Jewish Corruption in Ukraine
By Andrew Joyce, Ph.D. | The Occidental Observer | February 17, 2023
“At the same time, fifty Jewish families own 80% of all wealth. Where do you see the Ukrainian oligarch? I don’t know any. They are all Jews. Their wealth betrays their own bragging rights: Rolls-Royces, planes, castles, hotels, casinos owned in Monte Carlo. Aircraft and yachts under foreign flags. And, of course, they don’t pay taxes. And plants and factories were bought by them not at a real price, but stolen from the entire Ukrainian people.”
Serhiy Ratushniak, Former Mayor of Uzhhorod
With Russia now slowly escalating its ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine on the eve of its first anniversary, I find myself drawn once again to the complex but stark phenomenon of extreme Jewish corruption in the latter nation. While it’s become commonplace to note Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewishness, and perhaps also that of Volodymyr Groysman, the first Prime Minister to serve under Zelensky, I have yet to read a detailed discussion of the major Jewish players in the ongoing saga of Ukrainian oligarchy and its political affiliates. If anything, the present conflict is a huge distraction from the fact that, for decades, the biggest threat to Ukraine hasn’t been Russia, but financiers and speculators operating with impunity within Ukraine’s borders to exploit ethnic Ukrainians and plunder their resources.
Speaking in general terms, of course, Ukraine is an extremely corrupt country, with the culture of fraud and graft stemming in large part from the Soviet legacy and saturating all levels of society. Crooks of all ethnic backgrounds are ubiquitous in the nation. Bribery is systematic, where it’s accepted as a basic fact of life by ordinary citizens and extends even to such mundane tasks as vehicle inspection. As well as infesting politics, bribery and other forms of corruption remain endemic in the police force, higher education, health care, and the justice system, with the result that Ukraine ranks alongside some of the worst African nations in Transparency International’s assessment of corruption perception. According to 2015 data, politically connected businesses accounting for less than 1 per cent of companies in Ukraine owned more than 25 per cent of all assets and accessed over 20 per cent of debt financing. In the capital-intensive mining, energy and transport sectors, politically connected businesses accounted for over 40 per cent of turnover and 50 per cent of assets.
Far from being the beacon of freedom presented to us now by the mass media, Ukraine is a nation bankrupt in social trust and well-accustomed to the yoke of exploitation. There has been little internal outcry over the massive trafficking of its women for sex, both inside and outside the country, with coastal cities such as Odessa becoming sex tourism hubs for the worst of the Turkish and Israeli middle classes. Ukraine now has the highest adult HIV prevalence outside Africa, with sexual contact outpacing injection drug use as the primary form of transmission since 2008. The National Institute on Drug Abuse points out that substance abuse in Ukraine has been at epidemic proportions for the last 15 years.
Ukraine is on multiple levels a deeply flawed and troubled state, and like any bloody carcass it has attracted its share of hyenas. I believe, however, that Jewish corruption in Ukraine, despite Jews only comprising around 0.5% of the Ukrainian population, is of a character significant enough to merit special attention. In the following essay I want to explore some of the key players and their interconnections, as well as to offer some thoughts on the reasons why anti-Jewish attitudes have not taken hold in Ukraine, and why they are unlikely to do so in the future.
How ‘Anti-Corruption’ Is Zelensky?
Now overshadowed by his reinvention as a kind of Second Coming of Winston Churchill, Zelensky’s first great transformation was that of a close associate of the worst of Ukraine’s oligarchs (Ihor Kolomoisky, discussed below) into an “anti-corruption” populist. Zelensky’s relationship with Kolomoisky goes back to around 2012, when Zelensky and the Jewish brothers Serhiy and Boris Shefir, began making content for Kolomoisky’s TV stations through their production company, Kvartal 95. As is now well-known, Zelensky’s political ascent began after his starring role in the political satire ‘Servant of the People,’ which began airing on Kolomoisky’s 1+1 network in 2015. The 1+1 channel had been founded by another Jew, Alexander Rodnyansky. Servant of the People starred Zelensky as a school teacher whose anti-corruption rant in class is filmed by a student, goes viral, and wins him the presidency. Zelensky turned to real-world politics, capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, and ended up winning the Presidency with ease just three-and-a-half years after the show’s launch.
Zelensky is entirely a media creation, a blank canvas upon which anything can be projected. Before the war, the German Council on Foreign Relations pointed out that “Zelensky has so far been very vague about his policies and vision for the future. So it has been extremely difficult to tell what he stands for or fact-check his largely policy-free statements in the way the experts have for other candidates. He rarely mentions facts.”
Zelensky’s 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his authenticity given his close association with Kolomoisky. Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs astutely observed that, even if Zelensky was earnest in his claims to oppose the corrupt, “he cannot govern without systema [the oligarchic structure] and will bow to its interests.” In the heat of the campaign, an ally of incumbent Petro Poroshenko (rumored to have a Jewish father), journalist Volodymyr Ariev (who also claims Jewish ancestry), published a chart on Facebook purporting to show that Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms, which they had set up beginning in 2012, that received $41M in funds from Kolomoisky’s Privatbank. Many of these allegations were proven correct after the leaking of the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers, to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The documents show that Zelensky and his Jewish partners in Kvartal 95 set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the same year the company began making regular content for Ihor Kolomoisky. The offshores, which filtered Kolomoisky’s money through the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Belize, and Cyprus in order to avoid paying tax in Ukraine, were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London. The documents also show that just before he was elected, Zelensky gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to Serhiy Shefir — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of “giving up his shares,” the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to Zelensky’s wife.
Zelensky and Serhiy Shefir
Besides providing financial support during Ukraine’s 2019 election, Kolomoisky supplied Zelensky with cars, and the bulletproof Mercedes Zelensky used on the campaign trail was owned by Kolomoisky associate Timur Mindich — who is on the board of trustees of the Jewish Community of Dnipropetrovsk, a body of which Kolomoisky was president. Although Zelensky continued to deny that his relationship to Kolomoisky was anything but professional, the Kyiv Post reported in April 2019 that Zelenskiy traveled a total of 11 times to Geneva and an additional two times to Tel-Aviv, during precise periods when Kolomoisky was in these locations. Zelensky’s travel companions during these trips included Jewish oligarch and close Kolomoisky associate Gennadiy (Zvi Hirsch) Bogolyubov, and the brothers Hryhoriy and Ihor Surkis both whom have been accused of serious corruption. They are among the wealthiest people in Ukraine and are Jewish through their mother Rima Gorinshtein. The very Jewish character of these trips should come as no surprise given that, where possible, Zelensky likes to surround himself with Jewish aides. In the aftermath of the outbreak of war, for example, it emerged that he sought advice on public relations from two Likud-backing Israelis, Srulik Einhorn and Jonatan Urich.
Zelensky hasn’t exactly turned on the hand that fed him, and his rise coincided with the downfall of several of Kolomoisky’s opponents. After Zelensky became President, Kolomoisky’s nemesis at Ukraine’s central bank, Valeria Gontareva, was subjected to a sustained campaign of intimidation. Criminal proceedings were brought against her for alleged abuse of office during her time at the central bank, her Kiev flat was raided by the police, a car belonging to her daughter-in-law, also called Valeria Gontareva, was torched, and her house outside the Ukrainian capital was set ablaze and destroyed. Under Zelensky, Ukraine’s parliament passed a measure that prevented Kolomoisky from having to pay higher taxes on his mining operations, and prior to the start of the war with Russia all indications pointed to the renewed influence of interest groups opposed to reform. First, in March 2020, was the dismissal of the government of prime minister Oleksiy Honcharuk (who didn’t help his case by attending a concert headlined by an anti-Jewish heavy metal band), followed, a day later, by the removal from office of the reformist prosecutor-general, Ruslan Ryaboshapka. Then, in April, came the Constitutional Court’s blocking of judicial reforms, and a ruling by the same court, in October, that effectively paralyzed the work of the National Agency for Corruption Prevention. In July 2020 Zelensky forced the resignation of Yakov Smolii as National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) governor. After leaving his position, Smolii referred to “systematic political pressure” on the bank, and did not rule out a coincidence of interest between the President’s Office and Kolomoisky. He said that the President’s Office wanted to replace the NBU’s leadership with people it could control. Smolii’s resignation came shortly after Ukraine had received the first tranche of a new $5 billion IMF stand-by arrangement. A key condition for continued IMF support was the independence of the NBU, and the IMF had made it clear that it held Smolii and his team in high regard.
Seeking international assistance in the aftermath of Russia’s “special military operation,” Zelensky has done much to give the appearance of fighting corruption while actually doing very little. Western media and politicians in the last few weeks have lavished praise on Zelensky for a series of raids and dismissals tackling corruption in the country, but few charges have been brought and the raids have been perfectly timed with EU accession talks and attempts to obtain European financial and military assistance. Political commentator Yuriy Vishnevskyi pointed out the uselessness of the raid against Kolomoisky, stressing that “detectives knew perfectly well that they would most likely not find anything there, since Kolomoisky was not an official at [government bodies suspected of tax evasion]. It is doubtful that he compiled documents at home that would prove his involvement in criminal schemes.” Rumors that Zelensky has stripped Kolomoisky of his Ukrainian citizenship, along with the Ukrainian citizenship of Jewish oligarchs Hennadiy Korban and Vadim Rabinovich, have prompted counter-rumors that this is nothing more than a clever sleight of hand designed to free these figures from already weak anti-oligarch laws passed in 2022.
Ihor Kolomoisky – Supreme Parasite
Kolomoisky, who also holds Israeli and Cypriot citizenship, is probably one of the worst thieves to ever walk the earth, and there has been no greater parasite feeding on Ukrainians. Once named by the Center for Corruption and Organized Crime Research (OCCRP) as being in the top four most corrupt individuals on the planet, Kolomoisky used his ownership of PrivatBank to defraud customers of around $5.5 billion in deposits, which amounted to 40% of all private deposits in Ukraine. Although now banned from entering the United States, where he has numerous assets, Kolomoisky has never been arrested in Ukraine and Zelensky shows no indications of ever bringing him to justice. Regarded as criminal by almost anyone with a brain, Kolomoisky is a hero of the international Jewish community. In 2008 Kolomsoisky was elected President of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, and in 2010 he was elected president of the European Jewish Council.
In keeping with centuries of the same historical pattern, large-scale Jewish financial crime perpetrated by small numbers of key actors continues to benefit the general Jewish population. Jews internationally have benefited for years from Kolomoisky’s plundering of the Ukrainian people. In March 2021 it emerged that two Miami-based Jews, Mordechai Korf, 48, and Uri Laber, 49, were acting as Kolomoisky’s middlemen in the United States. As well as laundering his money in various assets, the pair donated more than $11 million to nearly 70 yeshivas and religious charities (Jewish Educational Media, Colel Chabad, among others) in Brooklyn and across the state of New York. Kolomoisky is also a listed donor for Yad Vashem. Both Korf and Laber also held shares in PrivatBank, and are reported by The Forward as having pumped “about $25 million into Jewish nonprofits between 2006 and 2018.” Kolomoisky is of course the patron of “Menorah,” the largest Jewish center in the world. Entirely appropriate given its existence is owed to international robber barons, the center is home to travel agencies and banks. The official website says that the building is something “every Dnipro resident can be proud of,” to which I can only reply that I’d hope so given that, willingly or not, some of the savings and deposits of every Dnipro resident went into its construction.
Menorah – Largest Jewish Community Center in the World
One of the best examples of how Kolomoisky conducts business is his ownership of Dnipro Airport. In 2009 Kolomoisky bought 99.45% of shares in the airport through his company Galtera. Under the terms of the investment agreement, Galtera was to invest UAH 882.1 million in the development of the airport, and had to hand over the runway, radio beacon system, and land plots to the state. By 2015, Galtera had invested only UAH 142,145, and failed to turn over any real estate to the government. A sequence of litigations began, but with Ukraine’s justice system fully in thrall to the oligarchy, no resolution was ever reached. Kolomoisky, meanwhile, made flying from the airport so expensive (one commentator explained that even short flights carried fees that would elsewhere take one to space) that the citizens of Dnipro unanimously opted to drive three hours to Kharkiv rather than pay the airport’s extortionate and inflated prices. On the bright side, they have an absolutely gargantuan Jewish center they can be proud of.
Jewish Invisibility in Ukraine
The lack of outcry over Ukrainian money going into Jewish pockets might seem surprising to Western observers but is perfectly explainable. There have certainly been no shortage of Jews acting parasitically in Ukraine. In addition to Kolomoisky and others named above, Hennadiy Kernes, Pavel Fuks, Andriy Yermak (now Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine), Hennadiy Korban, Vadim Rabinovich, Alexander Feldman, and Victor Pinchuk have engaged in fraud, corruption, and the amassing of vast amounts of wealth and power at the expense of the Ukrainian people. In Ukraine, however, pronounced examples of corruption and oligarchy are also found among other ethnic minority groups like Muslim Tatars (e.g. Rinat Akhmetov) and among ethnic Ukrainians themselves. The country is so corrupt that even clear examples of ethnic cohesion, such as the overlapping Jewish circles of Zelensky and Kolomoisky, fade into a broader picture of socio-political decay.
Discussion of the particularities of Jewish corruption in Ukraine became more difficult in September 2021 when Zelensky signed a new law defining the concept of anti-Semitism and establishing punishment for transgressions including imprisonment up to five years. The new laws mean that outbursts such as that by Vasily Vovk and Nadiya Savchenko will become a thing of the past. Vovk, a retired general who held a senior reserve rank with the Security Service of Ukraine wrote in a 2017 Facebook post that Jews “aren’t Ukrainians and I will destroy you along with Rabinovich. I’m telling you one more time — go to hell, zhidi [kikes], the Ukrainian people have had it to here with you. Ukraine must be governed by Ukrainians.” In the same year, Savchenko, a fighter jet pilot who was elected to parliament in 2014 while she was still being held as a prisoner of Russia, said during an interview “I have nothing against Jews. I do not like ‘kikes.’” She later said Jews possess “80 percent of the power in Ukraine when they only account for 2 percent of the population.”
Investigations into Jewish criminality are also being hampered by accusations of anti-Semitism, as witnessed in the May 2020 case involving Mykhailo Bank, a senior police official in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine. As part of an investigation into “transnational and ethnic organized groups and criminal organizations,” Bank wrote to Yakov Zalischiker, the head of the Jewish community in the city of Kolomyia, demanding the names all Jewish community members as well as those of foreign Jewish students staying in the city. Reading between the lines, one assumes that Bank had good reason to believe that these “transnational and ethnic organized groups and criminal organizations” were Jewish. Unfortunately for Bank, he was singled out by Eduard Dolinsky, Ukraine’s incarnation of the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who portrayed the demand as implying an impending Holocaust. “This is called stigmatization,” complained Dolinsky. “They [the National Police] did not send such a letter to the Greek Catholics or the Orthodox to compile lists in connection with the fight against organized crime. They turned to the Jews. This shows deep xenophobia.” The case was further amplified by the involvement of Jewish politician Igor Fris, who personally lobbied Zelensky about the matter. The head of the Department of Strategic Investigations of the National Police of Ukraine, Andriy Rubel, and the head of the National Police, Ihor Klymenko, were both forced into groveling apologies. Within weeks Bank was spontaneously “discovered” to have been involved in corruption and was quickly fired.
Finally, since Kolomoisky was one of the main funders of Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups like Right Sector, was linked with the Svoboda party, and was involved with the Azov Battalion, Ukrainian ultra-nationalism has a strangely non-ethnic quality; or rather, it is concerned more with defining itself as being against Russia than in pushing for any kind of “Ukraine for Ukrainians” platform. As such, Ukrainian ultra-nationalism has become a kind of aggressive civic nationalism, harmless to Jews and other minorities but incendiary enough to play a part in provoking the massive conflict currently absorbing the attention of the world.
What kind of Ukraine will emerge from the ruins remains to be seen. What seems certain is that luxury homes in Florida, London, Geneva, and Tel Aviv will long continue to host those who’ve fattened themselves on Ukrainian money, and who continue to hoard their stolen profits while tens of thousands of body bags continue their somber transit to the graveyards of Kiev and Moscow.
Scholz’s Judgement Under the Spotlight Now Over Nord Stream Bombs. But What About Bojo?
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 17, 2023
As the world holds its breath and gasps at the news that Germany has been egregiously used as America’s pawn in a sick power game which is filling the coffers of U.S. companies and making Joe Biden’s buddies in the military industry billionaires, many will reflect on the judgement of Olaf Scholz and ask whether he is fit to be the German chancellor. He may have known about Biden’s plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines which would guarantee that Germany would not only throw itself into the war against Russia, but stay at it in the long run, which is bad enough. Or he may not have known and was as shocked as anyone when it happened in June of last year during a NATO exercise.
In either case, Scholz’s judgement will be examined now for a very long time and a process of opprobrium has in fact already started in the same building where he announced that he would throw the lever on a 200 billion euro spending spree to ‘rearm’ the German army: the German parliament.
While the German press follows its lead from their masters in the coalition government which Scholz presides over by pretending that the Hersh piece doesn’t exist, MPs like Sevim Dağdelen regale the government in a bold speech. “Stop defaming the journalist & his sources! The German government must disclose its findings on the #terrorist attacks on #NordStream , considering that revelations by #SeymourHersh point to the responsibility of the #USA & #Norway” she summarizes in a tweet.
Scholz is of course in a quandary. Whichever way he turns he sees his career shot to shreds so the best course is to hope that the media will serve him admirably and help him with the ruse of simply closing one’s eyes and hoping the commotion will die down.
But the debate is actually gaining momentum in some strange places and this will only serve the purpose once again for social media to ask the critical questions for the incumbent journalists to write up, like stenographers.
In the UK, it is Boris Johnson who, despite no longer being PM, is still making the news for being an inept buffoon who can’t help getting entangled in sleaze and corruption scandals – some about him or others simply about bent MPs who he goes to some length to protect.
This time it is the appointment of the BBC chief, who, it turns out is a crony of Johnson’s who he owed a huge favour to. Richard Price, according to a parliamentary report, arranged for Bojo to have 800,000 pounds ‘loan’ from a Canadian businessman. After arranging such a kind gesture Price, who was an advisor of Johnson in Downing Street, made it be known that he wanted the top job. And he got it.
It’s this kind of ‘jobs for the boys’ corruption stories which most Brits wouldn’t be too bothered about as, apart from only expecting this from Johnson whose entire tenure in government is a trail of havoc of lies, deceit and sleaze, the UK public is getting used to the idea that Whitehall and Parliament are now fully-fledged US style centres of corruption.
The remarkable thing about the Richard Price story though is that it was not the fourth estate who broke it. Given the tawdry, unhealthy relationship between big media in the UK and the establishment most investigative journalists have taken up other professions as ‘graft’ as a subject isn’t an easy commodity to flog to those in the media who themselves are tacitly as corrupt as the elite they serve. Such journalists are in dwindling numbers in the UK.
And so it was Nicholas Wilson, an anti-corruption sleuth, who dug the dirt up and joined up the dots creating this latest sleaze story about a bent BBC boss, who, while a Johnson advisor managed to get 600,000 pounds from the government for one of his companies. This is how UK governments work these days. A little bit more sophisticated than brown envelopes or insider trading. But not much. Make yourself useful to a corrupt leader who has the morals of a sewer rat and then name your price in the form of a top job as payment.
But judgement is also an issue here. If Johnson was happy to harangue close friends for money and put it out that he was looking for a large cash donation, then surely any third-rate hack would ask “what about the Ukraine war?”. Does Johnson have a financial stake in this war? Recently he was in Kiev and then Washington doing his bit for lobbying. Given this new role and the fact that he was the first western leader to send ammo to Ukraine, is it not fair to ask “Is he on the Zelensky payroll these days?”. Was he also in the loop on the pipeline bombing plan? All reasonable questions that UK journalists would no doubt like to examine. Be patient. They’re no doubt waiting for an out of work activist to get onto Twitter and do their jobs for them.
Critics of failed COVID policies call for pandemic reckoning
By Daniel Nuccio | Washington Examiner | February 15, 2023
Eight leading critics of the United States’s COVID-19 response have called for an investigation of the many failures of policy architects and key decision makers — at institutions ranging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration to universities and hospitals — over their repeated mishandling of the pandemic.
Given the immense harm inflicted on our society by the follies of a ruling class and their expert advisers who never failed to make a wrong decision when presented with the opportunity, as well as the fact that lives are still being destroyed by their lingering policies, we can only hope this blueprint does not go ignored.
Dubbing themselves the “Norfolk Group,” the association of scholars includes such prominent names as Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, UCSF physician Tracy Beth Høeg, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, and Indiana University School of Medicine immunologist Steven Templeton.
According to the Norfolk Group’s website, although initially organized by the Brownstone Institute in May 2022, the eight members of the group have since worked free from outside influence to draft the 80-page document they published earlier this year, “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission.”
Presented as a series of summaries and questions pertaining to key elements of U.S. COVID policy, the document, in effect, lays out a thorough indictment of the consistent incompetence of our ruling class while also raising concerns over the possible influence on policy by special interests such as teachers unions and drug companies.
Regarding natural immunity, the authors ask, “Why did the CDC downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite robust evidence for it?”
In respect to school closures, they ask, “Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality … and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?”
On that matter, they also wonder, “Why did the CDC incorporate policy language proposed by leaders of teachers unions on the scientific and public health aspects of school reopening without soliciting expertise of outside scientists in public health, infectious diseases, or other related fields?”
When discussing lockdowns, they inquire, “Why was so much influence on public health policy accorded to Drs. [Francis] Collins and [Anthony] Fauci? They control the largest source of infectious disease research funding in the world. How many infectious disease scientists, who should have been strong voices during the pandemic, kept quiet for fear of losing the research funding on which their livelihood depends?”
In their section on epidemiologic modeling, they demand, “Why did world leaders overly rely on models that made unverified assumptions about the pandemic’s trajectory rather than trying to verify these assumptions and their implications?”
When addressing COVID-19 vaccines, they raise questions such as, “Why did many organizations continue with mandates through summer and fall of 2021, despite data demonstrating both waning efficacy of symptomatic infection and reduced long term ability to curb viral spread?”
Regarding masks, they state, “Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the evidence that masks did little if anything to stop the spread of respiratory viruses was uncontroversial,” before summarizing a few studies demonstrating this and asking the obvious: “[W]hy did public health officials and agencies promote the idea that masks would be effective against SARS-CoV2?”
In its entirety, the Norfolk Group’s “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission” serves as a blueprint for the kind of investigation our country needs. Just don’t expect the Biden administration to do anything about it.
Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.
Here’s why Ukraine’s Zelensky wants a long war with Russia
By Andrey Sushentsov | RT | February 15, 2023
It is unlikely that President Vladimir Zelensky expects to win militarily. But it seems that he genuinely believes that he will succeed in turning Ukraine into something like Israel – a paramilitary state living with a sense of constant military threat.
Ukraine doesn’t have the military or economic resources of its own to achieve victory, and the resources provided by the West will never be enough to inflict a final defeat on Russia. Zelensky’s calculation is likely based on the belief that by offering Ukraine as a tool for NATO to use against Russia, he will constantly mobilize Western support and thereby ensure his own survival, and that of his associates.
In the worst-case scenario, as he sees it, Zelensky is probably counting on emigrating to the West with his closest associates, where they will advocate a continued policy of Russian containment. But does he care about the interests of ordinary people in Ukraine?
The unprecedented hardships of war that the country now faces could have been significantly reduced if Zelensky had been willing to settle the crisis diplomatically. Russia has repeatedly taken diplomatic initiatives to resolve this conflict. In the first phase, for example, negotiations took place in Belarus and Turkey. However, under the influence of the US and the UK, Kiev has set a course to prolong the conflict, banking on Western military assistance to achieve its goals.
As Ukraine’s own military and economic resources have dried up, the country has become increasingly dependent on Western supplies, and has ultimately become a tool to fight Russia. Nevertheless, Kiev still has the opportunity to begin talks with Moscow.
Zelensky could take the initiative to negotiate a status quo that is still comfortable for Ukraine. Of course, as the Russian military campaign progresses, the situation will change in ways that are far from favorable to Kiev. And the solutions put forward by the Russian delegation at the beginning of the crisis will no longer be on the table. However, there is still the possibility of a sustainable peace, with reduced risks of escalation into Europe’s biggest military conflict since the Second World War and a nuclear catastrophe.
Zelensky could still claim the laurels of a peacemaker who sacrificed some of his personal ambition in the name of saving Ukrainian lives and ensuring a peaceful future for his country.
A truce would alleviate the economic difficulties of Kiev’s supporters in the West, and thus generate some gratitude. Ukraine would also save a considerable amount of its military resources. Peace would obviously limit them, as deliveries would dry up, but those resources in situ would still be at the disposal of the Ukrainian government.
Yet, Zelensky’s government acts as if it sees no value in preserving Ukrainian statehood. The administration is squandering citizens’ lives and the economic fabric of the country in the belief that this sacrifice is necessary to gain some possible, rather indefinite, advantage in the future. Instead of acting as a peacemaker, as someone who is prepared to make sacrifices to save the lives of his people, Zelensky acts like a gambler, while feeding the population military propaganda.
The unprecedented military, political and economic support Ukraine is receiving from abroad essentially covers up all of the mistakes by Zelensky’s government. A strategy which is based on the axiom “war will pay for everything”. At home, the militarist line has allowed the president to establish a political dictatorship and persecute his opponents in all spheres of state life, including religion. As a result, he has secured an unprecedented concentration of power in his hands and, for the first time in Ukrainian history, silenced all centers of opposition.
Zelensky need not worry about Ukraine’s economic well-being in the short term: the foreign economic aid being handed to the Ukrainian government will suffice. Meanwhile, Kiev is still actively betting that Russia’s $300 billion in foreign currency reserves, frozen in the West, will fall into its hands. What would amount to state-piracy would also allow it use the money as it sees fit.
As a result, Zelensky expects that even if he is defeated and loses part of his territory, he will remain in power as the military leader the West needs for the new Ukraine, which will be the main anti-Russian outpost on NATO’s eastern borders. One that will be armed to the teeth, saturated with Western economic aid and that will provide its citizens with an acceptable standard of living.
I believe that Zelensky is genuinely convinced he will succeed in turning Ukraine into something like Israel, a paramilitary state in a hostile environment, and living with a sense of constant military threat. I do not exclude the possibility that even in the worst-case scenario, where there is a complete collapse of his government, Zelensky expects to find himself and a group of his closest associates in exile in the West. Once there, they will actively advocate a continued policy of containment and defeat of Russia. History shows that this prospect has every chance of materializing.
Andrey Sushentsov is the Valdai Club program director.
The AMA Said Trust Your Doctor on Smoking
By Kevin Homer | Brownstone Institute | February 10, 2023
The American Medical Association (AMA) urges physicians to promote COVID-19 vaccines and bivalent boosters. The AMA even supplies members with social media talking points and strategies to deal with vaccine detractors. It is not the first time that my profession has endorsed a product that may be hazardous to your health.
For most of the 20th century, the AMA turned a blind eye toward the dangers of tobacco use. During the 1930s, 40s and 50s, tobacco companies paid handsomely to advertise cigarettes in AMA’s journal, JAMA. In a 1948 editorial minimizing the ill effects of smoking and justifying tobacco advertising in its publications, JAMA noted that “cigarette business is a tremendous business,” as if the size of the bottom line can mitigate a conflict for an organization founded for the “betterment of public health.”
The connection between smoking and lung cancer was recognized early in the century. At the same time, the AMA became increasingly dependent on money generated by tobacco sales. Tobacco companies sponsored meetings of medical societies, setting up their booths alongside exhibitions of the latest medical treatments. Free cartons were distributed at physician meetings. Cigarette makers even paid for publication of pseudoscientific reports claiming the health benefits of their products.
Doctors who opposed smoking faced ridicule from their colleagues. Dr. Alton Ochsner, a renowned surgeon and sentinel voice warning of the dangers of tobacco, began publishing on the connection between smoking and lung cancer in the early 1940s. His 1954 book Smoking and Cancer: A Doctor’s Report was negatively reviewed in prominent medical journals, characterized as a medieval model of logic that belongs in the nonscience section of a library. Prior to his appearance on Meet the Press, Dr. Ochsner was told he could not discuss the relationship between smoking and lung cancer on air.
Yet the mounting evidence was hard to ignore. In 1954, JAMA stopped accepting cigarette advertisements and published an editorial rebuking tobacco company advertising practices. But five years later, a JAMA editorial was still skeptical of the evidence linking smoking to cancer, and a 1961 Nebraska State Medical Journal editorial dismissed the evidence as merely “statistical.” Tobacco companies continued to sponsor state medical meetings as late as 1969. By then most people were aware of the dangers of smoking.
In 1964, the Surgeon General concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other life-limiting health conditions. The next year, a warning label was required on packages of cigarettes. By 1971, the government banned cigarette advertisements on television and radio. Instead of taking the lead against an obvious threat to public health, the AMA asked for time and money to study the effects of tobacco.
Between 1964 and 1976, the AMA received more than $20 million from the tobacco industry to fund research. Instead of using the money for smoking cessation programs, many of the funded studies focused on ways to make a safer cigarette. To keep money flowing into its Education and Research Foundation the AMA delayed, stating in a confidential 1971 report that, “AMA is not prepared to make any statement regarding termination of the smoking-health research program.” The report went on to complain that tobacco companies are “in arrears on 1970 contributions.” The dependency on tobacco money created a political alliance between doctors and cigarette makers as their lobbyists joined forces in Washington.
The delay benefitted tobacco sales and maintained the AMA’s “research” payments, but it angered Dr. Ochsner, who accused the AMA of being derelict. The AMA called Dr. Ochsner’s position “extreme.” But name-calling could not stall the inevitable conclusion any longer. In 1978 the AMA finally agreed with what most people had already realized: smoking causes lung cancer, and many other health problems. The romance with big tobacco was over.
Or was it?
As late as 1982, JAMA publications were warned to steer clear of “politically sensitive” topics like tobacco use. After most of a century of being on the tobacco dole, the AMA could not make a clean break. The AMA portfolio contained investments in tobacco companies until the late 1990s.
In 1998, the tobacco industry settled lawsuits filed by state governments with a massive Master Settlement Agreement. In exchange for perpetual annual payments and tight regulatory control, the tobacco industry could continue to sell its products protected from future lawsuits brought by participating states and jurisdictions.
But who really benefitted from the Tobacco Settlement? Only 2.6 percent of the money has been used for smoking prevention and cessation programs. Some states have used the tobacco money to fill budget gaps. South Carolina gave money to tobacco farmers affected by a drop in prices. Altria Group, a global tobacco company, is on the US News & World Report 10 best-performing stocks list. Altria, Phillip Morris, and British American Tobacco have all grown annual dividends consecutively since the settlement. According to Dr. Ed Anselm, “The most addictive thing about tobacco is money.”
Tobacco use remains the number one preventable cause of death in the United States. In the first fifty years after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report, more than 20 million Americans died of smoking. How many of these deaths would have been prevented if doctors had not been conflicted by financial entanglements with the tobacco industry?
Money blinds objectivity. When money drives decisions, controverting evidence is ignored, dissenting voices are ridiculed, open debate is suppressed, talking points are distributed, conclusions are delayed, and people die from a product with liability protection.
The New York State Journal of Medicine published a retrospective of tobacco’s relationship to medicine in its December 1983 issue. Flipping through the pages is enlightening. Surrounding the articles describing the greed and politics of Big Tobacco are advertisements from medicine’s new love—Big Pharma. Doctors have exchanged one bedfellow for another.
By endorsing irrelevant COVID-19 vaccines and poorly tested bivalent boosters, the AMA is pushing a product without concern for its potential negative health effects. Like before, the medical profession lags behind public opinion. According to recent Rasmussen Reports, 7 percent of vaccinated individuals report a major side effect, and nearly half of Americans believe that COVID-19 vaccines have caused unexplained deaths, about the same proportion who believed that smoking caused cancer in the 1960s while the AMA was studying the issue.
A conflicted profession cannot honestly evaluate data. Nowadays, the pharmaceutical business is a tremendous business. An organization benefitting from product sales cannot be trusted to evaluate that product.
If doctors could not recognize the health dangers of tobacco for most of the last century, why should we trust them when they say novel vaccines are safe and effective?
Kevin Homer, MD has practiced anatomic and clinical pathology at a community hospital in Texas since 1994.
Hungary slams EU push to arm Ukraine
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto © Michal Cizek / AFP
RT | February 12, 2023
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto speaks to journalists in Prague, Czech Republic, on August 30, 2022. © Michal Cizek / AFP
The European Union’s calls to keep supporting Ukraine with arms shipments will only prolong the conflict with Russia, the Hungarian foreign minister said on Sunday.
Speaking to radio Kossuth, Peter Szijjarto commented on recent remarks by the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, who pushed for fighter jets and long-range weapons to be sent to Kiev. According to the minister, EU lawmakers’ decisions on Ukraine “have generally caused damage to Europe,” and further weapons deliveries will only worsen the hostilities.
He went on to blast the EU legislature, claiming that its “credibility is practically zero.” Szijjarto pointed to a recent graft scandal as proof that the EU parliament is “one of the most corrupt organizations in the world.”
He was referring to the recent arrest of the parliament’s former vice president, Eva Kaili, who has been charged with taking bribes from Qatar in exchange for illegally lobbying the interests of the Gulf state.
Szijjarto noted that in Western countries, war rhetoric sounds “incomparably louder than the rhetoric of peace,” while nations outside “the transatlantic bubble” tend to prefer peace to a deadly conflict.
The minister went on to question the West’s anti-Russia sanctions. He argued that they have failed to force Moscow to end the conflict, while Europe’s economy has “faced incredible difficulties,” and that “the tenth sanctions package will only be suitable for causing further damage to us Europeans, similar to the previous nine ones.”
Since the start of large-scale hostilities in Ukraine almost a year ago, Hungary, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Moscow. It has also refused to support Kiev with weapons, or allow arms transfers across its border with Ukraine.
‘US troops should withdraw’ if implicated in German pipeline sabotage
Free West Media | February 12, 2023
The chairman of the AfD parliamentary group, Tino Chrupalla, has called for investigative committees to be set up in connection with the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Both the Bundestag and the EU Parliament must investigate whether the US and Norway had actively participated in blowing up the pipelines, he said.
The well-known US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted insider sources involved in the planning of the attack on German and European infrastructure.
Chrupalla called for an investigation into the claims: “The suspicions of the Pulitzer Prize winner must be investigated.” All the serious questions must now be “answered by committees of inquiry”. The Bundestag has “a right to know what knowledge the federal government had”.
The AfD boss underscored that such an inquiry should establish whether government officials were involved in the planning. “Were government officials privy to the planning of the attack?”
Biden, but also Scholz, Greens exposed
According to Hersh, after some “wobbling” Olaf Scholz decided to be on the American team. He was referring to a meeting between the German Chancellor and US President Joe Biden on February 7 last year. At the joint press conference, the American head of state said about the then imminent war in Ukraine: “If Russia invades, there will be no more Nord Stream 2. We will put an end to this.”
LNG deliveries from the US have increased by 143 percent from the previous year which has been a catastrophe for the climate, critics argue. “The biggest hypocrisy in decoupling Europe from Russian oil and gas supplies concerns environmental policy. The production and transport of LNG from the USA results in a CO2 footprint that is twice as large as that of conventional Russian gas,” according to Le Monde Diplomatique.
The sabotage act to enforce the “rules-based international order”, furthermore triggered a massive release of methane causing major damage to the environment, to marine life, including to dolphins, whales and plants. This fact has been of no interest to various EU Green party supporters nor to Greta Thunberg.
The AfD parliamentary group leader pointed out that the US had attacked an ally: “Has the leading power of NATO carried out an attack on our country’s vital critical infrastructure in European waters?” If so, one would have to question whether the alliance guarantees security in Europe or rather endangers it. The withdrawal of all US troops should be the consequence.”
According to Chrupalla, all the findings of national authorities should be laid out before the European Parliament: “The European states must not put up with such violent interference. They are even less allowed to participate in it.”
Norway profits from German loss
Until Wednesday, the investigative journalist had always been known as “a legend” in leading German media screeds – as a famous sleuth successfully uncovering numerous American state crimes. Since his [Nord Stream] revelations, he has become “controversial” however.
The treatment of the Hersh revelations in German mainstream media – either totally ignoring them or blaming the Kremlin – will most probably give the already low credibility of the “leading outlets” their final deathblow.
Moreover, it appears that Germany’s most trusted “ally” had no difficulty in persuading Norway as a member of the European “community of values” to take part in a criminal endeavour in order to sell its energy exports to Germany much more profitably.
But in order to do so, Norway became actively involved in an act of terrorism, breach of international law, as well as a breach of the United Nations Charter.
When US Special Forces covert actions in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras included mining the coast of Nicaragua to stop locals from fishing and other marine activities, the case was successfully brought to the International Court of Justice in June 1986. This means that the International Court of Justice, which was established by the UN Charter, has jurisdiction in this case, legal scholars believe.
Following the sabotage, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden launched separate inquiries into the attack, further highlighting the disunity of EU members. Sweden was reportedly the first to leave the planned joint investigation team; Denmark followed suit. To date, no European country has made its findings public.
Hersh’s revelations are especially a challenge for conservatives and right-wing Atlanticists. Because if Hersh’s comprehensive account of the events, which is based on high-ranking sources in Washington, is correct, then “there can be no other consequence than the demand for the withdrawal of all American troops and military bases from Germany,” according to Wolfgang Hübner, a long-standing city councilor and parliamentary group leader of the Bürger für Frankfurt (BFF).
Legal hurdles for team Biden
The executive branch under Biden may have unilaterally decided to wage war on Germany, but there are many legal problems associated with their project, such as the failure to inform Congress or even the powerful congressional Gang of Eight.
According to Hersch, the US Navy performed the destruction of a foreign government’s property at the direction of President Biden. Claiming that they were just following orders would not go far in court, since bypassing Congress is evidently illegal.
Specifically, the Gang of Eight includes the leaders of each of the two parties from both the US Senate and House of Representatives, and the chairs and ranking minority members of both the Senate Committee and House Committee for intelligence as set forth by 50 U.S.C. § 3093(c)(2).
It is also telling that US military service chiefs did not raise the alarm when the Biden team decided to blow up Nord Stream.
Well before Hersch’s report, Norwegian investigative reporter, Alf R Jacobsen, had written a detailed analysis of the Nord Stream sabotage. In October 2022, Jacobsen challenged the idea of Russia’s involvement in the blasts. According to him, Hersh’s piece is credible.
Who is Jake Sullivan, the Man Who Reportedly Assembled ‘Dream Team’ to Destroy Nord Stream?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 09.02.2023
National Security Adviser to President Biden Jake Sullivan played a prominent role in plotting the September 26, 2022, sabotage against the Russo-European Nord Stream pipelines, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed. So, who is Jake Sullivan: “the cat’s meow,” “once-in-a-generation intellect,” or a reckless hawk?
“I have great respect for Hersh and his reporting and believe that Sullivan could certainly have been instrumental in pushing for and carrying out this deceitful campaign that likely has inflicted monumental damage on citizens worldwide while also sapping America’s remaining national prestige,” Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
In December 2021, Jake Sullivan, acting with Joe Biden’s blessing, convened men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments to come up with a plan on how to destruct Nord Stream 1 and 2 designed to pump Russian natural gas to Europe, according to Seymour Hersh’s recent bombshell.
In early 2022, the CIA told Sullivan that they knew how to blow up the pipelines. The group decided to keep the risky plot on a hush. The US Congress wasn’t informed. The US military and intelligence operatives did their best to conceal Washington’s role in the sabotage. As per the investigative journalist, the team had concerns about the legality of the plot and was well aware that it could quickly morph into a foreign policy nightmare.
After the pipelines had been destroyed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, later, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly praised the development.
“When any crime is committed, the immediate question to ask when seeking suspects is ‘to whose benefit?’ Not only did it benefit the US, US officials made comments before and after the pipeline’s destruction virtually confirming their role and the benefits derived,” Brian Berletic, geopolitical analyst and former US marine, told Sputnik.
For his part, Jake Sullivan stated laconically on September 27, 2022, that the US was supporting efforts to investigate the “apparent sabotage” and “will continue [it’s] work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.”
“Hersh’s reporting on the Nord Stream bombing is completely convincing and I know for a fact that he has reliable sources, mostly in the intelligence community, but I would rather regard Sullivan as the implementer of the attack on the pipeline by virtue of his position rather than the driving force behind it,” Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief, now an executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik. “To be sure, Joe Biden would have had to promote and endorse the project.”
Clinton’s Golden Boy
Jake Sullivan, 46, has long been praised as a “golden boy” by the US mainstream media. Having graduated from Yale in 1998 Sullivan became an advisor to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008 and later, after Hillary dropped out from the race, he advised Barack Obama during his general election campaign.
Sullivan was just 32 when he was sworn in as Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for policy at the US State Department. When Clinton left the State Department in early 2013, Obama promoted Sullivan to the position of national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In 2015, Sullivan married Margaret Goodlander, onetime advisor to well-known hawks Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who used to previously work for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for a New American Security. (Goodlander is currently Counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland).
Sullivan is known for being a quiet but prominent member of the Clinton-Obama team. According to the press, he was part of the “exclusive” team working on resuming relations with Cuba and striking the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. He is also said to be Hillary’s close confidante in the Libya plan, which was developed months before the 2011 NATO invasion of the North African state and brutal killing of its leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Sullivan and his boss, Clinton, adhered to the concept of “smart power,” which encompasses the use of military threat, force, and sanctions and the soft-power levers favored by foreign policy doves, which includes humanitarian aid and negotiations.
The aide was reportedly called “the cat’s meow” and a “potential future president” by Hillary, while Biden lauded him as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.”
In 2015, the sandy-haired Minnesotan joined Hillary on her 2015/2016 election cycle as a foreign policy adviser and eventually returned to the US administration as Joe Biden’s national security adviser in 2021.
Sullivan Lacks True Sense of Right Versus Wrong
However, there’s another side to Sullivan’s stellar career. “Sullivan is clearly drunk on power and lacking a true sense of right versus wrong,” according to Ortel.
“Sullivan is a fiercely partisan globalist who achieved numerous high honors in academic life so he is supremely self-confident and, sadly, often grievously wrong,” Ortel told Sputnik. “One way to get a sense of the way he operates is to look through the State Department and Podesta WikiLeaks files and the FBI Vault files on Hillary Clinton where Sullivan is frequently involved. Like the Clintons, Sullivan thrust himself into contact with powerful Democrats and operated well above his experience level early on. But unlike the Clintons, Obama, and Biden, Sullivan has yet to hold elected office.”
One might wonder why Sullivan rose to prominence so fast even though he had relatively little experience in government affairs. Hillary herself admitted that Jake wasn’t the most experienced diplomat when it came to foreign policy.
“Jake was not the most experienced diplomat at the State Department I could have chosen, but he was discreet and had my absolute confidence,” Clinton wrote in her memoir Hard Choices while describing her decision to tap Sullivan to kick off negotiations with Iran in 2012. “His presence would send a powerful message that I was personally invested in this process.”
According to US media observers, Sullivan’s primary secret is that he mastered himself in delivering on his boss’s wants and needs even when it went contrary to rules and ethics. The US press quoted a senior Obama aide as saying that Sullivan was ready to do “everything” for then-Secretary Clinton.
Unsurprisingly, Sullivan had no scruples about Hillary’s unsecured email server use for classified and top secret government correspondence. He was bullish on Washington’s Libyan and Syrian interventions which spiraled out of control, completely ruining the North Africa state and leaving the Syrian Arab Republic in tatters.
“Under Obama and Biden, Sullivan is connected to train wreck after train wreck, from the Arab “spring”, to Benghazi, ISIS, the Iran ‘deal’ and more. He seems to be a huge fan of secret negotiations that are never subject to oversight,” Ortel noted.
Sullivan got mired in Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi scandal revolving around the former secretary of state’s failure to prevent a brutal slaughter of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US nationals in Libya on September 11, 2012. During the investigation into the matter, the House committee stumbled upon Sullivan’s letter in which the official emphasized that “we need to live in a world of risks,” while touting Washington’s decision to oust Gaddafi which opened the door to chaos in Libya.
Trump-Russia “Collusion” Hoax
“In the 2016 campaign, he had every motive to hide the misdeeds of the Clintons, including corruption and tax fraud involving The Clinton Foundation and many other charities,” said Ortel, who has been conducting a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for several years. “Here it will prove interesting to see what [Special Councel] John Durham has to say about Sullivan, including his likely role pushing the Russian Hoax, for Trump’s impeachment and for electing Joe Biden.”
Sullivan appeared to have no scruples about actively spreading the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and keeping the myth alive even after the allegations about Trump were proven null and void. Later, Durham’s investigation shed light on Clinton campaign operatives’ role in peddling a fake Trump-Alfa Bank story and uncorroborated “dirty dossier” by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
However, when testifying under oath before the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, the Clinton confidante denied any knowledge of the plot or people involved in it.
US investigative journalist Paul Sperry alleged that Sullivan was well-aware that the Trump-Alfa Bank story was “cooked-up” and personally spearheaded a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin.
Sullivan was also the one who personally promoted the Trump-Russia collusion story prior to the 2016 elections. Thus, during the July 2016 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, Sullivan met with a number of mainstream media producers and anchors to tell a story “that Trump was conspiring with Putin to steal the election.”
Around that time, the CIA intercepted Russian intelligence’s “chatter” about a Clinton “foreign policy adviser” who allegedly proposed a plan to vilify Donald Trump by linking him to the Kremlin in order to distract public opinion from Hillary’s emailgate scandal. Some US observers believe that the foreign policy adviser in question was Jake Sullivan.
According to Ortel, Sullivan could well be aware of many other “dirty” secrets of the US Democratic establishment, including the Clinton’s alleged pay-to-play schemes, Joe and Hunter Biden influence peddling and Team Obama’s efforts to undermine then-sitting President Donald Trump through a string of dodgy investigations and leaks.
“Simply put, Sullivan has no choice but to cover up the disasters connected to Biden, Obama and Clinton and likely cannot accept the grave errors (and high crimes) that seem to have been committed. In this effort, he will believe he is secure because his wife is a close advisor and friend of Attorney General Merrick Garland,” the Wall Street analyst remarked.
Nord Stream Reporting Not Done
When it comes to the Nord Stream sabotage, “in a just process, Sullivan and his co-conspirators would swiftly be charged, convicted and incarcerated if it is proven that he orchestrated an undeclared war against Russia,” argued Ortel.
According to Ortel, by fanning the flames of proxy war against Russia, Team Biden both pursues vested interests and seeks to cover up and obscure political misdeeds involving Biden, Clinton and Obama in Ukraine and other nations from 2009 to date.
Still, it appears that one could soon hear more about the Biden administration’s secretive and risky plot. Hersh indicated to Sputnik that more investigative pieces about the Nord Stream explosion were forthcoming, but declined to provide further details.
New corruption scheme to escape recruitment revealed in Ukraine
By Lucas Leiroz | February 9, 2023
A new illegal arrangement has been revealed in the country. This time, the denounced plan involves an illicit system of evasion of Ukrainian recruits, allowing them to escape the compulsory military service and, consequently, the battlefield. Although the case shows the high levels of corruption in Ukrainian society, it is also an example of how the neo-Nazi army is discredited and the local population is unwilling to maintain the conflict.
The scheme was revealed by Ukrainian informants to the Russian military involved in the special operation. According to them, Kiev’s officials engaged in the recruitment campaign constantly accept bribes in order not to proceed with the enlistment of some people.
The process works as follows: enlistment candidates pay a sum of 10,000 dollars to join volunteer units. In these units, volunteers start working by trying to raise funds for the army on social networks, being saved from the front if they successfully manage to do so. The heads of units take for themselves between 5% and 10% of the amount collected by each volunteer. As a result, the poorest Ukrainians – unable to pay the tariff of 10,000 dollars or to run fundraising campaigns and the less popular on the internet – are the most vulnerable to forced mobilization.
“According to information received from sources in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a corruption scheme of draft evasion has been established in Ukraine. The entrance tariff is $10,000. It is a one-time payment to a military commissar in order to enroll a potential recruit in a volunteer organization operating at each Recruitment and Social Support Center of the Ukrainian army. This is how the military enlistment offices are called there now (…) Depending on the amount collected, each volunteer is required to pay tribute personally to the military commissar through his intermediaries, the amount varies from 5% to 10% of the total sum collected”, sources say.
It is necessary to remember that this is not the first time that crimes in enlistment units have been exposed. In August 2022, Ukrainian media outlets reported the existence of a system in which the citizens of the country would be “buying” invitations to study abroad, mainly at universities in Poland and the Baltics, thus escaping mobilization. At the time, the news caused outrage among Ukrainians on the battlefield and, in the same vein, this recent case is expected to further increase the internal polarization among Kiev’s forces.
In fact, it is well known that Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, with crimes in virtually all sectors of the state. However, as far as the military issue is concerned, the situation is much more complicated. Despite the wrong attitude of the Ukrainian high rank officials in accepting bribes and extorting their own population, the case shows that there is a deep dissatisfaction on the part of the Ukrainian people in relation to the conflict. Such schemes only continue to exist because many people are willing to pay not to go to the front and if this is happening it is because Kiev’s forces are discredited among Ukrainian people.
In the western media it is said that the Ukrainian people are organized and cohesive in search of victory against Russia, but, in reality, local citizens seem wanting to do anything to escape the conflict. Ukrainians visibly do not believe in their country’s victory and do not even think this is a conflict worth fighting. For them, what really interests is to stay alive, fleeing the battlefield in every possible way, even through the involvement in corruption schemes.
Recently, videos of the forced mobilization campaign launched by Kiev began to circulate on the internet. It is possible to see people being conducted to the front by force, with houses being invaded and teenagers taken from their families. Even physically disabled people have been mobilized, which shows the weakness and despair of the forces of the neo-Nazi regime, which seek every form of support possible in order to face Russia. On the other hand, some corrupt officials within the Ukrainian army take advantage of the situation by seeking to extort these young people to allow them to escape the front.
With so many military experts around the world saying that Russian victory is inevitable, there is no reason for Kiev to keep fighting. The best thing to do is to negotiate peace and thus freeing the Ukrainian people from the suffering that affects them.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Jeffrey Epstein: A Jewish Individual?
Review of “One Nation under Blackmail”
The Occidental Observer | February 5, 2023
One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein (Volume 1 & 2)
Whitney Webb
Trine Day, 2022
“Far from being an anomaly, Epstein was one of several men who, over the past century, have engaged in sexual blackmail activities designed to obtain damaging information (i.e., “intelligence”) on powerful individuals with the goal of controlling their activities and securing their compliance.”[1]
Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell is locked away in prison, and the thought-makers of our world seem keen to let the more explosive parts of the scandal dissipate from the public consciousness. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, Epstein and Maxwell were little more than well-connected socialites who ran a sex-trafficking ring for the rich and the powerful, and the focus has shifted instead to the criminal and civil cases seeking to achieve redress for the victims of sexual abuse.
On occasion some newspaper articles will mention the hidden cameras littered across Epstein’s properties, others the reams of CDs and hard drives found within them during the FBI raids. Altogether missing from the Netflix documentaries (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich [2020] and Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich [2022]) or the articles that spend their time narrowly focusing on the links between Epstein and Bill Gates, is the acknowledgement of the true nature of Epstein himself and the ultimate purpose of this sex-trafficking of minors — a sexual blackmail operation.
Not everyone is cowardly enough to let these controversial aspects lie untouched, as the newly released two-volume book One Nation Under Blackmail by independent reporter Whitney Webb seeks to blow wide open this media-enforced blackout. Utilizing primarily open-source information (that is, publicly accessible information such as books, newspapers articles and government reports),[2] Webb’s book delves into the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein and his deep ties to Jewish billionaires and Israeli intelligence. The intersection of sexual politics with Jewish power has long since been of interest to this writer, and the case of Jeffrey Epstein is easily one of the most damning instances, as evident by the large amount of popular interest in the story. A selection of other books on the Epstein/Maxwell case has appeared in bookshops over the past two years, but a cursory glance through their pages and at their appendices, where the words ‘Israel,’ ‘Jewish,’ and ‘Zionism’ are conspicuously lacking, shows you how surface-level they are in comparison to Webb’s book.
As Webb details extensively throughout the first volume, using sexual blackmail[3] to achieve political ends is far from being an Epstein innovation; it is almost certainly a tactic he learned from others in the murky world where crime meets intelligence. Nor is it something exclusive to Jews. But one can’t help but notice a consistent ethnic pattern in the known major perpetrators of this sort of behavior in Western countries. I have previously written about the Australian variety, where Jewish underworld figure Abe Saffron acquired compromising pictures of prominent Australians (more often than not with underage prostitutes) and leveraged this for his own nefarious ends. Webb (in Chapter 2: Booze and Blackmail) outlines in detail the blackmail operations ran by mob-linked figures Lewis Rosenstiel and Roy Cohn from a bugged suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Other non-Jews that Webb identifies as running parallel schemes, such as Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi or Craig Spence, were likewise deeply enmeshed in the same circles (Khashoggi in fact worked for Israeli intelligence).
Ultimately what is most frightening about the Epstein case, and what makes it stands out from the rest, is the sophistication of the operation, the high profile of the targets—from sitting US presidents to senior members of the British Royal Family—and the extraordinary lengths gone to in order to protect Epstein and avoid the true nature of his activities being exposed. It was as if there was something important at the heart of it all, something worthy of being protected by those in power, with lots at stake lest it be brought into public view. On a number of occasions Webb points to the underreported comments attributed to Alex Acosta, the attorney who gave Epstein his infamous plea deal in 2007, who allegedly told the Trump White House transition team that he backed off upon being told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”[4] At every stage where Epstein came under scrutiny, from his first legal conviction, to his second arrest and the questionable circumstances of his death, and even in the post-mortem coverage of his indiscretions, forces seemingly moved in the background to obscure and obfuscate, to clean up the mess and avoid as much detail be allowed to come to light as possible.
Like many books published by small dissident publishers with limited resources, both volumes would have been improved with editing for a more streamlined narrative, as neither makes for easy reading. Without a familiarity with the major events and actors described throughout each densely-packed chapter, the connections and the significance of the interactions between people are sometimes difficult to comprehend. Webb’s sources are conveniently compiled in endnotes at the conclusion of each chapter, and she uncovers a level of detail that makes it a worthy resource for your bookshelf that you will inevitably return to when trying to remember a name or make sense of a connection. Nevertheless, as this review concludes, the book falls short of providing a satisfying answer to the questions that readers of The Occidental Observer would go into it having, and shies away from responding to the most glaring aspects of the Epstein case of all.
ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL
The central thesis of the book is that there has historically between a connection between organized crime and intelligence agencies in America, where the two are in some cases so intensely interwoven in their activities that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. This thesis, Webb claims, allows us to understand the nature of Jeffrey Epstein and his mysterious life, and that Epstein is one of many such nefarious actors who have operated on the margins of legitimacy. Volume 1 begins in the first half of the twentieth century, where Webb argues that the first connection between intelligence and organised crime was forged in America during the midst of World War II, in an undertaking known as Operation Underworld. This collaboration, specifically between the National Crime Syndicate (an alliance between the Italian and Jewish mobs) and the forerunners of the modern intelligence apparatus, came out of a sort of national security necessity that reaped geo-political dividends and continued after 1945 and into the Cold War.
Though intriguing, many of the chapters of Volume 1 deal with events and personalities of more limited relevance to the main Epstein blackmail story, covering the web of intrigue and scandal surrounding things such as Watergate, the BCCI, the China Lobby, and more obscure events like Billygate and Koreagate. Those chapters dealing with the spiritual forebears of Jeffrey Epstein are the ones that provide the most context and are the most enlightening to read. Webb presents a wealth of information about the history of the Jewish mob and other powerful Jewish figures during the middle years of the twentieth century, when wider Jewish political and cultural influence was beginning to solidify within America and the West. The cast of Jewish characters implicated in major American criminal, financial and political scandals, especially those with a direct line of descent to the Epstein blackmail operation, is staggering: the Bronfman family, Roy Cohn, Bruce Rappaport, Meyer Lanksy, Lewis Rosenstiel, Marc Rich, Max Fisher, Edmond Safra, and Robert Maxwell.
In Chapter 3, “Organised Crime and the State of Israel,” Webb underscores that much of the support given to the Zionist paramilitary groups that operated prior to the foundation of Israel—in the form of smuggled arms and funding—came from criminal networks. Canadian-Jewish liquor barons the Bronfman family, who participated in bootlegging during prohibition, financed the purchase of weapons for Haganah troops. Other Jewish mob figures with Zionist sympathies donated large sums and aided the Zionist cause during Israel’s formative years. This criminal collusion was, in Israel’s case, ongoing throughout its history and was “baked in at the very foundations of, not only its intelligence services, but the origins of the state itself.”[5]
Chapter 9, “High Tech Treason,” introduces us to Robert Maxwell, British media mogul and Israel’s Superspy, another figure of importance in Epstein’s younger years, who jumped almost seamlessly between the roles of organized crime associate and intelligence agent. Webb explores Maxwell’s involvement with the Eastern Bloc mob, including when he lobbied Israel to grant Semion Mogilevich an Israeli passport, allowing him access to the US financial system, and the PROMIS scandal, whereby Maxwell helped Israeli intelligence sell bugged computer software to governments and corporations around the world.
When MI6 attempted to recruit Maxwell for the service, it concluded, after conducting an extensive background check, that Maxwell was a “Zionist—loyal only to Israel.”[6]
Chapter 10, “Government by Blackmail: The Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era,” brings Volume 1 to a close, where many of the cast of disreputable characters revealed in earlier chapters come home to roost during the Reagan administration and the Iran-Contra scandal. The familiar figure of Roy Cohn appears again as a “political fixer” for the Reagan campaign, but Webb notes that Reagan’s intimacy with powerful Jewish figures with organised crime links goes all the way back to the very start of his career, with his mentor Lew Wasserman, the long-time president of Hollywood’s MCA, Inc. and “arguably the most powerful and influential Hollywood titan in the four decades after World War II,” acting as a political patron.
JEFFREY’S SHIKSES
Volume 1 sets the stage for Volume 2, where the interwoven networks of people introduced come together to contextualize the world that Epstein sprang from. Webb covers the underreported early years of Epstein’s financial career in the 1970s and 1980s, which are filled with just as much criminal intrigue as his later years as sex criminal, including his role as a “financial bounty hunter” allegedly working for Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. His years as an investment banker at Bear Sterns, where he was seemingly brought directly into the company by Alan Greenberg,[7] sat for many years under a cloud of suspicion that he participated in an insider trading scheme carried out by the Bronfman-owned company Seagram. Epstein’s involvement with Steven Hoffenberg in what was at the time the largest uncovered Ponzi scheme in American financial history, Towers Financial Corporation, is yet another fascinating detail largely ignored elsewhere.
How and when Epstein was inducted into the world of intelligence cannot be accurately deduced, but Webb offers a number of potential scenarios, relating to his proximity to people such as Maxwell and Khashoggi. Elsewhere she points to the direct relationship Epstein seemingly had with the highest levels of the Israeli government. Former Israeli Prime Minister and military intelligence figure Ehud Barak, another close Epstein associate, claimed that he was first introduced to Epstein by none other than Shimon Peres.[8] Webb pins the beginning of the sexual blackmail scheme to some point in the early 1990s, around the time Ghislaine Maxwell latched onto Epstein following the death of her father.
Chapter 18, “Predators” deals with the nuts and bolts of the operation, exploring in detail the various methods both Epstein and Maxwell used to recruit and procure girls. Sometimes it was through friendships with the owners of modelling companies, other times it was as simple as Maxwell approaching a girl on the street and recruiting them for “massages.” Even literally purchasing underage Slavic girls from Eastern Europe was apparently a possibility for Epstein.[9] Their relationship with Les Wexner (Epstein was Wexner’s long-time money manager) also proved fruitful, using their connection with the popular Victoria’s Secret fashion chain—a brand owned by Wexner—to pose as recruiters.
Webb first came to my attention when she conducted an interview with Maria Farmer, considered the earliest Epstein victim to report him to the authorities. The interview is long, upwards of three hours, but well worth a listen, especially when Farmer begins to discuss how she was treated by the powerful Jewish figures surrounding Epstein:
I don’t know any White supremacists, but I know a lot of Jewish supremacists… They made it very clear that I was a servant [to them] because I was White.[10]
Farmer may be unfamiliar with the word shikse, but it perfectly describes how Epstein and Maxwell considered these young gentile girls ensnared in their net of abuse. The supposed “trope” of the Jewish man lusting after the shikse finds in Epstein yet another real-life example, with underage blonde girls being his victim of choice when satisfying his own urges. Former Ghislaine Maxwell friend Christina Oxenberg, quoted in the book from an at-the-time anonymous source, relayed a conversation she once had with Maxwell about who these women were that she was “recruiting.” Maxwell reportedly dismissed them with ease: “They’re nothing, these girls. They are trash.”[11]
On the other side of the operation was of course the hidden cameras and the recording equipment. The presence of these hidden cameras in Epstein’s properties is independently confirmed by a number of eyewitnesses, court documents and early newspaper articles that detail this curious addition to Epstein’s properties, and the existence of the CDs and hard drives to store the footage is a matter of public record, including from the latest FBI raid of Epstein’s New York mansion in 2019:
Per photographs taken at the time of the raid, hard drives were found inside a safe forced open by the FBI and numerous large black binders were found in a closet that contain “CDs, carefully categorized in plastic slipcovers and thumbnails with photos on them.” When shown in court, the “homemade labels” were redacted, as judge Alison Nathan had ruled that they contained “identifying information for third parties.” Did that information involve only the names of underage girls, the names of blackmail victims, or both?[12]
The FBI conveniently lacked the warrant to seize these items, and upon returning four days later with the correct warrant, the CDs and hard drives were gone. They were later handed over by Epstein’s lawyer, but having not had the chance to view what was on them, we can only assume that this was more than enough time to delete any incriminating files.
Epstein schmoozing with elites. Left, from left: Epstein, Alan Dershowitz, Steven Pinker, and Larry Summers, presumably at Harvard. Right: with Ghislaine and Bill Clinton
Much has been made of the relationship that existed between Epstein and Donald Trump before they allegedly fell out with each other in 2004 over a property dispute in Palm Beach, Florida, but as Webb exposes in Chapter 16, “Crooked Campaigns,” Epstein and Maxwell had a far more politically intimate relationship with President Bill Clinton that coincided with his time in office and his early post-presidency years. Epstein visited the Clinton White House 17 times, and was apparently a prominent figure in the formation of the Clinton Global Initiative, which saw Clinton as a regular passenger on Epstein’s infamous plane, the “Lolita Express.” Webb refers to other attempts of sexual blackmail against Clinton, including in 1998 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently threatened Clinton with tape recordings Israel had obtained proving outright that he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, using them to pressure Clinton to pardon Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard.[13] It seems the Clinton White House, which was seeking a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, was of key interest.
Chapter 21, “From PROMIS to Palantir: The Future of Blackmail,” finishes off Volume 2 with the chilling insight that perhaps one of the reasons Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation collapsed was because it was allowed to collapse — it had become outdated and irrelevant. The advent of the permanent internet connection has brought about opportunities for far more widespread and even more intimate forms of blackmail, instead conducted and collected via electronic means. A technological panopticon whereby the cameras once placed by Epstein throughout his properties are instead now placed by big tech and social media companies in our own homes, omnipresent in our lives. After his 2008 conviction, both Epstein and Maxwell seemed to be shifting away from sexual blackmail and were making inroads in Silicon Valley and mixing with data-harvesting IT companies. Epstein’s previous ties with higher-ups at Microsoft and his financial support for John Brockman’s Edge Foundation gave him an in with plenty of big tech leaders, and he had re-branded himself as a tech investor, starting a company focused on collecting genetic data. Ghislaine’s siblings in the Maxwell family also have pedigree in the tech industry going back to the 1990s. As noted by Webb, “in a world where blackmail is overwhelmingly electronic, people like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell become liabilities to be silenced, rather than assets to protect.”[14]
WHO, WHAT AND WHY?
Upon finishing Volume 2, I found that many of the questions raised by Webb still remained open. Who or what is “the system” that enabled Epstein and protected him from justice? If so many people knew, why was there such an institutional resistance to speak out about Epstein? And the most important question of all: what was the goal behind collecting this sexual blackmail? Why were Epstein and his benefactors trying to control these victims? Unfortunately, Webb’s book does not provide a satisfying conclusion.
Webb does not shy away from pointing the finger at Israel or from discussing wider Zionist motivations and groups like B’nai B’rith. However, she stops frustratingly short of the obvious conclusions. Granted the reluctance is one that all those knowledgeable on the Jewish question are familiar with, and perhaps she simply avoids the discussion for the sake of keeping her book on Amazon and appealing to a wider audience, rather than have it be relegated to the ADL’s banned book department. But for an answer to the questions most readers are likely after, we are given nothing more than a few measly sentences concluding that the Epstein operation was instigated by Israeli intelligence and that those in the “power structure” and “the system” — the same people that made Epstein untouchable — have now strengthened their stranglehold over America. Ultimately, readers are given the impression that this blackmail was collected as control merely for the sake of control, power merely for the sake of power, without a deeper underpinning goal.
Upon being challenged during an interview by Jewish podcaster Adam Sosnick on the obvious Jewish identity of the key players, Webb retreats to the safe position: By referring to Israeli intelligence or Jewish criminals, one is not referring to all Jewish people, and one cannot conflate the Epstein network or powerful billionaire Zionists with the whole Jewish community, or ascribe any wider group motive to them. Sosnick also exhorts the listener to avoid speaking of groups and instead only of individuals, lest it breed hate.[15]
One is of course allowed to speak of the Chinese or Catholics or Russians in general terms and in a political sense as behaving out a sense of group identity and a sense of group interests, and it is sophistry to claim that the speaker is referring to every single Catholic in the world or every single Russian in the world. Regardless of which sociological theory of power you ascribe to, what is clearly being referred to is the organized community, the power structure that represents the wider in-group and operates towards a unique ingroup goal. In the case of the Russians, this is currently Putin and the Russian state apparatus, supplemented by the Russian military, media and business elite that do not dissent from achieving Russian strategic interests as determined by the state apparatus. For Catholics, it is the Vatican and the international network of dioceses, bolstered by the Catholic Universities, think tanks and charities. People are not forced to declare “not all Catholics” when dealing with the allegations of a cover-up of child sexual abuse within the church.
When one speaks of the Jews, it stands to reason that the same scenario should apply. That is, it quite reasonably refers to the organized Jewish community, including organizations like the ADL; the powerful figures in Israel and in the diaspora, as well as the religious and intellectual leaders, the business figures and the lobbying groups. Sure there are dissenters and outsiders, and of course there is internal debate and a difference of opinion on the best means for meeting its goals, but the organized Jewish community exists just the same, and remains firm in its fundamental goal of ensuring the security and survival of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
Herein lies the problem for Webb and the reason behind the demand to treat Epstein as a mere “Jewish individual.” The network of powerful Jewish figures and institutions chronicled throughout Webb’s book is a network that is intimately connected to Jeffrey Epstein or to his blackmail operation: Robert Maxwell, the Pritzker Family, Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz, Ehud Barak and Israeli intelligence, the world’s wealthiest Jewish families that formed the Mega Group (the Bronfman, Lauder and Wexner families). The list goes on and on. These are not powerless fringe figures or outsiders who are scorned by Jewish leaders or the wider Jewish community. They are the leaders of the organized Jewish community, some of whom practically direct Jewish-American cultural, political and even religious life. To remove them from the equation of power would be the equivalent of removing half of the highest-ranking members of the Vatican from the Catholic Church or leading members of the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese state.
Using the phrase “the Jews” cuts the Gordian Knot at the heart of Webb’s attempt to understand Epstein, whom he was working for, and how he so effortlessly moved among the elite strata of society, why it was covered up, who stood to benefit from this blackmail operation, and what its ultimate aim was. With those two words, all the jumbled euphemisms of “elites” and “Zionists” melt away, and the confusing mix of organized crime and intelligence, legitimate and illegitimate enterprises seemingly working in unison with each other starts to become intelligible. The ease with which Epstein and Maxwell abused and then dismissed these young girls as mere “trash” makes more sense when you know the meaning behind the word shikse (an unclean abomination). The reason for the legal cover-up and the inhibition of the mainstream media to run the story, even when they have no direct connection to the Epstein network, is obvious when you know who the proprietors of most mainstream American media outlets are, and with whom both cultural and institutional power in the US now lies. All this interwoven association is merely two sides of the same coin—a system constructed to ensure the security of Israel and the survival of the Jewish people. To talk openly about Epstein’s true activities is to talk openly about the nature of Jewish power, and for that reason alone most will not do so, for fear of the Jews. In all, Webb has picked up the puzzle pieces and assembled them neatly on the board, but she refuses to take that final step back and honestly contemplate the picture she has pieced together.
What are we to make of the institutional silence and protection, and the dishonest shifting of the narrative to a mere sex-trafficking ring? What can you conclude from the attempt to declare anyone who dares point out the clear ethnic goal at the heart of this vile sexual blackmail operation an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist? The only reasonable conclusion is that Epstein functioned with the support and backing of Jewry’s most powerful figures, and that the organised Jewish community is willing to conceal a criminal conspiracy of frightening proportions if it serves to benefit the Jews or would otherwise negatively affect them (by creating more anti-Jewish sentiment) if the American public knew the truth.
Had Epstein’s personal indiscretions not become too big to ignore and had it not all unravelled so spectacularly due to the pressure of the #MeToo movement, would Epstein also have been buried in honor like Robert Maxwell, with Israeli Prime Ministers and dignitaries lining up to give a tearful goodbye to yet another faithful servant to the Jewish people? If he had been released early from a prison sentence, would he also have been welcomed back to Israel with open arms like Jonathon Pollard? Epstein had already once been professionally rehabilitated by Jews after his first conviction, there’s no reason why it couldn’t have happened again.
Notes
[1] Webb, W 2022, One Nation Under Blackmail: The sordid union between Intelligence and Organised Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (Volume 1), Trine Day, Oregon USA, p.IX.
[2] Webb does on occasion rely on interviews she conducted with figures close to the Epstein story such as Ari Ben-Menashe and Maria Farmer.
[3] As distinct from simply bribing someone with sex with a consulting adult, or honey pots traps, a tactic as old as time—think Samson and Delilah or modern versions such as the honeypot trap that captured Mordechai Vanunu.
[4] Vicki Ward, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight,” The Daily Beast (August 19, 2019). https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-sick-story-played-out-for-years-in-plain-sight
[5] Webb, Op. Cit., p.93.
[6] Webb, Op. Cit., p.382.
[7] Webb, W 2022, One Nation Under Blackmail: The sordid union between Intelligence and Organised Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (Volume 2), Trine Day, Oregon USA, p.6.
[8] Tarnopolsky, N 2019, ‘Ehud Barak: I Visited Epstein’s Island But Never Met Any Girls’, The Daily Beast, July 15, retrieved from: https://www.thedailybeast.com/israels-ehud-barak-i-visited-epsteins-island-but-never-met-any-girls
[9] Webb, Volume 2, Op. Cit., p.266-267.
[10] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtD02MeZU4o from 1:31 or so
[11] Webb, Volume 2, Op. Cit., p.276
[12] Ibid., p.58.
[13] Stoil, R. S 2014, ‘Netanyahu said to have offered Lewinsky tapes for Pollard’, The Times of Israel, July 23, retrieved from: https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-have-offered-lewinsky-tapes-for-pollard/
[14] Webb, Vol 2, Op. Cit., p.373.
[15] PBD Podcast 2020, The TRUTH About Jeffrey Epstein w/ Whitney Webb, Episode 198, retrieved from: https://youtu.be/GVVHWVoZ4kU?t=5978
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
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