Fact Check: Is Russia Really Getting Ready to Invade NATO?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 15.01.2024
NATO is getting ready for Russian aggression against the alliance’s eastern flank, Bild says, citing a “secret Bundeswehr document” about preparations for the possible flashpoint. But what’s the actual chance of a Russian attack on NATO, and which side, historically, has dreamt about and planned for a World War III scenario in Eastern Europe?
The German military is reportedly getting ready for a hot war between Russia and NATO, with a conflict scenario imagined in a classified Bundeswehr document envisioning a gradual escalation of tensions from February onwards, culminating in the buildup of hundreds of thousands of Russian and NATO troops around the Baltics and potential clashes by the summer of 2025.
The document lays out a scenario in which Russia, emboldened by Ukraine fatigue among NATO countries, kicks off a successful spring offensive over the coming months, chipping away at the Ukrainian army, and then – for reasons known apparently only to Bundeswehr planners, starting a campaign of “cyber attacks and other forms of hybrid warfare” against the Baltic states to stir up unrest among the ethnic Russian minority there.
The so-called ‘Suwalki Gap’ – the 100 km long Polish strip of land separating Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, is deemed by the Bundeswehr to be the focal point of a possible Russia-NATO clash, with the scenario envisioning the transfer of some 300,000 NATO troops to Eastern Europe to “deter” Moscow from aggression. The scenario ends ambiguously, with its authors leaving open whether the tensions and troop buildup ends in a potentially world-ending shooting war.
Russian officials scoffed at Bundeswehr planners’ rich imagination, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova comparing the leaked plan to a “powerful horoscope” on Monday and saying she wouldn’t be surprised if the scenario was provided to the German military by the Foreign Ministry and its notoriously Russophobic chief, Annalena Baerbock.
The German Defense Ministry attempted to walk back the report, with a spokesperson assuring Bild that “considering various scenarios, even if they are extremely unlikely, is part of everyday military practice, especially during army training” while nevertheless emphasizing that it takes “threats” from Russia seriously.
‘Various Scenarios’
The German MoD wasn’t wrong in mentioning the military’s propensity to plan for “various scenarios” when it comes to the idea of an all-out conflagration between Russia and NATO. What it left out, however, is that historically, many of the most outlandish declassified conflict scenarios seem to involve the idea of a preemptive attack against Russia by Western powers, not the other way around.
In the spring of 1945, for example, just weeks after the end of WWII in Europe, and while the war against Japan was still raging, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill commissioned a secret plan for an invasion of the Soviet Union by the Western Allies, including the combined forces of the US and the UK, plus 10-12 German divisions created from the remnants of the Wehrmacht – the same force tens of thousands of American and British troops died fighting to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis.
The plan, dubbed “Operation Unthinkable,” had the objective of imposing “upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire,” and included “the occupation of such areas of metropolitan Russia” to “render further resistance impossible.” Fortunately, the contingency was never realized, with its existence revealed to the public in 1998 after many decades under wraps. Some historians believe the Soviet leadership learned about the plan ahead of time, with Red Army forces in Eastern Europe inexplicably reorganizing in late June of 1945, just before the July 1 hypothetical attack date.
From 1945 until 1949, the US enjoyed a global monopoly in the possession of nuclear weapons as Soviet scientists scrambled to catch up. During this brief window of time, the Pentagon developed at least nine separate plans to target its erstwhile WWII Soviet allies using nukes. Most famous among them was Operation Dropshot – a 1949 proposal calling for the bombardment of some 100 Soviet cities with 300 nuclear bombs and 250,000 tons of conventional munitions, plus chemical and bacteriological weapons, followed by a ground campaign to ensure “complete victory” over the USSR and its allies across Eurasia. The plan, which signed off on by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on December 19, 1949, was declassified in 1977, sparking disbelief among many ordinary Americans owing to its brutality.
In 1988, at the twilight of the Cold War, while President Reagan was visiting Moscow to schmooze with General Secretary Gorbachev and to announce that he no longer saw the USSR as an “evil empire,” the US Naval War College was playing out a strategic wargame modeling surprise offensive operations against Soviet air defenses, military-industrial complex, and naval assets in Asia.
After the Cold War ended and the USSR broke apart, the Pentagon continued to plan for scenarios of unprovoked aggression against Moscow – even as US leaders spoke of Russia as their ‘partners’ in the “new world order” announced by President George H.W. Bush in his State of the Union address in January 1991. In the early 2000s, while Bush’s son George W. Bush gushed about looking into President Putin’s eyes to “get a sense of his soul,” Pentagon planners were busy coming up with Prompt Global Strike – a scenario proposing the massed launch of precision-guided conventional missiles to decapitate the Russian leadership and declaw its nuclear forces.
The concept, still around and now called ‘Conventional Prompt Strike’, proposes the use of thousands of conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as air and space assets, either in place of or in coordination with nuclear weapons. The US began to develop the Prompt Global Strike idea at the same time that the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002, with that move, combined with NATO encroachment on Russia’s western borders from 1999 onward, forcing Moscow to invest significant resources into the development of fundamentally new strategic weapons, including hypersonic missiles.
The above examples serve to demonstrate that whatever the geopolitical climate at the time – and whether Moscow is an erstwhile ally in the fight against German Nazism and Japanese militarism, an adversary at the start of the Cold War, a newfound friend at its end, or a trusted ‘partner’ at the dawn of the 21st century, US and allied military planners will find cause to come up with scenarios for a war of aggression against Russia. The historical detour adds a dose of context to reporting on purported Russian plans to attack NATO without provocation, with such plans seemingly being more the alliance’s forte.
Tactical Blindspots
The Bundeswehr’s fearmongering about the potential for “Russian aggression against NATO” in the Suwalki Gap isn’t new. In fact, Sputnik has been reporting on and poking holes in similar claims since at least 2015, when Pentagon officials first began warning that Russia might attempt to close the gap, thus cutting off the Baltics from Poland and the West. Then, as now, the US and its allies never bothered to explain what on Earth would motivate Russia to attack NATO.
In 2017, following another dose of fearmongering related to Russia and the Suwalki Gap in the Wall Street Journal, political observer Yevgeny Krutikov said that NATO’s fears were nothing short of “stupidity,” pointing out that most of the Suwalki Gap area consists of woodland, lakes and swamps, including a national park, and that the region lacks any major roads. “It does not even cross anyone’s mind that tanks can’t pass through the Suwalki woods,” Krutikov stressed at the time.
Strategic Fallacies in Logic
Seven years later, the Suwalki Gap has reemerged in the minds of Western military planners as the place where Russia-NATO tensions could go hot. Leaving aside tactical considerations, the question Sputnik and others have asked, and which NATO have never been able to answer, is why Moscow would launch what amounts to an unprovoked invasion of Poland – a NATO member, and proceed to attack three more NATO allies (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), thus triggering World War III in the process.
Russia’s military demonstrated its capabilities against Ukraine in the proxy war with NATO in Ukraine, with the country’s troops, equipment and military production capabilities more than a match for an army trained, armed and funded by the Western bloc, and even earning the ranking of number one in the world militarily – above the United States, in a recent US report.
That said, a direct confrontation with NATO could very quickly turn against Russia’s favor, with the alliance having more than four times the total military personnel and active duty troops, three times the number of paramilitary reserves, nearly five times as many aircraft, six times as many armored vehicles, 3.5 times more warships, and over six times the population.
Russian Foreign Ministry graphic of NATO defence spending compared to that of Russia and the rest of the world.
Under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, members are required to come to the defense of members in the event of enemy aggression, and at least in theory, are under obligation to deploy weapons up to and including nuclear weapons, if necessary. That, combined with Washington’s carefree approach to nukes (including allowing their use on a first strike basis and even against non-nuclear-armed adversaries), means a Russian attack on the Baltics would very likely put the planet on a rapid ride to a world-ending World War – something Russian political and military leaders have repeatedly demonstrated they are not interested in.
“The whole of NATO cannot fail to understand that Russia no reason, no interest – neither geopolitical interest, nor economic, nor political, nor military – to fight with NATO countries,” President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with Russian media last month. Moscow and the bloc “have no territorial claims against each other,” Putin stressed, adding that Moscow would prefer peaceful coexistence to confrontation with bloc members.
Perhaps if the alliance spent more time listening to what the Russian president has been saying and living up to decades-old promises to Moscow not to expand eastward instead of antagonizing the country by fueling a proxy war against it in Ukraine, Bundeswehr planners wouldn’t have to worry about paranoid scenarios involving having to fight the Russian army hundreds of kilometers east of Germany.
Nazis and Zionists
Genocidal Hate Speech in Nazi Germany and Talmudic-Zionist “Israel”
Michael Hoffman’s Revelation of the Method | January 9, 2024
The Nazis
On 25 October 1941 we have the following statement from Hitler. It was uttered during a private dinner with his co-conspirators SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhardt Heydricht, commander of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Nazi Germany’s Department of Homeland Security):
“In Parliament [30 January1939 and 1941], I prophesied Jewry that the Jew will disappear from Europe if war is not avoided. This criminal race has to account for two million deaths in World War I, and now again hundreds of thousands. Don’t anybody tell me that we cannot send them into the morass! Who cares about our people? It is good if the terror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry. The attempt to create a Jewish state will be a failure!”
From the diary of Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, May 27, 1942:
“Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated (abgeschoben) eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated (liquidiert)…” (Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, 1941-1945; De Gruyter Saur).
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943
In July 1942, hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were being deported, most of them via the Treblinka Camp. Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto therefore decided to fight back. They started an uprising on April 19, 1943. It was put down brutally by German armed forces, for the most part within a few days, but skirmishes carried on until mid-May. Jews who survived were again generally deported.
October 6, 1943 SS chief Himmler spoke before the political elite of the Third Reich. In a brief excerpt from his long speech, we read the following (Smith/Peterson 1974, pp. 169 f.):
“I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate (only) the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up.
“The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organization which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had…I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly…”
October 7, 1943, the day after Himmler had given his lengthy speech about “making the Jews disappear from the earth,” Goebbels wrote: “As to the Jewish Question, (Himmler) gives a very frank and candid picture. He is of the opinion that we can solve the Jewish Question for all of Europe by the end of this year. He advocates the most radical and harshest solution, namely, that the whole of Jewry will be exterminated [auszurotten]. This is surely a consistent, if brutal, solution.”
Hans Frank (Nazi governor of occupied Poland) — diary entry for December 16, 1941: “We must destroy the Jews, wherever we find them, in order to maintain the overall structure of the Reich here. […] Currently there are in the Government General [occupied Poland] approximately 2½ million, and together with those who are kith and kin and connected in all kinds of ways, we now have 3 ½ million Jews. We cannot shoot these 3 ½ million Jews, nor can we poison them, yet we will have to take measures which will somehow lead to the goal of annihilation, and that will be done in connection with the great measures which are to be discussed together with the Reich. The territory of the General Government must be made free of Jews, as is the case in the Reich. Where and how this will happen is a matter of the means which must be used and created, and about whose effectiveness I will inform you in due time.” (IMT, Vol. 29, pp. 502f.)
On March 4, 1944, Nazi governor Frank stated (p. 687): “The Jews are a race that must be effaced. Wherever we catch one, he is coming to an end.”
Between late 1941 and late 1942, Nazi authorities deported many tens of thousands of Jews from western and central European countries to locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union… many if not most of them were killed there by the Einsatzgruppen and associated units.
“In particular the camp Maly Trostenets near Minsk (capital of Belorussia), and the prison at Fort IX near Kaunas (Lithuania) deserve to be mentioned in this context. Thousands of deported Jews were executed there.
“Jews living inside the Soviet Union were the primary target of the Einsatzgruppen and associated units…this happened primarily by way of mass shootings…German wartime documents speak of some 750,000 victims…”
“Not just one, but two Einsatzgruppen – C and D – were active in Ukraine. The most infamous crime scene associated with these units occurred in the suburbs of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, at Babi Yar… The Einsatzgruppen’s ranked death-toll list includes several entries for Ukrainian locations…(totaling approximately 138,000 victims)… Ukraine was completely occupied by Germany.. This put all of Ukraine’s remaining Jews in mortal danger, and many paid with their life.”
“SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe became head of Germany’s Civil Police in 1936. In June 1941, Nebe was appointed commander of Einsatzgruppe B, which he led from its inception in June, 1941 until October 1941, hence “for some four months. As such, he approved several Einsatzgruppen reports sent to Berlin which documented the execution of thousands of Jews in the deployment area of his Einsatzgruppe B.”
“SS Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf was the director of Office III, the “SD” (Internal Security Service) of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office). In 1941 he was appointed head of Einsatzgruppe D, a position he held for a year. This group operated in the southern region of the temporarily German-occupied Soviet Union (Bessarabia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, Caucasus)…“At the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial, Ohlendorf accepted responsibility for at least 90,000 victims of mass shootings carried out by Einsatzgruppe D, while he was in charge of that unit. There is an abundance of documentary evidence in support of these facts.
In the summer of 1942, the forced deportation of tens of thousands of Polish Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto was underway. When the deported Jews arrived further East, Wilhelm Kube, Nazi Commissioner for Belorussia, complained to his superior Lohse on July 31, 1942 (and later also to Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories), indicating Kube’s forces had been executing tens of thousands of Jews in the area to prevent them from supporting the partisans.”
“In Hitler’s Table Talk, Hitler drew a picture of the future of the Eastern European territories which is one of the best authenticated of his life’s visions and typical of his weltanschauung, which entailed the total disfranchisement of the subjugated. He ruled they have no claims of any kind, except to an early death. They are forbidden to learn to read and write; to concern themselves with history or politics is a crime worthy of death. Any communication whatever going beyond the confines of the village is strictly prohibited…They are to live in their filthy hovels without hygiene or inoculation, while the German settlers, strictly segregated, own splendid villages and spacious fortress farms.”
— German revisionist historian Ernst Nolte (1923-2016), author of the magisterial 1987 history, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg (“The European Civil War”).
The Zionists
“We shall try to spirit the penniless (Palestinian) population across the border…while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” —Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism, 1895
“I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it” (1938). “Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin (Palestinian peasant farmers)….….Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.”
—David Ben-Gurion, first Israeli Prime Minister, 1948
Writing in his diary in 1940 Yosef Weitz, a senior Jewish National Fund official who chaired the influential Transfer Committee before and during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), and became known as the “Architect of Transfer,” (mass expulsion of the Palestinian population), put it thus: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe can remain. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.”
The religious-terrorist Kach party was founded in 1971 by Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane who argued for the immediate expulsion of the Palestinians, who he called “dogs.” In 1984, Kahane introduced legislation in the Knesset to ban all Jewish-Gentile marriages and sexual relations and revoke the Israeli citizenship of non-Jews.
In 2019, Kahane’s follower Itamar Ben Gvir formed the “Jewish Power” party, an ideological offshoot of Kach. Merging with other Talmudic-Zionist parties to form Religious Zionism in 2022, they won the third-largest share of Israel’s parliament seats. Netanyahu appointed Ben-Gvir Israeli Minister of Security. For years Ben-Gvir displayed in a place of honor in his home a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli who killed 40 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 in a shooting massacre as they knelt in prayer at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994. As the Israeli Security Minister Ben-Gvir has instigated a settler reign of terror on Palestinian farmers and sheepherders on the West Bank.
In the aftermath of Goldstein’s slaughter, Noam Federman, a spokesman for the Kach party opined, “The act itself was one of greatness. It was a great act of sanctifying the Name (of God).”
Paying homage at Goldstein’s funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin told mourners that “one million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
”Palestinians in Lebanon are two-legged animals.”
—Israeli Prime Minister Menchaem Begin (source: NY Times, August 5, 1985, p. A6)
Palestinians are cockroaches scurrying in a bottle.”
—Israeli Army Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan (source: NY Times, August 5, 1985, p. A6)
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the head of the powerful Israeli Shas political party and chief rabbi of Sephadic Israeli Judaism, taught that the Arab people should be exterminated, “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them. It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.”
—2001 Passover sermon. Cf. Haaretz, April 12, 2001. 700,000 Israelis attended Ovadia’s funeral. In its obituary, the New York Times eulogized him and omitted all reference to his calls for exterminating Arabs.
“If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution.”
—Ben Shapiro, American media personality, Orlando Sentinel, September 8, 2023
“Well, if everyone in Gaza is a refugee, let’s scatter them around the world. There are 2.5 million people there, every country will take in 20,000 people, 100 countries.”
— Ram Ben Barak, Member of the Knesset, ex-Mossad Deputy Director, November 1
“There should be a second Nakba.”
—Israeli agriculture minister Avi Dichter, November 11, 2023. [Nakba: the 1948 forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, which culminated in the creation of the so-called “state of Israel”].
Gaza City in the early days of the Israeli terror bombings, October, 2023
“The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them (Palestinians) there is but one sentence, and that is death…Gaza has to be wiped off the map, in order to send a message to all our enemies and those who seek us harm…. In Gaza, we have to be clear, there are no innocent [civilians]. There are no “uninvolved” people.”
—Yitzhak Kroizer, Member of the Israeli parliament (“Knesset”), Nov. 5. 2023.
Tally Gotliv, an official in Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, has demanded that Prime Minister Netanyahu use a nuclear bomb on Gaza. “Before we consider inserting ground troops, doomsday weapon.”
Likud member of the Knesset, Boaz Bismuth stated with reference to Gaza: “There’s no place for any humanitarian gestures.”
Israeli journalist Zvi Yehezkeli said on Israel’s Channel 13: “[We] should have killed many times 20,000 people, [we] should have begun with a blow of 100,000.”
As of January 9, 2024, the Israeli military has damaged or destroyed 70 percent of Gaza’s housing.
85 percent of the population of Gaza have been dehoused and rendered homeless.
In three months the Israelis have killed more than 22,000 Gazans, the majority of them women and children. The number of wounded, disabled and mutilated are more than twice that casualty figure. It is expected that many more Palestinian civilians will die of intentional Israeli-imposed imposed disease and hunger.
“Non-Jews are uncompassionate by nature and attacks on them curb their evil inclination.” — Torat Ha-Melekh (sometimes spelled Torat Hamelech, 2009). Torat Ha-Melekh is an Israeli rabbinic book based on the Talmud which has been widely distributed to Israeli military personnel.
A Palestinian child is treated for injuries on a hospital floor in Gaza, inflicted by the “Israeli Defense Force”, while a wounded Palestinian man awaits further medical care, autumn, 2023
Torat Ha-Melekh teaches that it is a religious duty to kill non-Jewish children on the enemy side during warfare, “if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents.” Other reasons the Israeli authors furnish for the permission to kill non-Jewish children include if they “block the rescue of Jews… Little children are often situated in this way…it is permitted to kill them because their very presence facilitates the killing (of Jews)…(p. 215). “It is also permitted to kill the children of the leader (of the enemy) in order to put pressure on him…” (p. 215).
“We are imposing a complete siege on the city of Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”
— Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, October 9, 2023.
On January 6, 2024 the New York Times described Gallant as “a moderate member of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party…” (Section A, Page 6; italics added).
“Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza: no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell—you will get hell”.
—Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, Coordinator of the Government in the Territories, October 10
“Israel has no choice but to render Gaza into a place that is temporarily, or permanently, unfit for living.”
— Giora Eiland, Israeli Defense Ministry, October 11
“Do not leave a stone unturned in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn into Dresden. Complete incineration. Annihilate Gaza now!”
—Moshe Feiglin, Member of the Israeli Knesset, October 26, 2023. The Allied incineration by more than 800 bombers leveled the city of Dresden and burned alive tens of thousands of civilians.
Concerning the Palestinian population of Gaza: “They are not humans nor human animals, they are sub-humans and should be treated as such.”
—Arieh King, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, December 8
“There are no innocent [civilians] in Gaza.”
—Avigdor Lieberman, Member of the Knesset, and leader of Israel Beytenu Party, former Israeli Defense Minister, December 3
“We are too humane. Burn Gaza now, nothing less!”
—Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, November 17
“… we should make sure that there is a severe humanitarian disaster there (in Gaza), and severe epidemics, and horrible pressure, and cries to the sky—because that’s how wars are won… A humanitarian disaster is the only way to bring about the end of the war in a desirable way. Think about it this way: the poor women of Gaza, who are they? They are the mothers and sisters and wives of the Hamas murderers. Gaza’s system, unlike [its characterization by the US which I mentioned earlier] that there is Hamas and there are civilians—it is not true! Gaza is a state that is entirely united around its leader and its ideology for 15 years, without any dissent and with enthusiastic support….
“The weak point [of Gaza] is their civilian population…the thousands of Hamas terrorists, whose mothers and wives and children who will start suffering from severe illnesses, are the point of weakness. If we want to win the war—that’s how you win a war.”
“I agree with every word of Giora Eiland.”
—Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, November, 2024
“Given the collapse of Gaza’s sanitation and medical systems, as much as a quarter of Gaza’s people could die within the year, mostly from disease or lack of access to medical care.”
—Peter Beinart, Jan. 7, 2024
“Spend your energy on one thing; wiping Gaza off the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters fly to the southern fence and flee into Egyptian territory. Or have them die. And have them die horribly. Gaza must be wiped out. ..We require a revengeful and cruel IDF (Israeli military). Anything less than that is immoral. Simply immoral.”
—Galit Distel-Atbaryan, Member of the Knesset, November 1
“I am saying here to the citizens of Lebanon…(w)hat we are doing in Gaza we know how to do in Beirut.”
—Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, November 11.
(Gallant was telling the truth. In the summer of 1982 the Israeli air force terror-bombed the city of Beirut resulting in 20,000 civilians killed and tens of thousands wounded).
“The north of the Gaza strip—more beautiful than ever. Blowing up and flattening everything, simply a delight for the eyes.”
—Amichai Eliyahu, Israeli Minister of Heritage, November 1.
“…twice as many children have died in Gaza just since the war started on Oct. 7 as in all the conflicts worldwide in 2022…Far more women and children appear to have been killed in Gaza than in the entire first year of the Iraq war…pulverizing entire neighborhoods…Too many (people) see events through a prism in which (Israeli) lives are invaluable on one side while (Palestinian) deaths on the other are regrettable.”
—Nicholas Kristof, December 6
“This law is taught: in the case of Israel, this soul of the kelipah is derived from kelipat nogah, which contains good…The souls of the gentiles however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever.” —Shneur Zalman of Lyady, “the Alter Rebbe.” Likkutei Amarim, (chapter 1). This sacred text is more commonly known by its first Hebrew word “Tanya.” Zalman is the founder of Chabad Lubavitch. Tanya is its revered text.
“According to this radical Hasidic teaching, divinity dwells in the inner core of every Judaic human being. Those who are non-Judaic have no humanity, no inner core in which the divine can take up residence. Those beings who are not Judaic are sub-human: empty kelipot (corporeal ‘shells’) which constitute broken vessels.
“In this theology non-Jews are broken shells who adopt the appearance of a human form which conceals their demonic essence. Those who are not Jews are the personification of purely evil materiality. Kabbalistic theology posits a cosmic dichotomy wherein the gentile represents biologically-determined, irredeemable evil. This is the esoteric rabbinic teaching which the western secret societies (also known as the ‘New Age’), understood and implemented. In the case of the indoctrination of their agent Adolf Hitler, the western occult reversed the polarities and taught Hitler that “the Jews” were the kelipot (‘untermenschen’), and the ‘Aryans’ the purely distilled essence of the divine. The Hitler/Himmler/Goebbels version of National Socialism was, unknown to these dupes themselves, a Kabbalistic teaching on the biologically-determined, irredeemable evil in the form of the ‘Jew.’ Hitlerism was Kabalism in the garments of Aryanism.”
— Michael Hoffman
“The differences between Jews and gentiles are not religious, historical, cultural or political. They are, rather, racial, genetic and scientifically unalterable. The one group is at its very root and by natural constitution ‘totally evil’ while the other is ‘totally good.’ Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face total catastrophe do the Jews experience good fortune.”
—Rabbi Saadya Grama, Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut (“Jewish Superiority and the Question of Exile,” 2003). Grama is an alumnus of Beth Medrash Govoha, a renowned yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey.
There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”
—Talmudic-Kabbalist Yitzhak Ginsburg, Jewish Week (N.Y.), Aug. 26, 1996
“The dissimilarity between the Jewish soul, in all its independence, inner desires, longings, character and standing vis-à-vis the soul of all the gentiles–on all of their levels–is greater and deeper than the difference between the soul of a man and the soul of an animal, for the difference in the latter case is one of quantity, while the difference in the first case is one of essential quality.”
— Abraham Isaac Kook, Chief Rabbi of Palestine, 1921-1935, “The Father of Talmudic Zionism.” [Source: David Dishon,“The Beauty of Yefet in the Tents of Shem-Gentiles and Jews in the Thought of Rav Kook,” in Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation; Shalom Hartman Institute. 1 (2): 80–89.]
“Wherever there is liability for capital punishment, with regard to bloodshed, if a gentile murders another gentile, or a gentile murders a Jew, he is liable. If a Jew murders a gentile, he is exempt.”
—Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 57a
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, October 28: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you says our Holy Bible, and we do remember and we are fighting. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza or around Gaza and in all other regions in Israel are joining this chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that started 3,000 years ago—from Joshua to the heroes of 1948—the Six Day War, the 1973 October war—and all other wars of this country—are hero troops. They have one supreme main goal, to completely defeat the murderous enemy and to guarantee our existence in this country.”
In 1 Samuel 15:3 the judgment of God is on the Amalekites, in the form of the divine command to Saul, the first King of Israel: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
These are patently the marching orders Netanyahu gave the Israeli military (‘the most moral military in the world’): slay all the civilians of Gaza and spare them not. Not even Clarence Darrow could parse it otherwise. There’s no lawyer’s loophole here; no moderating clause.
“Netanyahu’s Amalek speech was a warrant for a genocide that has been carried out to the letter, notwithstanding the delusional Gaza holocaust denial which squats in our media, churches and government atop the cadavers of thousands of ‘unclean kelipot’—bombed and burned Palestinian children and their mothers, whose deaths do not register in the conscience of America. The Talmudic-resonate belief in the worthlessness of the Palestinians is as ubiquitous and inescapable as the racist hate speech which inculcates it.”
—Michael Hoffman, January 9, 2024.
I will not be silent.
Copyright©2024 by Independent History and Research
Michael Hoffman manages the podcast, Revisionist History®. He is the author of the banned 2008 textbook Judaism Discovered (1,102 pages), and nine other volumes of history and literature, as well as 122 issues of the periodical, Revisionist History®. Michael is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former paid consultant to the news department of the New York Times. His books have been published in translation in Japan and France. He resides with his family in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. On Twitter (“X”): https://twitter.com/HoffmanMichaelA
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Corruption, disinformation, warnings about assassinations: What to make of the latest Biden Ukraine links claims
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | January 12, 2024
At first it feels like a blast from the past but it’s really about the present and future: Journalist Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos has released a long interview with former Ukrainian MP Andrey Derkach. In which Derkach makes allegations about corruption in the US and Ukraine. In particular about the American President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
With regard to graft, while the various allegations (by no means only Derkach’s) and ongoing investigations are complex, in essence several simple questions are at stake: Did the current president’s son, Hunter Biden, sell his services as a Washington influence-peddler by using the “brand” (as one witness, Devon Archer, has put it) of his father’s connections (as then vice-president under Barack Obama)? And, potentially even more disturbingly, did the elder Biden himself profit from such influence-peddling? Finally, most disconcerting of all, did the current president use his leverage as Obama’s point-man on Ukraine to shield his son and, possibly, himself from investigations in Ukraine? Including by bringing down Ukrainian chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who got too close to the truth about Hunter Biden’s shady role in the Ukrainian Burisma gas company?
In sum, did the highest-ranking American official, charged with overseeing (among other things) Kiev’s putative “fight against corruption,” make things even worse by injecting a strong dose of US-establishment corruption into Washington’s newest client state? And, if so, could that two-sided entanglement have left a legacy, including of compromising actions, that has been influencing America’s reckless and failing (even on its own misconceived terms) proxy war policy in Ukraine?
Full disclosure: I happen to believe that the answer to all these questions is yes. Which is depressing, since it means that decisions, costing many human lives and making our shared global politics very dangerous, have been influenced by corrupt motives reminiscent of the world of organized crime.
But we do not know, yet. It is certain that Hunter Biden, a textbook failed-son and pampered heir, used his dad’s name to cash in, to the tune of (at the very east) $7.5 million. That much even the pro-Biden Washington Post had to admit (while revealing its bias with the packaging of the story, which accuses Republicans of “hyping” the numbers). As to whether Joe Biden himself also got a share and how all of this affected his policy on Ukraine – compelling proof, as opposed to plausible conjecture, is not available. At least at this point. But the Republicans, for their own selfish yet, politically, perfectly normal reasons, are digging for it through an impeachment inquiry into the current president’s record.
This is the background against which Derkach has now spoken up. Make no mistake: There will be attempts to dismiss all of this as – yes, you guessed it – the beginning of BIG BAD RUSSIAN MEDDLING in the 2024 presidential elections. In fact, they have already started. Frankly, yawn: Let’s not be distracted.
Such attempts will inevitably seek to make use of Mangiante Papadopoulos’ and Derkach’s own records. Mangiante Papadopoulos is a journalist and the wife of the former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. As such (though, to be precise, still his girlfriend at the time), she was questioned by the FBI in 2017, during the hot phase of the neo-McCarthyite campaign commonly known under the misleading label “Russiagate.”
Misleading because it was not really about Russia, but about the American Democrats’ foul-play attempt to undermine the reality of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. (which was really down to Trump’s gifts as a populist and the Democrats’ arrogant decision to try and ram down the country’s throat the unelectably unappealing and politically terrifying candidacy of Hillary Clinton.)
“Russiagate” was, in reality, Russia Rage, a mix of Centrist and Liberal conspiracy theory-mongering and mass hysteria. The true scandal was that a sizable part of the US political and media establishment further ruined what was left of any working relationship with Russia, and undermined the American public’s faith in a legitimate election result. (No, Trump was not the first one to do so in 2020/21: The roots of the January 6 riot in Washington are deeply bipartisan.)
Derkach came to international attention a few years later, with respect to Trump’s successor. A Russian-Ukrainian businessman and politician (who is open about receiving elite Russian intelligence training in the early 1990s), American and Ukrainian officials have accused him of playing an important role in “meddling” in the election of 2020, specifically by helping undermine Biden’s reputation. Derkach released recordings of what he claimed were conversations between then-vice-president Biden and then-Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko that, critics argued, pointed to illicit dealings. (Ironically enough, for a while these revelations were welcomed by the team of Poroshenko’s successor Vladimir Zelensky because they embarrassed his opponent.)
Derkach has also been accused of – and in Ukraine formally charged with – working for Russian intelligence and with treason. No wonder he fled the country in 2022 and now lives in exile in Belarus. The 56-year-old is, in sum, a very ambiguous figure whose statements should be treated with caution.
Yet they should not be dismissed wholesale. Simply branding anything inconvenient to the American Democrats and their media clique as “information warfare” or “Russian meddling” is how “Russiagate” has done so much damage. That was, after all, the manner in which the authentic and very relevant news about the compromising data on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was suppressed before his father’s election. If the evidence pointing to corruption (and revolting personal depravity) had been allowed to be subjected to ordinary scrutiny and public debate – as it certainly would have been if it had concerned a member of the Trump family – the chances of Biden senior would have suffered.
Derkach is a complicated source; Mangiante Papadopoulos has also been accused of promoting Russia’s interests. (But then, frankly, who hasn’t?) But the question among adult observers is not who may be interested in a given piece of information seeing the light of day. Because here’s a little secret: As long as the information is of any political relevance at all, there’s always someone interested (as, by the way, Derkach openly admits in the interview, as far as his case is concerned). And here’s another one: That doesn’t mean that a given piece of information is untrue (“disinformation,” as we have been trained to say now). And finally: Remember, interests are involved not only in revealing, but also in hiding facts. Or, indeed, in pooh-poohing inconvenient revelations as nothing but propaganda.
So, what to make of what Derkach has had to say now? In the interview, which is almost an hour long, he makes many detailed statements, involving a large number of specified persons, especially in Ukraine. Let’s try to focus on key aspects and look at three of his most striking allegations one by one.
First, Derkach states that the Ukrainian authorities started going after him in earnest, including by extra-legal and life-threatening means, when (or because?) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told them to resolve that Derkach problem. The interview is somewhat ambiguous: Is Derkach saying that Blinken himself gave, in essence, an order to use criminal methods or that Blinken – Henry II/Thomas Becket-style – “merely” called for someone to somehow rid his president of that turbulent Ukrainian?
Either way, it would have been a highly incriminating and tawdry act on Blinken’s part. But it would be naive to consider the current Secretary of State incapable of stooping so low. We are, after all, talking about the man who, during Biden’s election campaign, played a devious behind-the-scenes role in organizing the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Back then, by mobilizing the American intelligence community to, once again, serve party-political purposes, Blinken helped Biden win and, in the long term, further shredded what’s left of American establishment credibility. (Not to mention that, currently, Blinken is displaying his absolute legal nihilism in stunning fashion by shielding Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.)
Secondly, Derkach also maintains that former Ukrainian chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who lost his job for going after a Biden (or was it even two of them?), is in danger of assassination and should receive help to leave Ukraine. What makes this claim sound improbable is the fact that Shokin is still alive. What makes it plausible is the fact that there has already been at least one attempt on his life, although that took place years ago when he was still in office: As a matter of fact, for Shokin, losing his job may have made losing his life less likely.
Third, Derkach claims that, inside Ukraine, a large bribe linked to the fallout from the Burisma affair has been turned into funding for the Ukrainian intelligence services, in particular for assassinations in Russia and the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Can he prove this specific connection, namely that precisely that dirty money was used for this dark purpose? Maybe, maybe not. Yet there is no doubt that Ukraine’s military intelligence service in particular has organized assassinations. Indeed, some Western media have quite openly sung its praises for this, such as The Economist.
As regards Nord Stream, after an initial period of plainly silly Western disinformation absurdly trying to point the finger at Russia (anyone remember that?), it is now fashionable to blame it all on Ukraine, as if the latter could have acted without NATO permission and assistance. So, here as well Derkach gets a grade of ‘at least partly true’; and his allegation about how some of these activities have been financed cannot be dismissed as implausible either.
Let’s return, however, to the biggest issue at stake here: the Bidens. And let’s note a simple but generally overlooked fact: They are amazingly good at lowering expectations. They and their media allies are engaged in an ongoing, largely successful operation of shifting US baselines even farther down: In a normal country, there simply should not be an endless, partisan struggle over whether and how much money exactly went to the current president personally. In a normal country, the fact that, at the very least, Joe Biden has long tolerated, facilitated (to one extent or the other) and, finally, defended and shielded the screamingly unethical behavior of his son, should be more than enough to have forced him to resign.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
US journalist jailed and ‘tortured’ by Ukraine has died – family
RT | January 12, 2024
Chilean-American blogger Gonzalo Lira has died in a Ukrainian prison, his family said on Friday.
Lira, 55 at the time of his death, lived in Kharkov and blogged as ‘CoachRedPill,’ but switched to YouTube commentary after the conflict with Russia escalated in February 2022. He was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) last May and accused of “discrediting” the Ukrainian leadership and the military.
“I cannot accept the way my son has died. He was tortured, extorted, incommunicado for 8 months and 11 days and the US Embassy did nothing to help my son. The responsibility of this tragedy is the dictator Zelensky with the concurrence of a senile American President, Joe Biden,” his father Gonzalo Lira Sr. wrote in a note published by The Grayzone.
Lira Sr. also reached out to X host Tucker Carlson, confirming the death of his son in Ukrainian custody. He had spoken to Carlson about the case in early December.
Lira resurfaced from custody in late July with a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), revealing his torture in jail and attempts by the SBU to extort him for money. He said he was trying to flee to Hungary and seek asylum. “Either I’ll cross the border and make it to safety, or I’ll be disappeared by the Kiev regime,” he wrote, in his last public message.
Two days later, a source confirmed to RT that Lira had been caught and imprisoned by Ukrainian authorities.
According to a handwritten note Lira’s sister received on January 4, provided to the Grayzone by her father, Gonzalo Lira Jr. had severe health problems caused by pneumonia and a collapsed lung, which began in mid-October. Ukrainian prison authorities only acknowledged the issue on December 22, and stated he would undergo surgery.
Following his father’s appearance on Carlson’s show, X owner Elon Musk personally inquired about Lira’s case with both US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, apparently to no effect.
Lira was a national of both the US and Chile. According to his thread from last July, the Chilean Embassy in Kiev at least tried to help him, while the US mission gave him only “empty bromides.” Lira suggested that this was because Victoria Nuland – currently the acting deputy to Secretary of State Antony Blinken – hated him personally.
Former Ukrainian chief prosecutor ‘fired’ for Biden could be assassinated – ex-MP
Viktor Shokin has dirt on the US president’s family and Kiev is using him as a bargaining chip, Andrey Derkach has claimed
Viktor Shokin in February 2015, after his appointment as Prosecutor General. © Vladimir Shtanko / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
RT | January 11, 2024
The former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who was famously sacked by then-President Pyotr Poroshenko under pressure from US President Joe Biden, is being used by the current government in Kiev as a bargaining chip with Washington, controversial former MP Andrey Derkach has claimed in an interview.
Biden had Poroshenko sack Shokin in 2016, when he was vice president in the Obama administration, threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan unless his demands were met. The now-incumbent US president claimed that the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, but also bragged about getting rid of the man. Critics of Biden have alleged that he used his office to derail an investigation into the gas firm Burisma, which infamously retained his son Hunter on a well-paid board position during his father’s tenure as Obama’s VP.
Derkach made his explosive claims in an interview recorded in Minsk, Belarus, with Italian-US journalist Simona Mangiante, published on Wednesday on X (formerly Twitter).
“Shokin is now a hostage on Ukrainian territory. As far as I know, he is not allowed to leave Ukraine. He is under the total control of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU),” he claimed.
President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the US side, and President Vladimir Zelensky and his chief-of-staff Andrey Yermak on the Ukrainian side, are interested in information possessed by Shokin, according to Derkach.
He claimed that last October Shokin had contacts with two attorneys “working with the US Congress,” Jake Greenberg and Clark Abourisk. The SBU “recorded those conversations, where Shokin told the Congress about real criminal acts of Blinken and Biden, and about the corruption of the Biden family.”
The former official said he’d been tipped off about the surveillance by sources inside the SBU. Derkach is an intelligence officer by background and served in the Ukrainian agency before being elected to parliament.
He claimed that his sources had told him that “the question of liquidating Mr Shokin on the territory of Ukraine is under consideration.” He urged the US Congress to ensure the man’s safety and extraction from his home country.
Derkach spoke in Russian throughout the hour-long interview and touched on a number of sensitive aspects of US-Ukraine relations, including those he’d been personally involved in.
He was the official that published in 2020 what he claimed to be recordings of conversations that Biden and Poroshenko had in 2015-2016. In the interview this week he claimed that at the time he was acting with the blessing of Zelensky’s office, which was seeking to discredit the former president.
Washington branded Derkach a Russian agent in 2022 and indicted him for allegedly interfering in the 2020 US presidential elections. Last year, Ukraine accused him of treason, also claiming he was working for Moscow. Zelensky stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship in January 2023.
Derkach has denied the accusations and claims in the interview that the Ukrainian charges against him were brought after Kiev failed to dispose of him by other means, on a direct request from Antony Blinken.
Moscow mocks US claims it used North Korean missiles
RT | January 11, 2024
The US is peddling false information when claiming that Russia used North Korean missiles to attack Ukrainian targets, Russian envoy to the UN Vassily Nebenzia told a Security Council meeting on Wednesday.
Washington has accused Russia of buying North Korean ballistic missiles and using them during mass strikes on Ukrainian targets on December 13, and also last week. US national security spokesperson John Kirby described it as “significant and concerning escalation” in remarks last Thursday. Washington’s allies brought up the issue at the UNSC briefing on Ukraine.
Nebenzia brushed off the allegations, citing statements by a Ukrainian official. Yury Ignat, the spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, said on national television that no forensic evidence to confirm the US claims was available to Kiev.
“It turns out that the United States replicates deliberately false information without even bothering to give a heads-up to its direct subjects,” the Russian diplomat remarked during the briefing.
North Korea is under UN sanctions, which include an arms embargo, for developing nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Moscow and Pyongyang have stated that while the two have a good relationship, their cooperation does not violate this restriction, contrary to Western claims.
South Korean ambassador Hwang Joon-kook accused Russia of testing North Korean weapons as part of its military action against Ukraine, and providing “valuable technical and military insights” to the producer nation. He cited unspecified experts as identifying the weapons as KN-23s, which North Korea claims to be nuclear-capable.
Ignat, the military spokesman, said that positively identifying a ballistic missile as North Korean would be challenging due to their similarity to Russian equivalents, and significant fragmentation on impact. Both nations’ designs stem from Soviet technology.
Another Ukrainian official, Oleg Sinegubov, head of the administration of Kharkov Region, claimed that some of the fragments recovered from Russian missile strike sites had had their markings erased, which he suggested indicated their foreign origin.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov previously rejected allegations that Moscow was procuring North Korean arms. In an interview in October, he said he does not comment on “rumors”, adding that “the Americans are always accusing everyone of all sorts of things”.
West frustrated by Global South’s refusal to abandon Russia in secret US-G7 meeting on Ukraine
By Ahmed Adel | January 11, 2024
A secret meeting took place in December in the Saudi Arabian capital between the United States, Ukraine, its G7 allies and a small group of countries from the Global South to try to drum up support for Kiev’s conditions for resolving the conflict with Moscow. Russia was not invited to the meeting, and China decided not to send a representative, reported Bloomberg, whilst Brazil stressed any such meeting must have a Russian presence.
According to Bloomberg, the meeting’s secrecy was intended, in part, to make participating countries feel more comfortable joining, as it was believed that the smaller format would allow for a freer and more frank discussion on the so-called peace formula for Ukraine. However, according to people familiar with the meeting and interviewed by Bloomberg, there was no major progress as Ukraine and its G7 allies continued to resist calls from Global South nations to engage directly with Russia.
Although senior officials from India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey attended the December meeting in Riyadh, other major Global South nations that participated in some of the previous larger sessions – such as China, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates – did not send their representatives.
Brazil, which presides over the G20 this year, contributed to the secret meeting with only a written statement prepared by the International Affairs advisor to the Presidency of the Republic, Celso Amorim. Brazil was invited but was unable to attend due to incompatibility in Amorim’s agenda.
According to Jamil Chade’s column on the Brazilian portal UOL, Amorim sent a letter to the authorities who mediated the December meeting in Riyadh and clarified Brazil’s disappointment in the conduct of the process since the meetings do not have the other party necessary, Russia, to reach an agreement.
“Initially, we were encouraged by the untapped potential of this group’s restricted format, which could eventually serve as a facilitator between the two conflicting sides […]. Our contribution aimed to promote direct or indirect dialogue between the two parties […],” the former minister of foreign affairs said.
“[But] as the conflict prepares to enter its third year, there is still no opening for dialogue or a credible prospect for an end to hostilities […] the willingness of the parties to engage in talks is critical for the success of our diplomatic efforts,” stated Amorim, pointing out that it was precisely this disposition that allowed the tension between Venezuela and Guyana to be prevented from becoming a hot war.
When contacted by UOL, Amorim explained that he was “considering” whether to go to Davos but was unsure.
“In our interaction with Russia and Ukraine, we constantly emphasise our belief that dialogue is essential for this process to produce results. We invite them to create diplomatic opportunities […] Brazil remains committed to renewing its engagement in the Copenhagen process, as soon as the parties are willing to start an authentic dialogue […],” added the Brazilian government in the letter.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has already warned Zelensky that a peace process cannot be unilateral, while other emerging countries, mainly those from the Global South, have insisted that there is no way to endorse the Ukrainian plan without involving the Russians in the debates, writes the portal.
On January 14, Switzerland and Ukraine will host the fourth meeting in Davos to work on a solution to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. However, once again, the meeting’s agenda will be limited to the unrealistic peace plan of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and will not be attended by representatives from Moscow, thus ensuring its failure.
Under these conditions, Brazil is not wasting time on failed initiatives, especially when trade relations with Russia are booming. Last December, trade volume between Russia and Brazil grew 80%, reaching $1.6 billion for the first time, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Brazil acquired goods from Russia at the end of last year worth a total of $1.5 billion, which became the largest volume of purchases in modern history. The main import commodity was petroleum derivatives, at a record value of $1.1 billion. As a result, Moscow has become the South American country’s largest supplier of this commodity.
Latin America’s largest and most important country will not sacrifice trade relations with Russia or waste time with failed initiatives that will never eventuate because Zelensky has unrealistic demands on how to achieve peace, such as the full withdrawal of the Russian state from newly liberated territories and even Crimea, despite having no leverage to make such demands. In this way, there is little surprise that the secret meeting in Riyadh was destined only for failure.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
The Definition of Insanity
AARP: “Keep getting boosters even though previous ones didn’t work.”
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | JANUARY 9, 2024
This morning someone sent me a link to Alex Berenson’s post about the AARP advising its nearly 38 million members to get another COVID-19 booster shot, even if they have already had five boosters.
This prompted me to visit AARP’s website, which features an entire category of content titled Scams & Fraud—that is, warnings to older people about all the predators out there who wish to manipulate and deceive them in order to steal their money.
Under the category Caregiving is posted an articled titled COVID-19 Nursing Home Deaths Climb Ahead of Expected Winter Surge.
The article laments that nursing home residents and staff have lost interest in getting the latest booster, and suggests this is a likely explanation for why COVID-19 mortality in nursing homes has risen in recent months as we head into winter.
The author, Emily Paulin, does NOT mention the common experience of older people repeatedly falling ill with COVID-19 even after receiving multiple boosters. She also doesn’t mention a word about TREATING nursing home residents who fall ill with COVID-19. Four years after this mess began, an AARP writer about nursing home policy still has nothing to say about treating the illness.
Reading this article reminded me of a Joe Rogan podcast I watched yesterday in which his guest—an earnest and callow young man who says “like” every fourth word—asserts the following two propositions:
1). Most popular sports were conceived and developed to give men an advantage over women. For example, in basketball, “the way the ball moves” gives biological males an advantage.
2). Biological males who receive gender reassignment procedures to become women have NO advantage over women in sports.
The same kind of insanity is also evident among the foreign policy crowd that continues to advocate the war in Ukraine. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are run into the meat grinder of Russian defensive positions in the eastern part of the country, these lunatics continue to insist that the Ukrainians KEEP DOING THIS until they get their desired result.
All of the above is further evidence of the mental illness underlying what I call the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle:
1). COVID-19 vaccines are saving mankind. Anyone who questions the safety and efficacy of the vaccines is guilty of heresy.
2). The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is a sacred mission and NO negotiated settlement with Russia shall be countenanced. Anyone who criticizes the Ukrainian and U.S. governments, and any attempt to understand the war from the Russian point of view, is guilty of heresy. Indeed, as Ukraine’s American, transgender military spokeswoman asserted back in September, journalists who question this article of faith should be hunted down and killed.
3). Human induced climate change will soon destroy the earth if trillions aren’t spent to overhaul our entire energy policy. Anyone who questions this proposition is guilty of heresy.
4). The concept of biological sex is a mere “construct.” Skilled surgeons and endocrinologists can transform a boy into a girl or vice versa. Anyone who questions this assertion is guilty of heresy.
For my part, I have lost all patience with people who subscribe to the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle. In my view, they have become indistinguishable from sleep-deprived children. There is no sense in trying to have a conversation or reason with them. I can only hope that their insane assertions and conduct will ultimately be rejected by the great majority of adults in the United States and the rest of the world.
State Dept Shakedown: US Slaps ‘Ultimatum’ on Greece in Bid to ‘Extort’ More Ukraine Aid
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 10.01.2024
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Greece on January 6 as part of his latest diplomatic push over the spiraling Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The top US diplomat jumped at the opportunity to wring a promise from Athens to fork out more aid for Ukraine.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken presented Greece’s Prime Minister a humiliating “ultimatum” when he visited Athens recently, Greek media outlets claim.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis was reportedly given just a few days to decide on a shipment of new weapons systems to the regime in Kiev. Blinken had made a stopover in Greece during his shuttle diplomacy trip linked to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, driven by fears of greater regional spillover. But amid the growing difficulty of wrestling more aid packages to Kiev amid ‘Ukraine fatigue’ prompted the US top diplomat to stoop to “extortion,” wrote the outlets.
As it is, Greece, a NATO member and US ally, was one of the first to send military aid to Ukraine. “Greece has already given everything, it has breached national defense, especially on the islands, in order to support Ukraine with defense material,” wrote the publications.
“What exactly does Blinken want us to send to [Ukraine’s President] Zelensky, who is collapsing on all fronts?.. It goes without saying that if Mitsotakis succumbs to the blackmail, it will cause unimaginable damage to our national interests,” Greek media warned.
Greece is one of the countries that rushed to provide military and financial assistance to Ukraine in order to impose the tyranny of Kiev on the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has stated.
Last year, Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos boasted about the transfer of an “incredible amount” of weapons to the Zelensky regime. In August, Athens opted to join a coalition of countries training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets.
Back in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated at an Athens press conference with Mitsotakis that the sides had also adopted a joint declaration in which Mitsotakis committed Greece to continuing military support for Ukraine. Moreover, Athens vowed to support Kiev’s aspirations to join NATO.
In response, Greece’s largest opposition party, the Coalition of the Radical Left – Progressive Alliance (SYRIZA) slammed the moves, saying that they amount to Greece’s “direct military involvement” in the Ukraine conflict.
Moscow has repeatedly condemned the supply of weapons to Ukraine by Western countries and accused the US-led West of trying to prolong the conflict. In early June 2023, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated that the goals of the military operation would be achieved despite shipments of foreign weapons to Kiev, which would undoubtedly cause Ukraine “more suffering.”
West got Ukraine ‘painfully wrong’ – EU state’s PM
RT | January 10, 2024
Funding and arming Ukraine is a “futile waste of human resources and money” that will serve only to fill Ukrainian cemeteries with “thousands of dead soldiers,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico wrote in an op-ed on Tuesday. Fico’s article was a rebuttal to his country’s president, who has urged him to send weapons to Kiev.
Following his party’s electoral victory in September, Fico immediately cut off Slovakia’s military aid to Ukraine and vowed to block Kiev’s accession to NATO. Slovak President Zuzana Caputova, however, has called for Ukraine to be given “the means needed to defend itself,” while pro-Western pundits in Slovakia have accused Fico of cozying up to the Kremlin.
“I will no longer be subject to stupid liberal and progressive demagoguery,” Fico wrote in Slovakia’s Pravda newspaper. “It is literally shocking to see how the West has repeatedly made mistakes in assessing the situation in Russia.”
Despite pumping Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and sanctioning Moscow’s economy, “Russia completely controls the occupied territories militarily, Ukraine is not capable of any meaningful military counter-offensive, [and] it has become completely dependent on financial aid from the West with unforeseeable consequences for Ukrainians in the years to come,” he explained.
“The position of the Ukrainian president is shaken, while the Russian president increases and strengthens his political support,” Fico continued, pointing out that “neither the Russian economy nor the Russian currency collapsed, [and] anti-Russian sanctions have increased the internal self-sufficiency of this huge country.”
Should the West continue along the path desired by Caputova, “in two or three years we will still be where we are now,” Fico predicted. “The EU alone will be perhaps 50 billion euros lighter, and in Ukraine, cemeteries will be full with thousands more dead soldiers.”
Fico’s Slovak Social Democracy (SMER-SD) faction currently leads a three-party coalition government, while Caputova is the co-founder of the Progressive Slovakia party. Caputova’s role as president is largely ceremonial, and Fico claimed in his op-ed that she is “impatiently waiting” for the end of her term this year so that she can re-enter parliamentary politics.
Fico has labeled Caputova an “American agent” on several occasions. After consulting the American Embassy in Bratislava last summer, Caputova sued Fico over the remarks, Slovakia’s SITA news agency reported.
Wall Street Journal Sets Standard for Irresponsible Journalism in Ukraine
By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | January 10, 2024
Recently, The Wall Street Journal joined the flood of American mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, Politico and several others, in preparing the American public for a Russian victory.
After nearly two years, over $113 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money spent at horrendous cost in life and limb has put Ukraine in a worse bargaining position than they were at the start of the war. As many as 50,000 Ukrainians are now amputees. And though statistics on Ukrainian casualties are a tightly sealed state secret, the most plausible sources suggest casualties and fatalities as staggering as 400,000-500,000. These numbers fit with internal Ukrainian communications that suggest that maintaining their numbers on the field would require replacing 20,000 soldiers a month. The same figure has been given in a New York Times article that quoted a former battalion commander who “estimated that Ukraine will need to enlist 20,000 soldiers a month through next year to sustain its army, both replacing the dead and wounded.” 20,000 over an approximately two year war puts the figure well over 400,000. Most recently, Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general and ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, has said that 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded. Interestingly, it is Moscow that provides the most conservative figures. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu recently said that Ukraine has lost over 215,000 soldiers in 2023 with over 383,000 killed or wounded since the war began.
The 400,000-500,000 figure for Ukrainian soldiers lost to the battlefield by casualties and deaths also matches the 450,000-500,000 number that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says the military has requested in a new mobilization. In another sign of a battle between Zelensky and Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny, after Zelensky assigned responsibility to the military for requesting the unpopular draft, Zaluzhny placed the responsibility back on the government, denying that the military had ever formally requested the mobilization or provided the number.
The Wall Street Journal laid the psychological groundwork preparing the American public for defeat in Ukraine, despite the loss of Ukrainian lives and American dollars, with the line “Even if aid for Ukraine is renewed, it is essential to consider a realistic ending for the war.” It goes on to say that, though “Ukraine’s insistence on regaining all the territory Russia has seized since 2014 is understandable…events over the past year have made it clear that this goal can’t be achieved anytime soon.” The article concludes with the prescription that “Western leaders should explore” negotiations to end the fighting, calling it “a bitter pill” but “the only realistic path to a lasting peace in Europe.”
But it is in two short paragraphs near the end of the article that The Wall Street Journal does its readers a disservice by leaving out more information than it gives them, challenging the standards for responsible journalism.
The first of the two paragraphs state, “Recent reports, which Mr. Putin hasn’t denied, suggest that he is ready to agree to a cease-fire along the current battle lines. Although he is unwilling to retreat, these reports indicate that he had shelved his aim to dominate all of Ukraine.”
Though The Wall Street Journal is free to speculate that Vladimir Putin aimed to “dominate all of Ukraine,” it is also obliged to clarify that there is nothing on the documented historical record to indicate that Putin ever had dominating all of Ukraine as an objective. Scholar John Mearsheimer has pointed out, “There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state and make it part of greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24th.” That has also never been one of Putin’s stated goals of the military operation. His list of goals has consistently been that Ukraine cannot join NATO, that NATO won’t turn Ukraine into a heavily armed anti-Russian country on its border, and that the rights of ethnic Russian Ukrainians be protected. Russia has clearly stated that it “support[s] Ukraine’s territorial integrity” if Ukraine returns to the promise of permanent neutrality upon which Russia first recognized Ukrainian independence in 1991.
In the next paragraph, the article insists that “there are good reasons to be skeptical” that Putin is serious about negotiating a peace that would abandon his ambition to dominate Ukraine. But, though the author has the right to be skeptical, he needs to set out what those “good reasons” are because, once again, they ignore the historical record.
An overwhelming host of people who were present at the Istanbul talks have testified to just how close Russia and Ukraine came to a negotiated peace in the early days of the war. But in questioning Putin’s seriousness about negotiating a peace, The Wall Street Journal ignores reporting that came out several days before its own reporting that former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Oleksandr Chalyi, who was a member of the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, says that Putin was very serious about negotiating.
After reminding his audience at a debate in Geneva that he was actually there, Chalyi says that during the Istanbul talks “in March and April,” they “concluded [the] so called Istanbul Communique. And we were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.” Chalyi reports that Putin personally decided to accept the text of the Communique and that Putin “demonstrated a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.”
The Journal article then goes to claim that Putin’s Ukraine ambitions are merely part of a larger “plan to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” As evidence, the writer cites Putin’s 2005 statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Putin did say that. But like other quotations made by Putin, it is employed misleadingly by omitting its context. First of all, he did not call it “the greatest” catastrophe but “a major” disaster. But the catastrophe after the fall he is referring to is not the absence of the Soviet Union but, primarily, the economic hardship that followed in the wake of its break up. He bemoaned that “individual savings were depreciated” and oligarchs “served exclusively their own corporate interests.” He remembered that “mass poverty began to be seen as the norm.”
The misleading strategy employed here is similar to the one frequently employed when Putin is quoted as having said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart,” without adding that his next words were, “Whoever wants it back has no brain.” The first part refers to the same events Putin bemoans in the statement quoted in the Journal article; the second part entirely changes the claimed meaning by restoring the first to its context.
The Wall Street Journal article seems to be part of a media psychological campaign to prepare Americans for a Russian victory in Ukraine despite the massive expense in American aid, American weapons, and Ukrainian lives. But it could better prepare them for the inevitable negotiations that it predicts by honestly preparing them with the truth about the causes of the war and about the demonstrated possibility of negotiations, an understanding of which will be necessary if those negotiations are to succeed.
London, Paris and Kiev break arms control regime with recent cruise missile deliveries
By Drago Bosnic | January 10, 2024
On January 9, Avia.pro reported that the Kiev regime is expecting a “significant strengthening of their arsenal thanks to supplies from France”. Citing Le Figaro as its primary source, the report claims that France plans to send at least 85 SCALP-EG air-launched, long-range cruise missiles. The missiles are the French iteration of the “Storm Shadow”, a UK design that has been used by the Neo-Nazi junta since at least May last year. Various sources indicate that there are approximately 50 French-made SCALP-EG missiles in its arsenal, while it’s extremely likely there are even more of the UK-made “Storm Shadow” ones. The Kiev regime itself has been bragging about the supposed effectiveness of these weapons, although the Russian military is claiming it has managed to adapt most of its air defenses to both versions of the missile.
However, while it’s certainly true that Moscow has superb air defenses and the world’s most advanced SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems, the Neo-Nazi junta is boasting about having the non-export version of the “Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG” missiles. Namely, the United Kingdom, France, Ukraine and over 30 other countries are members of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a multilateral export control regime that limits the proliferation of missiles and related technologies that could ease their development and manufacturing. MTCR came into force in 1987, when the political West was terrified of the prospect of having second-to-none Soviet missile technologies proliferate to other countries. This would’ve made it impossible for the belligerent power pole to conduct its endless wars of aggression.
And indeed, if Serbia/former Yugoslavia, as well as countless other countries in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere had access to such technologies, it’s highly unlikely that the likes of NATO would’ve had the chance to invade as easily as it did. Officially, the MTCR seeks to limit the export of missiles and weapons that would be capable of delivering a warhead of at least 500 kg to a range of at least 300 km. This also refers to any hardware, software and other technologies that could aid in the development of such weapon systems. However, in essence, the MTCR is only disguised as an arms control agreement that supposedly seeks to “ensure peace”. In reality, the political West honors such agreements only when it suits it geopolitically and militarily, after which it’s rejected as allegedly “unnecessary”.
Both the United States and NATO as a whole have a history of unilaterally breaking international arms control treaties that prevent large-scale conflicts. The MTCR is no different in this regard, as it already served its purpose, so now it’s more of an obstacle than a geopolitical asset. By delivering the non-export version of the “Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG” missiles, the political West continues to probe the Russian military. This move will certainly result in a significant strengthening of the Neo-Nazi junta’s long-range strike capabilities. By creating an additional threat to Russian military infrastructure in the regions around Ukraine, NATO is seeking to disrupt the special military operation (SMO) as much as possible. Officially, this is done with minimal direct participation in order to avoid implicating the political West.
However, in reality, military specialists from various NATO member states have been in Ukraine for years, making sure that the Kiev regime forces can stay as functional as possible against a technologically superior opponent. This is an obvious red line for Moscow and there are a number of ways in which it can respond to such escalation. Admittedly, there’s very little Russia can do to prevent the delivery of such weapons to the Neo-Nazi junta. On the other hand, although the Kiev regime is desperate to keep the global spotlight on itself only, Ukraine is certainly not the world’s sole geopolitical hotspot. There are numerous other places where the Western neocolonialist system can be damaged beyond repair or even destroyed entirely. Russia could simply use NATO’s MTCR violations to arm its allies around the world.
By delivering weapons previously banned by the MTCR, Moscow would not only strengthen the standing of its many partners, particularly the new members of the growing BRICS+ framework, but it would also hurt the political West’s neocolonialist ambitions and, by extension, its extremely exploitative economic system. This is particularly true in Africa, where countries like France and the UK are still maintaining their (neo)colonial empires through all sorts of direct and indirect meddling. By limiting their space for geopolitical maneuver, Moscow could make it impossible to maintain these leftover (neo)colonialist structures and hurt the long-term interests of NATO’s foremost powers. This is perhaps best seen in countries like Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, among others in Africa, as well as Latin America and South Asia.
It should be noted that the UK and France are not the only Western countries that are violating or close to violating the MTCR. Although they’re the most prominent ones, as the delivery and integration of “Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG” missiles on the Neo-Nazi junta’s Soviet-era Su-24M tactical bombers has proven to be a major contributing factor to the escalation of the conflict, other NATO/EU members are increasingly involved in similar moves.
What’s more, when the political West talks about sending certain weapons, it usually means they’ve already been delivered. The Kiev regime has been pushing for the deliveries of a similar German-Swedish weapon, the 500 km range “Taurus” missile. Although Berlin’s official position is that it supposedly “doesn’t want the conflict to escalate”, its resurgent “Drang nach Osten” ambitions speak for themselves.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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UAE tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization
The Cradle | October 31, 2026
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause. … continue
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