Both leaders arrived in Singapore, with significant excitement greeting them. Trump, arriving from a bitter G7 meeting, after which he attacked Justin Trudeau personally, flew into Singapore on Sunday, June 10, as did Kim Jong-un, who took serious precautions in his travel arrangements. By this point Trump had already significantly lowered expectations, saying that it would just be a meeting where the two leaders got to start a dialogue: “at least we’ll have met each other, we’ll have seen each other; hopefully, we’ll have liked each other. We’ll start that process….But I think it will take a little bit of time”. The lowered expectations might have been well advised. The usual appeal to authority that is the now customary wail of panic-striken, discredited elites, was evidenced by the scorn heaped on the work of Dennis Rodman, for not being a “professional”—when his work was fundamental to laying the groundwork for the peace talks. Others, with a longer and more considered view of history, pointed out that, “The history of U.S. foreign policy is littered with unsuccessful presidential summits, even when they have been preceded by months of careful preparation and infused by a coherent strategy and clear objectives set by a well-informed and experienced president”.
An Historic Encounter
Just the fact of meeting and talking was significant enough: already there was evidence that the campaign of “maximum pressure” was over and not likely to come back. Sanctions on North Korea were already being loosened, tested, and plans made for a future after the talks. In the meantime, clearly in a deep, quiet panic over the summit, Fox News saturated its coverage with talking heads offering Trump advice from a distance, hoping to pressure him—including advising flatly undiplomatic and plainly rude tactics such as not shaking Kim Jong-un’s hand, or preventing photographs of the two leaders together.
The Summit, televised live around the planet, wrapped up in the the afternoon on Tuesday, June 12 (Singapore time), with the final event being an extended press conference by Donald Trump, and the release of the text of the agreement jointly signed by Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. Also released was the video, “A Story of Opportunity,” prepared by the US side and shown in person to Kim Jong-un, which offered the progressivist American vision of the future.
(See Trump’s 12 tweets on the summit here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)
Early reactions, including one from a former CIA expert, was that “denuclearization,” the way the US envisaged, is not what the Summit agreement affirmed. Others held that at the very least the Summit was a real turning point, that averted war and began a peace process; also set to rest was the trope that Kim and Trump are “madmen”.
“The joint declaration specifies no timeline for denuclearization nor it does have steps to verify disarmament. It also refers to denuclearization on the entire Korean Peninsula—Pyongyang’s preferred phrasing—and does not include the words ‘verifiable’ and ‘irreversible’ despite months of U.S. statements. Trump also agreed to something North Korea has sought for years: the suspension of joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises”.
In some key respects, Trump’s concessions matched what had long been the position of Russia and China (both of which were keen to formally rejoin negotiations on Korea): that the US freeze war games in return for North Korea suspending testing nuclear weapons. The double-freeze approach finally won. In addition, one outcome of the Summit was that China was now pressing for sanctions to be eased, almost immediately, with Trump acknowledging—without criticism on his part—that China had already eroded sanctions enforcement over the last few months. Kim and Trump also promised to personally visit each other’s capitals in the near future.
Another assessment saw the Summit as a victory for all of Korea, and the signed document as simply an aspirational declaration and not an agreement on denuclearization as such:
“The North Korean side played its cards exceptionally well. It built its capabilities under enormous pressure and used it to elevate the country to a real player on the international stage. The ‘maximum pressure’ sanction campaign against it is now defused. China, Russia and South Korea will again trade with North Korea. In pressing for an early summit Trump defused a conflict that otherwise might have ruined his presidency. The losers, for now, are the hawks in Japan, South Korea and Washington who tried their best to prevent this to happen. The winners are the people of Korea, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. Special prizes go to President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and to Dennis Rodman who did their best to make this happen”.
Others offered well-informed analysis by individuals who were intimately involved in negotiations with North Korea and who argue that North Korea is not intending to “get away” with keeping its nuclear weapons, but that the North instead has real reasons for wanting to denuclearize. The argument here is that North Korea developed nuclear weapons to entice the US to the negotiating table, in order to end the Korean War, remove all sanctions, offer diplomatic recognition, and ending the US military threat to North Korea. In addition, a rapprochement with the US would allow North Korea to diversify its foreign relations, not remaining exclusively dependent on China, when North Korea has traditionally preferred independence. Another view is that the Summit simply resulted in a momentary stabilization. Yet, as Pepe Escobar noted, “by reaffirming the Panmunjom Declaration, the US President has committed to bringing its military back from South Korea and thus a complete denuclearization of the South as well as the North”. The accusation by liberal media was that, somehow, Trump managed to get nothing at all from the summit with Kim Jong-un—though even within this line of attack, there were some thoughtful pieces that at least addressed the facts of the summit in detail, with some showing how one could still take a Democratic, anti-Trump line and yet concede the significant value of the Summit.
US Domestic Politics and Trump’s Foreign Policy
In terms of domestic politics, it became evident that for any country to deal with the US—whether friend or foe—it would enter into a dangerously unreliable relationship: the pattern has now been set where one party’s international agreements are automatically decried, and then rescinded, by the opposing party. While many Republicans praised Trump on North Korea, they viscerally rejected Obama’s similar advances with Cuba and Iran. Likewise, while all for peace with Iran and good relations with Cuba, Democrats reacted as belligerently imperialist war hawks on North Korea, with liberals validating neconservatives and war-mongers. For both parties then, imperialism remains a tool to be used in domestic competition, and it is thus continually reproduced and validated.
Within just 12 hours of the close of the Summit, mainstream media in the US began to move the event off the front pages of their sites (most notably Reuters, where one had to dig to find any report on the event). This fact alone suggested that the anti-Trump opposition itself saw the event as a success, or there would be little to begrudge Trump. However, the opposition was much more serious than that. While only four months earlier much of the media celebrated the role played by Kim Jong-un’s sister at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, and how she diplomatically bested Mike Pence—now the media gave vent to denunciations of North Korea’s “brutality” and “human rights atrocities”. This was an opportunistic use of “human rights,” instrumentalizing allegations of human suffering to score political points at home. This was also domestically-driven virtue signalling at the expense of North Korea—when historically the number one killer of North Koreans has been the US itself, having destroyed every city in the North during the Korean War, while killing at least one out of every nine persons. Current sanctions have also exacted a toll on ordinary North Koreans—so much for the “human rights” lobby. The position was also bizarre for excluding the danger of nuclear war from the scope of “human rights”. If “human rights” do not include the right not to suffer a catastrophic nuclear apocalypse, then surely the concept is of little weight and even less merit, and should probably not be a significant concern. Opposition to Trump was also expressed in terms of resentment of parity shown to North Korea at the Summit, as if anything short of the public humiliation of North Korea on the world stage was somehow a sign of American “weakness,” of “unilateral concessions,” and of course, of Trump’s personal failure. Anything that might show North Korea in a more dignified light than the usual barbarian, torture state, was depicted as mere propaganda.
Similar reasoning could be found in articles such as one in The New Yorker, which reacted with alarm at rumours of Trump wanting a summit with Vladmir Putin. First, why the resort to rumours? Trump has always been very public and very explicit about his desire to meet Putin for a full one-on-one dialogue. There is no mystery about it, and any attempt to make it sound mysterious is an attempt to make it appear sinister. Second, the underlying tone of the article is that Trump is “unbound,” manifesting the continued disregard for the legitimate election of Donald Trump to office, such that he should not be allowed to command—like a president would do. Third, The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser is clearly projecting her faction’s anti-Russian hysteria onto Europe—forgetting that it was the US which pressured Europe into anti-Russian sanctions that hurt European economies, and which few European nations want to continue.
One charitable way to look at this situation would follow these lines: “Washington is a liberal town and the media rush to defend the status quo when it’s threatened by an interloper. When outsiders intervene, their influence declines”. Another approach would be a critique of how accusations that Trump is in “bonding sessions” with “brutal dictators,” are the liberal-left’s way of extending, translating, and reinforcing its inherent racism, by maximizing such racist attitudes on the world stage while pretending to challenge racism in discrete social pockets at home.
Rubbing Their Faces In It
On the other hand, Trump really succeeded in taking neoconservatives, professionals in the corporate-funded and government-backed human rights industry, the liberal imperialist media, and vigorously rubbing their faces with his foreign policy. Though many in the corporate media had—just in February—produced articles laced with praise for Kim Yo-jong (the sister of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un) because she had diplomatically upended Mike Pence—now that Trump’s relations with North Korea turned in a positive direction, the media reversed polarity and switched to denunciations of the “brutality” of the North Korean “dictator,” in terms as shrill as they were opportunistic. To add more context to this, Trump declared that it was not North Korea that was the enemy of the US, instead: “Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News”. Remember that within the media some wanted Trump to avoid even shaking hands with Kim Jong-un, at the Summit itself of all places and times—when he did, some called it “disconcerting”. In their faces, Trump rubbed the following admiration for Kim Jong-un: “he is the strong head….He speaks, and his people sit up at attention”. Trump praised Kim Jong-un in no uncertain terms: “He’s smart, loves his people, he loves his country” and that, “really, he’s got a great personality”. On his own relationship with Kim Jong-un, Trump affirmed: “I think we have a very good relationship. We understand each other” and “I think he trusts me and I trust him”. From the start of the Summit, Trump said he and Kim, “got along very well”. In response to charges that Kim Jong-un is a “human rights violator,” Trump’s responses included: “Look, he’s doing what he’s seen done….He’s a tough guy,” adding in another interview, “he has to be a rough guy or he has to be a rough person,” and in another, “he’s a strong guy”. Kim Jong-un, charged by an interviewer with doing some “really bad things,” got this response from Trump: “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people have done some really bad things”. On Kim’s stance regarding his fellow citizens, Trump stated: “I think you have somebody that has a great feeling for them”. Trump added: “He’s a funny guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by that, but he loves his people”. In return, the North Korean people love Kim: “His country does love him—his people, you see…the fervor, they have a great fervor”. About saluting a North Korean general at the summit, Trump stated simply: “I met a general. He saluted me. I saluted him back. I guess they’re using that as another sound bite. I think I’m being respectful to the general”. To top it all off, Trump added to his statement about ceasing war games with South Korea, saying he would like to also withdraw all US troops from South Korea: “I would love to get the military out as soon as we can because it costs a lot of money and a lot of money for us. I would like to get them home. I would like to”. Then Trump cheerfully assessed the outcome of his own efforts: “I did a great job this weekend”.
WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s own National Security Adviser John Bolton, the Democratic Party and the US mainstream media were all trying to derail the US president’s new agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, analysts told Sputnik.
On June 12, Trump and Kim met on the Singaporean island of Sentosa and signed a document showing their commitment to establish new bilateral relations and build a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. Trump also agreed to halt US-South Korea military exercises near the Korean peninsula, while Kim reiterated his country’s commitment to denuclearization.
The Democratic Party in the United States and the media establishment that supported them were cooperating closely to try and discredit Trump’s peace initiative in Korea, University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle said.
“As the ancient Chinese proverb says, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, a very positive and encouraging step,” Boyle said. “Regretfully, it [the Singapore agreement] has pretty much been trashed by the Democrats and the mainstream US media who are in cahoots with them.”
The Democrats’ hostility to the new dialogue with Pyongyang flowed directly from their strategy in trying to discredit Trump over the past two years, Boyle pointed out.
“The Democratic strategy has been to bash Trump from the right. That goes back two years now to the conventions that nominated Trump and Hillary Clinton as their parties’ candidates,” he said.
The spectacle of the US media ganging up against the president when he was trying to resolve a potentially dangerous conflict was a depressing one, Boyle commented.
“All these newspapers condemning President Trump, it’s just unimaginably sad,” he said.
The media and the Democrats were misrepresenting Trump’s talks with Kim by falsely alleging that the US president had caved in by agreeing to talk to him when in fact Trump was just fulfilling the obligations placed upon him by the United Nations Charter which the US has signed, Boyle explained.
“Trump did not give Kim Jong-un an unnecessary concession. All he did was fulfill the commitment required of him or any US leader to hold such negotiations that is in the United Nations Charter,” he said.
Under Article 23 of the UN Charter there is a requirement for President Trump to have negotiations with North Korea which he did, Boyle recalled.
“Article 33 clearly requires ‘negotiations’ to maintain international peace and security,” he added.
Far from failing to make any progress, Trump had succeeded in getting Kim’s assent to giving the new negotiating process a promising beginning, Boyle observed.
“Trump did get a commitment on complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula so that’s a good start. It incorporates the Panmunjom Declaration between Chairman Kim and President Moon. It’s a good start. I’m moderately encouraged,” he said.
Trump Rejected Bolton’s Parallel Between Libya, North Korea Talks
Boyle warned that the talks faced another major threat because National Security Adviser John Bolton was likely to try and undermine them.
“Bolton is a hard-line neoconservative (neocon) who publicly bragged about having sabotaged the process [of negotiations] with North Korea. He tried to sabotage these negotiations by going public and saying we are going to go the Libya route,” he said.
Last month, Bolton commented that the US denuclearization talks with North Korea would follow the pattern of previous talks to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in Libya. However, several years after Libya agreed to scrap such programs, its ruler Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown in a West-backed rebellion and murdered.
Trump contradicted Bolton and said that model of negotiations with Libya would not apply to North Korea.
Boyle said Bolton was highly intelligent and knew what he was doing when he made such remarks or and when he had encouraged Vice President Mike Pence to make similar ones.
“Bolton is a smart guy. He is a very cunning operator in the bureaucracy. I’m afraid Bolton will try to sabotage the negotiations. He has brought his own hardline people on to the National Security Council. I’m afraid that he will do what he can behind the scenes to sabotage this thing,” he said.
Boyle said he believed Trump needed to fire Bolton and select a new national security adviser who was committed to trying to make the negotiations with North Korea succeed.
“If Trump were smart I think he would fire Bolton and bring in a realpolitik-er,” he said.
Even if the talks with North Korea went well, they would take many months and several years, Boyle cautioned.
“This is going to be a long process. The administration people have conceded to the New York Times that it will take at least two years… However, following the summit, there is momentum,” Boyle concluded.
Military Establishment Tries to Hold on to US Bases in Asia-Pacific
Retired US Army Colonel and historian Doug Macgregor agreed that the Washington establishment opposed Trump’s efforts to achieve a lasting peace agreement with North Korea.
“The swamp [the establishment] will now fight the inevitable withdrawal of US ground troops from Korea because it will lead to the removal of the Marines from Okinawa as well,” Macgregor said.
Trump had made the mistake of surrounding himself with super-hawk figures like Bolton when he needed other kinds of officials who would support his peace plans, Macgregor cautioned.
“President Trump’s current defense [national security] team won’t help him! To achieve his aims the President will need to make new appointments,” he said.
However, the US public felt no commitment to running risks of full-scale war on the Korean peninsula and would support an agreement that could end the US military presence there, Macgregor advised.
“The mood and attitude of the political class in Washington is reminiscent of London’s attitude toward leaving India after World War II,” Macgregor said.
Like the British people then, the American people support the departure, Macgregor added.
Former chief of an Israeli spy service unit has said that the first cyber target in any future conflict with Iran should be its energy infrastructure.
Speaking at a major cyber conference in Israel, former Unit 8200 chief Ehud Schnerosen referred to the energy sector as a “major pillar economy, state’s cardiovascular system.”
“We should not attack water, food, healthcare on ethical grounds, and should not attack banks because of the potential butterfly effect,” he said. “The next 9/11 in cyber will be energy sector.”
Israel is widely believed to be behind a cyber attack on the Iranian nuclear energy program in 2011.
The Washington Post reported in June 2012 that US spy services and Israel’s military had worked together to launch the Stuxnet computer virus against a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, Iran. It was the first publicly known example of a virus being used to attack industrial machinery.
Since Stuxnet’s discovery in 2010, security researchers have uncovered a handful of other sophisticated pieces of computer code they believe were developed by the US and Israel in tandem to engage in espionage and warfare.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over the weekend that Israel would strike against Iranian efforts to entrench itself militarily throughout Syria, and not only along the Syrian border with the occupied Palestinian territories.
“First of all, Iran needs to withdraw from all of Syria,” he told the weekly cabinet meeting.
“Second, we will take action – and are already taking action – against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria, both close to the border and deep inside Syria. We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria.”
Diplomatic officials said that Netanyahu raises the issue of Iranian activity in Syria in all his conversations with foreign leaders.
Once upon a time, if you were an American who didn’t like nuclear energy, you had to stage sit-ins and marches and chain yourself to various inanimate objects in hopes of closing the nation’s nuclear power plants. Today … all you have to do is sit back and wait.
There are 99 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the United States today. Collectively, they’re responsible for producing about 20 percent of the electricity we use each year. But those reactors are, to put it delicately, of a certain age. The average age of a nuclear power plant in this country is 38 years old (compared with 24 years old for a natural gas power plant). Some are shutting down. New ones aren’t being built. And the ones still operational can’t compete with other sources of power on price. Just last week, several outlets reported on a leaked memo detailing a proposed Trump administration plan directing electric utilities to buy more from nuclear generators and coal plants in an effort to prop up the two struggling industries. The proposal is likely to butt up against political and legal opposition, even from within the electrical industry, in part because it would involve invoking Cold War-era emergency powers that constitute an unprecedented level of federal intervention in electricity markets. But without some type of public assistance, the nuclear industry is likely headed toward oblivion.
“Is [nuclear power] dying under its own weight? Yeah, probably,” said Granger Morgan, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
Morgan isn’t pleased by this situation. He sees nuclear energy as a crucial part of our ability to reduce the risks of climate change because it is our single largest source of carbon emissions-free electricity. Morgan has researched what the U.S. could do to get nuclear energy back on track, but all he’s come up with is bad news (or good news, depending on your point of view).
The age of the nuclear fleet is partly to blame. That’s not because America’s nuclear reactors are falling apart — they’re regularly inspected, and almost all of them have now gone through the process of renewing their original 40-year operating licenses for 20 more years, said David McIntyre, a public affairs officer at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A few, including the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Florida, have even put in for a second round of renewals that could give them the ability to operate through their 80th birthdays.
Instead, it’s the cost of upkeep that’s prohibitive. Things do fall apart — especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren’t especially profitable. Historically, nuclear power plants were expensive to build but could produce electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, making them a favored source of low-cost electricity. That changed with the fracking boom, Morgan told me. “Natural gas from fracking has gotten so cheap, [nuclear plants] aren’t as high up in the dispatch stack,” he said, referring to the order of resources utilities choose to buy electricity from. “So many of them are now not very attractive economically.”
Meanwhile, new nuclear power plants are looking even less fetching. Since 1996, only one plant has opened in the U.S. — Tennessee’s Watts Bar Unit 2 in 2016. At least 10 other reactor projects have been canceled in the past decade. Morgan and other researchers are studying the economic feasibility of investment in newer kinds of nuclear power plants — including different ways of designing the mechanical systems of a reactor and building reactors that are smaller and could be put together on an assembly line. Currently, reactors must be custom-built to each site. Their research showed that new designs are unlikely to be commercially viable in time to seriously address climate change. And in a new study that has not yet been published, they found that the domestic U.S. market for nuclear power isn’t robust enough to justify the investments necessary to build a modular reactor industry.
Combine age and economic misfortune, and you get shuttered power plants. Twelve nuclear reactors have closed in the past 22 years. Another dozen have formally announced plans to close by 2025. Those closures aren’t set in stone, however. While President Trump’s plan to tell utilities that they must buy nuclear power has received criticism as being an overreach of federal powers, states have offered subsidies to keep some nuclear power plants in business — and companies like Exelon, which owns 22 nuclear reactors across the country, have been happy to accept them. “Exelon informed us that they were going to close a couple plants in Illinois,” McIntyre said. “And then the legislature gave them subsidies and they said, ‘Never mind, we’ll stay open.’”
So intervention can work to keep nuclear afloat. But as long as natural gas is cheap, the industry can’t do without the handouts.
Human Rights campaigners say that Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) must suspend Israel and ban Israeli diamonds exports.
A global coalition of organizations working for justice and peace in Palestine have called on the EU to seek the suspension of Israel from the Kimberley Process and a ban on Israel diamond exports at next week ’s meeting of the diamond regulatory body in Antwerp.
The KPCS is the process established in 2000 to prevent “conflict diamonds” from entering the mainstream rough diamond market by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 55/56 following recommendations in the Fowler Report.
The process was set up “to ensure that diamond purchases were not financing violence by rebel movements and their allies seeking to undermine legitimate governments.”
In the wake of the latest Israeli massacres in Gaza, which Human Rights Watch said “may amount to war crimes” and called on the international community to “impose real costs for such blatant disregard for Palestinian lives” it is imperative that diamonds which generate revenue used to fund the Israeli military are banned.
Israel is the biggest net beneficiary of the global diamond trade with exports worth US$11 billion net in 2014 when diamonds accounted for 30% of manufacturing exports.
Revenue from the Israeli diamond industry is a highly significant source of funding for the Israeli government and its violent settler-colonial project in Palestine.
Despite generating an estimated $1 billion per year in funding for Israeli occupation forces which stand accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, the proliferation of unregulated nuclear weapons and the enforcement of a system of apartheid jewelers claim diamonds processed in Israel are conflict-free.
Diamonds that are a significant source of funding for violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law are regarded as blood diamonds.
The jewelry industry refuses to ban all blood diamonds and limited the remit of the KPCS to “conflict diamonds” which are defined as rough diamonds used by rebel groups to fund violence against legitimate governments.
‘After the last week, Trump is clearly a man who puts the dick in dictator. He’s a fanboy of Putin, Kim, Duterte, and a dog’s breakfast of the worst examples of oppression, thuggery, and anti-Western values the globe has to offer. [ . . . ]
‘[T]his week, Trump’s love of authoritarians, dictatorships and his actions and words came together. Donald Trump first went to the G-7 to wreck the proceedings with a combination of insult-comic schtick, diplomatic demolition derby, Putin cheerleading, and giant-toddler petulance.
‘He followed that with the Singapore Shitshow. It was a monstrous reality TV event, as was intended. But it left our putative allies wondering at the new Axis of Assholes Trump has joined—the CRANK: China, Russia, America and North Korea. By the end, it didn’t feel like he was after denuclearization but management tips from the portly little thug Kim.
‘For the American president to normalize, excuse, and ally himself with the worst of the world’s bad actors while insulting, degrading, and destroying our allies and alliances would be appalling in any circumstance. The fact that Trump acts like a bumbling, eager fraternity pledge, desperate to join Phi Sigma Dictator makes it all the worse.’
Except these so-called ‘allies and alliances’ aren’t valuable to the United States. They’re a positive danger and a detriment.
Let’s get one thing straight: the United States has no real allies. There are countries we dominate and control, more properly termed client states or even satellites. (True, given Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s lock-stock-and-barrel ownership of the American political class, it seems rather that we are their clients, not the other way around…) Conversely, on an almost one-to-one correspondence, countries that are not satellites are our enemies, either currently (Russia, North Korea, Iran, Syria) or prospectively (China).
But do we have any actual allies – that is, countries that provide mutual security for the United States, and whose contributions actually make us Americans safer and more secure in our own country?
Try to name one.
Let’s start with the granddaddy of our alliances, NATO. How does having a mutual defense pact with, say, virulently anti-Russian Poland and the Baltic States make America more secure? How does, say, tiny corrupt Montenegro, contribute to US security? Are these countries going to defend America in any conceivable way? Even if they wanted to, how could they possibly?
For that matter, against what ‘threat’ would they defend us? Is Latvia going to help build Trump’s Wall on the Mexican border?
‘Our NATO allies help out in Afghanistan,’ we are told. NATO-Schmato – it’s Americans who do almost all the fighting and dying. It’s our treasure being wasted there. Maybe without the fig leaf of an alliance mission, we might long since have reevaluated what we still are doing there after 17 years.
But comes the answer, ‘Russia!’ Except that Russia isn’t a threat to the United States. Despite their hype even the most antagonistic Russophobic countries in NATO themselves don’t really believe they’re about to be invaded. And even if they were, that still doesn’t make Russia a threat to us – or wouldn’t except for the very existence of NATO and a forward American presence on Russia’s borders and in the Black and Baltic seas littorals. How does gratuitously risking conflict with the one country on the planet whose strategic arsenal can annihilate us make Americans safer?
Let’s look at other supposedly valuable alliances.
Why do we need South Korea and Japan? ‘China!’ But except for a nuclear stockpile much smaller than our intercontinental deterrent China doesn’t present a military threat to us. ‘Yes, but Beijing poses a danger to South Korea and Japan.’ Maybe, maybe not. But even if that is so why is it our problem?
Why do we need Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and bunch of other Middle Eastern countries? We aren’t dependent on energy from the region as we arguably were when Jimmy Carter proclaimed a vital national interest there four decades ago. ‘Well then, Iran!’ But the Iranians can’t do anything to us. ‘Yes, but they hate Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc., etc.’ Again, what’s that got to do with us?
In each case the argument of a US interest is a tautology. The US ‘needs’ allies for the sole purpose of defense against purported threats not to us but to those very same allies. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone.
It would be bad enough if these faux alliance relationships were only detrimental in terms of getting embroiled in quarrels in which we have no interest, wasting money and manpower in areas of the world where our security is not at stake. But there’s also a direct economic cost right here at home.
Based on the claimed need for “allies” US trade policy since World War II could almost have been designed to undermine the economic interests of American workers and American producers. Starting with Germany and Japan, our defeated enemies, we offered them virtually tariff-free, nonreciprocal access to our huge domestic market to assist with their economies’ recovery from wartime destruction; in return, we would take their sovereignty: control of their foreign and security policies, as well as their military and intelligence establishments, plus permanent bases on their territory.
This arrangement became the standard with other countries in non-communist Europe, as well as some in the Far East, notably South Korea. As much or more than puffed-up claims of military threats (and companies that benefit from inflated military spending) lopsided trade is the glue that keeps the satellites in place. In effect, our “allies” cede geostrategic control of their own countries and are rewarded at the expense of domestic American economic interests. Already of questionable value in its heyday, this pattern not only survived the end of Cold War 1 but continued to grow, contributing to the rise of Cold War 2.
Put into that context, this is where Trump’s tariffs dovetail with his other blasphemies, like expecting the deadbeats to pony up for their own defense. He challenges them to reduce tariffs and barriers to zero on a reciprocal bilateral basis – knowing full well they won’t do so because it would spoil their cozy arrangement at the expense of American workers. He threatens the sanctity of the North Atlantic Treaty’s vaunted Article 5 obligation of mutual defense on whether countries meet a two percent of GDP level of military spending – knowing that few of them will since they don’t in fact face any external military threat and would rather keep the money.
In his own unvarnished, zigzaggy way, Trump is doing what he said he would: putting America and Americans first. As he has said, that does not mean hostility towards other countries, whose leaders have aduty to put their countries and peoples first as well. It means both stopping our allies’ sandbagging us, while restoring to them their unsought-for – and for many of them, undesirable – sovereignty and independence.
In the final analysis, what the likes of Rick Wilson are really afraid of is disruption of a decades-old, crooked racket that has been so lucrative for countless hangers-on and profiteers. As James P. Pinkerton, former aide to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, describes it: ‘[T]he basic geopolitical foundations of the last seven decades are being challenged and shifted – or, as critics would prefer to say, being subverted and betrayed. Yet in the meantime, even as his myriad foes prepare their next political, legal, and punditical attacks, Trump is the man astride the world stage, smiling, shaking hands, signing deals – and unmistakably remaking the old order.’
This documentary describes the alleged toxicity of the artificial sweetener known as aspartame and the questionable methods employed in order to secure FDA approval.
When it comes to North Korea, Japan and Russia may seem like two “lost souls” in Northeast Asia, standing on the fringes anxiously looking on as China, South Korea and the United States dominate the headlines.
The tremors set in motion by the meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore last Tuesday add to the angst.
In reality, Russia is way ahead of Japan. The meeting in the Kremlin on Wednesday between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the visiting Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea Kim Yong-nam, the number two man in the hierarchy in Pyongyang, underscores this.
Clearly, the two countries are keeping up the momentum in high-level exchanges.
Japan out, Russia in
Japan, on the other hand, is groping for a way to somehow make an entry. Notionally, it is aligned with the US at the leadership level. But then, Trump is a lone ranger. Japan has no diplomatic relations with North Korea and setting up high-level contacts needs protracted efforts.
Besides, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been the most forceful proponent of the “maximum pressure” policy toward North Korea. He probably overreached, overlooking Trump’s propensity to make abrupt shifts. Indeed, the shift in the tectonic plates this week caught Tokyo flat-footed. Quick backtracking is necessary.
Kim must first decide when, how urgently or even whether to meet Abe. It’s a fraught situation for Tokyo, because Japan is a stakeholder and is most vulnerable to North Korea’s missiles. But with Kim having twice met both Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Abe is the only major regional leader yet to establish eye contact with the top man in Pyongyang.
Clearly, Kim is prioritizing Beijing and Moscow before Tokyo. The plane carrying Kim from Singapore to Pyongyang on the return journey reportedly landed in Beijing airport and someone “disembarked.” And, at the Kremlin meeting, Kim Young-nam handed over to Putin a letter from his supreme leader.
Putin’s remarks suggest that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s visit to Pyongyang on May 31 has re-injected some dynamism into the longstanding ties between the two.
The Russians invited a dignitary from Pyongyang to the FIFA World Cup inaugural ceremony – although the North Korean soccer team has not qualified. Kim Young-nam represented North Korea at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and Putin received him again just before the gala ceremony at the Luzhniki Stadium.
Putin recalled the “old and very good relations” between Russia and North Korea and took the opportunity to “welcome and praise the outcome of the meeting” in Singapore between Trump and Kim on Tuesday. He said that this has been “the first step towards a full settlement” and the goodwill of the two leaderships made it possible.
Putin assessed the meeting as creating conditions for further progress and reducing the overall level of tension in the region. Putin added that a large military conflict would have had a “very dire outcome,” and thanks to the meeting in Singapore, “a possible negative scenario has been postponed.” He noted, “now there are prospects of resolving the problems by peaceful political and diplomatic means.”
Putin reiterated Russia’s cooperation and stressed its readiness to “establish ties” in economic cooperation. Without doubt, the long-standing Russian proposals to link the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Korean railways systems, and to run a new pipeline from the Russian Far East through North Korea to energy-thirsty South Korea, are high on Putin’s agenda. Kim Young-nam responded that North Korea’s new strategy aims to “concentrate all its resources and efforts on economic construction.”
Putin also showed an interest in an early meeting with Kim Jong-un. He suggested that the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September might provide an occasion for Kim to visit Russia, but added that a “stand-alone” visit is also possible.
The positive tone of all this is self-evident.
If the US is determined to keep Russia out of the peace process looming ahead, Moscow is equally determined to be present at center stage. Ideally, Russia would have preferred a resuscitation of the long-moribund, Beijing-sponsored six-party talks format, which gave it a habitation and name at the high table.
But that is unlikely to happen, given Trump’s preference for the Art of the Deal – a “bilateral deal” with Kim, with Xi and Moon acting as facilitators. At any rate, Trump has disclosed that Washington intends to keep the negotiations on a peace treaty as a matter between North Korea, China, South Korea and the US.
However, Moscow can be expected to play an active role. Unsurprisingly, Russia emphasizes the “denuclearization” of the entire Korean Peninsula, which includes the future US military presence and a host of attendant issues.
From Kim’s perspective, Russia, by its sheer presence, creates more space for him to negotiate. In fact, Moscow is compelled to play an active role, since it shares a border with North Korea and any expansion of American influence in that country there impacts vital Russian interests.
North Korea’s integration into the region is a key template of Russia’s “pivot to the East.” The development of the Russian Far East is significantly dependent on the success of this pivot policy. North Korea’s re-construction opens up business opportunities for Russian companies and provides a transit route for Russia’s trade with the Asia-Pacific region.
Putin has a rare genius for optimizing geopolitics by combining it with geo-economics, although the two are often regarded as fundamentally different paths.
Donald Trump’s praise this week of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been presented by much of the Washington political class and US corporate media as an anomaly in history and a stark deviation from political norms.
It is not normal or right, they tell us, for US presidents to meet with and applaud dictators of brutal regimes. This kind of phony virtue-signaling was all over the airwaves and the Twittersphere on Tuesday. It was like a competition with the winner being the person who could publicly register their disgust and dismay in the most dramatic fashion possible.
One former Republican lawmaker tweeted that “never before” in history had a US president “spoken this way of a dictator accused of crimes against his own people” — an outright lie, as pointed out by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who detailed a number of occasions when American presidents and top ranking officials had indeed heaped praise on dictators — from Barack Obama’s praise of the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as a man who had “the courage of his convictions” and who was “dedicated” to his people, to Ronald Reagan’s praise of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt as “a man of great integrity” — to Hillary Clinton’s description of Hosni Mubarak as a “friend of my family.”
In the real world, even the most mildly politically-aware person knows that meeting with and praising dictators is par for the course in US foreign policy. The United States has a long history of befriending, praising and propping up brutal dictators all over the world — and flattering Kim with a few meaningless comments designed to foster goodwill is absolutely mild in comparison with the tangible support the US lends to other dictatorships.
Curiously though, many of those shouting loudly in protest at Trump’s praise of Kim are unbothered when American presidents — Trump included — lavish praise on those friendly dictators that Washington relies on to help serve its geopolitical interests. While they breathlessly condemn Trump for cozying up to Kim for a few hours in Singapore, they are nonchalant about US support for brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia.
Last year, peace activist and former Green Party candidate for Illinois governor Rich Whitney, compiled research in an effort to dispel the myth that the US opposes dictatorships and champions democracy around the world. What he found would not come as a surprise to any rational observer of global affairs, but would surely shock heavily propagandized Americans who have been led to believe that their country promotes freedom and democracy since they were waddling around in diapers.
Analyzing publicly available data, Whitney found that the US provides military assistance to 36 out of 49 nations that democracy watchdog Freedom House classifies as dictatorships. In other words, the US provides military support to a whopping 73 percent the world’s dictatorships while simultaneously claiming to be the most virtuous and well-intentioned nation on earth.
There is one determining factor when it comes to the decision to lend US support to a foreign government or regime — and it is a simple one: If that government or regime is sufficiently subservient to Washington and serves US global interests in any meaningful way, it will be protected and propped up at almost any cost. Its crimes will be swept under the rug and human rights concerns, along with freedom and democracy, will go straight out the window. Every now and then, some US official may pay lip service to its supposed moral values by expressing “deep concern” over some heinous incident or other before swiftly moving on.
This is the reality, yet we are still told to believe Trump is some kind of historical anomaly and subjected to endless think-pieces and on-air pearl-clutching over his “problematic” affinity for some questionable characters. The narrative goes, that before Trump, US leaders were all going around crushing dictatorships and delivering peace and prosperity to oppressed peoples everywhere. This kind of revisionist commentary is completely disingenuous and utterly at odds with reality and history — yet it is spewed unquestioningly from the mouths of journalists, analysts, various “experts” and regular Americans without so much as a pause to consider whether it has any basis in fact. It would take far too long to list every instance of the US supporting — and indeed installing — brutal dictatorships around the world, but there are some that stand out as particularly shameful moments in American history.
In 1973, the CIA engineered and financed a bloody coup in Chile which installed Augusto Pinochet for a 17-year reign of terror. Declassified documents show that while the Pinochet regime was torturing and murdering its opponents, the US actively sought to downplay and whitewash Chile’s human rights violations — and even put the head of the Chilean secret police, Manuel Contreras, on the CIA payroll.
In the 1960s, the US actively supported the extermination of up to one million suspected communist sympathizers in Indonesia under the leadership of General Suharto. Washington supplied Suharto with financial support, military equipment and lists of communists. Suharto then ruled as a dictator for 35 years until 1998 — with Washington’s support.
Propping up and providing material support for dictatorships has been a central theme of US foreign policy. Trump’s kind words for Kim are not a worrying departure from the norm. In fact, they barely even register in the history of American support for brutality and corruption.
Unfortunately, the notion that the White House supports democracy and crushes dictatorships is a belief system so ingrained in the American psyche that when confronted with reality, rather than admit they’ve been lied to, its adherents instead begin to look for ways to rationalize the inexcusable. At that point, we’re told that even if America does bad things sometimes, it’s all with good intention — or as Hillary Clinton would say, “America is great because America is good”.
The level of delusion required to believe something so demonstrably false and easily debunked is astounding. Then again, it must be difficult to come to terms with the fact that something which made you feel righteous and good for so long was only ever a nonsense fairytale.
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance journalist. Having lived and worked in the US, Germany and Russia, she is currently based in Budapest, Hungary. Her work has been featured by Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, Russia Direct, teleSUR, The BRICS Post and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ, check out her Facebook page, or visit her website: danielle-ryan.com
Who would have guessed it? US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un achieved a stunning success this week when they met face-to-face in Singapore.
It was the first time a sitting American president ever met a leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Seven decades of hostility melted away when Trump and Kim greeted each other with warm handshakes and smiles.
Over the past year, the two leaders had dueled with extremely bellicose rhetoric. Many people around the world feared that a nuclear war was imminent. After the unlikely summit in Singapore, the world suddenly feels relieved that a peaceful way forward may be found after all.
It has to said that this week’s diplomatic exchange is exactly what Russia and China had been advocating for many months, if not years. Only through mutual engagement can mistrust and animosities be dispelled to create constructive dialogue.
At the beginning of this year, it was the young North Korean leader who took the initiative by extending a hand of friendship to South Korean President Moon Jae-in. To his credit, President Moon accepted and quickly built up a dialogue which led to the breakthrough of North Korea attending the Winter Olympics hosted South of the border.
It was most likely Moon’s prudent mediation that then enabled back-channel contact between Washington and Pyongyang, despite the background of fiery, aggressive rhetoric. President Trump deserves praise for responding to overtures from North Korea for a peaceful dialogue. Trump’s unorthodox openness led to the historic summit this week in Singapore.
Another key element evidenced this week was how Trump put aside high-handed ultimatums to North Korea for unilateral nuclear disarmament. There was a leery expectation among many observers that the American side would approach the Singapore summit as a forum for North Korea’s capitulation. A certain deal-breaker.
Last month, the meeting nearly failed to materialize when hawkish members of the Trump administration recklessly compared North Korea’s fate to Libya. In the end, President Trump managed to salvage the summit by assuring Pyongyang that he was genuine about seeking a mutual dialogue.
This week, Trump delivered on a broadminded engagement. He did not issue high-handed demands. Instead, he made a major concession to North Korea by vowing to cancel future US war maneuvers on the Korean Peninsula. Trump actually referred to the annual military exercises as “provocative war games”.
Moreover, the US president talked about ending the Korean War (1950-53) with the imminent signing of a full peace treaty, and the eventual removal of nearly 30,000 US troops from South Korea.
This is the big-picture, pragmatic security guarantees that North Korea has long called for if it is expected to participate in a comprehensive peace settlement, including the removal of nuclear weapons from the peninsula. This broader approach in which the US recognizes its historic obligations to resolving the conflict is also what Russia and China had been advocating.
This so-called “freeze-freeze” reciprocal reduction of antagonism was until recently rejected by the Trump administration as it had been by previous US presidencies. The American side was encumbered with an arrogant view that its military forces in the region were not part of the problem.
Trump has upended that logjam in American attitude towards Korea. When Trump greeted Kim this week he did so with a refreshing attitude of civility and equality, not treating the North Korean leader as a demonized pariah. More importantly, Trump stepped up to the plate to offer major concessions in order to engage Kim with trust that the White House is indeed serious about a comprehensive peace settlement.
Another positive sign was that Trump did not demand a prompt denuclearization by North Korea. Again, there seemed to be a shift towards wisdom that any progress has to be part of a gradual reciprocal process in which the Americans have also obligations to deliver in terms of scaling back their military forces.
This is all very promising. But still yet only in the realm of potential. The main thing is that for now the American and North Korea leaders appear to have forged a solid understanding and mutual commitment. Trump, surprisingly, has risen to the occasion to show real leadership.
It bodes well too that Trump’s vow to cancel war games seems a firm offer. In subsequent meetings later this week in South Korea and China, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated the suspension of military exercises.
Crucially, the Singapore summit has been welcomed by all regional players. South Korea, China and Russia as well as Japan have all greeted the outcome. This will provide an essential supportive forum for dialogue to build in the coming months and years. Japan has expressed some reservation about the cancellation of military drills with the US, but South Korea has said that it is ready to accept the suspension for the sake of building trust and furthering dialogue.
Ironically perhaps, the greatest threat to Trump’s bold peace initiative with North Korea stems from his domestic political foes. Rather than grasping an opportunity to win the peace and avert possible nuclear catastrophe, there was much negative reaction among the US political establishment following Singapore.
In particular, Democrats and some Republican hawkish neocons have been carping that Trump “gave too much away” to North Korea. Prominent sections of the anti-Trump news media, like the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, have been undermining the initiative by complaining about Trump not raising the issue of human rights or not giving allies sufficient defense assurances. There is a strong sense that these concerns are disingenuous and are really driven by an obsession to attack Trump no matter what.
There is also the looming danger of US deep state reaction. Trump’s understanding of the need to build trust by de-escalating US military forces on the Korea Peninsula is appropriate for the search for a peaceful settlement. But for Washington’s imperial planners in the Pentagon and its menagerie of think-tanks such a long-term withdrawal of military force is anathema to power projection in Asia-Pacific, specifically towards Russia and China.
President Trump and Chairman Kim deserve huge respect for their willingness to engage. So too does South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in. A word of praise is due too to China and Russia for their positive advocacy.
But the way ahead is fraught with dangers and pitfalls. And those dangers to peace emanate from within the corridors of Washington DC.
A final cautionary word too is that Washington’s power is an endemic noxious entity, and that embroils the current president, despite his seemingly benign intentions towards North Korea. Washington is infested with criminal foreign conduct, from regime change to illegal wars. Trump’s aggression towards Iran and his sabotage of the nuclear accord is grounds for holding deep skepticism about anything coming from Washington. The current US-backed criminal siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida is another cause for distrust and contempt towards Washington’s global power designs.
All we can say perhaps for now with regard to US-North Korea relations is that a good start has been made. But peace is still a long way off.
A compilation of various racist and hateful quotes by Israeli Prime Ministers demonstrating the extent to which racism is entrenched as well as normalized in Israeli political culture.
Most nation states in our world today have dealt with their fair share of institutionalized racism and bigotry, and Israel is no exception. However when it comes to Israel, the volume of racism expressed by prominent political figures is both astounding and concerning.
DAVID BEN-GURION:
David Ben-Gurion was the first Prime Minister of the state of Israel, serving his first term between 1948 and 1953, he later served a second term from 1955 to 1963. Other than being a member of – what the British considered a terrorist organization at the time – the Haganah, David Ben-Gurion also notably presided over the ethnic cleansing of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.
David Ben-Gurion made his contempt for Palestinian human rights evident from his actions and therefore giving an example of his hatred for Palestinians would be nothing new. Instead it is crucial to understand that, from the very first Prime-Minister, the Israeli government viewed non-European Jews as “the other” and were very much racist.
On the 11th of June, 1962, David Ben-Gurion made the following statement at a meeting with the head of Israel’s teachers federation, Shalom Levin:
“The danger we face is that the great majority of those children whose parents did not receive an education for generations, will descend to the level of Arab children”. (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.653134)
The statement was addressing the question as to whether Israel should segregate the “Mizrahi” (Jews of Middle-Eastern origin or “oriental communities”) from the “Ashkenazi” (European Jewish) population.
This quote is crucial to understanding the attitude of the Prime Minister towards Jews, who were not of European descent.
This information comes from the Israeli Labour Party archives and was reported upon by the Israeli media outlet Haaretz on the 24th of April, 2015.
MOSHE SHARETT:
Moshe Sharett was Israel’s second and shortest serving Prime Minister (1953-1955), he was perceived by many as a liberal Zionist. Unfortunately for Israel romanticists, the fictional depiction of Moshe Sharett, as the ‘dove amongst hawks’, really came under fire when he revealed his racially charged descriptions of Palestinian refugees.
The following is an entry from Moshe Sharett’s diary on the 15th of November, 1953, where he refers to returning Palestinian refugees as infiltrators:
“In the last three years [Shani reported] 20,000 infiltrators settled in Israel, in addition to 30,000 who returned immediately after the war…. Only because these 20,000 have not been given permanent documents has the brake been put on the flow of infiltration directed toward settlement. To abolish the military government would mean to open the border areas to undisturbed infiltration and to increasing penetration toward the interior of the country. Even as things are, around 19,000 Arabs in Galilee are in possession of permanent permits to move freely around but only to the West and the South and not toward the North and the East…. it is true that the troublesome problem of the evacuees must be liquidated through a permanent resettlement”.
The entry was made addressing a report, which was submitted to the Israeli cabinet, that same day, by the chief Military governor of the Arab minority in Israel, ‘Colonel Yitzhak Shani’.
A leading right-wing Israeli scholar, Benny Morris, in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict quotes Sharett as saying; “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it”, confirming that the liberal Zionist, isn’t so representative of liberty when it comes to Palestinian human rights.
LEVI ESHKOL:
Levi Eshkol served as Israeli Prime Minister between 1963 and 1969. Eshkol oversaw 1967’s ‘six day war, in which Israel was responsible for attacking a defenseless Egypt and initiating a war in which they would illegally occupy the Golan Heights (From Syria), the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula.
On the 17th of November, 2017, Haaretz News reported upon declassified documents previously release by the Israeli government. The documents unearth some very revealing opinions and the way in which Levi Eshkol discussed Palestinians.
In December 1967, months after the war, Levi Eshkol discusses the Palestinians of Gaza, labelling them a “problem” that needs to be dealt with by making life so miserable for them that they would just leave, he even began discussing the “luxury” of another war which would deal with the “problem” Israel faces.
Eshkol goes on to state:
“I cannot imagine it – how we will organize life in this country when we have 1.4 million Arabs and we are 2.4 million, with 400,000 Arabs already in the country?” (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.823075)
Evidently someone who declares Palestinians as a “problem” and “cannot imagine” living with them, actively working to violently expel them and/or force their departure, is no friend to any kind of peace in the region.
GOLDA MEIR:
Golda Meir became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969 and served until the year 1974. Golda Meir notably spoke of non-European Jews in a very demeaning way, perpetuating a very popular European Zionist stereo-type, that Jews from parts of the world other than Europe were essentially primitive.
Golda once said, whilst addressing the Zionist federation of Great Britain (in 1964):
“We in Israel need (Jewish) immigrants from countries with a high standard, because the future of our social structure is worrying us. We have immigrants from Morocco, Libya, Iran, Egypt and other countries with a 16th century level. Shall we be able to elevate these immigrants to a suitable level of civilization?”
Golda’s statement speaks for itself as to what she thought of non-European Jewry, hardly holding those from countries foreign to Europe at high esteem.
A notable concept pushed by the likes of Golda Meir, is the idea that Palestinians don’t exist, they are just Arabs and that Palestine never existed, an outright denial of history.
Golda Meir stated this idea loud and clear, on the 8th of March, 1969:
Although the statement above is one that Golda Meir gave, she seemed to acknowledge the existence of Palestine when she wrote letters, during her time living under the British Mandate of Palestine.
YITZHAK RABIN:
Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s Prime Minister twice, the first time between 1971 and 1977 and then the second time he served 1992-95. Yitzhak Rabin, for the most part, was seen through the eyes of the West as a liberal president, ultimately facing assassination at the hands of a fanatical right wing Israeli in 1995.
The Yitzhak Rabin known to the Palestinians however, was the bone-breaker, who oversaw mass murder and the brutalization of their people.
Something very kept quiet, is Yitzhak Rabin’s greeting of John Vorster in April, 1976. Yitzhak Rabin threw a Banquet for the Prime Minister of Apartheid South Africa, expressing that Israel and Apartheid South Africa both face “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”, he then went on to praise Apartheid South Africa and hailed “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa”.
MENACHEM BEGIN:
Menachem Begin was Israel’s Prime Minister between the years 1977 and 1983. Menachem Begin was once described by Albert Einstein as a terrorist, he and 25 other prominent Jews even wrote an open letter to the ‘New York Times’ in 1948. Begin was involved in the infamous bombing of the King David Hotel as well as many other terrorist attack, which claimed the lives of innocent men, women and children.
To point to the language, by which Menachem Begin used, to characterize his Palestine “enemy”, I would simply turn to Ammon Kapeliouk’s article from the New Statesman (June 25,1982). The article entitled ‘Begin and the Beasts’ sums up the dehumanizing way in which Menachem Begin referred to Palestinians, stating that they were “beasts walking on two legs” according to Kapeliouk’s account from the observation of his speech delivered to the Knesset.
YITZHAK SHAMIR:
Yitzhak Shamir was Prime Minister of Israel twice, first from 1983 to 1984 and then again from 1986 to 1992. Yitzhak Shamir was formerly a leader of the Lehi (Stern Gang), a terrorist group responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, along with countless attacks on civilians before this.
Yitzhak Shamir said, prior to the Madrid peace talks (in 1991), “The Arabs are the same Arabs and the sea is the same sea”. With this statement he was insinuating that the Palestinians and Arab neighboring countries had never changed, asserting that engaging with them in a negotiable manner was not something he was so happy about.
Shimon Peres was elected twice as Prime Minister of Israel, serving the first time from 1984-1986, then again from 1995 until 1996. Peres also served the ninth President of the state of Israel (2007-2014) taking over from the convicted rapist Moshe Katzav.
Although dubbed as a champion of peace, Shimon Peres was in fact the man who led the initiative to create Israel’s first illegal settlements. He was also the founding father of Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
As Prime Minister Shimon Peres oversaw the massacre of Qana Massacre (South Lebanon, 1996) in which more than 100 civilians were killed, this occurred after Israel targeted and blew up a United Nations facility where roughly 800 people had gathered to take shelter.
Despite the often used, flowery language he chose to consult international media with, Shimon Peres actively enforced the strategic, zionist objective, of pacifying the Palestinian population through the means of strangling them financially.
During an interview, conducted by al-Jazeera, (published on the 30th of December, 2012) Peres blamed Palestinians for the hardships they endure, stating that; “They are self victimizing. They victimize themselves. They are a victim of they’re own mistakes, unnecessarily .” (https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/frostinterview/2012/12/2012122610132412135.html)
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU:
Benjamin Netanyahu was also Israel’s Prime Minister twice, beginning his first term in 1996 leaving office in 1999, he was then again elected in 2009 where he currently remains to this day.
Benjamin Netanyahu has a large track record of massacring Palestinians, most notably in Gaza during the large scale bombardments in 2012 and 2014. Netanyahu has on multiple occasions announced that settlements will never be reversed and constantly allows the approval of more settler units in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
A sample of things that commonly come from Benjamin Netanyahu’s mouth are as follows:
On March the seventeenth, 2015, in order to urge Israeli Jews to vote for him, Benjamin Netanyahu released a video on Facebook and other social media platforms, where he said; “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” (https://www.facebook.com/Netanyahu/videos/10152778935532076/)
As reported by Haaretz News, Netanyahu on the ninth of February, 2016, visited the construction of a concrete wall that was being constructed on the border between Gaza and Israel. In his own words, the wall was necessary to “defend ourselves against the wild beasts”. (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.702562)
Something else that is notable about Mr. Netanyahu is his views on African migrants. Haaretz News reported upon the comments made by the Prime Minister – on the 31st of August, 2017 – in which he referred to African Migrants as “infiltrators”. A portion of what Netanyahu said was; “We will return south Tel Aviv to the citizens of Israel, they are not refugees, but infiltrators looking for work,” he said. He added: “If needed, we will legislate an amendment to the law or change the agreements with the African countries, or both.” (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.809999)
EHUD BARAK:
Ehud Barak was Israel’s Prime Minster between 1999 and 2001, he saw the beginning of the second Intifada during his time in office.
In April of 1973 Ehud Barak entered Beirut, dressed in drag (as a woman), in order to assassinate members of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), in killing innocent people.
On the 13th of June, 2002, Ehud Barak was interviewed by the New York Review of Books, during this interview he said the following:
“They [Arabs] are products of a culture in which to tell a lie… Creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture”.
ARIEL SHARON:
Serving from 2001 until 2006 as Israeli Prime Minister leaving behind a lengthy trail of blood.
Ariel Sharon was most infamous for commanding the Qibya massacre,along with the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Sharon also used his death squads to execute people in mass numbers in Gaza during the 50’s, especially upon the strips establishment.
Other than his willingness to massacre Palestinians and Arabs, it is also important to be aware of Ariel Sharon’s stance on stealing Palestinian land. Ariel Sharon said (as Foreign Minister) on Israeli radio in November of 1998; Everybody has to move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [Jewish] settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11576714)
EHUD OLMERT:
Prime Minister from 2006 until 2009, Ehud Olmert, inflicted devastating wars of aggression upon the civilian population of Lebanon (2006) and the Gaza strip (2008-2009), targeting and killing thousands of innocent people.
Like former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Olmert also liked to compare Israel to Apartheid South Africa. Olmert spoke to Haaretz News following the Annapolis conference – which ended in an agreement to try and reach a Middle-East peace settlement by the end of 2008 – making the following comments:
In 2014 Ehud Olmert was sentenced to 27 months imprisonment, over charges on the grounds of corruption, he served 16 of those months before being released.
Racism and bigotry have been prominent features of Israeli politics since the states very inception. Israeli political leaders have repeatedly expressed dehumanization of Palestinians and Jews of non-European origin, across the political spectrum.
Radioactive microparticles were detected in the homes of six workers in central Washington state’s Tri-City area who are associated with the Hanford nuclear site, a major Cold War-era plutonium manufacturing facility, scientists have reported.
A study published this month in the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science reported that small but still dangerous amounts of radioactive elements were found in dust collected by cloth wipes and vacuum cleaners in order to track the potential spread of radiation from one of the United States’ most notorious nuclear cleanup sites.
The same study also found radioactive particles in the homes of nuclear workers associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado. All three sites are heavily associated with nuclear weapons production.
It’s believed the particles could have found their way into the homes in a variety of ways, including being attached to workers’ clothing and being stirred up by wind storms and wildfires, which are common in the region, and blown inside.
The tests found radioactive uranium, thorium, plutonium and americium particles that, while innocuous in the external environment, represent a “potential source of internal radiation exposure” if ingested, warns Marco Kaltofen, a civil engineer affiliated with the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and author of the study, the Seattle Times reported.
Exposure to these materials increases the risk of cancer, the study noted. Plutonium is “fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts,” said Glenn Seaborg, the physicist who discovered the element in 1941, as quoted in a 2011 fact sheet on the Rocky Flats site. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry notes in its public health statement on thorium exposure that the radioactive isotopes can sit in the soil for decades and cause lung cancer if inhaled. Uranium ingestion mainly targets the kidneys, the ATSDR notes, while americium destroys and irradiates bone tissue and can cause bone cancers such as leukemia or lymphoma and damage the thyroid.
“These radioactive particles are tiny and difficult to detect once you get a few inches away, but once inside the body, the distance from our tissue is essentially zero,” Kaltofen explained. While the skin can handle certain amounts of radiation safely, the body’s internal organs have no protection and a tiny amount can prove fatally toxic. Polonium-210, for example, is 250 million times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide, the New York Times reported.
The report’s conclusions come from years of testing coordinated with Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based organization that has fought for decades for accountability in the federal cleanup of the Hanford site. Kaltofen used an unusual technique that involves both electron microscopy and a specialized X-ray analysis that can detect extremely low levels of radioactive particles. The samples were compared to those taken from the Hanford site, which served as a kind of fingerprint for identifying the particles.
The levels found in the Hanford workers’ homes represented a health risk exceeding that considered acceptable by the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s safety standards. However, the manager of the Radioactive Air Emissions Section of the Washington Department of Health John Martell told the Seattle Times that the level found in the study “is not jumping out to us as a public health risk.”
The US Department of Energy (DoE) performs regular environmental monitoring to measure radionuclide concentrations in the air, water and soil, as well as in fish and wildlife “to assure the public that the dose and risk from Hanford contaminants are well understood,” the department says.
Hanford Site, or Hanford Nuclear Reservation, is a 586 square-mile site between the Columbia and Yakima Rivers, just upstream from the Tri-Cities and adjacent to Richland. It is roughly half the size of Rhode Island. The site was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ top secret program to develop an atomic bomb.
Hanford housed the world’s first full-scale plutonium reactor in the world, B Reactor, and was expanded to nine nuclear reactors and five plutonium processing plants. Plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the Trinity blast, the world’s first nuclear explosion, as was the fuel for the two atom bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in August 1945, that killed more than 200,000 people. Most of the nuclear fuel for the 60,000 nuclear weapons the United States produced through the 1980s came from the Hanford site, according to the US Department of Energy.
Hanford was decommissioned after the Cold War but remains the storage site for 53 million gallons of liquid nuclear waste and 25 million cubic feet of solid nuclear waste, the DoE website notes. Neither the stored waste nor the waste from production has been properly stored, and large radiation leaks have contaminated much of the area, which remains the nation’s largest environmental cleanup site. According to Earth Island Journal, between 1944 and 1972, “as much as 1.7 trillion gallons of liquid waste, radionuclides and hazardous chemicals” were dumped into the Columbia River or into the ground.
The site regularly leaks nuclear contaminants, notably in February 2016 and May 2017, with the planned December 2017 demolition of a Hanford plutonium finishing plant being halted after several workers inhaled contaminated particles, arousing fears of a larger contamination if demolition continued, the Seattle Times reported at the time. Plutonium and americium traces were found up to 10 miles away from the condemned plant in subsequent tests. However, all of Kaltofen’s samples came from before the demolition began.
The Yakama Nation, whose reservation sits only 20 miles from the site, for decades fought turning Hanford into a nuclear waste site, as did other affected tribes such as the Nez Perce and Umatilla nations. Three counties around the Yakama reservation have seen high rates of a rare and fatal birth defect called anencephaly, in which a fetus’ brain and skull fail to fully form, which is believed to be caused by irradiation, Earth Island reported. Higher rates of anencephaly are also associated with sites in Iraq where the US military used depleted uranium rounds during the Iraq War, Iraqi doctors in Basra and Baghdad have noted.
Indigenous nations in Washington aren’t the only ones negatively affected by the US nuclear weapons program: decades of uranium mining in the Navajo Nation have caused extensive irradiation of the countryside, creating a disease known as Navajo Neuropathy, NPR reported. One spring in northeastern Arizona was reported in 2015 to have uranium levels “at least five times greater than safe drinking water standards” by a study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The contamination caused the early deaths of many children who drank from the spring or whose mothers drank the water while pregnant.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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