. (This claim was repeated in five other letters posted by Manduca.) The letter also minimized the danger posed by nearly three dozen tunnels dug by Hamas under the border into Israeli communities. The letter calls the Israeli operation to find and destroy these tunnels “an excuse” and “a falsehood for the use of propaganda” to cover the real reason for the IDF operation, which the letter says is “for genocide.”
  • On August 28, Manduca posted an email from the Venezuelan Embassy in Malaysia forwarding and praising a letter by the former dictator of communist Cuba, Fidel Castro.  In the letter, Castro writes of the “Yankee-Israeli genocide” being waged in the Gaza Strip.  Castro also described Israel, which is one-fifth the size of Cuba, as “the most powerful empire that has ever been created over half a century” in the Middle East.

Paola Manduca, Interpal, and New Weapons Committee

Paola Manduca is associated with Interpal, which is designated as a terrorist entity by the United States. The BBC describes how funds from Interpal have “helped build up Hamas into what it is today by most of them being sent to Islamic (partner) charities in Gaza and the West Bank, a number of which promoted Hamas’ ideology.”

This summer Manduca raised money for Interpal sending out an appeal to the Sempre Contro la Guerra group. In 2013 The Lancet published a paper co-authored by Manduca that blamed Israel for increased birth defects in Gaza. The paper was funded by “Interpal Gaza” and “approved by the Ministry of Health, Gaza Strip,” an arm of the Hamas-led Gaza government.

Manduca is a leading member of the New Weapons Committee (NWC), a “group of academics, researchers and media professionals focused on promoting risk assessment surveys on the effects upon individuals and population of the most recent kinds of weapons used in the course of wars.

The group was born in the third quarter of 2006 after Israel-Lebanon conflict.”

Since then, NWC has been the primary source for the conspiracy theory that Israel has been “experimenting new non-conventional weapons in Gaza” (sic). In a January 2009 press release, NWC claimed, “There is growing evidence that the Israeli army is using non-conventional weapons” but admitted that “it is very difficult to verify this usage directly,” that confirmation is impossible “due to a lack of access to the area,” and that NWC relied solely on “the images of the dead and wounded” and “news from witnesses.”

One of these “witnesses” was Dr. Mads Gilbert, another co-author of the “Open Letter” that appeared in The Lancet. Gilbert, who stood as the Red Party’s candidate in local elections in the town of Tromsoe, Norway in 2007, has a long record of justifying terror and supporting Hamas.  He has repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians and invented allegations of use of illegal weapons. Though having volunteered at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, he made no mention of evidence that this hospital had been used for military purposes and also shielded the Hamas leadership.

Gilbert justified the 9-11 terror attacks, telling the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet,  “The attack on New York did not come as a surprise after the policy that the West has led during the last decades…The oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with.” When asked directly in the same interview, “Do you support a terror attack against the USA?,” Gilbert replied, “Terror is a bad weapon but the answer is yes within the context which I have mentioned.”

Swee Ang,  Medical Aid for Palestinians, and The Lancet

Swee Ang is a founding trustee of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), an NGO that uses the veneer of medicine and humanitarian objectives to impose a highly politicized platform, repeatedly accusing Israel of “indiscriminate attacks” and “collective punishment” against the Palestinian population. In 2002, MAP accepted the proceeds of a book, After the Terror, which argues for the legitimacy of Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli civilians. MAP’s government donors include the European Commission, Ireland (Irish Aid), Scottish Community Foundation, Trocaire (Ireland), and the UK (Department for International Development).

Emails from Drs. Paula Manduca and Swee Ang promoting David Duke video, “CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix”