Timeless or most popular

Podesta emails showed Facebook colluded with Clinton, Assange reminds

RT | September 29, 2017

As US lawmakers demand social media companies show how their platforms were allegedly used by Russia to meddle in the 2016 election, WikiLeaks co-founder tweeted emails that show Facebook executives in direct communication with one candidate’s team.

Beginning on October 7 last year, WikiLeaks published hundreds of emails from the private account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. The daily drops continued for a couple days after the November 8 election.

On Thursday, as US media were speculating about “Russian” meddling on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, Julian Assange tweeted some of the Podesta emails with a reminder that the social network’s leading lights were Clinton fans.

In an email from early January 2016, Podesta wrote to Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, saying that he was excited to work with her on getting Clinton elected.

“Look forward to working with you to elect the first woman President of the United States,” Podesta wrote. Sandberg replied she was “thrilled” by the progress that Clinton was making.

In February 2015, Podesta was copied on an email from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who said she had arranged for Sandberg and her researcher to visit the office and “step through the research on gender and leadership by women.”

That visit took place one hour before a “main meeting” concerning Clinton.

In June 2015, Sandberg wrote an email to Podesta, saying she would “still want HRC to win badly.”

“I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids,” Sandberg wrote.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, sent a personal email to Podesta in August 2015, saying he enjoyed spending time with him, and that their conversation gave him “a lot to think about.”

Zuckerberg thanked Podesta for sharing his experiences with the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Democratic think tank founded by Podesta.

Included in the thread was an email to Podesta from Elliot Schrage, the vice president of communications at Facebook, who said Zuckerberg was looking for a way to “direct his wealth to have an impact as great as Facebook” adding that Podesta’s ideas had “really moved his thinking.”

Zuckerberg then asked Podesta if he could reach out in the future to hear his ideas and said he was looking forward to continuing their conversation.

“I hope it’s okay if I reach out as my thinking develops to get your ideas and reactions,” Zuckerberg said. “If there are any other folks you think I should talk to, please let me know.”

Some Twitter users were quick to point out the hypocrisy behind Democrats spending so much time and energy investigating all the major social media sites, desperately searching for any possible collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia, even though Facebook colluded with Clinton.

Several users began tweeting under the hashtag #FaceBookLeaks, hoping to bring attention to the story.

September 29, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, Hillary Clinton, United States | Leave a comment

Pressure on Russian Media Abroad Unacceptable – Putin

Sputnik – September 29, 2017

According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the current pressure on Russia-based media abroad unacceptable.

During Putin’s meeting with the Russian Security Council, both the president and the council declared pressure on the Russian media abroad unacceptable, underlining that it has increased recently.

“The issue of continuing and sometimes increasing pressure on Russian media in some foreign countries was also touched upon during the meeting,” Peskov said.

“It was noted that such actions against our media are unacceptable,” Peskov stressed.

The day before, Margarita Simonyan, the RT editor-in-chief stated that RT broadcaster was asked to register as a foreign agent. Otherwise, it might face restrictions that would make it unable to continue work in the United States.

The Russian Foreign Ministry commented on the US Department of Justice’s demands to register RT America channel’s services provider as a foreign agent under FARA, saying that every move in relation to a Russian media will have a relevant response.

Earlier in September, the US Department of Justice asked a RT contractor in the United States to register under Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), while in June US congressmen introduced the Foreign Agents Registration Modernization and Enforcement Act bill, which would broaden the scope of FARA to include RT, by expanding DoJ authority to investigate attempts to “unlawfully influence the political process.”

On September 11, RT America channel’s service provider in the US received a letter from the US Department of Justice demanding that the company should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The letter was received amid discussions on a bill in the US lower house aimed at amending requirements for registration of foreign agents under FARA.

The bill, among other things, empowers the US DOJ, including the Federal Investigation Bureau (FBI), to identify and prosecute organizations that “illegally” try to influence the political processes in the United States.

The same day it was reported that the FBI had questioned former Sputnik employee Andrew Feinberg as part of the investigation of reports that the news outlet allegedly acted as a Russian propaganda agency in violation of FARA.

It was claimed that the FBI had access to Sputnik’s working correspondence from Feinberg and another former employee of Sputnik’s Washington bureau, Joseph John Fionda. The FBI itself has not responded to Sputnik’s inquiry on whether it was conducting an investigation into the news agency.

In response, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced the move as contradicting pluralism and freedom of the press, while Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova highlighted that Moscow “reserves the right to respond to the outrageous actions of the American side.”

September 29, 2017 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | FARA, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

The Slimy Business of Russia-gate

By Robert Parry | Consortium news | September 28, 2017

The “Field of Dreams” slogan for America’s NGOs should be: “If you pay for it, we will come.” And right now, tens of millions of dollars are flowing to non-governmental organizations if they will buttress the thesis of Russian “meddling” in the U.S. democratic process no matter how sloppy the “research” or how absurd the “findings.”

And, if you think the pillars of the U.S. mainstream media – The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and others – will apply some quality controls, you haven’t been paying attention for the past year or so. The MSM is just as unethical as the NGOs are.

So, we are now in a phase of Russia-gate in which NGO “scholars” produce deeply biased reports and their nonsense is treated as front-page news and items for serious discussion across the MSM.

Yet, there’s even an implicit confession about how pathetic some of this “scholarship” is in the hazy phrasing that gets applied to the “findings,” although the weasel words will slip past most unsuspecting Americans and will be dropped for more definitive language when the narrative is summarized in the next day’s newspaper or in a cable-news “crawl.”

For example, a Times front-page story on Thursday reported that “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the [NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem] issue with hashtags, such as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.”

The story, which fits neatly into the current U.S. propaganda meme that the Russian government somehow is undermining American democracy by stirring up dissent inside the U.S., quickly spread to other news outlets and became the latest “proof” of a Russian “war” against America.

However, before we empty the nuclear silos and exterminate life on the planet, we might take a second to look at the Times phrasing: “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia.”

The vague wording doesn’t even say the Russian government was involved but rather presents an unsupported claim that some Twitter accounts are “suspected” of being part of some “network” and that this “network” may have some ill-defined connection – or “links” – to “Russia,” a country of 144 million people.

‘Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon’

It’s like the old game of “six degrees of separation” from Kevin Bacon. Yes, perhaps we are all “linked” to Kevin Bacon somehow but that doesn’t prove that we know Kevin Bacon or are part of a Kevin Bacon “network” that is executing a grand conspiracy to sow discontent by taking opposite sides of issues and then tweeting.

Yet that is the underlying absurdity of the Times article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Scott Shane. Still, as silly as the article may be that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. The Times’ high-profile treatment of these gauzy allegations represents a grave danger to the world by fueling a growing hysteria inside the United States about being “at war” with nuclear-armed Russia. At some point, someone might begin to take this alarmist rhetoric seriously.

Yes, I understand that lots of people hate President Trump and see Russia-gate as the golden ticket to his impeachment. But that doesn’t justify making serious allegations with next to no proof, especially when the outcome could be thermonuclear war.

However, with all those millions of dollars sloshing around the NGO world and Western academia – all looking for some “study” to fund that makes Russia look bad – you are sure to get plenty of takers. And, we should now expect that new “findings” like these will fill in for the so-far evidence-free suspicions about Russia and Trump colluding to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton.

If you read more deeply into the Times story, you get a taste of where Russia-gate is headed next and a clue as to who is behind it:

“Since last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter accounts — human users and suspected bots alike — they have linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.

“Of 80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25 percent ‘had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,’ the researchers found. About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton, falsely accusing her of funding left-wing antifa — short for anti-fascist — protesters, tying her to the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her daughter Chelsea’s use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in the federal investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, with most of them treated the news as a vindication for President Trump’s earlier wiretapping claims.”

The Neocons, Again!

So, let’s stop and unpack this Times’ reporting. First, this Alliance for Securing Democracy is not some neutral truth-seeking organization but a neoconservative-dominated outfit that includes on its advisory board such neocon luminaries as Mike Chertoff, Bill Kristol and former Freedom House president David Kramer along with other anti-Russia hardliners such as former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.

How many of these guys, do you think, were assuring us that Iraq was hiding WMDs back in 2003?

This group clearly has an ax to grind, a record of deception, and plenty of patrons in the Military-Industrial Complex who stand to make billions of dollars from the New Cold War.

The neocons also have been targeting Russia for regime change for years because they see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the chief obstacle to their goal of helping Israel achieve its desire for “regime change” in Syria and a chance to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran. Russia-gate has served the neocons well as a very convenient way to pull Democrats, liberals and even progressives into the neocon agenda because Russia-gate is sold as a powerful weapon for the anti-Trump Resistance.

The Times article also might have mentioned that Twitter has 974 million accounts. So, this alarm over 600 accounts is a bit disproportionate for a front-page story in the Times, don’t you think?

And, there’s the definitional problem of what constitutes “anti-Americanism” in a news article. And what does it mean to be “linked to Russian influence operations”? Does that include Americans who may not march in lockstep to the one-sided State Department narratives on the crises in Ukraine and Syria? Any deviation from Official Washington’s groupthink makes you a “Moscow stooge.”

And, is it a crime to be “critical” of Hillary Clinton or to note that the U.S. mainstream media was dismissive of Trump’s claims about being wiretapped only for us to find out later that the FBI apparently was wiretapping his campaign manager?

However, such questions aren’t going to be asked amid what has become a massive Russia-gate groupthink, dominating not just Official Washington, but across much of America’s political landscape and throughout the European Union.

Why the Bias?

Beyond the obvious political motivations for this bias, we also have had the introduction of vast sums of money pouring in from the U.S. government, NATO and European institutions to support the business of “combatting Russian propaganda.”

For example, last December, President Obama signed into law a $160 million funding mechanism entitled the “Combating Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.” But that amounts to only a drop in the bucket considering already existing Western propaganda projects targeting Russia.

So, a scramble is on to develop seemingly academic models to “prove” what Western authorities want proven: that Russia is at fault for pretty much every bad thing that happens in the world, particularly the alienation of many working-class people from the Washington-Brussels elites.

The truth cannot be that establishment policies have led to massive income inequality and left the working class struggling to survive and thus are to blame for ugly political manifestations – from Trump to Brexit to the surprising support for Germany’s far-right AfD party. No, it must be Russia! Russia! Russia! And there’s a lot of money on the bed to prove that point.

There’s also the fact that the major Western news media is deeply invested in bashing Russia as well as in the related contempt for Trump and his followers. Those twin prejudices have annihilated all professional standards that would normally be applied to news judgments regarding these flawed “studies.”

On Thursday, The Washington Post ran its own banner-headlined story drawn from the same loose accusations made by that neocon-led Alliance for Securing Democracy, but instead the Post sourced the claims to Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma. The headline read: “Russian trolls are stoking NFL controversy, senator says.”

The “evidence” cited by Lankford’s office was one “Twitter account calling itself Boston Antifa that gives its geolocation as Vladivostok, Russia,” the Post reported.

By Thursday, Twitter had suspended the Boston Antifa account, so I couldn’t send it a question, but earlier this month, Dan Glaun, a reporter for Masslive.com, reported that the people behind Boston Antifa were “a pair of anti-leftist pranksters from Oregon who started Boston Antifa as a parody of actual anti-fascist groups.”

In an email to me on Thursday, Glaun cited an interview that the Boston Antifa pranksters had done with right-wing radio talk show host Gavin McInnes last April.

And, by the way, there are apps that let you manipulate your geolocation data on Twitter. Or, you can choose to believe that the highly professional Russian intelligence agencies didn’t notice that they were telegraphing their location as Vladivostok.

Mindless Russia Bashing

Another example of this mindless Russia bashing appeared just below the Post’s story on Lankford’s remarks. The Post sidebar cited a “study” from researchers at Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda asserting that “junk news” on Twitter “flowed more heavily in a dozen [U.S.] battleground states than in the nation overall in the days immediately before and after the 2016 presidential election, suggesting that a coordinated effort targeted the most pivotal voters.” Cue the spooky Boris and Natasha music!

Of course, any Americans living in “battleground states” could tell you that they are inundated with all kinds of election-related “junk,” including negative TV advertising, nasty radio messages, alarmist emails and annoying robo-calls at dinner time. That’s why they’re called “battleground states,” Sherlock.

But what’s particularly offensive about this “study” is that it implies that the powers-that-be must do more to eliminate what these “experts” deem “propaganda” and “junk news.” If you read deeper into the story, you discover that the researchers applied a very subjective definition of what constitutes “junk news,” i.e., information that the researchers don’t like even if it is truthful and newsworthy.

The Post article by Craig Timberg, who apparently is using Russia-gate to work himself off the business pages and onto the national staff, states that “The researchers defined junk news as ‘propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political news and information.’

“The researchers also categorized reports from Russia and ones from WikiLeaks – which published embarrassing posts about Democrat Hillary Clinton based on a hack of her campaign chairman’s emails – as ‘polarizing political content’ for the purpose of the analysis.”

So, this “study” lumped together “junk news” with accurate and newsworthy information, i.e., WikiLeaks’ disclosure of genuine emails that contained such valid news as the contents of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street banks (which she was trying to hide from voters) as well as evidence of the unethical tactics used by the Democratic National Committee to sabotage Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign.

Also dumped into the researchers’ bin of vile “disinformation” were “reports from Russia,” as if everything that comes out of Russia is, ipso facto, “junk news.”

And, what, pray tell, is “conspiratorial political news”? I would argue that the past year of evidence-lite allegations about “Russian meddling” in the U.S. election accompanied by unsupported suspicions about “collusion” with the Trump campaign would constitute “conspiratorial political news.” Indeed, I would say that this Oxford “research” constitutes “conspiratorial political news” and that Timberg’s article qualifies as “junk news.”

Predictable Outcome

Given the built-in ideological bias of this “research,” it probably won’t surprise you that the report’s author, Philip N. Howard, concludes that “junk news originates from three main sources that the Oxford group has been tracking: Russian operatives, Trump supporters and activists part of the alt-right,” according to the Post.

I suppose that since part of the “methodology” was to define “reports from Russia” as “junk news,” the appearance of “Russian operatives” shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but the whole process reeks of political bias.

Further skewing the results, the report separated out information from “professional news organizations [and] political parties” from “some ‘junk news’ source,” according to the Post. In other words, the “researchers” believe that “professional news organizations” are inherently reliable and that outside-the-mainstream news is “junk” – despite the MSM’s long record of getting major stories wrong.

The real “junk” is this sort of academic or NGO research that starts with a conclusion and packs a “study” in such a way as to guarantee the preordained conclusion. Or as the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”

Yet, it’s also clear that if you generate “research” that feeds the hungry beast of Russia-gate, you will find eager patrons doling out dollars and a very receptive audience in the mainstream media.

In a place like Washington, there are scores if not hundreds of reports generated every day and only a tiny fraction get the attention of the Times, Post, CNN, etc., let alone result in published articles. But “studies” that reinforce today’s anti-Russia narrative are sure winners.

So, if you’re setting up a new NGO or you’re an obscure academic angling for a lucrative government grant as well as some flattering coverage in the MSM, the smart play is to join the new gold rush in decrying “Russian propaganda.”

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Rise of the New McCarthyism”; “WPost Pushes More Dubious Russia-Bashing”; “The Crazy Imbalance of Russia-gate”; and “More Holes in Russia-gate Narrative.”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

September 28, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Alliance for Securing Democracy, CIA, United States | Leave a comment

Bernie Sanders Can’t Shake His Imperial Piggishness

By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | September 28, 2017

Donald Trump’s performance last week at the UN General Assembly set the rhetorical bar for U.S. imperial piggery at a 21st century low — although Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton is surely his equal in moral depravity. At about the same time that Trump was threatening to incinerate a whole nation of people, Bernie Sanders attempted to fill in the vast holes in his own foreign policy profile, in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the same venue where Winston Churchill, the 20th century’s prototypical western imperial pig politician, delivered his Cold War-initiating “Iron Curtain descending on Europe” speech in 1946. This is deep swine territory, and Sanders could not help but wallow in it.

Churchill was an arch racist, an admirer of fascists until they threatened his home island and its global colonial empire, and a great innovator in war crimes against civilian populations — and, therefore, a hero of the Wild White West. Sanders revealed his own swinish predilections in Westminster. The Vermont senator reverently quoted Churchill’s “strategic concept” to provide “nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands.” What these words actually meant in the mouth of an imperialist, is eternal subjugation of the darker races while rich white men bore the “burden” of global governance. But Sanders chose to give the most benign interpretation to Churchill’s colonial pig-talk, claiming the British prime minister’s “challenge” to current society means moving “toward a global community in which people have the decent jobs, food, clean water, education, health care and housing they need.”

Churchill would never dream of providing a welfare state for Britain’s colonial captives, nor is Sanders proposing to do so for the far-flung subjects of the U.S. empire. However, imperialists reserve for themselves and their “exceptional” home countries the right — no, the obligation (or “burden”) — to shape the destinies of the rest of the human species, if only in their imaginations or to garner cheap speechmaking points. President George W. Bush also wanted to bring “freedom and progress” and safety and welfare and all those other good things to Iraq in the wake of Shock and Awe — and doubtless meant it. Donald Trump has a vision of prosperity for the world, too – embossed with his own golden logo. The Japanese empire imposed an Asian “Co-Prosperity Sphere,” under the armed guidance of Tokyo.

Bernie Sanders is an imperialist, and therefore of the same general political species as Churchill, Clinton and Trump. Many of Sanders’ leftish supporters cannot fathom how anyone could describe their hero as “an imperialist pig,” as I did in a June 15 article. They think imperialism is a personal characteristic, a kind of meanness — the same misconception they have about racism — rather than a global system centered in their home country. That’s why, not only is nearly every self-styled “patriot” an imperialist, but so are many, if not most, U.S. “progressives” — especially the white ones. They truly cannot fathom the meaning of other people’s right to self-determination, but see themselves as benevolent vectors of human progress – which is why “liberals” are so prone to crimes of “humanitarian” military intervention, the imperialist hoax-of-choice since Bill Clinton’s presidency.

A disturbing proportion of Black Americans have caught the same disease, after eight years of identification with U.S. power under Obama, whom, I wrote “was among the most aggressive defenders of white supremacy in history,” having waged seven simultaneous wars to preserve the U.S.-based multinational corporate empire. Obama handed off those wars to Trump, who is vigorously pursuing all of them and threatening more aggressions.

Foreign policy was largely an afterthought in Bernie Sanders presidential campaign — which is a kind way of saying that he did not challenge Barack Obama’s foreign policy and was, therefore, in tacit agreement with the First Black President’s global depredations. Certainly, Sanders backed sanctions against Russia (“that means tightening the screws on them”) and supported the near-genocidal Obama-Clinton regime change war “to get rid of this guy [President al Assad]” in Syria. That’s more than enough to qualify the 2016 Sanders as a world class imperialist pig.

The 2017 version is much the same. Like virtually the entire Democratic Party, Sanders eagerly foments anti-Russian hysteria, embracing CIA tales of Russian “efforts to undermine one of our greatest strengths: the integrity of our elections, and our faith in our own democracy.” He vows to “work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia” – code words for continuation of the Obama-Hillary Clinton policy to foster regime change in Moscow. No serious advocate for peace talks like that — and if you do not advocate for peace, you are not a progressive.

Sanders’ anti-Russia rhetoric negates much of the progressive-sounding wordage in Sanders speech. At any rate, his remarks contained very little of substance on the burning issues of the day. Sanders delivered mostly pablum to signify that he is the Not-Trump, and takes strong stands only on long dead issues. “The goal is not for the United States to dominate the world,” he said. “Nor, on the other hand, is our goal to withdraw from the international community and shirk our responsibilities under the banner of ‘America First.’” But even Trump is capable of saying nice things about the UN — and did, last week, even as he displayed complete contempt for and ignorance of international law. And Barack Obama broke every international law and covenant in the book, while grandiloquently playing the globalist.

Sanders said the U.S. should not have overthrown the elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, and shouldn’t have deposed Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. He was against the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War — George Bush’s, not the current Obama-Trump Iraq war, about which he has nothing to say.

Sanders claims to oppose the U.S.-backed Saudi Arabian war against Yemen, although last year he was encouraging the Saudis to become more aggressive in the region. (He apparently meant more aggression against Syria — a violation of international law with which Sanders had no quarrel, since President Assad is a “bad guy” and the Russians are trying to subvert “our democracy.”)

“The Global War on Terror has been a disaster for the American people and for American leadership,” said Sanders. “We must rethink the old Washington mindset that judges ‘seriousness’ according to the willingness to use force. One of the key misapprehensions of this mindset is the idea that military force is decisive in a way that diplomacy is not.”

The “new Washington mindset” Sanders fuzzily proposes has no room for the universal principles of self-determination, national sovereignty and international law. It should be understood that Sanders is talking about use of American military force against sovereign nations; “diplomacy” does not apply to al-Qaida and its ISIS offshoot. Sanders fails to once mention the legality of U.S. violations of other nations’ sovereignty — because he is an imperialist who does not respect international law. Sanders says “military force is sometimes necessary, but always — always — as the last resort,” but he does not recognize that only the UN Security Council can legally authorize attacks on sovereign nations. Plus, even Trump will claim that he only unleashes the military as a last resort.

Bernie Sanders supports the Iran nuclear deal. So do lots of Republicans. But, the “deal” is an imperialist instrument, based on lies that even the U.S. intelligence agencies rejected. In 2007, all of the U.S. spy agencies joined in assessing that Iran had dismantled its nuclear program in 2003. This National Intelligence Estimate outraged the Bush regime, and probably prevented them from launching a full-scale military attack on Iran. But the Obama administration ignored the Estimate, despite another intelligence assessment in 2011 that determined Iran was still on a non-weapons nuclear track. The U.S. and Israel nevertheless waged an assassination campaign against Iranian scientists and unleashed the world’s first massive cyber-attack on the country’s installations, finally threatening a full-scale military attack to force through the current “deal” on nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump, the unilateralist imperialist, threatens to break the deal. Sanders says the U.S. should honor it. But the Iran agreement is itself an imperial imposition based on threats of armed aggression. Whoever supports that type of “diplomacy” is as much an imperialist pig as Trump.

Sanders wants the Iran agreement to serve as a model for dealing with North Korea; in other words, bully Pyongyang until it buckles under. The difference between Sanders approach and Trump’s “fire and fury” is that the Democrat would “look for ways to tighten international sanctions” through “the international community working together.” But, it’s the same lawless blackmail. Sanders says nothing about direct talks with North Korea, the North’s key demand, which would amount to actual diplomacy. But that would smack of equality among nations – an anathema to imperial powers, and to would-be imperial presidents, Bernie Sanders included.

In his entire speech on foreign affairs, Sanders did not utter the word “Africa” once, nor did he say the word “Israel.” Yet the U.S. virtually occupies the continent of Africa, through its African Command, while Israel practically occupies U.S. foreign policy. Does that mean Sanders has no policy on Africa or Israel? No, it means he goes along with the general direction of U.S. imperial policy as it exists – because he is an imperialist.

Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .

September 28, 2017 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Bernie Sanders, CIA, Democratic Party, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Abbas Is No Arafat. He Must Go.

Mahmoud Abbas PLO d11b6

By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | September 27, 2017

I’ve been writing about the plight of the amiable Palestinian people under Israel’s jackboot for the same length of time that Mahmoud Abbas has been Palestinian president. And that’s far too long. Abbas has also been chairman of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation, which describes itself as the sole representative of the Palestinian people) for even longer.

A recent poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that the Palestinians have had enough. Two-thirds want Abbas out.

A majority are also dissatisfied with the decision at Fatah’s latest Convention to keep Abbas as head of Fatah for another 5 years. The poll found that most view the Palestinian Authority, which is also headed by Abbas, as a burden to the Palestinian people rather than an asset. An even larger majority feel they cannot criticise the PA without fear. Perception of corruption in the PA now stands at 76%.

What’s more, two-thirds of Palestinians believe a two-state solution is no longer possible due to Israel’s relentless expansion of illegal settlement and 53% support a return to an armed intifada.

And if presidential elections were held now, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would probably win.

“As naked as the day that he was born”

Abbas has been a big noise in Palestinian affairs for decades. In 2003 Arafat appointed him prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority. Some say the West foisted Abbas on Arafat. A power struggle ensued, and after Arafat’s suspicious death in 2004 Abbas was seen as a natural successor. Hamas boycotted the presidential election of January 2005 and Israel arrested or restricted the movement of other candidates. So Abbas won easily in dubious circumstances.

Abbas’s term as President officially ended more than 8 years ago. It is long past clear-your-desk time. The Basic Law allowed him an extension of one year but he still clings to power. Increasingly he’s seen as the king with no clothes and, in the words of the Danny Kaye song, “altogether as naked as the day that he was born”.

The trouble with Abbas is that he’s always ‘behind the curve’. Illegal settlement building under the Allon Plan, effectively annexing Palestinian territory, began in 1967 and the Israelis’ dash to create as many irreversible ‘facts on the ground’ as possible in order to make their occupation permanent was clear from the start.

Abbas claims to be one of the architects of the Oslo Interim Agreement, which was supposed to ensure a start to negotiations on permanent status by 1996 and lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the settling of all main issues. But ever since the beginning of the Oslo process back in 1993 the rights of the Palestinian people have been sacrificed on the altar of so-called political progress, the glittering prize being ‘peace and security’.

That was all smoke ‘n’ mirrors, of course. What we’ve seen is a continuous slide downhill for the Palestinians while the Israeli colonisation and expansion programme goes from strength to strength. Justice has never been allowed to play a part. Furthermore Abbas has repeatedly given the Israelis time to cement their ill-gotten gains, readily agreeing to more bogus negotiations arranged by the same dishonest brokers.

And he inexplicably dragged his feet over joining the International Criminal Court.

During his over-long tenure Abbas has failed to unite the Palestinians under a single purposeful voice with a clear mission. He has driven the factions further apart by letting rip the old Fatah-Hamas rivalry. His regime fails to keep the world informed or make proper use of media opportunities and behaves as if gagged.

He is not noted for tactical brilliance and his embassies in the West are lazy, uncommunicative and uncooperative towards journalists and writers, and probably under orders not to ‘make waves’. I myself have been branded an enemy of Palestine by Abbas’s London embassy, an insult I wear as a badge of honour.

The Palestinian Authority under Abbas is frequently accused of collaborating with Israel in its brutal oppression. Abbas seems to be the darling of the West and of Israel, and the Israelis are said to regard him as a strategic asset. They’d hate to lose him.

Hamas is usually blamed for any whiff of corruption but the PA is bursting with it. In 2015 a report by The Coalition for Accountability and Integrity (AMAN) titled Absolute Power, Total Corruption hit the headlines. AMAN was established by a number of Palestinian civil society organizations to combat corruption and enhance integrity, transparency and accountability in Palestinian society.

According to the Commissioner-General, Azmi Shuaibi, “the cancellation of elections and the absence of the Legislative Council led to the president’s monopolizing the three powers — legislative, judicial, executive — which has served as fertile soil for some cases of corruption.” Certain non-ministerial government institutions were still outside the scope of official accountability and had awarded salaries and privileges to officials that were inconsistent with financial reality.

But even this catalogue of misbehaviour didn’t hammer the final nail into Abbas’s political coffin. Today he’s increasingly busy cracking down on dissenters within his own Fatah party and outside organisations.

Peace process “a deceptive farce”

The confidential Palestinian Papers, leaked by Al-Jazeera in 2011, revealed the shambolic conduct of the so-called peace process and how the Palestinian team allowed the Israelis to walk all over them, with US help.

One of the leak’s sources, a French-Palestinian lawyer and former adviser to the PLO, Ziyad Clot, said in an article in The Guardian that the peace process was “an inequitable and destructive political process which had been based on the assumption that the Palestinians could in effect negotiate their rights and achieve self-determination while enduring the hardship of the Israeli occupation”. They were “a deceptive farce whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU”. They “excluded for the most part the great majority of the Palestinian people: the seven million Palestinian refugees”. And, he said, “the PLO, given its structure, was not in a position to represent all Palestinian rights and interests”.

So why did the Palestinians’ chief negotiator since 1995, Saeb Erekat, still engage in it? Erekat was educated in political science in the US and conflict studies in England, so should have been savvy enough to see through it. Will no-one steer the Palestinians into a sane justice process and away from the ‘kangaroo’ peace negotiations that Erekat and Abbas seem addicted to?

Not long ago, in an interview, I asked law professor and former UN special rapporteur Richard Falk: “How acceptable is it for a weak, demoralized and captive people like the Palestinians to be forced into negotiating with their brutal occupier under the auspices of a US administration seen by many people as too dishonest to play the part of peace broker?

He replied: “Even if the United States was acting in good faith, for which there is no evidence, its dual role as Israel’s unconditional ally and as intermediary would subvert the credibility of a negotiating process. In fact, the US Government signals its partisanship by White House appointments of individuals overtly associated with the AIPAC lobbying group as Special Envoys to oversee the negotiations such as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk… The unsatisfactory nature of the current framework of negotiations is further flawed by weighting the process in favor of Israel, which enjoys a position of hard power dominance.”

That the UK Government will shortly be celebrating 100 years of the infamous Balfour Declaration, and continuing to endorse its cruel legacy while refusing to support Palestinian statehood, is an indictment of Abbas’s dismal performance.

Face it, the guy is no Arafat. On Abbas’s watch the high hopes of ordinary Palestinians have turned to dust. As Oliver Cromwell told the English Parliament in 1653: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” Those same words are applicable also to Abbas, and indeed the entire PLO and Palestinian Authority.

What Palestinians need, but probably will never get, is leadership with style, wisdom and the will to make friends with the West. Their case is still not widely understood and any new leader must have the ability to outwit Israel’s absurdly successful propaganda. Yes, the Zionists may have a stranglehold on Western opinion, but the Palestinians possess a superior two-edged weapon which they have never used effectively: truth and a just cause.

*(Mahmoud Abbas. Image credit: Kremkin.ru)

September 28, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Hamas, Israel, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Lord Balfour’s nephew: Palestine was a ‘swamp’ before Israel

MEMO | September 27, 2107

Roderick Balfour has said that his great-great-uncle Lord Arthur James Balfour would have been proud of the role he played in creating the state of Israel if he were alive today.

In an interview with Israeli daily Ynet News the current Lord Balfour alleged how it was known to all that the Jews needed a homeland to escape anti-Semitism, and spoke of the role his ancestor played in advocating for Britain to establish a Jewish state. He also claimed that Palestine was an empty land prior to 1948.

“You have to look at Palestine as it was then. It was a desert, a mosquito-infested swamp. The Palestinians on the whole were looking after their goats and sheep.”

“I don’t know what arguments there were about Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock and all that sort of stuff those years, and there was obviously a bit of resistance by the indigenous Palestinians. But when you look at it, there was just a huge uninhabited land basically,” he added.

Balfour, who is heavily involved in the Anglo-Israeli Association in London, also attempted to explain the ongoing persecution and occupation of the Palestinian people as a result of overpopulation and laziness on their part.

“The Palestinian population has expanded, and one of the problems is that the Palestinians are not self-sufficient. They lived in the same land, they had the same opportunity, they can cultivate stuff, they could do whatever it is, but they don’t seem to want to help themselves and I don’t think they have any more right to Palestine than the Jews do.”

He did acknowledge that the ongoing conflict was negative to the region, deeming it: “Not good politics, you know, for the rest of the world.”

He also spoke of his endorsement of the occupation of the Palestinian territories during the Six Day War of 1967, at a time when he worked in Paris as a journalist and benefitted from the pro-Israeli media coverage.

“You know, if you win—that’s what you do. You keep what you conquer, especially if it’s going to increase your security.”

He ended by responding to the calls of pro-Palestinian activists for the British government to apologise for the Balfour Declaration due to the displacement of millions of Palestinians refugees. He alleged that the declaration was issued out of good intentions and that Palestinian resentment of Israel was unjustified.

As the Balfour Declaration surpasses its 100th anniversary, the UK government’s Arabic spokesman Edwin Samuel said Britain acknowledges that the Balfour Declaration was “a catastrophe for the majority of Palestinians”.

September 27, 2017 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israel To Commit War Crime Against West Bank Villagers

“No sanctimonious language… can erase the disgrace or hide the facts: the destruction of Khan al-Ahmar means the forcible transfer of protected persons,
and forcible transfer is a war crime.”

[If Americans Knew notes: Twelve Palestinian communities in an area near Jerusalem are at risk of expulsion. These villages have been living for years without basic health, education, and welfare services, and without proper electricity or sewage systems. They are under constant surveillance for “illegal” construction—structures built without a permit from the Israeli government (permits are impossible to obtain in this region). These structures, many built of necessity to house growing families, are then quickly demolished by Israel’s Civil Administration.

Israel makes life almost unbearable for these Palestinians. Demolishing homes is just the beginning: grazing and farming land is confiscated, making it harder and harder for the residents to feed themselves and make a living; roads are nearly impassable; settlers and Israeli authorities harass them daily.

This is taking place not in Israel, but in the West Bank, on Palestinian land under full control of Israel.

One community that is at risk of imminent expulsion is Khan al-Ahmar. The Bedouin tribe has already been expelled twice since the 1950s.]

IMEMC News | September 26, 2017

Israeli rights group B’Tselem said, on Monday afternoon, that Israeli government is to commit war crimes against Palestinian villagers in Khan al-Ahmar.

B’Tselem Executive Director Hagai el-Ad said, according to Days of Palestine: “Following the state’s response submitted earlier today to the [Israeli] High Court of Justice, that the state was asking the court to authorize a war crime.”

He explained: “No sanctimonious language about a ‘planning, proprietary and realistic’ alternate, or ‘time to prepare’ can erase the disgrace or hide the facts: the destruction of Khan al-Ahmar means the forcible transfer of protected persons, and forcible transfer is a war crime.”

El-Ad added: “Those responsible for it will bear personal criminal liability – exactly as B’Tselem stated two weeks ago, in a letter addressed to the prime minister, defence minister, justice minister, chief of staff and the head of the Civil Administration.”

According to updated data, Khan al-Ahmar community, which lives on land Israel has earmarked for settlement expansion in the area, is home to 32 families numbering 173 persons, including 92 minors.

It has a mosque and a school, which was established in 2009 and serves more than 150 children between the ages of six and fifteen – some of them from neighbouring communities.

Khan al-Ahmar is located around the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

The Israeli occupation considers it strategic for building and expanding illegal settlements and establishing a territorial link between Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem.

More background on Khan al-Ahmar and the other communities can be found here.

September 27, 2017 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, Israeli settlement, Jerusalem, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

‘Killer Robots’ Could Lower Barrier for Politicians to Start Wars

By Tommy Yang | Sputnik | September 27, 2017

As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) have grown rapidly in recent years, visionaries in global AI research and development have expressed concerns over how the same technology could be used in lethal autonomous weapons, often referred to as “killer robots,” because these unmanned weapons could lower the barrier for politicians to start wars.

In late August, a group of leading global AI researchers, including 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries, issued an open letter urging the United Nations to urgently address the challenge of lethal autonomous weapons and ban their use internationally.

The letter was released by its key organizer, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, at the opening of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2017 in Melbourne, the world’s prominent gathering of top experts in AI and robotics.

THERE SHOULD BE DIFFICULT BARRIERS TO WAR

While many politicians defended the use of lethal autonomous weapons as they could help save human lives in a military conflict, the Australian expert told Sputnik that the lowered cost of starting a war could be a bad thing, because wars are supposed to be costly.

“If we feel we can do this [getting involved in a military conflict] without risking human lives, maybe this lowers the barrier to war. And that’s a very bad thing. There should be very difficult barriers to war. War should be a massive loss. We should be discouraging it. It should be that politicians have to explain why our sons and daughters are coming home in body bags,” Walsh told Sputnik.

The expert argued that previous wars were started based on the same misconception.”It’s a rather short-sighted argument. It ignored the fact that all the civilians and other people got caught up in the crossfire. Maybe you have taken your people out of the battlefield; you’re not taking the civilians out of the battlefield. We probably have been drawn into these conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan, because we thought we could fight without putting military boots on the ground. It’s a misconception that we could actually fight without risking soldiers’ lives,” he said.

The Australian scholar elaborated that if future wars will be with robots fighting robots, humans won’t need to fight wars anymore because the result can be decided by a game of chess.

‘DUMB ROBOTS’ CAUSE MORE WORRIES

Compared to super smart robots and AI technology we see in Hollywood movies, the Sydney-based AI expert expressed concerns that it’s the “dumb robots” that makes him worry the most.

“Those sort of things you see in Hollywood movies, like Iron Man or The Terminator, they’re still a long way away. Actually, I am more worried about stupid AI, than I am about smart AI. We’ll be giving responsibilities to machines that aren’t very capable at the moment and certainly can’t follow international humanitarian laws. They won’t be able to make the right distinction and there will be a lot of collateral damage. It’s the incompetence that I’m worried about [more] than anything else,” Walsh said.Walsh noted that the UK’s Ministry of Defense said it may actually remove humans from the loop of Predator-like drones, which is technically possible today.

“It wouldn’t be very capable, but it will still be able to commit a lot of harm. We have already seen the fact that the Predator drones are actually killing a lot of the wrong people, even with humans in the loop. It’s not difficult to do that with fully autonomous drones,” the expert said.

In 2016, former US president Barack Obama admitted that drone and other airstrikes had killed between 64 and 116 civilians during his administration, a figure that is widely criticized as under-representing the loss of innocent civilian lives during those strikes.

NO HUMAN-ENSLAVING EVIL AI

Despite popular plots in Hollywood Sci-Fi movies where super smart AIs often try to conquer the human race, just like what Skynet tried to do in The Terminator, world-leading AI researchers dismissed such plots because they lack a basic understanding of AI technologies.

“It [current AI technology] is really different from what you see in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies, where you have the evil AI fighting the good bodybuilder. In the movies, you have a goal conflict between the super smart AIs and the humans. It doesn’t really make sense for an AI to enslave humans. A super smart AI has very little interest in humans as slaves, because we’re miserable slaves for someone who can build a smart robot much more quickly and make it do whatever it wants to do,” Jurgen Schmidhuber, a signatory to the open letter and a leading deep learning expert who co-founded AI research firm Nnaisense in Switzerland, told Sputnik.

There have been several initiatives seeking to regulate the development of AI technologies. In December 2016, Dmitry Grishin, former chairman of Mail.ru group, proposed a draft law on robots, based on the Three Laws of Robotics conceived by Russian-born US Sci-Fi novelist Isaac Asimov in a short story named “Runaround” in 1942.

According to Asimov’s Laws, a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Russia’s State Duma, the lower house of parliament, plans to introduce a new legislation regulating relations between humans and AI in the near future, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, said Monday.

“Relations between humans and AIs, the relations between humans and robots are the issues that we should define legally in the near future. This issue is on our agenda,” Volodin said.

But the Swiss AI expert argued that the regulation in the field would be difficult to put in place.

“It’s rather difficult to regulate the use of a particular algorithm, such as the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), it’s about as difficult as regulating the use of fire. To a certain extent, you can regulate fire, but anybody can buy a set of matches, burn them at home or even burn his own house or his neighbor’s garden. Although everybody can do that, fire, as a powerful thing that has been known for 600,000-700,000 years, is something very useful, because it keeps us warm at night and we can cook with it. These two sides of fire are widely known. Society has adapted to its use. The advantages of fire are overwhelming that its disadvantages are accepted. I guess we will also have continually evolving sets of regulations for AI in a similar way,” Schmidhuber said.

The Swiss entrepreneur’s LSTM AI algorithm is now being used in 3 billion smartphones globally. He believes that AI in the future will not have a goal conflict with humans because they will realize that all the sources are out there in space, as less than one-billionth of all sunlight hits the earth. The AI will be ready to emigrate to outer space, which is impossible for humans, as AI can travel by radio just like how the algorithm is transmitted in his own labs, the Swiss expert explained.

September 27, 2017 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights | Leave a comment

Philip Giraldi’s Remedy for Wars

May 5, 2016: Ultra-Zionist Billionaire Megadonor Sheldon Adelson attends 4th annual champions of Jewish values international awards gala at Marriott Marquis Times Square

By Israel Shamir | The Unz Review | September 27, 2017

Once in a while, an observer notices a concerted Jewish action, and reports on it pro bono publico. It could be that Jews support Third-world immigration, or Jews fight the memorials, or, in the recent case, Jews promote the war on Iran. The Jews respond with a huge vehement counterattack and make life very difficult for the outspoken observer. Afterwards, the subject recedes, as people get cold feet to proceed, or do not know how to proceed, though the problem remains at large.

The recent example is a piece by Philip Giraldi on the Unz.com, which still produces waves on the web. In his piece he rolled the list of Jews who were keen on Iraq invasion, and who are pushing the US now into an attack on Iran: “David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen… And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives.”

Giraldi proposed to keep Jews out of the positions of influence on the foreign affairs, in order to keep the US out of wars it does not need. Giraldi wrote: “We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver.”

Actually, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote at the time (in April 2003): “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it’s possible.”

I also wrote things in the same vein during Iraq invasion, and it is good to see that this thesis did not die but keeps resurging from time to time. One could add that these very persons are pushing for conflict with Russia, demonise Putin and attack Trump, though the Orange Man tries to fulfil their wishes as an eager Santa Claus of diligent Lizzie.

While agreeing with Giraldi on the malady, let us discuss the remedy. Would keeping Jews out of foreign policy making actually help? Did the US keep out of wars before the Rise of Jews in late 1960s? The Jews weren’t specially prominent before that time, and certainly weren’t overrepresented in the establishment. A Jewish couple, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg has been fried on the electric chair in 1953, and there were few objections. McCarthy terrorized Jews. The word Holocaust had yet to make its first appearance (in 1968). Jews were still kept out of clubs and out of high level politics. Israel had been threatened by the US (in 1956) rather than assisted.

And still, the free-from-Jews US had fought in Korea the terrible three-year long war (1950-1953), and in Vietnam (up to 1974), invaded and caused regime change in Guatemala and Iran, violently interfered in elections in France and Italy, and had fought the fierce Cold War against the USSR. In all these campaigns, the US Jews were actually for peace and against war. The Jews were nowhere in power when the US fought its wars against Spain and Mexico. The non-Jewish US made a coup in Iran, and non-Jewish and not-pro-Israel President Carter tried to invade Iran. Jews weren’t involved in the conquest of Panama, in Nicaragua intervention, in Granada operation.

Perhaps the Jews had moved the arena of wars to the Middle East and out of Latin America. Less Jewish-influenced America would rather invade Venezuela than Iraq or Iran. But is it so wonderful?

The idea of correcting or channelling the excessive Jewish influence is a reasonable one, but can this goal be achieved by keeping Kristol and Krauthammer out of media (an excellent thought anyway)?

The Jewish prominence in the US is inbuilt in the US culture and tradition. Karl Marx wrote that “in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression”. He said that all Yankees are Jews, behave like Jews, aspire to be Jews and even are circumcised like Jews. So it is natural that real Jews succeed better in being Jews than their Gentile neighbours. Werner Sombart added that Jews were prominent from the very dawn of America and they created American-style capitalism the way that fits them. The Jews are prominent now because America is custom-built for Jews to fit and suit them, he said.

This is what should be corrected, and then the Jewish scribes, these Krauthammers will be out of business of inciting wars. Stop subscribing to Jewish success model, and the Jews won’t be able to influence the Senate. Make the US Christian as Christ taught, share labour and wealth, aspire to God instead of Mammon, make the first last and the last first, love thy neighbour and the problem will be solved.

If this is too tall an order, make it a smaller one. Unseating Ledeens and Frums (and I think they deserve tar and feathers all right) will not do the trick unless the rich Jews are un-wealthed. Without excessive Jewish wealth, there will be no excessive Jewish push for wars. And provided that more than half of all US wealth is in few Jewish hands, freeing it will make a colossal effect of improving life of every American, even every person on earth.

And why to stop there? The super-rich non-Jews are as Jewish as any Jew. They share the same aspirations. Strip them of their assets. Why should we worry whether Jeff Bezos is a Jew by blood or faith, or he is not? He behaves like a Jew, and that is enough. Establish a ceiling of wealth, a counterpart of minimal wage. This idea has been mulled: Jeremy Corbyn called for the maximum wage. Taxes can do it easily – in wonderful Sweden of 1950s, top tax rate was 102%. Or this can be achieved in a more festive way of stripping the richest men of their ill-gotten wealth on the main square of Washington, DC on Mardi Gras Sunday. Do not say this is a punishment for their diligence – other way around, this is assistance on their way to spiritual improvement. Too many assets imprison the spirit.

This would be good for Jews and for all concerned: while the average Jewish wealth in the US had been lagging below total average (that is as long as Jews were less wealthy than Gentiles), the Jews acted in the interests of the people. Around 1968-1970 the Jews became more wealthy than all Americans, and that was it: they ceased to strive for the common good.

Jews could be a force for good if their excessive tendency to collect material goods is nipped in the bud. So it was in the USSR: as the Jews could not make money, they went into science and worked for the common good. Even oligarchs could be good managers instead of pain in the neck for the society.

This is not more complicated than booting Max Boot out of writing business. So why to go for a palliative if you can go for the jugular?

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

September 27, 2017 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Destruction of Last Chemical Munition in Russia is ‘Historic Event’ – Putin

Sputnik – September 27, 2017

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called the destruction of the last chemical munitions in the country a “historic event.”

The last kilogram of Russia’s 40,000-tonne stockpile of chemical warfare agents, which was contained in two artillery shells, was destroyed on Wednesday at the Kizner facility in Udmurtia.

Attending the event via video link, Putin said that it is “a huge step towards” a more balanced and secure world, stressing that Russia had held the largest chemical stockpiles in the world. Putin also said Russia was working closely with partners to save mankind from the threat of the use and spread of chemical weapons.

“In this regard, I would like to recall the key role of our country in solving the problem of chemical weapons in Syria,” he said.

The president pointed out that Moscow is fulfilling all of its obligations under the non-proliferation treaties and expects that other countries, including the United States, will follow in Russia’s footsteps.

“As is known, Russia was the largest holder and possessor of chemical weapons, and so far the United States, which unfortunately does not fulfill its obligations on the timing of the destruction of chemical weapons, has already three times postponed the destruction on the pretext of lack of funds, which sounds very strange,” he pointed out.

The elimination of chemical materials was conducted under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), an arms control treaty that prohibits the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons. The treaty, which came into force in 1997, has been signed by 192 states as of April 2016.

Russia joined the CWC in 1997 and was initially expected to destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles by December 31, 2018.

September 27, 2017 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular | Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Referendum Blues: The Issue of an Independent Kurdistan

By Dr Can Erimtan | 21st Century Wire | September 26, 2017

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (aka the Prez) and his Justice and Development Party (or AKP) have been steering the state founded by Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] (1881-1938) into distinctly Islamic waters for quite some time now… and as Turkey houses the largest percentage of Kurds in the region (14.7 million according to the CIA), solving Turkey’s Kurdish issue had been part and parcel of the AKP’s policy of Sunnification.

The Prez and his AKP henchmen had namely devised a plan to transform the country into a nation of believers, firmly dedicated to Sunni Islam and moving away from Turkish nationalism.

A Nation of Muslim Immigrants versus an independent Kurdistan

But the Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani now seems to have thrown a spanner in the works, as he told the international press in 2014 that “We [referring to the Kurdish population of Iraq living in the north of the country] will hold a referendum in [the KRG or Kurdish Regional Government] and we will respect and be bound by the decision of our people and hope that others will do likewise.” In this way, one of Turkey’s deepest fears is finally about to become a reality now – the formation of an independent nation state called Kurdistan in the wake of a popular referendum to be held on Monday, 25 September 2017. Somewhat fortunate for Ankara, though, not quite on Turkish soil, but nevertheless directly adjacent to Turkey’s south-eastern region, which many Kurds as well as their sympathisers refer to as Northern Kurdistan these days. And thus, AKP-led Ankara is now up in arms as the rather natural expectation is that a so-called domino effect will take place and that Turkey’s Kurds might very well want to join their southern brethren in an independent nation state possessing underground hydrocarbon reserves or a coveted natural source of income, if you will.

The Turkish nation state established by, Mustafa Kemal, and his followers developed its own brand of nationalism, its own brand of Turkish nationalism which was meant to transform the ethnically diverse inhabitants of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace into a homogeneous body of Turks (or Turkish citizens). Throughout most of its existence, the ideological construct of Turkish nationalism adhered to the politcal precepts of the state carrying the name Kemalism, in reference to the nation state’s founding father and, as I explained nearly four years ago: “the idea of the Anatolian population as a Turkish entity was first proposed as early as 1922, the year prior to the official proclamation of the republic. And in 1924, the first Turkish constitution proclaimed that the ‘name Turk, as a political term, shall be understood to include all citizens of the Turkish Republic, without distinction of, or reference to, race or religion.’ A policy of ‘Turkification’ carried out in the first decades of the republican existence has meant that these various ethnic subgroups have in time merged with the Turkish mainstream.” This Kemalist exercise in social engineering worked well for the majority of ‘Turks,’ whose ethnic identities became submerged in a superstructure of Turkishness that came to replace the previously employed social construct of Ottomanism, that had been in place in the period 1876-1918. The only notable exception to this narrative were the Kurds, whose tribal organisation at the fringes of both the Ottoman and Turkish state structures basically meant that they were able to continue their lives beyond the strictures of the state and its bureaucratic framework and control.

Prior to the foundation of the Republic in 1923, “Anatolia was . . . home to ethnically heterogeneous Muslim groups: in addition to a large majority of Turkish Muslims, there were Kurds, Arabs, Lazes, Muslim Georgians, Greek-speaking Muslims, Albanians, Macedonian Muslims, Pomaks, Serbian Muslims, Bosnian Muslims, Tatars, Circassians, Abkhazians and Dagestanis among others. Prior to the formulation of Turkish nationalism as an ideological binding-force, the diverse ethnic groups in Anatolia were united by their common identity as Muslims and their allegiance to the Ottoman Caliphate, abolished in 1924 . . . Anatolia has always been home to a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups and sub-groups, and today, the makeup Turkey’s population is the result of Ottoman government policies carried out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These policies were aimed at transforming Anatolia (the heartland of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic’s geo-body, using Thongchai Winichakul’s coinage denoting the territory of a nation as expressed on a map and inscribed on the people’s consciousness) into a Muslim homeland where refugees from the Russian Empire and the Balkans were settled.” And in the 21^st century, the Prez and his AKP henchmen are bent to return Turkey’s state-of-affairs to this pre-nationalist reality, dismantling “the nation state Turkey into an Anatolian federation of Muslim ethnicities,” beholden to the Prophet’s example, the strictures of the Shariah and possibly even to a revived Caliphate. As a result, the expectation was that the Prez and his henchmen would be able “to unite and pacify the country as a nation of believers, firmly dedicated to Sunni Islam able to supersede mere ethnic or national ties and solidarity.” And in this way, the issues of Turkish and Kurdish nationalism that had in the Kemalist past (1923-2002) caused major unrest in the country would have been replaced by the common cause of Islam and Muslim solidarity. But events in the real world were such that developments in neighbouring Syria and Iraq have led to a strengthened sense of Kurdish nationalism, not just in Turkey. First in northern Iraq where the KRG emerged on the scene in the aftermath of the first and second Gulf Wars led by Bush, Senior and Junior respectively. As well as in Syria where the “three autonomous cantons of Kobani, Afrin, and Cizre, making up the district of Rojava, are under the control of the PYD (or the Kurdish Democratic Union Party) that is arguably attempting to put into practice precepts and ideas of ‘libertarian municipalism’ developed by the libertarian socialist thinker Murray Bookchin (1921-2006).” This last aspect is particularly troubling for Turkey, as its homegrown Kurdish terror group PKK (or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) equally espouses these ideals which were popularised by its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öçalan, thereby attesting to the organic ties between the PKK and the PYD, and its military wings the YPG (People’s Protection Units) and YPJ (Women’s Protection Units).

And finally, there is also a notable Kurdish presence in Iran, supporting its own separatist terror group, known as PJAK and which Turkey also sees as being organically linked to the PKK.

The Spectre of a Greater Kurdistan: 25 September 2017

The fact that the Kurds, arguably much like the Palestinians or even the Rohingya, are a social group consisting of Muslims that lack a proper homeland or nation state means that they can easily garner major support around the world, particularly in the West where the cult of the underdog has transformed the Kurds into a perennial favourite amongst human rights’ supporters all around. And as such, the Kurds and the goal of an independent Kurdistan have now also found major backers in the somewhat unlikely duo of Israel and Saudi Arabia, as I explained in the summer of 2015.

The spectre of “an independent Kurdistan in Northern Iraq could very well be the opening move for redrawing the mapped heritage of Sykes-Picot by means of consolidating Kurdish unity – stretching from Syria in the West (Rojava), over Turkey in the North (South-Eastern Anatolia) and Iraq in the South (KRG) to Iran in the East (Rojhilate Kurdistane).” As such, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York City (19 – 25 September 2017), Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim Jaferi, and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu got together to discuss this thorny issue (20 September 2017)… even managing to publish a joint communiqué afterwards: “In the meeting, the three Ministers, reaffirmed their strong commitment to the territorial integrity and political unity of Iraq, welcomed the recent liberation of the Nineveh Governorate, which constituted a major victory against DEASH [or the Islamic State or ISIS]… acknowledged the perseverance, commitment and resolve of the people of Iraq as a whole in fighting DEASH . . . . . . Expressed their concern that the planned referendum by the KRG, which is scheduled for September 25, 2017, puts Iraq’s hard-earned gains against DEASH under great risk, [f]urther expressed their concern that the planned KRG referendum is unconstitutional and runs the risk of provoking new conflicts in the region, that will prove difficult to contain.” As a result, the Kurds managed to do the impossible – to unite the governments of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Or, as put by the communiqué: the assembled foreign ministers “… registered their unequivocal opposition to the referendum, decided to urge the leadership of the KRG to refrain from holding the referendum, emphasized that the referendum will not be beneficial for the Kurds and [the] KRG, [and a]greed, in this regard, to consider taking counter-measures in coordination,” adding that there is a “need for concerted international efforts to convince the KRG on calling off the referendum,“ while renewing “their call on the international community to remain engaged on the issue.“

Turkish Reactions: War in the Offing?!??

With the fateful date fast approaching, and the Prez also having had his last minute tête-à-tête with the current Leader of the Free World in New York City (21 September 2017), while his proxy the hapless PM Binali Yıldırım spoke to the Turkish press invoking the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923) in his argumentation against the possible outcome of the upcoming referendum (22 September 1922): “This referendum is an issue of Turkey’s national security. Turkey is determined to use its natural rights originating from international and bilateral conventions and will not hesitate in this.” Hapless Yıldırım referred particularly to articles 3 and 16 of the cited document.

The Lausanne Treaty basically functions as the Turkish Republic’s founding document in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-18), the Turkish War of Independence (1919-22) and the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate (1922). Its third article holds that the “Turkish and British Governments reciprocally undertake that . . . no military or other movement shall take place which might modify in any way the present state of the territories“ of the Republic of Turkey and Iraq, which was then known as the Kingdom of Iraq under British Administration (1920-32) or simply a British protectorate under the sway of Westminster and nominally ruled by George V (1910-36). Article 16, on the other hand, simply clarifies that “Turkey hereby renounces all rights and title whatsoever over or respecting the territories outside the frontiers laid down in the present Treaty,“ which is basically quite beyond the present scope of Turkey’s foreign policy. But Yıldırım citing the article clearly signifies that Turkey’s Kurds should not harbour any desires of joining their southern ethnic brethren, given the finality of Turkey’s borders. The fact that Yıldırım, representing his boss and the AKP establishment, is now quoting Lausanne to sway the Iraqi Kurds from holding a referendum indicates that AKP-led Ankara is really grasping at straws. Turkish Islamists and the AKP nomenklatura, in particular, have in the past always attacked the Treaty of Lausanne as a document of surrender, signing the death of the Ottoman enterprise and forcing Turkey to renege on much-coveted territories. In fact, but last year the Prez himself referred to the Kemalist ‘National Pact’ or Misak-ı Millî (originally drafted by Mustafa Kemal during the Erzurum Congress, 23 July-5 August 1919, and accepted by the last Ottoman parliament on 28 January 1920) to argue that Aleppo, Kerkük and Mosul are “ours” (23 October 2016) – areas also inhabited by Iraqi Turkmen as well as harbouring underground hydrocarbon reserves.

And now, with the hours counting down and everyone’s nerves on end, “the Turkish government will seek a mandate from the Parliament [or TBMM, in acronymized Turkish] to send troops to Iraq and Syria after consecutive security meetings where measures to be taken against the Erbil administration have been decided. The Turkish Parliament is set to hold an extraordinary session on Sept 23 to vote on a mandate that permits the government to deploy troops to its southern neighboring countries, Iraq and Syria, just two days before the scheduled referendum to be held by the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG),“ as reported by the Turkish press.

As it happens, Turkey’s National Security Council, which was supposed to convene on Wednesday, 27 September 2017, was also been brought forward to coincide with the extraordinary parliamentary session. Tayyip Erdoğan told the Turkish press on Friday (22 September) that “[w]e will initiate another step in conjunction [with the already agreed upon measures]. This step will consist of deciding upon what kind of sanctions will be imposed, we will discuss all these matters in great detail during the National Security Council meeting. It would not be right for me to say anything about that now. The timing of the sanctions, what the road map will be like, all these things will be discussed in the National Security Council meeting and if necessary in the Council of Ministers meeting, and our government shall announce the decisions following the Council of Ministers meeting.” As it turns out, when it comes to the Kurds, the post-Kemalist state (2002-) turns out to be as firm and ruthless as its Kemalist predecessor (1923-2002).

The extraordinary parliamentary session on Saturday approved a motion to extend a mandate permitting the AKP government to deploy its armed forces (or TSK, in acronymized Turkish) to Iraq and Syria for another year. In spite of the extreme political polarisation present in post-Kemalist Turkey, the said motion received the approval of a large majority in the TBMM with deputies from the main opposition CHP (or Republican People’s Party) and the opposition fascist MHP (or Nationalist Movement Party) easily joining the nationalist cause spearheaded by the Prez and his AKP henchmen. The mainly Kurdish opposition HDP (or Peoples’ Democratic Party) quite naturally did not join the nationalist and Islamofascist throng in the Turkish Parliament. During the proceedings, Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli made the following remarks: “Pulling out just a brick from a structure based on very sensitive and fragile balances [which is the territorial status quo that emerged in the wake of the Sykes-Picot agreement, ratified on 16 May 1916] will sow the seeds for new hatred, enmity and clashes . . . Th[is] pirate referendum which is illegal and unacceptable should be cancelled before it is too late,” making plain how the Turkish political establishment is unable to countenance the merest hint of Kurdish independence or even the noun Kurdistan, for that matter.

The opposition CHP MP Öztürk Yılmaz promptly echoed the Defense Minister’s words, declaring somewhat disingenuously that “[w]e want the referendum to be cancelled and support the motion not for war but for peace in the region.” In fact, the rather surreal concordance between government and opposition was all but underlined by a surprise meeting between the hapless PM and the CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and the MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli during a break at the session. The HDP MP Osman Baydemir, on the other hand, simply and matter-of-factly called the session’s predictable outcome a “war mandate . . . [and] a proclamation of enmity towards 40 million Kurds.” Meanwhile, on the same day. south of the border, in the sovereign state that is the as-yet unitary Republic of Iraq, where Kurds constitute about 17% of the population, the KRG’s ruling bloc sent a delegation to the central government in Baghdad, a Shi‘ite Arab coalition led by the PM Haider al-Abadi and ceremonially presided over by the ethnically Kurdish politician Fuad Masum. Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani’s top adviser Hoshiyar Zebari told the Reuters news agency that the “delegation will discuss the referendum but the referendum is still happening . . . We said we would talk to Baghdad before, during and after the referendum.” And then, there is the U.S., the main culprit behind the current predicament as the KRG was set up in 1992 (with first elections organised on 19 May), in the wake of the first Gulf War (2 August 1990–28 February 1991), led by Bush, Senior, the 41st President of the United States of America (1989-93). The current Trump administration has now vocally urged the Kurds to cancel the referendum, while the U.N. Security Council, for good measure, issued a warning calling the vote “potentially destabilizing” for Iraq and the region.

In other words, another frontline in the Middle East’s ongoing military conflict could very well be added to the conflagrations in Syria, Iraq and Yemen . . . another front that might or might not include the south-eastern part of Anatolia, nowadays more commonly referred to as Northern Kurdistan and an integral part of the territories of the Republic of Turkey, albeit largely inhabited by Kurds-carrying-Turkish-passports and ID cards. And this “potentially destabilizing” military action would come to sit on top of the ongoing fight against the Islamic State (or ISIS or Daesh) and pit Turkish soldiers against Kurdish Peshmerga and civilians . . . and northern Iraq as well as the whole of Turkey – as Kurds live dispersed thoughout the whole of the country and not just the South East – might very well join the lands where death and destruction have come to dominate daily life and have turned the solid and stable structures of men into sheer rubble and junk. At the moment, such alarmist words are merely hovering in the air, as on the appointed day, “Kurds voted in large numbers in an independence referendum in northern Iraq” (voter turnout of aproximately 78%), as explained by Reuters. While simultaneously, Turkey and Iran engaged in war games on the Iraqi border. Iraq’s PM al-Abadi, for his part, ordered the Iraqi army to “protect citizens being threatened and coerced” by triumphant Kurds.

Now that the long-awaited and much-feared day of reckoning has come and gone, “Tehran and Ankara fear the spread of separatism to their own Kurdish populations,” as expressed by Reuters, and the Baghdad government is all but fearful of maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity… and all-out ethnic war could just be around the corner now.

***

21WIRE special contributor Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar who was living in Istanbul for some time, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East. He attended the VUB in Brussels and did his graduate work at the universities of Essex and Oxford. In Oxford, Erimtan was a member of Lady Margaret Hall and he obtained his doctorate in Modern History in 2002. His publications include the book “Ottomans Looking West?” as well as numerous scholarly articles. In the period 2010-11, he wrote op-eds for Today’s Zaman and in the further course of 2011 he also published a number of pieces in Hürriyet Daily News. In 2013, he was the Turkey Editor of the İstanbul Gazette. He is on Twitter at @theerimtanangle

September 27, 2017 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Syria, Turkiye, United States | Leave a comment

Syria prepared to discuss post-war autonomy with Kurds in geo-strategic blow to the US and Israel

By Adam Garrie | The Duran | September 26, 2017

Syria’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem has stated that once the conflict against terrorist groups is finished in Syria, Damascus will be willing to politically negotiate internal autonomy for Syrian Kurds.

Reuters quotes Muallem, who delivered Syria’s address to the United Nations, as stating,

“This topic (Kurdish autonomy) is open to negotiation and discussion and when we are done eliminating Daesh (aka ISIS), we can sit with our Kurdish sons and reach an understanding on a formula for the future”.

There are several geo-political implications to this statement.

1. Seizing the initiative from the US occupiers

First and foremost, Muallem’s proposals take the wind out of the sails of the United States. As I wrote previously in The Duran, with Syria and Russia quickly securing control over areas east of the River Euphrates, the US is being squeezed out of Syria.

Bearing these realities in mind, one of the only options the US has left is to use the Kurdish national cause in order to foment either a new puppet state in the region that is built on stolen Syrian territory or else create a permanently occupied entity similar to the Serbian Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. Apart from this, the US will have no choice but to either leave Syria or directly confront the Syrian Arab Army and most likely, also its Russia ally. Presently, the US seems unwilling to confront Russia by any means other than through the US of proxy/terrorist forces and this is unlikely to change.

However, given the extreme backlash against Kurdish separatism in Iraq, the US would not only retain old enemies but gain new ones, particularly in the form of Turkey. Ankara is vocally opposed to Kurdish separatism in Iraq and has threatened to take all measures necessary to stop moves in this direction. Turkey has an even worse relationship with Syrian Kurds. This would automatically mean that the US would be in for a very difficult ride if they backed Kurdish separatism in Syria.

With Turkey’s President Erdogan specifically telling Iraqi Kurds “The Israel flag will not save you”, Syria’s proposals would be a geo-strategic blow not only to the US but also to Israel.

2. Separating SDF terrorists from civilian Kurds with Syrian citizenship

The Arab Socialist Ba’ath party has already given Syrian Kurds full citizenship rights which means that they are co-equals to Arabs as well as to other minorities including Assyrians and Armenians, both of whom are grateful to the pluralistic Ba’athist government for protecting them from foreign funded Sunni supremacist terrorism.

While it is clear that the Kurdish fronted SDF proxy militia is operating as a terrorist force in Syria, the old line about separating terrorists from moderates could work in a post-war scenario where the SDF has been defeated in certain regions and rendered irrelevant in others.

In exchange for negotiated autonomy, one which would clearly have to protect the rights of Arabs in ‘Kurdish regions’ of an Arab Republic, Syria could force Kurdish leaders to weed out those who have collaborated with foreign powers and create a new political paradigm for Kurds in Syria.

This would give the moderate Kurds what they want, it would protect the human rights of Arabs and Syrian minorities and it would allow Syria to further purge her soil of terrorists and enemy collaborators.

3. Leverage with Turkey

Unlike Iraq which is currently collaborating with Turkey in military drills bordering separatist regions of Iraq, Syria has no plans to engage with Turkey after years of Turkey’s participation in the pro-jihadist war against Syria.

However, in actively preventing the formation of a Kurdish state in Syria through a negotiated settlement which Turkey’s new found partner Russia could possibly help to broker, Syria could effectively end the current ‘Kurdish excuse’ which is being subtly invoked by Turkey to justify its continued presence in Syria.

Furthermore, Syria could, possibly again via Russia, offer Turkey assurances that Syria will not allow for PKK activity directed against Turkey to foment on Syrian soil. This would be in the best interests of peace in the region as Turkey and Syria both need to eventually come to terms with the fact that they are neighbours.

Historically, Syria’s traditional regional adversaries have been Israel and Jordan and more recently the extremist Arab states of the Persian Gulf. These are the states Syria must be on guard against when looking to the wider future. Because of this, Syria and Turkey will and should slowly but surely normalise relations.

4. Containing Iraqi Kurds

While Iraqi Kurds are politically at odds with their Kurdish counterparts, there exists a fear that the menacing separatist movement in Iraq could lead towards a greater Kurdish push for a multi-state land grab which would be supported by Israel, especially where Syria and Iran are concerned.

If, as is expected, Turkey sends its troops into northern Iraq, it would send a message to the wider Kurdish movement that Kurdish independence equals creating not a greater Kurdistan but a greater Turkey.

Thus, the example of Iraq when viewed simultaneously with the generous offer from Syria, may lead to moderate elements within the Syrian Kurdish movement making the pragmatic choice for guaranteed autonomy versus the prospect of Turkish domination.

Conclusion

Far from being a concession, it was always expected that after the present conflict against imperialism and imperialist funded jihad, Syria would happily engage in a political process with various parts of the Syrian population, including Kurds, in order to develop a settled internal peace.

Syria, in announcing this now however, sends a strong message to radical Kurds and the United States. The message is clear, Syria is a sovereign country and the Kurdish issue is a purely internal matter.

September 26, 2017 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Syria, Turkiye, United States | Leave a comment

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Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?

By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026

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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