Tucker Carlson reviews Putin interview and reveals what ‘radicalized’ him
RT | February 12, 2024
Following his two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, US journalist Tucker Carlson opened up about his experience at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
In an hour-long interview with TV presenter Emad Eldin Adeeb, Carlson addressed why the conversation with Putin did not touch on certain topics, how the US political establishment had reacted to it, and why Washington has failed to understand Moscow, among other things.
Putin the diplomat
Carlson claimed that he had an off-the-record conversation with Putin after their interview, but would not reveal what was discussed, however.
Carlson did say that Putin seemed willing to negotiate with the West about both the end of the Ukraine conflict and a new balance of power in the world. Diplomacy is the art of compromise, and almost everyone “other than maybe the United States during the unipolar period” understands this, Carlson said. But while Putin wants the conflict to end, his position will only harden the longer it goes on, he added.
NATO and Russia
One of the major revelations in the interview for Carlson was that Russia had asked to join NATO – and while then-US President Bill Clinton seemed receptive, his aides pushed against the idea and it ultimately failed.
Since the entire point of NATO was to keep the Soviet Union out of Western Europe, Carlson said in Dubai, “if the Russians ask to join the alliance, that would suggest you have solved the problem and you can move on to do something constructive with your life. But we refused.”
“Go sit in the sauna for an hour and think about what that means,” he added.
The problem with Western politicians
Politicians in the West aren’t setting themselves “achievable” goals, Carlson has argued.
“I have heard personally US government officials say well we just have to return Crimea to Ukraine,” he said. “That’s not going to happen, short of a nuclear war. That’s insane, actually.”
Even bringing up this kind of idea “shows you are a child, you don’t understand the area at all, and you have no real sense of what’s possible,” the journalist concluded.
It’s always Munich 1938
According to Carlson, one of the biggest issues in the US and the West in general is the tendency to reduce everything to the 1938 Munich conference, at which Britain and France sought to “appease” Nazi Germany by giving it a portion of Czechoslovakia.
“The American policymaker historical template is tiny – in fact there’s only one – and it’s a 2-year period in the late 1930s, and everything is based on that understanding of history and human nature. That’s insane,” Carlson said.
How Moscow ‘radicalized’ him
Carlson pointed out that he’s 54 and grew up in an America that had nice, safe and beautiful cities, “and we no longer have them.”
It was “radicalizing” to see Moscow “cleaner, safer and prettier” than American cities, he said, or be reminded of that in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – while in the US, one can’t ride the subway in New York City because it’s dirty and unsafe.
“That’s a voluntary choice,” he said. “You don’t have to have crime, actually.”
Reacting to the backlash
Asked why he hadn’t raised certain topics with Putin, Carlson said he wanted to do the interview because he was interested in how the Russian leader saw the world – and not to inject himself into the discussion.
Most journalists who interview leaders the US dislikes tend to make it about themselves, Carlson added, and since he only cared about the approval of his wife and their children, he didn’t need to virtue-signal.
Asked to comment on former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton calling him a “useful idiot” for Russia, Carlson laughed it off.
“She’s a child, I don’t listen to her,” he said. “How’s Libya doing?”
Elon Musk Goes to Canossa
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 12, 2024
Although unknown to almost all present-day Americans, Emperor Henry IV was one of the most powerful European monarchs of his day. Under his twenty year reign, the Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages governed Germany, the Low Countries, much of Italy, and other important lands, with many considering him heir to the fabled Charlemagne.
With the arrogance that came from holding such enormous temporal power and commanding large armies, he challenged the authority of Pope Gregory VII, but the Pontiff quickly brought him low, excommunicating him from the Catholic Church and declaring that Henry’s powerful feudal vassal lords no longer owed him any allegiance. Faced with the very real prospect that he might lose his throne, the emperor traveled to Canossa in hopes of seeing the Holy Father and gaining his forgiveness, then waited three long days outside the castle walls despite the bitter cold, clad in an uncomfortable hair-shirt, and according to some accounts wearing no shoes in the frozen snow. The Pope finally allowed him to enter and granted him an audience, then accepted his capitulation and lifted the religious penalty that had been imposed. In the centuries since that famous incident, the phrase “going to Canossa” has meant the surrender of a proud, powerful figure who does penance and begs forgiveness, submitting to the forces that had humbled him.
Given this history, it’s hardly surprising that the phrase was widely circulated a couple of weeks ago when Elon Musk traveled to Auschwitz to offer his abject submission to Jewish power, donning a skullcap, promising to root out “antisemitism” on the platform he controlled, and even declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”
The two most powerful and influential figures in today’s world are surely Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But I think a reasonable case can be made that Elon Musk should be placed third on that global list.
Our current Western era is dominated by oligarchic wealth and Musk has ranked as the richest man in the world for much of the last few years. The technology industry carries enormous prestige and influence, and Musk is the owner of Tesla, the pioneering electric vehicle company, whose market value is greater than that of the world’s next five car companies combined. His very innovative SpaceX rocket company has become the central pillar of the West’s entire space program, crucial for American national security, while his equally innovative Starlink satellite company has proven itself absolutely vital to Ukraine in its NATO-backed war with Russia, inspiring imitators in China and other countries. More than a year ago, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and took the company private, giving him a media empire far greater than that of any American television network and perhaps as powerful as most of them combined. Meanwhile his own 170 million Twitter Followers provide him a personal megaphone that would be envied by any American president or top Hollywood celebrity.
What other world figure could match Musk in such global power and influence? President Joseph Biden is elderly and doddering and widely despised, very much a Brezhnevian figure from the last days of the decaying USSR and obviously someone totally controlled by his nervous aides. Although former President Donald Trump is the all-but-certain 2024 Republican Presidential nominee and stands a better than even chance of recapturing the White House, he is facing 91 felony charges in court and is detested by nearly half the American population, including an overwhelming majority of our elites; his likely victory this November would be almost entirely due to Biden’s unpopularity. Indeed, given such glaring weakness at the top of the American political hierarchy, some shrewd observers have argued that Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu probably commands greater influence in our own Congress than either Biden or Trump; but in his own country, Netanyahu’s support is at 15%, and he faces a sea of corruption charges, so he might easily end his life in a prison cell.
In our deeply-polarized society, nearly all our other politicians are admired by small devoted followings, but usually despised by many, many more, and I can’t think of any private citizen who can remotely match Musk’s wealth, technological prestige, and media reach.
Meanwhile, traditional spiritual authorities have been reduced to mere shadows of their predecessors. Some nine hundred years ago, Pope Gregory VII humbled a German emperor and even a generation or two ago, Pope John Paul II wielded great international authority, but these days our current Pope Francis only commands a tiny sliver of such influence, and no other religious leader of greater weight comes to mind. So perhaps by default, I think Musk is the most powerful figure in the Western world, and his willingness to humble himself before pro-Israel Jews at Auschwitz amidst the ongoing slaughter in Gaza provides a striking indication of the true balance of temporal and spiritual power in today’s Western world, while also demonstrating which group commands the latter.
Just a few months earlier, Musk had been riding high, having successfully dismantled Twitter’s large censorship department even as he granted an amnesty to most of the banned voices of the previous few years, notably including former President Donald Trump. Under his direction, secret documents were provided to Matt Taibbi and other investigative journalists that produced bombshell revelations of a nefarious government role in orchestrating Twitter censorship. Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter-based interview show had racked up enormous ratings, with his August Trump interview outdrawing the viewership of the official 2024 Republican Presidential debates shown on broadcast television. Musk seemed to be successfully resurrecting Twitter’s old motto that it represented “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
Most remarkably, he’d apparently seen off the challenge of the very formidable ADL, which for decades had terrified so many of the powerful. When that widely-feared censorship organization accused him of allowing “antisemitism” and “racism” to flourish on his platform and sought to intimidate his advertisers, Musk threatened to sue them for business interference, turning that weapon of “lawfare” against one of its most prolific wielders even as a #BanTheADL hashtag went viral on Twitter. The ADL had financial assets of $500 million and enormous media influence, but for the first time its leaders realized that they faced an opponent who greatly outmatched them in such resources, and fearing the risk of a multi-billion-dollar legal judgement, its leaders quickly settled, abandoning their attacks against Musk and Twitter.
However, the sudden, unexpected Hamas attacks of October 7th changed everything. Well over a thousand Israelis died, and the anger and agitation of Jewish activists in America reached an unprecedented fever-pitch. Israel soon began a merciless bombardment of Gaza in retaliation, eventually killing tens of thousands of helpless civilians, and those horrific scenes of death and devastation reached the entire world on social media, bypassing the traditional pro-Israel gatekeepers who controlled Western broadcast television and newspapers. As a result, polls shockingly revealed that younger Americans—whose information on world events came from the Internet—were quite evenly divided between Israel and Hamas or even actually favored the latter. So Jewish and pro-Israel organizations began an all-out mobilization to suppress such “antisemitic” material.
Cities and college campuses across the Western world saw large demonstrations against Israel’s televised slaughter of women and children, with Muslim immigrants naturally becoming an important element of these, causing Jewish activists to fiercely denounce those groups as “antisemitic.” For generations, Jews had overwhelmingly supported non-European immigrants, while widely praising and promoting all attacks by non-whites against white Gentile society. Most recently they had been the primary backers of the massive 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, triggered when a black lifelong career criminal died of a drug overdose while in police custody. But with “Jewish privilege” and “Israeli privilege” now suddenly coming under such hostile criticism, Jewish groups turned on a dime and demanded total censorship and suppression. Anti-immigrant right-wingers noted this rank hypocrisy in their social media posts, and in mid-November one such Tweet caught Musk’s eye, prompting him to endorse it: “You have said the actual truth” he wrote.
Those simple six words probably took Musk merely seconds to type but they may have shifted the trajectory of American history. Almost immediately, waves of Jewish and pro-Israel activists swarmed to denounce him, and many leading corporations pulled their advertising from Twitter, threatening its financial viability. Faced with such an enormous backlash, Musk traveled abroad to meet with Israel’s president, pledging to combat “antisemitism.” On that same visit, he also posed for a photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, solemnly eyeing an empty crib, which presumably symbolized the forty Israeli babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas, one of the many outrageous atrocity-hoaxes promoted by Israel and its dishonest propagandists.
In the years following Donald Trump’s upset 2016 victory, right-wingers had been heavily censored on many social media platforms, while progressives were free to run wild, but now the latter began suffering the same fate for criticizing Israel’s massacres. Since the early years of the twentieth century, Israel’s ruling Likud party and its Irgun predecessor had always used the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” promising a Greater Israel under total Jewish control and domination. But over the last couple of decades, anti-Zionist progressives had embraced those same words, advocating a unified secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. Musk now declared that latter phrase “genocidal” and warned that it would trigger an immediate ban from Twitter, even as Netanyahu continued publicly using it in its original Jewish-supremacist meaning.
A few weeks later, Musk traveled to Auschwitz, accompanied by his companion and guide, a young pro-Israel pundit named Ben Shapiro, whose own right-wing media empire had been lavishly funded by Zionist donors. This widely-covered quasi-religious pilgrimage seemingly marked Musk’s complete capitulation to the awesome power of Organized Jewry.
Musk was hardly the only prominent figure to bow down before the Jewish forces of Zionism, now fully mobilized by the Hamas attack and the ensuing Israel/Gaza conflict. When Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and first began to draw fire from the ADL, another prominent public figure was also facing that organization’s wrath. As I wrote at the time:
Perhaps by coincidence, a somewhat similar controversy had recently played out in the case of a different high-profile individual, the billionaire black rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. Although I’d previously had only the vaguest impression of him, he was apparently a towering international celebrity, as well as being among the wealthiest black Americans who had ever lived, while having tens of millions of followers on Twitter and other networks.
Apparently for some reason or other, he became angry and agitated over what he saw as the overwhelming Jewish influence in the worlds of business and media, and began loudly saying so in various venues and on his social networks. As might be expected, the media reaction was swift and devastating, portraying him as a moral leper, and thereby forcing most of his business partners to cut their ties, often at enormous financial cost. Apparently 25% of the profits of footware giant Adidas came from West’s line of sneakers, but they abandoned the longtime deal at a total cost of almost $650 million when their media masters proclaimed it as a fundamental issue of morality. At the other end of the spectrum, Goodwill Industries announced that they would no longer offer their impoverished clientele the donated cast-offs associated with such a vile anti-Semite. The rapper’s longtime bank even closed his accounts and would no longer provide a haven for his money.
The immediate result of all these coordinated blows was that the bulk of West’s large fortune suddenly evaporated, while his (Jewish) personal trainer publicly declared that if he continued his bad behavior the erstwhile billionaire might end up spending the rest of his life heavily drugged and imprisoned in a mental institution. Almost none of his fellow black celebrities rallied to his side, or if they did, I didn’t hear about it. The story soon dropped from the media, perhaps permanently taking with it the once-iconic global black celebrity.
While Musk overcame his ADL challengers, West had quickly abandoned the fight and disappeared from public attention. But the black rapper now had a new album ready for release, so he and his advisors apparently decided that only the most abject sort of public surrender to Jewish power could safeguard his music sales. Even as Israel was clearly committing the greatest televised massacre of defenseless women and children in the history of the world, outraging much of his youthful rap following, West declared his boundless love and admiration for Jews and the Jewish State, recording a 40-minute video apologizing for his past antisemitic statements and Tweeting out a shorter, similar message written in Hebrew.
Back in late 2022 I’d expressed considerable skepticism that either Musk or West would succeed in their separate challenges to Jewish power, and readers can judge for themselves the extent to which my predictions proved correct.
- American Pravda: Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Much Riskier Targets
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 21, 2022 • 3,800 Words
Although Musk has now bent his knee to the broader Zionist coalition, I’ll have to admit that he actually did surprising well against his initial ADL tormentors, even without utilizing the secret history of that nefarious organization that I’d offered him during his battle.
- Elon Musk and the True History of the ADL
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 13, 2023 • 6,900 Words
The capitulations of Musk and West hardly surprised me. But far more noteworthy has been the case of independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose total surrender to Zionism over the last several months has deeply disappointed so many of his erstwhile admirers, certainly including myself.
Although I’d only been very vaguely aware of Kennedy until 2021 and remained deeply skeptical of much of his notorious anti-vaxxing advocacy, I’d greatly admired his vocal positions on many other important issues, especially including our disastrous Ukraine proxy-war against Russia and therefore expected to give him my vote in November.
I was particularly impressed by his remarkable courage on certain historical matters of a personal nature. Several years ago, he had publicly declared that Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of his father, was innocent of the crime and should be released after more than a half-century in prison, and he further proclaimed that his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, had also died at the hands of a conspiracy. I noted that although the mainstream media ferociously vilified him on numerous other grounds, they tended to carefully avoid these sorts of “great unmentionables” because the facts were so strongly on Kennedy’s side.
- American Pravda: Why the Media Fears RFK Jr.
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 14, 2023 • 8,200 Words
And once anyone recognized that Sirhan had not fired the fatal shot, I argued that important elements of the conspiracy would have immediately suggested the true culprits behind the crime:
David Talbot’s influential 2007 book Brothers revealed that Robert F. Kennedy had been convinced almost from the first that his brother had been struck down in a conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his circle of friends that he stood little chance of tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments after winning the crucial California presidential primary. The logical assumption is that his death was engineered by the same elements as that of his elder brother, who were now acting to protect themselves from the consequences of their earlier crime.
A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan had fired a pistol at the scene and was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder. But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report revealed that the fatal bullet came from a completely different direction, while the acoustical record proves that far more shots were fired than the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Such hard evidence demonstrates a conspiracy.
Sirhan himself seemed dazed and confused, later claiming to have no memory of events, and Talbot mentions that various assassination researchers have long argued that he was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning. Nearly all these writers are usually reluctant to note that the selection of a Palestinian as scapegoat in the killing points in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman’s recent book also includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young Palestinian was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.
Kennedy seemed like an intelligent, thoughtful individual, and if he had concluded years ago that Sirhan was innocent, I assumed that the remainder of this chain of reasoning would have fallen into place, producing a high-profile Presidential candidate willing to stand up for American interests against those of Israel. But instead Kennedy recently moved in exactly the opposite direction, becoming the most egregiously pro-Zionist candidate in the race and heavily relying upon his ultra-Zionist advisors Morton Klein and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. In a recent public interview, he shockingly declared that the Palestinians were “the most pampered people in the world” even as hundreds of thousands of them were currently facing death by starvation at Israel’s hands.
Kennedy’s apparent willingness to betray his principles—and the memories of his martyred father and uncle—was hugely disheartening to me. Moreover, with both Biden and Trump known as fervent supporters of Israel, a contrary position emphasizing a ceasefire and sympathy towards the suffering Palestinians might have provided a political home for the substantial minority of voters and activists taking that position, certainly attracting huge support among college students and other youthful Americans. But it was not to be. Imagine if Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had run in 1968 as the fiercest Vietnam War hawk in the race.
Unfortunately, the total political submission of Musk, West, and Kennedy to the massed power of Jews and Zionism is hardly a new development. Indeed, they constitute merely the latest examples in a long series of such Gentile defeats and surrenders, as I had noted at the beginning of my original 2018 article on the ADL:
Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.
Musk certainly stands as the greatest of these unfortunate recent examples, but almost exactly one hundred years before his submission, a rather similar historical case occurred involving another world-famous industrialist tycoon who also sought to challenge Jewish power but ultimately apologized and abandoned the fight.
Although the name of Henry Ford remains well-known to most Americans, I doubt that more than a small fraction are fully aware of the immense global stature he had enjoyed during the early decades of the twentieth century. The assembly-line mass production techniques he pioneered at his Ford Motor Company were responsible for transforming the automobile from a mere plaything of the rich into a reasonably-priced product owned by most Americans, so his achievements completely reshaped our society and the rest of the world as a consequence. His business success established him as one of the wealthiest men in the world—one of his later biographies was entitled The Last Billionaire—but by doubling the basic wages of his ordinary workers, he also created the American middle class and became a worldwide legend.
According to some accounts, an ailing President Woodrow Wilson sought to enlist the apolitical Ford as his Democratic successor in the White House. By the early 1920s Adolf Hitler ranked Ford as one of his greatest personal heroes, but Vladimir Lenin felt much the same way, and the Bolsheviks called their Soviet industrial policy “Fordizm.” In Aldous Huxley’s famous 1931 novel Brave New World, “Fordism” had become the world’s secular religion, with the population celebrating “Ford Day,” swearing oaths “By Ford!” and displaying Christian crosses truncated into a symbol representing the Ford Model T.
But in the aftermath of the First World War, Ford became very concerned about the unprecedented growth of Jewish power in America and how the entire mainstream media was increasingly intimidated from reporting the associated crimes and abuses. He had bought his local newspaper The Dearborn Independent in 1918 and within a couple of years transformed it into a national publication with enormous circulation, seeking to rectify this situation, as I discussed in a 2018 article:
As for The Dearborn Independent, Ford had apparently launched his newspaper on a national basis not long after the end of the war, intending to focus on controversial topics, especially those related to Jewish misbehavior, whose discussion he believed was being ignored or suppressed by nearly all mainstream media outlets. I had been aware that he had long been one of the wealthiest and most highly-regarded individuals in America, but I was still astonished to discover that his weekly newspaper, previously almost unknown to me, had reached a total national circulation of 900,000 by 1925, ranking it as the second largest in the country and by far the biggest with a national distribution. I found no easy means of examining the contents of a typical issue, but apparently the anti-Jewish articles of the first couple of years had been collected and published as short books, together constituting the four volumes of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a notoriously anti-Semitic work occasionally mentioned in my history textbooks. Eventually my curiosity got the best of me, so I clicked a few buttons on Amazon.com, bought the set, and wondered what I would discover.
Based on all my pre-suppositions, I expected to read some foaming-at-the-mouth screed, and doubted I would be able to get past the first dozen pages before losing interest and consigning the volumes to gather dust on my shelves. But what I actually encountered was something entirely different.
Over the last couple of decades, the enormous growth in the power of Jewish and pro-Israel groups in America has occasionally led writers to cautiously raise certain facts regarding the untoward influence of those organizations and activists, while always carefully emphasizing that the vast majority of ordinary Jews do not benefit from these policies and actually might be harmed by them, even leaving aside the possible risk of eventually provoking an anti-Jewish backlash. To my considerable surprise, I found that the material in Ford’s 300,000 word series seemed to follow this exact same pattern and tone.
Although I somehow managed to plow through all four volumes of The International Jew, the unrelenting drum-beat of Jewish intrigue and misbehavior became somewhat soporific after a while, especially since so many of the examples provided may have loomed quite large in 1920 or 1921 but were almost totally forgotten today. Most of the content was a collection of rather monotonous complaints regarding Jewish malfeasance, scandals, or clannishness, the sort of mundane matters which might have normally appeared in the pages of an ordinary newspaper or magazine, let alone one of the muckraking type.
However, I cannot fault the publication for having such a narrow focus. A consistent theme was that because of the intimidating fear of Jewish activists and influence, virtually all of America’s regular media outlets avoided discussion of any of these important matters, and since this new publication was intended to fill that void, it necessarily provided coverage overwhelmingly skewed toward that particular subject. The articles were also aimed at gradually expanding the window of public debate and eventually shaming other periodicals into discussing Jewish misbehavior. When leading magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine began running such articles, this result was hailed as a major success.
Another important goal was to make ordinary Jews more aware of the very problematical behavior of many of their community leaders. Occasionally, the publication received a letter of praise from a self-proclaimed “proud American Jew” commending the series and sometimes including a check to purchase subscriptions for other members of his community, and this achievement might become the subject of an extended discussion.
And although the details of these individual stories differed considerably from those of today, the pattern of behavior being criticized seemed remarkably similar. Change a few facts, adjust the society for a century of progress, and many of the stories might be exactly the same ones that well-meaning people concerned about the future of our country are quietly discussing today. Most remarkably, there were even a couple of columns about the troubled relationship between the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine and the surrounding native Palestinians, and deep complaints that under Jewish pressure the media often totally misreported or hid some of the outrages suffered by the latter group.
As might be expected, Jewish organizations were ferociously hostile to Ford’s media project and they launched a fierce lobbying campaign to force him to cease his critical coverage, employing consumer boycotts, widespread vilification, and damaging lawsuits. Meanwhile, few if any prominent Americans publicly joined Ford’s efforts so several years of such relentless Jewish attacks eventually proved successful. By 1924, Ford had ended his series of articles on Jewish activities and the billionaire industrialist finally shuttered his newspaper in 1927, while also sending an apologetic public letter to the president of the ADL recanting his “antisemitic” views. Just like today’s Elon Musk, America’s greatest industrialist of the early twentieth century took his own painful trip to Canossa. Although heavily slanted against Ford, the basic facts of this story and Ford’s capitulation are provided in a lengthy section of his Wikipedia article.
By the early 1930s, Christianity had been the dominant religion of the West for nearly two thousand years and seemed so strongly rooted in American society as to be unassailable. Therefore, Huxley’s futuristic novel suggesting that it would be replaced by the secular religion of Fordism must surely have seemed an absurd possibility at the time, perhaps even constituting deliberate satire. But over the last three generations, a somewhat similar religious replacement has indeed occurred, though the doctrine elevated would surely have shocked and dismayed both Huxley and Ford.
Under the inexorable ideological pressure of heavily-Jewish Hollywood and our mainstream media organs, the traditional Christianity of the West has been steadily deconstructed and pushed aside, often replaced by the quasi-religion of Holocaustianity, which features an entirely different set of martyrs, sacred texts, and holy places. The central shrine of Holocaustianity is Auschwitz, a former Nazi concentration camp, so Musk demonstrated his complete submission to this reigning spiritual doctrine and its tenets by undertaking a pilgrimage to that hallowed ground.
In 2018, I discussed how this remarkable shift in the beliefs of the Western world, noting that even the top spiritual leaders of other global religions apparently recognized Holocaustianity as their own uber-faith, far more important in its central elements than their own.
According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.
Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.
In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media today provide the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular society, and the overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed films over Christian ones has obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our globalized world, the American entertainment-media complex totally dominates Europe and the rest of the West, so that the ideas generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds of millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully recognize that fact.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI sought to heal the long-standing Vatican II rift within the Catholic Church and reconcile with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a major media controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long been a Holocaust Denier and also believed that Jews should convert to Christianity. Although the many other differences in Catholic doctrinal faith were fully negotiable, apparently refusing to accept the reality of the Holocaust was not, and Williamson remained estranged from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was even prosecuted for heresy by the German government.
Just as the Popes of the Middle Ages deployed the sacred power of Christ and Christianity to humble even the most powerful of earthly monarchs and force them to submit, Jews and Zionists today use the power of the Holocaust and Holocaustianity in much the same way, with even the mightiest of Western figures such as Elon Musk helpless before it.
For generations, Hollywood and the media steadily nibbled away at the legitimacy of traditional Christianity, while academic scholars boldly questioned its truth and emphasized historical doubts. As a consequence, neither Musk nor any other prominent Westerner today trembles before Christian symbols nor bows down to the anointed representatives of that faith. But instead it is the Holocaust that has become inviolate, with the harshest social and economic sanctions visited upon those who question its elements or dispute its claims. Across much of the West, any such challenges are subject to severe legal penalties, including lengthy prison sentences, the present-day equivalent of once-common blasphemy laws. And that sweeping, transcendent doctrine has therefore become powerful enough to overawe Elon Musk or any other public figure. This situation has important real-world consequences.
Critics of the events now unfolding in the Middle East must recognize that the Jewish Holocaust of World War II stands as the central justification for the existence of the Jewish state and also as the universal excuse for any of its international crimes, including those currently being committed. Gaza and the Holocaust are so closely connected that they constitute two sides of the same coin.
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Zionists lead the charge to a more authoritarian Canada
By Yves Engler | February 12, 2024
Israel supporters have become a leading fascist force in Canada. They are pushing to restrict civil liberties, dismantle democratic organizations and increase policing.
Since I wrote about the phenomenon a month ago Zionist groups and journalists have deepened their ties to fascist groups and escalated their anti-democratic rhetoric in a bid to defend the genocide in Gaza. Israel lobby groups and commentators have repeatedly taken their cues from the former head of the thuggish and racist Jewish Defence League (JDL). They’ve repeatedly circulated long-time JDL head Meir Weinstein’s videos depicting anti-genocidal protesters as a threat and in a sign of this deepening alignment arch-Israeli nationalist reporter Joe Warmington recently quoted Weinstein in a story tarring protesters. In a Toronto Sun article spurred by the former JDL head’s X post headlined “Security threat against Trudeau all of Canada’s concern”, Warmington quotes Weinstein labelling Palestine solidarity protesters a “risk.”
As they deepen their ties to Khanist fascists, Zionist lobby groups have repeatedly called for marches to be banned, individuals to be fired and talks canceled. To suppress criticism of Canada’s contribution to Israel’s genocide Liberal MPs Anthony Housefather, Marco Mendicino and Ya’ara Saks have repeatedly taken up the call to suspend democratic rights. A month ago Saks posted, “As I stated last week, & will repeat again – protests within largely Jewish neighbourhoods like the ones in our riding of #YorkCentre is completely unacceptable. Targeting an overpass in an area that is known to be local Jewish community is a form of intimidation.”
In response to pressure from Saks, Weinstein, B’nai Brith, CIJA and others, the Toronto police barred protests on an overpass of Highway 401. They then arrested three people for asserting their right to assemble. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) condemned the police’s move and CCLA executive director Noa Mendelsohn Aviv pleaded in the Canadian Jewish News against the Zionists’ push to suppress civil liberties. (A B’nai Brith suit to expand the anti-protest zone was rejected.)
As part of this push to supress demonstrations, Israeli nationalist city councillor James Pasternak pushed Toronto representatives to develop a “policy and framework for the management and monitoring of rallies and protests.” In mid-January Pasternak declared, “It does not take much to see the [Palestinian] gatherings taking place downtown are not Charter-protected.”
In a similar bid to shut down basic democratic rights B’nai Brith called for suppressing the public’s rights to ask questions at city council meetings. Reportedly, on December 21 a handful of members of the public showed up at a meeting of the Agglomeration Council of Montreal in response to Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi telling me he would support Israel even if they killed 100,000 Palestinian children since “good needs to prevail over evil”. Apparently, they asked about Levi’s genocidal apologia and a Hampstead law to send money raised from fines for ripping down posters of hostages to Israel, which led B’nai Brith to file a complaint with the Quebec Municipal Commission (The Commission rejected it). When members of the public asked questions at the January meeting B’nai Brith filed a second complaint (also rejected). The arch Zionist Suburban newspaper/website has published three stories on the matter and a week ago the Montreal Gazette put the Zionists complaints on its front page in a story headlined “Agglomeration council won’t act on antisemitism complaint, Montreal mayor says”.
CIJA and B’nai Brith recently succeeded in pressuring Concordia and Carleton universities to cancel their stops on a national speaking tour with British commentator Sami Hamdi, organized by the Canadian Muslim Political Affairs Council. A recent Zionist sponsored lawsuit also called for the Concordia administration to block students from funding their union. In a similar vein, Conrad Black penned a commentary last week headlined “SHUT CUPE DOWN” due to their Palestine solidarity and in the same National Post newspaper lawyer Howard Levitt called on Zionist members to decertify the Canadian Union Public Employees union.
Fascists have long targeted labour unions. Ditto for books. Montreal’s Jewish Public Library recently pulled the books of Quebec’s most prominent children’s author, Elise Gravel, from their displays because she posted against genocide. A councillor in Côte-St-Luc, Mike Cohen, called for his municipality to do the same.
On X Israel supporters regularly respond to videos of large numbers protesting Canadian complicity in genocide by calling for protesters to be deported. In a similar vein, JSpace board chair Joe Roberts recently called protesters “fifth columnists” whose “real enemy has always been the liberal democracies of the west.”
To supress the “fifth column”, the establishment Jewish groups are campaigning for increased police funding. On January 18 CIJA instigated a letter writing campaign demanding “Reverse the police cuts” in Toronto. Two weeks later, the advocacy agent for Canada’s Jewish Federations wrote, “We continue to urge Council to take action to prevent any shortfall in funding for the Toronto Police Service, so that our police have the tools they need to enforce the law and safeguard the Jewish community and all Torontonians from the threat of hate-motivated and all other types of crime.”
B’nai Brith recently called for increased funding to Montreal police and a slew of Zionist voices have called for the provincial government to allow security guards at schools to carry guns. City councillor Sonny Moroz, who previously worked for arch Zionist federal MP Anthony Housefather, submitted a motion calling for greater police presence in part of Montreal.
CIJA, B’nai Brith and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center have extensive ties to police forces across the country. Recently it was reported that the RCMP’s controversial Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG), which has spied on indigenous and pipeline protests, has been targeting Palestine solidarity protests. In internal budgetary documents C-IRG labelled one protest a “Hamas Day of Action”.
Zionists have long sought to criminalize support for Palestinians. In a bid to promote the slaughter in Gaza, they’ve become cheerleaders for authoritarianism, cancel culture and other forms of intimidation historically associated with fascism.
People in Gaza suffer unprecedented levels of famine-like conditions: UN Food and Agriculture Organization
Press TV – February 12, 2024
Israel’s deadly campaign in Gaza has brought “unprecedented” levels of “near famine-like conditions” in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Virtually 550,000 people are currently facing catastrophic food insecurity levels, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said.
FAO Deputy Director General Beth Bechdol said on Monday all the 2.2 million people in Gaza are in the top three hunger categories, from level three, which is considered an emergency, to level five, or catastrophe.
“We are seeing more and more people essentially on the brink of and moving into famine-like conditions every day.”
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) rates hunger levels from one to five.
“At this stage, probably about 25 percent of that 2.2 million are in that top-level IPC five category,” Bechdol said.
International agencies have repeatedly sounded the alarm that Gaza is starving.
UN special rapporteurs say one in four people are starving and nine out of ten families in some areas spend a day and night without food. They say every single person in Gaza is hungry as Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people.
There is no estimate of how many Palestinians have died directly or indirectly of hunger since Israel launched the war on October 7, 2023. The few remaining hospitals in Gaza typically only record deaths from Israeli attacks.
Israel has killed more than 28,000 people, many of them women and children, since that October day, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The vast majority of the Gaza population has been displaced and the medical system lies in ruins, meaning many deaths go uncounted.
Israeli Army Exiles A Female Palestinian Journalist To Gaza
IMEMC | FEBRUARY 12, 2024
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) confirmed, Sunday, that the Israeli army exiled a Palestinian female journalist from the occupied West Bank to the devastated and destroyed Gaza Strip, after abducting her earlier this month.
The PPS said the army abducted the journalist, Seeqal Yousef Qaddoum, 51, after stopping her at a military roadblock near Ramallah, in the central West Bank, on February 1st.
While the detained journalist was born in the Gaza Strip, she has been living for many years in the Shiokh Palestinian town, east of the southern West Bank city of Hebron.
The PPS added that the army transferred the detained journalist from one of its prisons to the Kerem Shalom Crossing, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, before exiling her to the devastated and destroyed coastal enclave.
Seeqal works for the official, government-run Palestine TV, and was abducted by the soldiers on February 1st after they stopped her at a military roadblock near Ramallah.
She was first taken to HaSharon Israeli prison and then to the Damoun prison, and was interrogated but was never facing charges.
The PPS said the number of female Palestinian detainees in Damoun Israeli prison is more than 45, and added that it doesn’t have any available data on the number of detainees, who were abducted in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, due to Israel’s restrictions on such information, even to international human rights groups, and added that many detainees are subject to “forced disappearances.”
On Sunday morning, the PPS said the number of Palestinian political prisoners has exceeded 6,950 Palestinians, including many elders, women, and children, mostly from their homes, and the dozens who were taken prisoner at military roadblocks, across the occupied West Bank.
Since October 7, the Israeli army began a massive abduction campaign in the West Bank, targeting women, men, and children, and dozens of Palestinians, including laborers from the Gaza Strip who have been living and working in the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Detainees’ Committee said the abductions have seriously escalated, and include massive searches and destruction of homes and property across the West Bank, including in and around occupied Jerusalem.
It added that while not all of the abductees remain imprisoned, most are either in interrogation facilities, and various prisons and detention camps and dozens were slapped with arbitrary Administrative Detention orders, held without charges or trial for renewable periods that generally vary between three and six months each time.
On February 5, 2024, the Ad-Dameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association said the number of political prisoners held by Israel reached 9,000, including 70 women and 200 children, in addition to 3,484 Palestinians held under Administrative Detention orders.
Euro-Med: Israeli army entertains settlers by allowing them to witness torture of Gazans
Palestinian Information Center – February 12, 2024
GENEVA – Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor announced receiving new shocking testimonies from recently released Palestinian prisoners revealing that the Israeli occupation army brought groups of Jewish settlers to detention centers and prisons to witness how detainees from the Gaza Strip are tortured, allowing many of them to film prisoners using their mobile phones.
The Jewish settlers enjoyed witnessing the torture rounds of Palestinian prisoners with all types of ill and inhumane treatment, the released detainees told Euro-Med Monitor.
The prisoners were detained for varying periods inside a detention center in Zikim military base on the northern border of the Gaza Strip, and another detention center near the Negev prison in the south, after they were rounded up in the Israeli occupation army’s ground incursions into the Strip.
The released detainees told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers deliberately presented them in front of Jewish settlers and claimed they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian factions, and that they participated in the Oct. 7 attack on Gaza Envelope settlements.
The Euro-Med explained that, according to the testimonies it received, groups of Jewish settlers, ranging from 10 to 20 people in each group, were allowed to watch and take photos of Palestinian prisoners who were held naked while being subjected to beating with metal batons and electric sticks by Israeli soldiers who poured hot water over their heads, amid verbal insults and threats in Arabic.
Euro-Med pointed out that this was the first time Israeli illegal practices and torture have been carried out in front of Jewish settlers inside prisons and detention centers, allowing settlers to document the beatings using their personal mobile phones while laughing at and humiliating the Palestinian detainees. This is an added crime to all crimes previously committed by the Israeli army against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, especially against prisoners and detainees who are subjected to arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearance, brutal torture, and denial of fair trial.
Omar Abu Mudallala, a 43 years old Gazan, told the Euro-Med team: “I was arrested at the checkpoint near Al-Kuwait roundabout, which separates Gaza City from Central Gaza, as part of random arrests campaign. I was subjected to torture and abuse at all stages. The arrest lasted for about 52 days,” pointing out that Israeli soldiers “brought civilians to watch our torture while we were naked.”
“The Israeli army brought a number of Jewish settlers into our detention centers while they were beating us, and they started telling them, ‘These are the Hamas terrorists who killed you and raped your women on October 7’. The settlers were filming us on their mobile phones while we were subjected to beating, abuse, and torture. They were making fun of us”, Abu Mudallala added.
“This happened five times during my detention period, once in Zikim and four times in Negev. We were blindfolded, but one of the detainees who knows Hebrew informed us that the soldiers were talking to Israeli civilians, claiming that we were fighters,” he said.
The Euro-Med Monitor wondered why the Palestinian detainees who were claimed to be resistance fighters were released, which obviously indicated that the Israeli story was false and was only used to collectively punish the Palestinian people.
The Euro-Med confirmed that the crimes of torture and inhuman treatment practiced by the Israeli army against Palestinian detainees are war crimes and mounts to crimes against humanity in accordance with the Rome Statute, condemning the behavior of transforming these illegal practices into entertainment tools for Jewish settlers because it constitutes a war crime that involves a serious assault on human dignity through humiliation and degradation of prisoners.
The Euro-Med has warned of the consequences of engaging Israeli settlers in detention centers, stressing that it perpetuates a state of extremism, fuels hatred, and inflames internal Israeli opinion towards committing more crimes and violations against the Palestinians.
The human rights organization reiterated that the vast majority of the detainees of the Gaza Strip are subject to arbitrary detention based on no charges or trials because they have been subjected to enforced disappearance, torture, and inhuman treatment, calling on the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate detention conditions of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, to expose their fate and the crimes they have been subjected to.
The Euro-Medi affirmed that Israeli practices against Palestinian detainees are clearly violating the international norms and conventions, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
Dutch court: Netherlands must stop delivering parts of F-35 jets used by Israel in Gaza
MEMO | February 12, 2024
The World’s Gyre
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 12, 2024
The U.S. is edging closer to war with Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, a state security agency composed of armed groups, some of which are close to Iran, but which for the main are Iraqi nationalists. The U.S. carried out a drone strike in Baghdad, Wednesday that killed three members of the Kataeb Hizbullah forces, including a senior commander. One of the assassinated, al-Saadi, is the most senior figure to have been assassinated in Iraq since the 2020 drone strike that killed senior Iraqi Commander al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani.
The target is puzzling as Kataeb more than a week ago suspended its military operations against the U.S. (at the request of the Iraqi government). The stand down was widely published. So why was this senior figure assassinated?
Tectonic twitches often are sparked by a single egregious action: the one final grain of sand which – on top of the others – triggers the slide, capsizing the sandpile. Iraqis are angry. They feel that the U.S. wantonly violates their sovereignty – showing contempt and disdain for Iraq, a once great civilisation, now brought low in the wake of U.S. wars. Swift and collective retaliation has been promised.
One act, and a gyre can begin. The Iraqi government may not be able to hold the line.
The U.S. tries to separate and compartmentalise issues: AnsarAllah’s Red Sea blockade is ‘one thing’; attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, an unrelated ‘another’. But all know that such separateness is artificial – the ‘red’ thread woven through all these ‘issues’ is Gaza. The White House (and Israel) however, insists the connecting thread instead to be Iran.
Did the White House think this through properly, or was its latest assassination viewed as a ‘sacrifice’ to appease the ‘gods of war’ in the Beltway, clamouring to bomb Iran?
Whatever the motive, the Gyre turns. Other dynamics are running that will be fuelled by the attack.
The Cradle highlights one significant shift:
“by successfully obstructing Israeli vessels from traversing the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Ansarallah-led Sanaa government has emerged as a powerful symbol of resistance in defence of the Palestinian people – a cause deeply popular across Yemen’s many demographics. Sanaa’s position stands in stark contrast to that of the Saudi and Emirati-backed government in Aden, which, to the horror of Yemenis, welcomed attacks by U.S. and British forces on 12 January”.
“The U.S.–UK airstrikes have prompted some heavyweight internal defections … a number of Yemeni militias previously aligned with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, consequently switched allegiance to Ansarallah … Disillusionment with the coalition will have profound political and military implications for Yemen, reshaping alliances, and casting the UAE and Saudi Arabia as national adversaries. Palestine continues to serve as a revealing litmus test throughout West Asia – and now in Yemen too – exposing those who only-rhetorically claim the mantle of justice and Arab solidarity”.
Yemen military defections – How does this matter?
Well, the Houthis and AnsarAllah have become heroes across the Islamic World. Look at social media. The Houthis are now the ‘stuff of myth’: Standing up for Palestinians whilst others don’t. A following is taking hold. AnsarAllah’s ‘heroic’ stance may lead to the ousting of western proxies, and so to dominate that ‘rest of Yemen’ they presently do not control. It seizes too, the Islamic world’s imagination (to the concern of the Arab Establishment).
In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of al-Saadi, Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad chanting: “God is Great, America is the Great Satan”.
Do not imagine this ‘turn’ is lost on others – on the Iraqi Hashd al-Sha’abi, for example; or on the (Palestinians) of Jordan; or on the mass foot-soldiers of the Egyptian army; or indeed in the Gulf. There are 5 billion smartphones extant today. The ruling class do watch the Arabic channels, and view (nervously) social media. They worry that anger against the western flouting of international law may boil over, and they will be unable to contain it: What price the ‘Rules Order’ now since the International Court of Justice upended the notion of a moral content to western culture?
The wrongheadedness of U.S. policy is astonishing – and now has claimed the most central tenet in the ‘Biden strategy’ for resolving the crisis in Gaza. The ‘dangle’ of Saudi normalisation with Israel was viewed in the West as the pivot – around which Netanyahu would either be forced to give up on his maximalist security control from the River to the Sea mantra, or see himself pushed aside by a rival for whom the ‘normalisation bait’ held the allure of likely victory in the next Israeli elections.
Biden’s spokesperson was flagrant in this respect:
“[We] … are having discussions with Israel and Saudi Arabia … about trying to move forward with a normalization arrangement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. So those discussions are ongoing as well. We certainly received positive feedback from both sides that they’re willing to continue to have those discussions”.
The Saudi Government – possibly angry at the U.S. recourse to such deceptive language – duly kicked the plank out from beneath the Biden platform: It issued a written statement confirming unequivocally that: “there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops – and all Israeli occupation forces are withdraw from the Gaza Strip”. The Kingdom stands by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in other words.
Of course, no Israeli could campaign on that platform in Israeli elections!
Recall how Tom Friedman set out how the ‘Biden Doctrine’ was supposed to fit together as a interlinked whole: First, through taking a “strong and resolute stand on Iran” the U.S. would signal to “our Arab and Muslim allies, that it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner … that we can no longer allow Iran to try to drive us out of the region; Israel into extinction and our Arab allies into intimidation by acting through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — while Tehran blithely sits back and pays no price”.
The second strand was the Saudi dangle that would inevitably pave the path into the (third) element which was the “building of a credible legitimate Palestinian Authority as … a good neighbour to Israel …”. This “bold U.S. commitment to a Palestinian state would give us [Team Biden] legitimacy to act against Iran”, Friedman foresaw.
Let us be plain: this trifecta of policies, rather than gel into a single doctrine, are falling like dominoes. Their collapse owes to one thing: The original decision to back Israel’s use of overwhelming violence across Gaza’s civil society – ostensibly to defeat Hamas. It has turned the region and much of the World against the U.S. and Europe.
How did this happen? Because nothing changed by way of U.S. policies. It was the same old western bromides from decades ago: financial threats, bombing and violence. And the insistence on one mandatory ‘stand with Israel’ narrative (with no discussion).
The rest of the world has grown tired of it; even defiant towards it.
So to put it bluntly: Israel has now come face-to-face with the (self-destructive) inconsistency within Zionism: How to maintain special rights for Jews on territory in which there is an approximately equal number of non-Jews? The old answer has been discredited.
The Israeli Right argues that Israel then must go for broke: All or nothing. Take the risk of wider war (in which Israel, may or may not, be ‘victorious’); tell Arabs to move elsewhere; or abandon Zionism and themselves move on.
The Biden Administration, rather than help Israel look truth in the eye, has discarded the task of obliging Israel to face up to the contradictions in Zionism, in favour of restoring the broken status quo ante. Some 75 years after the founding of the Israeli state, as former Israeli negotiator, Daniel Levy, has. noted:
‘[We are back to] “the “banal debate” between the U.S. and Israel over “whether the bantustan shall be repackaged and marketed as a ‘state’”.
Could it have been different? Probably not. The reaction comes from deep in Biden’s nature.
The trifecta of U.S. failed responses paradoxically has nonetheless facilitated Israel’s slide to the Right (as evidenced by all recent polling). And has – absent a hostage deal; absent a Saudi credible ‘dangle’; or any credible path to a Palestinian State – precisely opened the path for the Netanyahu government to pursue his maximalist exit from collapsed deterrence through securing a ‘grand victory’ over the Palestinian resistance, Hizbullah, and even – he hopes – Iran.
None of these objectives can be achieved without U.S. help. Yet, where is Biden’s limit: Support for Israel in a Hizbullah war? And were it to widen, support for Israel in an Iran war too? Where is the limit?
The incongruity, coming as it does, at a moment when the West’s Ukraine Project is imploding, suggests that Biden may see himself needing some ‘grand victory’, as much as does Netanyahu.
Does anybody still believe in Ukrainian victory?
By Uriel Araujo | February 12, 2024
While Moscow is making major investments in defense, Ukraine has stalled (in the battlefield) and so is the American aid package, writes Foreign Policy reporter Amy Mackinnon. “Ukraine will lose – on our present trajectory”, says Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow of the Centre for European Studies, Harvard, interviewed by John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.
According to Ferguson, thus far the US-led West has given Kyiv enough weapons “not to lose, but not enough to win”. In addition, the United States’ “interest” is “clearly waning, particularly “among Republican voters and Republican politicians”, to the point that American aid to the Eastern European country “could be cut off if Donald Trump is reelected president in November 2024”. In this scenario, he says, it is hard to see how Ukraine could possibly win. Furthermore, he claims, the Ukrainians themselves admit that they have achieved a “stalemate” now, and in terms of resources it is “David versus Goliath,” with the latter being, more and more, “the likely favorite.” If Russia is, “to put it very, very modestly”, able to “retain control” of those parts of Ukraine it already does, that will be “the first big defeat of Cold War II, for the West.” Considering all the Western pro-Zelensky propaganda, all the “speeches”, “support” and “pledges” made, if Ukraine “loses”, the West’s credibility will be greatly undermined, Fergunson convincingly reasons.
Meanwhile, should an “all-out multifront assault on Israel” arise, in the Middle East, and the US fails to take meaningful action, then the expert argues, somewhat less convincingly, it would be “surprising” if Xi Jinping “didn’t take the opportunity to add Taiwan to the strategic mix” – and, in the scenario of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, it would be “rather difficult to send another major naval expedition across the Pacific” because of the risk of US-China “hostilities” in this case, which then would mean a “much larger war than anything we’ve seen so far.” What Ferguson fails to acknowledge is that tensions with Taiwan arose after a series of American provocations, and that the current crisis in the Levant and the Red Sea is largely the result of the Western resolve to keep aiding and funding its Israeli ally even in face of the latter’s disastrous and globally condemned ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine.
Back to the Ukrainian conflict’s prospects, Mark Episkopos, Eurasia Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, writes that, at this point, there is “no magic weapon left”, and that Kyiv’s “backers” (on “both sides of the Atlantic”) have “no realistic theory of victory” accounting for “the dire conditions” faced by Ukraine and thus fail to offer “a sustainable framework for war termination on the best possible terms for Kyiv and the West.” In the same spirit, James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe sees no future for Ukraine other than a land-for-peace deal.
Back to the aforementioned Ferguson’s interview, the Scottish–American historian concludes, from an Anglo-Western perspective, that “this is a very dangerous moment in world history”, and “we’ve stumbled into it, partly by forgetting the lessons of Cold War I”, namely that one must have “credible deterrence.” Such deterrence, he laments, has been lost. As I’ve written, the West has no such deterrence against Iran in the Middle East either.
As is often the case, notwithstanding any criticism one may have of the Russian president and of his choices pertaining to Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine, there is something missing in the conversation about the crisis, namely any mention of the Western role in at least partly bringing it about by NATO expansion or, for that matter, any mention of the Western white-washing and support for far-right paramilitary nationalism in Ukraine – which is often neo-Fascist – since the Maidan Revolution, and the role this factor played in the Donbass war (going on since 2014); not to mention the issue of the civil rights of ethnic Russians, Russian-speaking and pro-Russian people in Ukraine since the aforementioned Maidan.
In any case, it is not just into Eastern Europe that Washington has “stumbled”. It is also “stuck”, as I wrote, in the Middle East, where it acts as an undecided declining superpower, “torn”, as it is, according to a recent The Economist piece, “between leaving and staying and cannot decide what to do with the forces it still has in the region.”
In September last year, Former US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates described his country as a “divided” and “dysfunctional superpower”, unable to deter both China and Russia. “Torn”, “stuck”, “divided” – undecidedness could really be a key word with regards to the existential crisis haunting American exceptionalism: Washington seems unable to decide, for example, as Jerry Hendrix (formerly an adviser to Pentagon senior officials) puts it, whether it wishes to maintain its declining naval hegemony, as a sea power, in Mackinder’s terms, or to keep engaging in land wars in Eurasia in its struggle for the “Heartland”. It cannot decide whether to pivot away from the Middle East towards the Indo-Pacific Region (IPR) or to “stay” in the Middle East region. It seems to want it both ways always, as materialized in the different versions of the “dual containment” formula – now applied to both Beijing and Moscow simultaneously.
Thus, going beyond the issue of Ukraine, it is about time to acknowledge that the declining American superpower is currently overburdened and overstretched, in Stephen Wertheim’s words; that its policy of “dual containment” makes the world a far less stable place; and that Washington therefore must exercise restraint.
Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
Kremlin comments on Starlink claims
RT | February 12, 2024
The Russian military never officially ordered SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet terminals and they are not certified for use in Russia, the Kremlin has said. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov made the comment shortly after Ukrainian intelligence claimed that Russian forces were using the technology amid the ongoing armed conflict between Moscow and Kiev.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk donated some 20,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its offensive against the country in February 2022. Ukrainian troops are using them to operate drones along the front line. However, the billionaire said last year that he had refused Ukraine’s request to activate the Starlink service in Crimea.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Peskov noted that Starlink had never been certified in Russia, meaning that it “cannot be and is not being delivered here officially.” He added that, for this reason, the technology cannot be used in any official capacity in Russia.
The Kremlin’s representative concluded by saying that there was no point in Moscow getting involved in a “discussion between the Kiev regime and entrepreneur Musk.”
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Musk lamented that “a number of false news reports claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia.”
“To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia,” the SpaceX CEO added.
In a separate statement on Thursday, SpaceX insisted that it “does not do business of any kind with the Russian government or its military,” and has “never sold or marketed Starlink in Russia, nor has it shipped equipment to locations in Russia.”
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) claimed to have intercepted a conversation between Russian military personnel, where one service member could be heard saying in Russian “Starlink is working, we have internet [access].”
GUR spokesman Andrey Yusov alleged that Russian troops are “systematically” using Starlink terminals.
In September, Musk said his company had refused to enable Starlink coverage over Crimea. “Now, the reason it was turned off was actually because… the United States has sanctions against Russia… and that includes Crimea,” he explained at the time. In the absence of any direct orders from the US leadership, SpaceX opted not to run afoul of the regulations despite Kiev’s request to do so, the entrepreneur noted.
Earlier, CNN reported that Musk’s decision had thwarted a Ukrainian drone attack against the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Mainstream propaganda machine’s laughable meltdown over Putin interview
By Drago Bosnic | February 12, 2024
As expected, Tucker Carlson is getting a lot of flak for conducting his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’s not merely being accused of “spreading Russian propaganda” (he’s long been accustomed to that, as well as the mainstream propaganda machine’s obsession with all sorts of deranged “Russia, Russia, Russia” conspiracy theories), but there’s an actual push in the European Union to sanction Carlson. It seems journalists doing journalism is considered “heresy” by most other mainstream “journalists”. The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt is unhappy that the interview was “neither a talk show nor a real conversation”, so he went on to parrot every propaganda trope in the book. Al Jazeera’s Mansur Mirovalev insists that Putin is “obsessed”, concluding his remarks by quoting a certain Valentin, the Kiev regime’s drone operator who allegedly complained that both Putin and Carlson are “conspiracy theorists” and that “Ukraine is real and it will prevail.”
In a piece published by Politico, a German-owned publication infamous for attempts to whitewash Nazism, Sergey Goryashko claimed that Putin supposedly “lied”. Among several propaganda claims he used to, as he says, “debunk” Putin’s points was that the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky “only signed a decree banning negotiations specifically with Putin, not Russia as a country”. Such ludicrous claims aren’t only false, but are even childish. Pushed by the United States, United Kingdom and NATO, the Kiev regime certainly broke the March 2022 peace deal that could have ended the special military operation (SMO) in less than a month. What’s more, it even publicly promotes its so-called “10-point peace plan” that boils down to Russia’s unconditional capitulation, a fantasy that the political West wholeheartedly supports and even promotes through some sort of absurd unilateral “peace talks”. In doing so, the Neo-Nazi junta effectively codified the impossibility of a peaceful settlement.
So much for Putin “lying”. However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to frenzied attacks by the mainstream propaganda machine. In a piece for The New Yorker, Masha Gessen, the infamous “woke” ideologue obsessed with Putin, called the interview “boring”. She (although Gessen insists her pronouns are “they/them”, a request I earnestly refuse to comply with) obviously loathes historical facts, so the trouble she has with going through the entire interview, a problem most likely exacerbated by her two-second attention span (tends to happen to a lot of people staring at reels all day), perfectly explains her rather poor judgment of Putin’s points. Then came the “fact-checkers” such as Charlie Hancock of the Amsterdam-based Moscow Times who essentially repeated several of Goryashko’s long-debunked claims and added a few of his own. After all, what would the mainstream propaganda machine ever do without “fact-checkers“?
Of course, Hancock wasn’t the only one. The UK’s state-run BBC also published its own version, “fact-checking Putin’s nonsense history“. It would seem Masha Gessen isn’t the only one who skipped history classes in primary school, as the BBC’s Ido Vock quoted several self-styled “experts” and “pundits” to supposedly “debunk Putin’s rambling”, as he called it, clearly implying that he was also bored by the interview, which further indicates just how much he actually knows about the topic he covered for the UK’s state-run news agency. And of course, there’s also the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), claiming that Carlson’s Putin interview supposedly serves as a “propaganda platform”, which is quite rich coming from a literal CIA front formed to spread Washington DC’s state-sponsored propaganda. The Economist insists that “Russia’s president is not a man to be trusted, still less to emulate or admire”, because, luckily, they “know Putin’s real message” better than he himself does.
Newsweek’s Brendan Cole quoted Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Kiev regime’s “human rights activist”, who also slammed Carlson. Comically enough, Cole insists that Matviichuk’s opinion “matters” because she’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Is it even necessary to explain just how politicized that vaunted “peace prize” is when laureates include people like Barrack Obama and Al Gore? The Obama administration came to power criticizing the previous government run by George W. Bush for its aggression across the Middle East. Obama promised to end these wars, which is why he got the once-prestigious award in the first place. However, as soon as Bush left the White House, Obama expanded his aggression from two countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) to another five (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan), seven in total. Worse yet, during Obama’s presidency (2009-2017), Washington DC launched ten times more airstrikes than under Bush, killing millions of innocent civilians in the process.
While the DNC-dominated media always try to whitewash Obama by shifting blame solely on Bush, it should be noted that the former personally authorized at least 6,000 drone strikes (approximately 2 per day during 8 years of his presidency), although the actual number may be orders of magnitude higher. So much for Obama’s contribution to “peace”. As for Al Gore, his active role in the Clinton administration’s war crimes and aggression on Serbia/former Yugoslavia requires an entirely separate analysis. However, as previously mentioned, this isn’t the end of the mainstream propaganda machine’s attempts to denigrate Putin’s interview with Carlson. The Associated Press (AP) insists that Russia’s president “missed the bigger picture”, so they felt the urge to “fill the gaps” with five points, composed largely of debunked propaganda tropes. And yet, these were expanded to nine in another piece by Politico, signed by Eva Hartog and, once again, Sergey Goryashko.
The key takeaway is that the mainstream propaganda machine is in meltdown over the interview, seen by hundreds of millions (if not billions at this point) on TV and across numerous Internet platforms. The political West is genuinely terrified of Putin’s global popularity, so the goal is to try and tarnish his reputation by twisting his remarks or simply telling outright lies about him. And while the interview may seem lengthy (by today’s standards), Putin simply had to get a lot of propaganda out of the way, as NATO and its Neo-Nazi puppets have been falsifying historical facts about Ukraine quite intensively, particularly in recent times, all in an attempt to show that the country supposedly has “nothing to do with Russia“. In that sense, websites such as Wikipedia have experienced an unprecedented number of edits with the goal of promoting these historically baseless claims. Putin is certainly aware of that, which is why he had to explain the complex history of the Ukrainian conflict.
Putin’s intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of history, law, intelligence and several other key fields are a massive boost to Russia’s already world-class diplomacy. This stands in stark contrast to the US and its current administration. Could anyone imagine Joe Biden giving an unscripted, two-hour-long interview to a foreign journalist, much less one conducted with near-scholarly precision? Regardless of whether one adores or loathes President Putin, the fact is that the increasingly unpopular and impotent leaders of the political West are simply no match for him, which is why we never see any of them giving remotely similar interviews to journalists of Tucker Carlson’s caliber. And while he might be among the most prominent journalists to ever interview Putin, Russia’s president is well-known for hours-long discussions with hundreds (if not thousands) of journalists from all over the world, without any papers, cliff notes or scripted questions. He simply doesn’t need them.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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Lies are Unbekoming | May 12, 2016
I’ve been following Jennifer Bilek’s reporting on the Transgender Agenda for the last year.
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What we don’t understand is the scale of money behind this push, and the individuals controlling this weaponized capital. These are questions that go to the heart of Jennifer’s work. … continue
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