Samantha Power and the Power of a Word
BY DIANA JOHNSTONE • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 3, 2024
Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
NATO’s air attacks on the Balkan nation were the practical application of a new post-Cold War doctrine. To succeed, this doctrine relied on Western media to report on crisis areas with the appropriate mixture of exaggerations, omissions and outright lies to justify NATO’s virtuous interventions. The military industrial complex could breathe easy and a new generation of journalists began successful careers eagerly spinning their reports to serve the new humanitarian war ideology.
None was more successful than Dublin-born Samantha Power, whose novice reports from Bosnia in the mid-1990s provided the basis for her 2002 book on “genocide” which “quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine.” She has gone on from one top governmental post to another, a Washington star, urging the United States to intervene on moral grounds.
Samantha Power owes her remarkable success to her talent as a writer, her ambition, her striking presence, but not least to the man at the origins of the whole humanitarian war policy.
That was none other than Morton Isaac Abramowitz, a highly influential member of the foreign policy establishment and the main inventor of what would become the “R2P” (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine. The crucial policy contribution of Abramowitz is explained at the start of my 2002 book, Fools’ Crusade, as follows:[1]
As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the early 1990s, Abramowitz headed a project to develop a new U.S. foreign policy for the post-Cold War era. Rather than identifying “threats”, especially at a time when few threats could be seen, a successful new policy needed to combine promotion of U.S. interests with proclamation of U.S. “ideals”.
Theory and Practice
At the Carnegie Endowment in 1992, Abramowitz published the theory of the new U.S. “humanitarian intervention” policy as Self-Determination in the New World Order.
“The vision of a ‘new world order’ since 1990 has been a world with one superpower – the United States – in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.”
That sounds very nice. But put into practice, “collective resistance” means NATO, and “all people are treated justly” depends on Washington’s preferences. The new rules-based order was not to be confused with traditional international law, based on national sovereignty. Globalization was making national sovereignty outdated (except for the United States). “Ideals” make rules more flexible.
The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, “groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination”. […] In the future, the authors announced, “humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable”. The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene.
Abramowitz subsequently helped put his theory into practice in crumbling Yugoslavia. He was the eminence grise behind U.S. diplomats, steering the events leading to the “Kosovo war” that split the province of Kosovo off from Serbia. He was advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the imitation “peace negotiations” staged at Rambouillet to provide an excuse for the bombing of Serbia. The moderate Albanian Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova was replaced by the armed gangster, Hashim Thaci. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright set terms no Serbian leader could accept, demanding the right to station NATO troops over the entire country, with full impunity. The Serb side was then blamed for the failure, and NATO began to bomb on March 24, 1999.
Samantha Steals her Way into Bosnia
Back in 1992, fresh out of Yale, 22-year-old Samantha Power was given a position as intern in the office of Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. As a proofreader, she quickly absorbed the new official doctrine. At that time, her boss was obsessed with the conflicts in Bosnia as implicating the future of NATO. Determined to get to Bosnia where the action was, Samantha stole stationery from the neighboring office of Foreign Policy magazine and forged a letter from the editor to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide her, as Foreign Policy’s “Balkan correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”[2]
From that time on, her work functioned precisely to advance the new “humanitarian intervention” policy of her mentor, Morton Abramowitz. She recalls that his influence helped her get increasingly important assignments – most crucially, writing about the Srebrenica massacre for The Washington Post.
With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
The Western press corps based in Sarajevo tended to become emotionally involved with the Muslim side which was its principal news source. Missing from their dispatches were reports on Muslim massacres of Serbs villages or on the well-armed Islamic fighters who joined the Muslim side from Afghanistan and Arab countries, some of them settling permanently in Bosnia.
When Bosnian Serb forces captured the Muslim base at Srebrenica in July 1995, they evacuated women, children and the aged to safety, while men fled, fearing retaliation. Many were killed in unclear circumstances.
Without reference to such context, Western media focused on reports of a massacre of 8,000 male prisoners as a unique event which branded the Serbs as the guilty party in the three-sided civil war. With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
Calling Srebrenica “genocide” provided the argument for NATO bombing: if Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia, it implied that Serbs were genocidal and risked committing genocide in Kosovo unless NATO intervened. This theory was supported by wildly inaccurate accusations voiced by leading Western politicians during the bombing campaign.
That was the story that was sold to the public by politicians and the media. From the start, the Serb majority in Yugoslavia had been portrayed as invaders in their own country, with everyone else as victims. Thus was destroyed the last semi-socialist, nonaligned country in Europe.
The Kosovo war indeed combined U.S. “interests and ideals”. The ideals were preventing a genocide that never would have taken place (and also, incidentally, preventing a negotiation that could have settled the whole conflict as well). The interests included the immediate construction by the Americans of a giant U.S. military base on the territory of Kosovo, once Serbian forces were obliged to leave.
Genocide and R2P
Samantha Power’s 2002 book was subtitled “America in the Age of Genocide”. To speak of the present as an “age of genocide” is wildly melodramatic, but the purpose is to place virtuous America in the center of drastic moral demands. America must save the world from its genocidal self. “Genocide” was thereby promoted as the most potent pretext for U.S. military intervention – precisely by deploring its absence, both in Bosnia and more convincingly, in Rwanda. The Clinton administration was certainly not going to intervene in Rwanda, because the bloody chaos was in fact favoring the conquest of Rwanda by Paul Kagame and his army, which had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Kagame was a favored client of the United States. There was no reason for Washington to interfere with Kagame’s victory.
But the “failure to stop genocide” was an appeal to the liberal conscience to intervene later on, whenever the U.S. was in need a powerful argument to get rid of a someone it wanted to get rid of. Moammer Gaddafi had been on the U.S.-UK hit list for decades, but had made concessions to gain reconciliation. But when Gaddafi’s usual fundamentalist Islamic opponents in Tripoli used the 2011 “Arab spring” to raise protests, the “threat of genocide” alarm was raised on their behalf. In Washington, action to stop Gaddafi from “committing genocide” was urged by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, while Bernard Henri Lévy raised the alarm in Paris. NATO rose to the challenge, destroyed the most economically successful country on the African continent and murdered its leader, creating a flood of refugees to Europe and other disasters. Most of the liberal left cheered.
Today it is widely recognized that the Irak war was based on deceit and ended in disaster. Other U.S. wars are mostly conceded to have been unfortunate mistakes. There are doubts about Libya, due mainly to the refugee flow. But the destruction of Yugoslavia, and in particular the 1999 “Kosovo war”, is still widely accepted in the West as what it was arranged to appear: NATO’s generous humanitarian intervention to prevent “genocide” by racist Serbs against the oppressed Albanian minority.
The distortions of the Bosnia conflict and the Kosovo war were precisely the practical application of the Abramowitz policy: promote minority rebellions to break down national sovereignty and change governments the U.S. doesn’t like, while supplying NATO with a new geographically unlimited mission of “humanitarian intervention”. Yugoslavia was the starting point of the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order, using the idealistic pretexts set out by Abramowitz. Young Samantha Power, who was very smart, got the point and ambitiously cheated her way into a supporting role as reporter in the Bosnia spectacle, which she eventually transformed into an astonishingly successful career.
I was in Kosovo on my own in months prior to the NATO bombardment and saw quite clearly that in that small province, the Serbs were a frightened minority while Albanians were already tasting their future triumph. There was absolutely no danger of a Serbian “genocide” of Albanians. But Western editors kept sending in ignorant young aspiring journalists, on the lookout for some “Serb atrocity” that could advance their budding career. Editors rejected any report that went in a different direction. It was at that time just plain impossible to publish an unbiased report. I know from experience.
Above all, breaking up Yugoslavia was an exercise in subsequent efforts to undermine the Russian Federation, by inciting the Federation’s ethnic minorities against the Russians. Ukraine was the crucial battering ram. I always used to think of Ukraine when studying the conflicts in the Krajina regions of Croatia and Bosnia, as both words have the same root (border land) and suffered from similar conflicts, notably in World War II. Western powers had revived the Nazi-supported Croatian nationalism against the Serbs to break up Yugoslavia. They would revive much more virulent Nazi-supported Ukrainian nationalism against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, in an effort to weaken and eventually even break up the Russian Federation.
And for the United States, the humanitarian “ideals” of supporting minorities would be compensated by the major strategic “interest” of eventually gaining control of Crimea, and with it, Russia’s main naval base in Sebastopol. Putin did what any Russian leader not brain-dead would have done: he headed off this disaster by mobilizing the Russian inhabitants of Crimea to vote to return to Russia, which they had never chosen to leave. This obvious act of self-determination is denounced in the West as an invasion.
The Ideological Backlash
Unfortunately, the blatantly tragic misuse of the “humanitarian intervention” or R2P doctrine in Libya has not managed to achieve its discredit. It is threatened now by the danger that it is changing sides in the very global conflicts it has stimulated.
The referendum in Crimea was a democratic measure of self-determination that fit the Abramowitz standards. The Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in 2022 was partially motivated by the sort of consideration featured in the Abramowitz doctrine: defense of the population of Donbas, under attack from an ultranationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, Western governments and media have simply totally ignored any Russia appeal to the ideals of human rights and self-determination, which they consider their own private property as self-declared unique “democracies”. Russia is classed as an “autocracy” whose interests must be malevolent and thus don’t count.
A greater threat to the West’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. Most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full Western backing, committing Genocide – the real thing this time, out in the open, blatant and unrelenting.
The NATO war machine may have to conjure up a new set of moralizing pretexts for its aggressions.
Notes
[1] See Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press, 2002, pp 9-10; Monthly Review 2003
[2] Here, with William Burns, Samantha Power discusses her new autobiography The Education of an Idealist and recalls her short term working for Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/13/samantha-power-on-education-of-idealist-event-7178
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Black – Jewish Delusion
Nation Of Islam Research Group | March 2024
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…”
—The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
When confronted by journalist Vicki Dillard on his stance on several Black issues—including his support for Israel’s genocidal obliteration of Gaza, Israel’s targeting of Black youth, and Israel’s training of police in America—presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ducked, dodged and resorted to the standard political pablum that every politician knows to pitch to the Black electorate. But when this Caucasian Irish Catholic lectured Blacks on how grateful they should be to white Jews for ALL they have done for them, he brought arrogance and ignorance to new levels. A verbatim transcript of his remarks follows:
“I would point out to you that during the civil rights movement that the Jews in this country and particularly the leadership of the Jews took a, um, were at the forefront of that movement and were embraced by Martin Luther King, were embraced by the other leaders of the movement. Three Jewish boys—Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney—were killed in Mississippi. They died or that Black Americans could—first the civil rights movement. Many, many other Jews took, took great risk and suffered because of their sacrifices for this civil rights movement…”
And with this fairytale-filled paragraph Kennedy believes he can dismiss the immense record of Jewish slave trading and the slavery-derived profits that made America the “promised land” for Jews, who, as a direct result of the slave trade, slavery, and sharecropping, achieved unprecedented wealth and prosperity. It is impossible to tell exactly what Kennedy is referring to with his disjointed word salad, but what is clear is that Kennedy believes he can milk an alleged civil rights legacy left to him by his father and uncle, Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy respectively. His double-barreled gambit is that (1) he can “embrace” the Black vote with a nostalgic civil righteousness; and (2) he can keep Jewish money flowing into his current presidential campaign by repeating an imaginary “civil rights” history Jews love to hear over and over and over again.
Indeed, Kennedy referred to the civil rights “movement” five times in that single paragraph. But the hard truth is that as attorney general, RFK, Jr.’s father ordered the FBI’s 24-hour surveillance and wiretapping of the movement’s leader—the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King—as part of his Justice Department’s notorious COINTELPRO operation that terrorized and murdered Black leaders and organizations. The harassment suffered by Dr. King, his family, and his movement has been well-covered elsewhere (here and here), but it included sending a menacing letter to Rev. King (see graphic) calling him “an evil, abnormal beast” and advising him to kill himself. Ultimately his assassination in 1968 was most likely carried out by these same agents of the U.S. government. When confronted recently on the role his father played in this targeting of Rev. King, RFK, Jr. exonerates his elders: “There was good reason for them doing that at the time… They knew that Hoover was out to ruin King,” Kennedy acknowledges. Blacks would be hard pressed to find a “good reason” for anyone to unleash J. Edgar Hoover on Black America’s most revered religious leader.
The Kennedys’ Alleged Civil Rights Legacy
As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy—RFK,Jr.’s father— developed a reputation as an advocate of civil rights in large part based on an incident that occurred in Georgia in 1960 involving the Rev. Martin Luther King, whom the FBI had been monitoring for five years. Dr. King was leading more than 200 activists in a campaign of sit-ins at 11 department stores in Atlanta when he was among the 51 Blacks arrested, but King was sentenced to four months of hard labor at a Georgia penitentiary.
When the incident hit the national news, the public outcry and pressure on “Bobby” to act was intense and so Kennedy called the sentencing judge and appealed to him to allow King to be released on bond and to appeal the conviction. Thus, Robert Kennedy became known as a “protector” of Black rights, if not a crusader. But the Atlanta episode exposed the underbelly of the Black–Jewish relationship and challenges the notion that the “Jewish leaders,” as Kennedy so smugly claimed, “um, were at the forefront of that movement.”
The arrest of Dr. King and the many demonstrators with him occurred at Rich’s Department Store, the largest department store in the South—at the demand of its Jewish owner Richard Rich (in photo). Rich was an honored member of his Atlanta synagogue and a president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and he was even voted Georgia’s Citizen of the Year by the Association of County Commissioners. Certainly he would be considered a Jewish leader, and he certainly was at the “forefront” of the civil rights movement—but on the opposite side of Black justice.
Rich (who changed his name from Rosenheim) operated the largest segregated business in Atlanta. He paid Blacks less than whites, had separate cafeterias and restrooms, and even held separate Christmas parties. Despite having one of the largest Black customer bases, he denied Blacks the right to work in any capacity other than in the kitchen, and he put those Black women in “Aunt Jemima costumes” to serve the all-white diners. All of this is by anyone’s definition the very opposite of “civil rights.”
This is significant because Jews and their supporters—like RFK, Jr.—demand that Blacks only consider the works of the “helpful” Jews like Goodman and Schwerner, but ignore the much larger role of those powerful Jim Crow Jews like Richard Rich who created the very conditions that necessitated the civil rights movement.
According to the book We Are Not Afraid: The Story Of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, after the first anti-segregation protest at his store a defiant Richard Rich “warned them angrily that integration would not be tolerated at Rich’s and that if they attempted a sit-in in his store again he would have them all arrested.”
Rich said he based his racism on “local customs,” but the other Jim Crow stores indicated that their racist policies were based on Rich’s, because his store was by far the largest. It was on the orders of the racist Richard Rich that Martin Luther King was handcuffed and jailed. When the publicity threatened to affect Rich’s profits, he tried to escape responsibility and declined to prosecute—but not because King and fellow protestors were right, but because, according to Rich and his attorney Morris Abram, “we didn’t want to make martyrs out of them and King.”
Rich was the most important Jew in Atlanta, and he was following in the footsteps of another leading Jew of a previous generation. In 1906, Oscar Pappenheimer was the most influential Jewish businessman in Atlanta. He offered this “practical suggestion” for Black civil rights in the Atlanta Constitution:
“I propose the registration of negroes in the southern states 14 years of age and more….Each person so registered should possess… a certificate… in which should be entered description, date and place of birth and, at each registration, record of abode, employment, conduct and reference….Let others decide whether it be legal to pass laws bearing on this subject with reference to the colored race only…”
Pappenheimer’s Atlanta proposal was nearly identical to that which Adolf Hitler enforced against Jews in Nazi Germany 30 years later.
So far, where do these Jews fit in RFK, Jr.’s civil rights fairytale?
RFK’s “Three Jewish boys”
In a truly embarrassing gaffe Kennedy claimed that “Three Jewish boys—Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney—were killed in Mississippi.” This, of course, would be news to James Chaney (left) and his family, who were not only Black but members of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Meridian, Mississippi. Nonetheless, the three martyrs cannot be forgotten for the ultimate sacrifice they made in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 for the cause of Black human rights. Nor can we allow falsehoods and propaganda to be cynically promoted in their names. Kennedy is the latest in a long line of mostly Jewish deceivers who use the names and tragic stories of the two “Jewish boys” to very subtly conceal the long and very uncivil history of Jews in the apartheid South.
By far Mississippi had more lynchings and racist violence than any other state. It is where at least 581 human beings met a horrifying, trial-free demise, and it is where three outright massacres of Blacks occurred in Vicksburg, Clinton, and Macon. After slavery Blacks made great strides in education and began building independent communities, so whites who saw no other role for Blacks but as plantation laborers increased their anti-Black violence and repression. In 1890, Mississippi legislators passed a state constitution specifically to “eliminate the nigger from politics.”
On the other hand, the two Jewish New Yorkers—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were coming to a state that had loved and embraced Jews—and vice versa—for centuries. It is a secret reality that the most distinguished Jewish historians, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Marcus and Dr. Abraham Peck, proudly expressed in the book Jews in Early Mississippi:
“Where else would members of the Christian community donate monies to help build the local synagogue? Where else could Jews be members of the city council or even become mayor? Where else, as in the case of Leopold Marks, could a town be named after a Jew? And when it came time to answer the call to arms [serving the pro-slavery Confederate army] the Jews of Mississippi went with enthusiasm.”
Drs. Marcus and Peck write that these Jews “had love of and devotion to the state of Mississippi.” With the same evident pride the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life lists 23 Jewish mayors who reigned in cities and towns all over Mississippi. And note that these Jews were considered by their overwhelmingly white gentile voters to be the very best people to lead their slavery-based, apartheid-practicing, drop-of-a-hat lynching, black voter-discriminating towns and cities. As the Institute says, “For the most part, Jews have enjoyed remarkable acceptance in Mississippi.”
Here is a screenshot of their listing:
Jewish leaders, like Natchez, Mississippi, merchant Jacob Soria, would not have “embraced” Martin Luther King, as RFK, Jr. surmises, but would have sold him and his fellow protesters at Rich’s along with the 32 Black men, women and children he advertised for sale at auction in 1839.
Jewish hate groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center exploit the triple murder tragedy to advance the fallacy that the fates of Blacks and Jews in America were somehow intertwined—that their histories are one and the same. And from this hypocritical trick these satanic shysters, claiming to be “friends and allies” of Blacks, have been able to maneuver themselves into organizational control over the Black “civil rights” leadership.
Typical of this Tricknology is the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who in 2023 stood in front of Dr. King’s children and other Black leaders and pompously “counseled” them on “the history of how Blacks and Jews struggled alongside one another…” He said, “They don’t remember the sacrifices of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman…” But it is Greenblatt who doesn’t remember the sacrifices Blacks made for Jewish wealth in Mississippi and elsewhere in America.
To wit, B’nai B’rith is the parent organization of Greenblatt’s ADL. In deep, dark, Ku Klux Klan-saturated Mississippi the B’nai B’rith of Vicksburg held a dance (left photo below) in 1917 at the dedication of their palatial new “BB club.”
Their new building—opulent even by today’s standards—was designed in Spanish Renaissance architecture and constructed with Georgian marble and fine mahogany with ivory inlay. The lower level had a swimming pool, massage tables, locker rooms, a servant’s entrance, a butler’s pantry; and the upper floors had meeting rooms with pivoted windows, a walnut-encased billiard room, high-relief plaster work accented with electric lighting, a fine dining room, a lounge area in the mezzanine leading to the balcony overlooking the chandeliered ballroom, a roof garden, a gallery with a tiled floor and stone balustrade, a kitchen with a gas range, and a library.
This is how Mississippi Jews were faring 47 years before Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner arrived to help Blacks achieve voting rights! At that same moment, Mississippi Blacks “were landless sharecroppers or laborers facing inescapable poverty,” trapped in oppressive “contracts” with wealthy landowners like H. Hiller, a Jewish merchant who owned 400 of these sharecropper farms.
The pictured “negro shack” on white-owned land was the lot of the vast majority of Mississippi Blacks, whilst Jews flaunted the wealth they acquired in the most obscene way, in the most violently racist state in America.
Today we must ask why on earth would these Jews want to jeopardize, let alone change, this golden reality by participating in any “civil rights” movement? Logically, they would not, and indeed they did not.
Nonetheless, by all accounts both Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman came to Mississippi as dedicated individuals committed to racial justice, and, tellingly, not representing any synagogue or Jewish organization. And though their memories are cynically exploited—as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just did—for political benefit, a very thoughtful Andrew Goodman offered his community some sage advice about a Black organization that “Jewish leaders” like Greenblatt and his predecessor Abraham Foxman were dedicated to destroying:
“… it is true that the white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general) has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes towards the Negro race…. The historical contempt that the white race held for the Negroes has created a group of rootless degraded people. The current neglect of the problem can only irritate this deplorable state of affairs. The Black Muslims should constitute a warning to our society, a warning that must be heeded if we are to preserve the society. The road to freedom must be uphill, even if it is arduous and frustrating. A people must have dignity and identity. If they can’t do it peacefully, they will do it defensively.”
According to the aforementioned book We Are Not Afraid, Goodman’s 31-page thesis “The Black Muslims: A Phenomenon of Negro Reaction,” completed just days before he was murdered, “was a young man’s cri de coeur, a pronouncement of beliefs, and an explanation for the action he was about to take.” Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Jonathan Greenblatt must then come to grips with a very inconvenient racial reality—that Andrew Goodman, the man they hold up as a sacred symbol of the Black–Jewish relationship, made his fateful decision to aid the Black struggle in Mississippi as a consequence of the Teachings of the Nation of Islam.
For more on this topic see the Nation of Islam book series The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews. Download the free guide by clicking here.
To purchase the series click here.
Russian athletes ‘not welcome’ at Olympics – Paris mayor
Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, Kiev, Ukraine, March 28, 2024 © Getty Images / Aleksandr Gusev/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
RT | March 31, 2024
The mayor of Paris has reiterated her proposal that Russian and Belarusian contestants stay away from this summer’s Olympic Games in the French capital, despite them being officially allowed to compete as neutrals.
“I want to tell the Russian and Belarusian athletes that they are not welcome in Paris,” Anne Hidalgo told Ukrainian athletes at a training center in Kiev on Thursday, while on a visit to Ukraine.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) initially pushed for a complete ban on competitors from Russia and Belarus after the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. However, last December the IOC ruled that a limited number of people from the two countries could participate as AINs (individual neutral athletes).
Hidalgo told Reuters earlier this month that she would prefer for Russian and Belarusian contestants not to come at all. “We cannot act as if [the Russian military operation in Ukraine] did not exist,” she told Reuters.
When asked about Israel’s Olympic participation – in the context of the Gaza war, raging since the Hamas attack on October 7 – Hidalgo insisted there was no comparison to be made.
Sanctioning Israeli athletes is “out of the question because Israel is a democracy,” she stated.
Russia has slammed the IOC’s difference in approach to Israeli and Russian contestants. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused the Switzerland-based body of “political activism” and called its approach self-discrediting.
The maximum numbers of Russian and Belarusian athletes that can qualify for the upcoming games are 55 and 28, respectively. The IOC has noted that the teams are unlikely to actually meet the quota, with some 36 Russian and 22 Belarusian athletes expected to make it to the games, according to IOC director James Macleod.
Participants from the two nations can only compete in individual events, and not team sports, under a neutral flag, and are barred from the Olympic opening ceremony.
Commenting on the restrictions faced by Russian and Belarusian competitors, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move “destroys Olympic ideals and discriminates against the interests of Olympians.” Such restrictions run “absolutely contrary to the entire ideology of the Olympic movement,” he insisted.
Imagine If Russia or China Did the Things Israel Is Doing in Gaza
By Caitlin Johnstone | March 28, 2024
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was bombing and starving a walled-in population of two million, half of them children. Seriously, imagine it. Imagine the rage and vitriol. Imagine the nonstop media coverage.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, US media coverage of that war exceeded the media coverage of all US wars in the previous three decades. If Russia were deliberately and systematically exterminating civilians in Ukraine or anywhere else, the western media coverage of those war crimes would be many times more.
It’s almost cliché at this point to say “imagine if Russia or China did this”, but such comparisons are important for retaining a sense of perspective on just how evil the western political-media class is being about Gaza right now. We’re seeing articles come out in the mass media about starvation in Gaza which never once even mention the word “Israel”. Do you think that would be happening if this were being perpetrated by a government which defies the western empire? Of course not.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately blockading food from an imprisoned population of millions of people.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was relentlessly raining military explosives on densely packed urban areas known to be full of children.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately and methodically ethnically cleansing an oppressed population for entirely racist reasons.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if evidence that Russia or China are committing horrific war crimes was surfacing on a daily basis.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China were getting caught in lie after lie after lie while carrying out such a mass atrocity.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China tried to present them with blatantly fabricated evidence of crimes committed by the targeted population in justification of their atrocities.
We’d be living in a different political and media landscape. If Russia or China was doing what Israel is doing, entire presidential campaigns would have been built around who would oppose it most aggressively. Every sanction and embargo in the book would have been slammed upon the perpetrating government. The western press would be falling all over themselves to expose every atrocity and every lie and blaring those expositions as feature stories on every platform for months, and showering one another with awards for doing so.
Instead we get this. Government officials babbling nonstop about Israel’s “right” to “defend itself” and how this would all be over if Hamas didn’t keep fighting, while showering Israel with weapons to help it continue its atrocities. The mass media churning out a constant deluge of passive-language “Gazans are having trouble finding food for some reason” headlines and continuous reminders that this is all happening because of October 7, while repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda like it’s gospel truth. All viable US presidential candidates vowing their unconditional support for Israel while occasionally impotently finger-wagging at this or that aspect of Israel’s atrocities to avoid looking like complete psychopaths.
That contrast between how the western political-media class is acting toward the Gaza genocide and how we all know they’d be acting if an unaligned government was doing something similar is exactly why the US-centralized empire cannot be permitted to rule our world anymore. It pretends to stand for peace, justice, freedom and democracy, but in reality it just inflicts nonstop death and suffering upon human beings around the world and covers it up with propaganda spin from its servile mainstream press. It purports to uphold the “rules-based international order”, but all that means in practice is that it upholds an international order in which the US empire makes up the rules as it goes along and changes them as it pleases.
Humanity cannot allow itself to be abused and tyrannized by this murderous, hypocritical globe-spanning power structure any longer. A better world is possible, but we’re going to have to find a way to pry the talons of these monsters off the steering wheel first.
Spain denounces “indiscriminate massacres” in Gaza but exports weapons to Ukraine
By Ahmed Adel | March 25, 2024
Spain will acquire combat-tested Israeli military material worth €207 million at a time when the Iberian country also promised to recognise a Palestinian state and cut military exports to Israel. Decisionmakers in Madrid justify cutting exports to Israel due to “massacres” against Palestinians, but at the same time, export weapons to Ukraine, contributing to the massacre of civilians in eastern Europe.
The Ministry of Defence of Spain, through the General Subdirectorate of Acquisitions of Weapons and Materials, has initiated the purchase of Israeli-made weapons by awarding a contract to Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, one of the three largest military-industrial companies in Israel, to equip the Air Force’s Eurofighter Litening V fleet. In the award announcement, Rafael was claimed to be “the only one technically qualified to develop the project from a technical point of view” since it included the use of laser-guided precision munitions.
It also happens that the Litening V laser pods by Rafael have been used for months in Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza, which has caused more than 31,000 deaths to date. Like almost all the war material that Israel usually exports, the Litening V laser pods are weapon support equipment whose manufacturers boast of their “combat proven” status due to their effectiveness against the Palestinians.
Spanish Foreign Affairs Minister José Manuel Albares announced on more than one occasion the “total embargo” on the export of weapons to Israel. The contract awarded to Rafael obviously concerns an import and not an export, and, in this manner, Spain virtue signals against Israel whilst still benefiting from its military-industrial complex.
However, according to a study by the Delàs Center for Peace Studies, Israeli weapons imports carry a greater severity than military exports to Tel Aviv. In effect, the purchase of military material from Israel strengthens the country’s military and security model and, more importantly, contributes to subduing the Palestinians, which Israel makes economically viable with the sale of its combat-tested military products.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez says he is going to recognise Palestine as an independent State and that he considers what Israel is committing in the Gaza Strip “an indiscriminate massacre,” but then he continues to buy weapons from Israel. Therefore, it is not feasible to grant any type of credibility to the statements of the members of the Spanish government.
Last November, Sánchez vowed to prioritise the recognition of Palestinian statehood as its main foreign policy priority. However, when speaking after a summit in Brussels on March 22, he suggested to reporters that Spain would coordinate with other EU countries instead of unilaterally making the decision to recognise Palestinian statehood.
“We want to take this step united. It’s a decisive step in order to lay the foundations of a lasting peace,” he said in an evident u-turn, adding that the EU should “carefully calibrate” the right moment to take the step.
At the same time, before the Congressional Defence Commission, the Secretary of State for Commerce reported on the list of shipments of military material to Ukraine between March 2022 and February 2024. The amount supplied is equivalent to €190 million. These are mainly drones, grenade launchers, anti-tank mines, artillery ammunition, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, tracked vehicles, night vision equipment, and 10 Leopard 2A4 tanks.
But this list does not take into account a new batch of Leopard 2A4 battle tanks since the Interministerial Board for Trade and Control of Defence Material and Dual-Use Technologies (JIMDDU) authorised the shipment of another 19 of these armoured vehicles to Kiev once they are repaired and conditioned at the facilities of the Santa Bárbara Sistemas factory in the province of Seville.
Ten of the 19 tanks have already been transferred from the Army base in Casetas near Zaragoza, where they were stored. According to military sources cited by El Heraldo de Aragón, the plan is to send them to Ukraine at the end of June. To this end, the parts and spare parts necessary for its reconstruction must first be found, and when the entire process is completed, Spain will have sent a total of 29 Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
Nonetheless, shipping will be complicated since these vehicles are in even worse condition than the dozen reconditioned Leopards already shipped in 2023. Spain is sending such poor-conditioned vehicles to Kiev to increase its rearmament because the old stock must be disposed of before buying new weapons and equipment.
In this context, Spain justifies not exporting weapons to Israel because of the “indiscriminate massacre” of Palestinians but exports weapons to Ukraine, which contributes to the massacre of people in Ukraine and Russia’s newly liberated territories. Compounding the contradiction is then the fact that Spain imports military equipment from Israel while refusing to export to the Jewish state and promising to recognise a Palestinian state.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Scholz won’t congratulate Putin on election victory – Berlin
RT | March 18, 2024
The Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz will not send a message of congratulations to Russian President Vladimir Putin on his re-election victory, which Berlin has branded as “undemocratic,” government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann told a media briefing on Monday.
Putin won the ballot by a wide margin, receiving 87% of the votes, according to the Russian Central Election Commission. This year’s vote also saw the highest turnout in Russia’s modern history, which surpassed 74%.
Hoffmann claimed that the vote was not democratic and “no real opposing candidates were allowed.” She went so far as to brand Russia a “dictatorship” ruled “in an authoritarian manner” by Putin, and added that Scholz shares such an assessment.
Russia’s election saw four candidates present on the ballot. Apart from Putin, who ran as an independent with support from three political parties, all other candidates were nominated by major parliamentary opposition parties: the left-wing Communist Party of Russia, the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and the New People Party, which entered the State Duma in 2021.
Berlin decried an alleged “climate of intimidation” and a lack of “freedom of expression” in Russia, as it justified Scholz’s decision not to congratulate Putin on his landslide victory.
“We see this so-called election in Russia last weekend as neither free nor fair,” Hoffmann said, in a statement that was similar to one earlier offered by the US.
She called it “extremely problematic” that votes were also held in the four former Ukrainian territories – the two Donbass republics as well the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – which joined Russia following a series of referendums in autumn 2022 that Kiev and its Western backers have not recognized.
The Russian national election of 2024 prompted a flurry of critical statements in the West, which were dismissed by Moscow as expected but irrelevant. “This is not an opinion for us to heed,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday, referring to remarks made by Washington and other Western nations.
Earlier, Putin himself responded to Western criticism of the election results, calling them “predictable,” considering that those nations “are fighting against us, including with arms,” referring to the West’s constant stream of weapons deliveries to Ukraine.
Gaza Genocide Exposes Fraud of U.S.-led NATO’s Humanitarian Wars
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 17, 2024
Twenty-five years ago, the United States and the NATO military alliance launched an illegal war on former Yugoslavia.
It was a watershed event that led to a series of US-led NATO wars around the world over the next quarter century until today – all on the basis of some lofty principle about “defending” human rights or democracy.
In the former Yugoslavia, the 10-week aerial bombing campaign that began on March 24, 1999, caused hundreds of civilian deaths and destroyed the infrastructure of what was then a well-developed socialist country.
The rationale for the military intervention was declared to be a “humanitarian” one – allegedly to protect civilians in a civil war.
International lawyer and author Dan Kovalik says that the “humanitarian” pretext for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was a sham.
The real objective, he says, was for the United States and its Western imperialist partners to create a precedent for systematically violating international law.
Kovalik is the author of the book ‘No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using Humanitarian Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests’.
The NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia did not have legal authorization from the United Nations Security Council. It was a unilateral action more accurately defined as an illegal aggression – a war crime.
Kovalik notes that the historical period was a crucial one. During the 1990s, the United States was reconfiguring its imperial power in the post-Cold War era (1945-90). With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington was proclaimed to be the sole superpower. He says that the United States wanted to establish its prerogative in the post-Cold War world of using its military power and that of its NATO partners wherever and whenever it needed for the purpose of advancing its strategic interests.
The US-led aggression against Yugoslavia was thus an opening to a new world order for American and NATO military power to be used at will in total disregard of international law and the United Nations Charter that had been drawn up in 1945 to prevent the kind of aggression that Nazi Germany had waged.
In short, it was a reinvention of imperialism dressed in a cloak of virtue.
Following Yugoslavia, which was balkanized as a result of the NATO aggression, the United States and its military partners embarked on a 25-year orgy of illegal wars and covert interventions. Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and other places in the Middle East and Africa. Endless wars costing the Western public trillions of dollars and fomenting a litany of socio-economic problems from mass migration to mass poverty – all of these wars have been engaged in by successive US presidents, including Democrat incumbent Joe Biden and his Republican rival Donald Trump.
The current war in Ukraine – the biggest since World War Two – can be attributed to NATO’s relentless expansion towards Russia’s borders over the past 25 years. Washington and its Western partners claim to be defending democracy, human rights and international law in Ukraine against alleged Russian aggression. This Western narrative ignores the reality that the US and its NATO partners have militarized a NeoNazi regime in Ukraine for at least eight years before the current conflict erupted on February 24, 2022.
Daniel Kovalik concludes with a devastating argument: if the United States and its NATO allies are so concerned by humanitarian principles and democracy then why are they not intervening to stop the genocide in Gaza against Palestinians? Over 30,000 people – mainly women and children – have been killed by Israeli military offensive. Far from intervening to protect civilians from Israeli slaughter and starvation, the United States and its NATO partners are fully complicit in supporting Israeli war crimes – militarily, politically and diplomatically.
Western “humanitarian intervention” so readily embarked on elsewhere is exposed as a grotesque fraud to cover for US imperialist crimes.
Stop sending weapons to Ukraine: Russian diplomat responds to Macron’s ceasefire plan
TASS | March 17, 2024
MOSCOW – French President Emmanuel Macron should stop sending weapons to Kiev and propose a ceasefire agreement to parties to the Middle East conflict, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told TASS.
Commenting on the latest initiative by the French leader who said he would ask Russia to observe a ceasefire in Ukraine during the Paris Olympics, the Russian diplomat said: “I come forward with a proposal in response to Macron’s: stop supplying weapons being used to kill [civilians] and also stop sponsoring terrorism.” “I also suggest that Macron come up with a similar proposal to the parties to the Middle East conflict. A lot probably depends on what France says there,” Zakharova maintained.
Earlier, Macron told an interviewer during a Ukrainian telethon that France will ask Russia to observe a ceasefire for the duration of the Olympic Games in Paris. When asked to comment on the potential participation of Russian athletes as neutrals, he said that, as the host country, France is sending a message of peace as it follows decisions made by the International Olympic Committee.
US ‘principal defendant’ for human rights abuse in world: Iran
Press TV – March 15, 2024
Iran has censured the United States’ use of human rights as an instrument, saying Washington is the main defendant of violations of rights in the world and in Israel’s months-long crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani made the statement in a post on his X social media account on Friday following a recent US-instructed report by the United Nations that accused the Islamic Republic of committing what it claimed to be “crimes against humanity” during foreign-backed riots in Iran in 2022.
The report came as the brutal war in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank by the Israeli regime, which enjoys Washington’s untrammeled support, has lingered for more than five months with no end in sight.
“By preemptively activating their propaganda machine concerning human rights in Iran, American authorities will not be able to expunge the stain of oppression and the US complicity in the genocide and mass murders inflicted upon the oppressed Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank,” Kan’ani said.
“In the collective conscience of humanity and global public opinion, America stands as the principal defendant for the violation of various human rights and humanitarian laws, owing to its involvement in the provision of equipment and arms to the Zionist regime,” he added.
The spokesman also underlined that Washington’s move to airdrop humanitarian aid into Gaza would not compensate for its unflinching support to the occupying regime’s crimes in the besieged Palestinian territory.
“The ostentatious and hypocritical display by the United States regarding its endeavors to supply and deliver food to the Palestinians fails to mitigate the undeniable reality of its unwavering support for the war crimes committed by the Zionist regime,” Kan’ani said.
“The politicization and instrumentalization of human rights and international human rights mechanisms constitute an inherent aspect of American foreign policy reality.”
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war following Operation al-Aqsa Storm by Gaza-based resistance movements on October 7, 2023, more than 31,300 Palestinians, including many women and children, have lost their lives.
The Israeli military offensive has left a trail of destruction in Gaza, leaving hospitals in ruins and displacing around half of its 2.4 million residents.
Tel Aviv has additionally enforced a comprehensive blockade on the territory, severing the supply of fuel, electricity, sustenance and water to the population of over two million Palestinians residing there.
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Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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