Lebanon is expecting the visit of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week at a time when the Lebanese economic-political map is being redrawn and while Lebanon is suffering its most serious economic downturn in recent history.
Reasons for the deterioration of the local economy include not only the corruption of Lebanon’s political leadership and lower level administration but also US sanctions imposed on Iran. The latest sanctions are the harshest ever imposed. They will also dramatically affect Lebanon so long as President Donald Trump is in power if Lebanon does not follow US policy and dictates.
If, as anticipated, Washington declares economic war on Lebanon, the sanctions will leave Lebanon few alternatives. They may force Lebanon to fall back on Iranian civilian industry to overcome US economic pressure, and to rely on the Russian military industry to equip Lebanese security forces. This will be the result if Pompeo insists on threatening Lebanese officials, as his assistants have done on previous visits to the country. The consistent message from US officials has been: you’re either with us or against us.
Politically, Lebanon is divided between two currents, one pro-US (and Saudi Arabia) and another outside the US orbit. The economic situation may well increase internal division to the point that the local population reacts angrily in order to exclude the US and its allies from influence in Lebanon.
Such a scenario may still be avoided if Saudi Arabia injects enough investment to reboot the agonising local economy. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia fears that those who are not aligned with its policies and those of the US could benefit from its support. To date, Riyadh has not fully understood the internal Lebanese dynamic and what it is possible or impossible to achieve in Lebanon. The kidnapping of the Prime Minister Saad Hariri was the most flagrant indication of Saudi ignorance of Lebanese politics. The Saudis’ lack of strategic vision in Lebanon will likely prevent any serious support to the failing economy and may lead the country into serious instability.
Before 1982, one US dollar was equivalent to 3 Lebanese Lira. This was in part because the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was spending tens of millions of dollars in the country on its own people and on Palestinian families living in Lebanon. Moreover, United Nations organisations (UNRWA) and other NGOS were also distributing financial support to Palestinian refugees whose homes had been taken by Israel forcing them to leave their country.
Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the PLO was forced to leave the country. Not much later, one US dollar reached an exchange rate of 3000 Lebanese Lira, later devalued to stabilise at the current rate of 1$ for 1500 L.L. Iran entered the scene to support local Lebanese fighters (the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, i.e. Hezbollah) to recover their territory from Israeli occupation. In the year 2000, Iran began to make a serious investment in Hezbollah as the group managed to force the Israelis out of most Lebanese territory. Iranian financial investment had reached a very high level by the 2006 war when Israel was prevented from disarming Hezbollah to keep its rockets and missiles out of range of Israel.
In 2013, the Syrian government asked Hezbollah to support the Syrian Army to prevent disintegration of the country and to keep Takfiri militants from taking over. Iran pumped billions of dollars to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda and to prevent them from overwhelming Syria and Iraq, aware that Iran would be the next target. The budget for Hezbollah troops went sky high. Support for movements of troops, logistics and daily allowances given to fighters, contributed to boosting the Lebanese economy. Hezbollah’s monthly budget went much beyond $100 million per month.
But after the arrival of Donald Trump in power and his rejection of the Iran nuclear deal, the US government has imposed the severest sanctions on Iran and halted donations to the United Nations organisations supporting Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). Sanctions on Iran have forced a new budget on Hezbollah, a five-year austerity plan. Forces have been reduced to a minimum number in Syria, movement of troops are slowed accordingly and all additional remunerations are suspended. Hezbollah reduced its budget to a quarter of what it had been without suspending any militants or contractors’ monthly salaries and medical care as stipulated by a personal order from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Secretary General.
This new financial situation will affect the Lebanese economy as cash flow and foreign currency dry up. The consequences are expected to be more noticeable in the coming months, leading to a plausible domestic reaction from the local population that will feel the weight of the failing economy.
The US and Europe are imposing strict controls on any monies transferred to and from Lebanon. The country is on a financial blacklist and there is tight scrutiny on all transactions. Religious donations from abroad are no longer possible since they expose donors to serious accusations of support for terrorism by western countries.
As long as Trump is in power, Hezbollah and Iran believe the situation will remain critical; they estimate that the US President will most probably enjoy a second term. The next five years are expected to be hard on the Lebanese economy, particularly if Pompeo’s visit brings messages and dictates that Lebanon cannot obey.
Pompeo wants Lebanon to give up on its demand to redraw its disputed water borders with Israel, compromising on blocks 8, 9 and 10 to the benefit of Israel. This request will not be granted and Lebanese officials have said on several occasions that they are relying on Hezbollah’s precision missiles to stop Israel from stealing Lebanese water.
Pompeo also wants Lebanon to give up on Hezbollah and its role in government. Again, the US establishment seems ignorant that Hezbollah is almost a third of Lebanon’s population, enjoying the support of more than half of Lebanese Shia, Christian, Sunni and Druse, with official members in the executive and legislative authorities of the country.
What then is the alternative? If Saudi Arabia moves in, Lebanon doesn’t need one or two or five billion but tens of billions of dollars to resuscitate its economy. It also needs a hands-off policy from the US establishment to allow the country to govern itself.
The Saudis are already suffering from Trump’s bullying, and their funds are drying up. If Saudi decides to invest in Lebanon, it will seek to impose terms not much different from US demands. Saudi Arabia engages in wishful thinking when it aims to expel Iran’s influence and Hezbollah supporters from Lebanon, an impossible goal to fulfil.
Lebanon’s remaining choices are few. Lebanon can move closer to Iran to lower its expenditures and the cost of goods, and it can ask Russia to support the Lebanese army if the West fails to do so. China is preparing to move in and can be a positive alternative for the country, using Lebanon as a platform to reach Syria and later Iraq and Jordan. Otherwise, Lebanon will have to prepare to join the list of poorest countries.
A shadow is hanging over the land of the cedars, a country that has already had to fight for survival in the 21stcentury. Hezbollah, now subject to US and UK sanctions, is the same force that protected the country from ISIS and other takfiri fighters who threatened to expel Christians from the country, in accordance with French President Sarkozy’s advice to the Lebanese patriarch that Lebanese Christians abandon their homes. The takfiri jihadists and NATO shared the same intentions for Lebanon. The failure of the US establishment’s plan to divide Iraq and create a failed state in Syria as part of a “new Middle East” woke the Russian bear from its long hibernation. Today Russia competes with the US for hegemony in the Middle East, obliging Trump to pull out all the stops in an attempt to break the anti-US front.
It is a battle with no taboos where all blows are permitted. The US is pushing Lebanon into a bottleneck with no alternatives to closer partnership with Iran and Russia.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has made an unprecedented visit to the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in his first US visit before a meeting with US President Donald Trump scheduled on Tuesday.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, a lawmaker and son of the Brazilian president confirmed the visit on Monday, calling the intelligence agency one of the “most respected” in the world.
“Going now with president Jair Bolsonaro and ministers of the CIA, one of the most respected intelligence agencies in the world. It’ll be an excellent opportunity to speak about international relations topics in the region with experts and the technicians of the highest level,” he said in a tweet.
Eduardo Bolsonaro claimed the meeting was to discuss “international themes in the region”.
Leading Brazilian daily O Globo reported that Bolonsaro visited the agency along with Brazilian Justice Minister Sergio Moro, noting that the visit had not been published in the president’s public agenda and that press was not allowed to accompany Bolonsaro in the event.
The CIA had no comment on the visit.
Observers believe the unusual visit further signals Bolsonaro’s shift towards Washington. The move is, however, expected to be received controversially in Brazil.
In 2013, American whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the American National Security Agency (NSA) had wiretapped the conversations of then-President Dilma Rousseff, leading to suspicions towards the US and its spy agencies.
Former Brazilian Foreign Minster Celso Amorim has also slammed the meeting, saying that “no Brazilian president had ever paid a visit to the CIA.”
“This is an explicitly submissive position. Nothing compares to this,” he added.
Bolsonaro originally arrived in the US on Sunday, stating that the trip marked the first “pro-America Brazilian president” recently visiting the country.
“It’s the beginning of a partnership focused on liberty and prosperity, something that all of us Brazilians have long wished for,” he said.
Bolsonaro is an ardent admirer of US President Donald Trump and the White House’s policies, particularly those with regard to opposing left-wing governments in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The Brazilian president, who is also known as “Tropical Trump,” has sparked controversy by following Trump on calling for the relocation of his country’s embassy to the occupied city of Jerusalem al-Quds.
Bolsonaro personally made the promise to Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu while he attended the Brazilian president’s inauguration ceremony on January 1.
Last week, however, reports emerged that Bolsonaro may fail to carry out the move following opposition from military officers in his cabinet.
Vice President Hamilton Mourao also objected to the embassy move last month, claiming that the measure would hurt Brazilian exports to Arab countries which include an estimated $5 billion in halal food sales.
Bolsonaro has also said that he is open to considering the establishment of a US military base in Brazil as a way to “counter Russian influence” in neighboring Venezuela.
The move was rejected by Brazilian Defense Minister General Fernando Azevedo e Silva a week later.
The Trump Administration has delivered yet another concession to Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the eve of parliamentary elections: the Israeli military occupation of much of the Palestinian West Bank and of the Golan Heights will no longer be referred to in official U.S. government documents as an occupation. America’s so-called Ambassador to Israel is a former Trump lawyer named David Friedman who is more involved in serving Israel than the United States. He personally supports the view that the illegal Jewish settlements are legitimately part of Israel, choosing to ignore their growth even though it has long been U.S. policy to oppose them. He has also long sought to change the State Department’s language on the Israeli control of the West Bank and Golan Heights, being particularly concerned about the expression “occupied,” which has legal implications. Now he appears to have won that fight, to the delight of the Netanyahu government.
And the expunging of “occupied” might be only the first of many gifts intended to bolster Netanyahu’s chances. Senator Lindsey Graham, who also boasts of his close ties to the Israeli Prime Minister, intends to initiate legislative action to go one step further and compel the United States to actually recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the Syrian territory that was annexed after fighting in 1967, but which has not been recognized as part of Israel by any other country or international body. If a vote on the bill is pushed forward and goes as expected virtually unanimously as the subject before congress is Israel, it would hugely benefit Bibi. Some sources are also predicting that recognition of the Golan Heights could easily lead to U.S. government recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over much of the West Bank.
Israel’s election is scheduled for April 9th, so there is still plenty of time for additional mischief. There have even been suggestions in the Israeli media that Netanyahu just might escalate fighting with any one or more of a number of its neighbors to enhance his wartime leader credentials. That Gaza will be pummeled is a certainty and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria is probably also in the gun-sights. An uncorroborated report last week out of Israel claimed that Hezbollah is operating a “terror cell” in Syria close to the border with Israel. It would serve as a pretext for a bit of military action and America’s own congress-critters would immediately be jumping up and down expressing their support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.” The big prize for Netanyahu would, of course, be success at getting the United States to attack Iran and one can bet that Mossad is cranking up “false flag” plans to bring about such an eventuality while also making it look like the Mullahs were at fault.
Netanyahu, bedeviled by corruption charges against him, is otherwise sinking into his usual pre-election mode, which is to outflank nearly everyone on the intransigent right of Israeli politics. He has entered into a coalition with the openly racist Kahanist party Otzma Yehudit, which most Israelis consider to be close to a Jewish version of fascism as it advocates, among other policies, the forceful expulsion of all Arabs.
Benjamin Netanyahu is also looking for a boost through his attendance at the annual American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) summit, which is being held in Washington from March 24-26. The theme of the conference is, unfortunately, “Connected for Good,” which is clearly a boast by AIPAC rather than an admission of the shameful reality that has been delivered to the American people by a groveling and subservient congress and White House. Co-opting the United States is what it is all about, with the promotional material promising an “UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCE : The AIPAC Policy Conference is the largest gathering of America’s pro-Israel community. The conference is a celebration of the U.S.-Israel partnership and the premier opportunity for every attendee to lobby their Congressional office to advance the U.S.-Israel relationship. The Policy Conference is also a rich educational experience and inspirational booster shot. Attendees will hear keynote speeches by American and Israeli leaders, attend intimate educational sessions, and be wowed by moving stories of U.S.-Israel partnerships, Israeli heroism, and groundbreaking Israeli innovations that are changing our world.”
AIPAC is a seriously threatening organization with income of more than $100 million per annum, nearly 400 employees, 100,000 members, seventeen regional offices, and a “vast pool of donors.” It clearly includes a lot of smart and savvy folks who know a lot about what is going on in the Middle East, but its panels will not include a single word about shooting unarmed protesters, declaring Israel to be a “nation state for Jews alone,” its own acceptance of laws attacking freedom of speech, or its use of Jewish donated money to corrupt the American political system encouraging “allegiance to a foreign country” on the part of U.S. citizens. Bibi will undoubtedly pick up on AIPAC’s cozy theme of inclusiveness by taking the opportunity to burnish his credentials as the leader who can continue to deliver on unlimited and uncritical support from the United States. He will almost certainly meet with President Donald Trump and the two will undoubtedly mention the terrible wave of anti-Semitism that is sweeping the globe, justifying still more ethnic cleansing of the diminishing number of Arabs living in Greater Israel and the bombing of Iran.
Other leading American politicians who will be at AIPAC in supporting rolls include the slimy Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the despicable former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. It will also include numerous other congressmen, administration officials and the usual scumbags who gravitate to these events, including pardoned criminal Elliott Abrams and unindicted felon Senator Robert Menendez. Abrams, who believes that Jews and gentiles should not intermarry, is currently engaged in destroying Venezuela and just might be otherwise occupied.
A number of the “American” government attendees at the event are actually Israeli citizens. Sigal Mandelker, a committed Zionist who holds the perpetually Jewish position of Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the United States Department of Treasury, is an Israeli by birth and it is widely believed that a number of Jewish congressmen and government officials who will be attending the AIPAC conference have dual citizenship. On the conference website’s roster of attendees, it is amusing to see the official photos in which the U.S. legislators and officials are standing in front of the American flag, seemingly disinterested in the irony that what AIPAC is doing is destructive of democracy in America and a sell-out to Israeli interests, undermining those of the United States.
Netanyahu’s most serious opposition in the election appears to be a centrist coalition headed by former Israeli Defense Force chief General Benny Gantz, who has spoken of his pride in killing 1,364 “terrorists” in Gaza, and former Finance Minister Yair Lapid. It is the principal challenge to incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election hopes. Israeli courts have also meanwhile banned several Arab parties while allowing extreme right-wing Jewish parties to appear on the ballot.
Whatever the outcome, the United States will be on the receiving end of what Israel decides to do post-election as Trump and company as well as the Democrats in opposition also have an election coming up next year and will want to receive the Israeli seal of approval. And AIPAC will be right there to make sure that Israel in return gets everything that it so richly deserves. Goodnight America.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Britain is providing “engineering support” for UK-supplied aircraft operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force, responsible for killing innocent people in Yemen, a British government minister has revealed.
Armed Forces Minister Mark Lancaster was responding to a question in parliament from Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, on military personnel seconded to BAE Systems in Saudi Arabia, when he admitted that the RAF have provided engineering and “generic training” to the Saudi Air Force involved in the bombing of Yemen.
“RAF personnel on secondment to BAE Systems in Saudi Arabia have provided routine engineering support for UK-supplied aircraft operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), including aircraft engaged in military operations in Yemen.”
Lancaster insisted UK personnel were not involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties, in response to Russell-Moyle’s claim that the “British support keeps Saudi’s air war going.”
Andrew Smith of Campaign Against the Arms Trade has branded the revelation “shocking but not surprising,” arguing that UK military personnel “should not be servicing Saudi jets or supporting the Saudi armed forces.”
It’s not just the UK that has been widely criticised for being party to the Saudi-led coalition’s bombardment of Yemen.
In December, the US Pentagon revealed that they were having to claw back $331 million of taxpayer-subsidized money gifted to Saudi Arabia and the UAE over a three-year period, when it ‘accidentally’ refueled their aircraft for free during their war on Yemen.
In November, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry accused the UK government of having “blood on its hands” after admitting that the RAF had trained over a hundred Saudi pilots in the past ten years.
Coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have relentlessly bombed Yemen since 2015 in an effort to oust the Houthi rebels controlling the capital city of Sanaa.
They have reportedly targeted hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, leading to a massive cholera outbreak, and upwards of 60,000 people are believed to have died in the conflict since 2016 – with a further 85,000 estimated dead from famine and malnutrition.
Half of Yemen’s population relies on food aid to survive, placing them in immediate danger of starving to death after coalition forces blockaded the port city of Hodeidah last year.
President Hassan Rouhani announced that Tehran will pursue legal action against US officials who imposed sanctions on Iran, adding that the dispute could be brought before an international court.
The Iranian president said that he had ordered the ministries of foreign affairs and justice to “file a legal case in Iranian courts against those in America who designed and imposed sanctions on Iran.”
Describing the unilaterally imposed sanctions as a “crime against humanity,” Rouhani said that if Iranian courts believe there is a strong case against Washington, Tehran would then pursue the legal challenge in international courts of justice. He said that the United States is seeking to “come back to Iran and rule the nation again.”
While dragging US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before an Iranian court may be far-fetched, Tehran has had past success arguing against US sanctions on the international stage. In October, the International Court Of Justice (ICJ) ordered the United States to ensure that its sanctions do not target humanitarian aid or civil aviation safety.
Washington re-imposed sanctions on Tehran after US President Donald Trump decided in May to abandon the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran. Trump’s decision to back out of the deal – which was negotiated with five other world powers – has strained relations between Washington and its European allies, who are now looking to bypass the US-imposed sanctions.
In February, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that despite the US withdrawal from the 2015 accord, Iran was still in full compliance with its commitments towards non-proliferation.
Iran has scoffed at Washington’s stated aim of reducing the country’s oil exports to “zero,” and has repeatedly warned that it is prepared to take military action to protect its oil tankers from US interference.
US National Security Adviser John Bolton has not ruled out that Turkey is a “foe” of the United States, blasting Ankara for maintaining a “very bad” relationship with Washington’s close ally Israel.
When asked by AM 970 radio host John Catsimatidis on Sunday whether Turkey was a “friend or foe” to the US, Bolton refused to give a straight answer and instead cited several major stumbling blocks in ties.
“Well you know they’re still a NATO ally; we’re trying to work with them, but they’ve got a very bad relationship with our close friends in Israel. That’s something we need to look out on,” Bolton said.
A war of words began between Turkey and Israel recently, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau said the occupied territories only belong to the Jewish people and not all citizens.
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin strongly condemned Netanyahu’s “blatant racism and discrimination.”
In response, the Israeli premier called Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator” who jails journalists and judges.
Erdogan, however, called Netanyahu a “thief” and a “tyrant who massacred seven-year-old Palestinian children.”
The war of words continued Friday when the Turkish president rebuked Netanyahu’s son for suggesting the city of Istanbul was under “Turkish occupation”.
“You occupied the whole of Palestine!” Erdogan fired back at Netanyahu’s son, saying it is actually the Tel Aviv regime which has occupied the entire Palestinian land.
Elsewhere in his Sunday comments Bolton said that disagreements “with respect to the conflict in Syria” were another issue affecting bilateral ties between the US and Turkey.
He said US President Donald Trump “would like to have a good relationship with Turkey; he’d like to see US trade with Turkey increase, but we need them to help us out in some of these other problems in Syria and elsewhere in the region.”
US support for YPG militants, whom Ankara views as terrorists and their group an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has angered Turkey.
The US has been arming and training Kurdish militants under the banner of helping them fight Daesh, but Syria and several other countries see ulterior motives behind the deployment.
President Trump’s decision last year to leave Syria has exposed the Kurdish group to possible Turkish attacks.
Fears of a Turkish assault have led the Kurds to strike an agreement with the Syrian government to leave Manbij in exchange for military support in case they come under attack from Turkey.
Turkey, a key US ally in the region, has repeatedly questioned Washington’s deployment of heavy weapons in Syria despite the defeat of Daesh in much of the Arab country.
Bolton slams Turkey over S-400 deal
In his talks to AM 970 radio, Bolton further blasted Turkey for refusing to abandon a deal to purchase S-400 air defense missile systems from Russia, a major obstacle to US-Turkish relations.
“We’re concerned about their purchase of the Russian air defense system called the S-400 – that’s a big problem,” Bolton said.
The United States has warned Turkey of “grave consequences” if Ankara goes ahead with the plan to purchase Russian S-400 missile systems.
Moscow and Ankara finalized an agreement on the delivery of the S-400 missile systems in December 2017.
Last April, Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said in Ankara that they had agreed to expedite the delivery which could be made between late 2019 and early 2020.
Washington has reportedly proposed to deliver one US-made Patriot missile battery by the end of 2019, on the condition that Ankara abandons the deal with Moscow.
The S-400 is an advanced Russian missile system designed to detect, track, and destroy planes, drones, or missiles as far as 402 kilometers away. It has previously been sold only to China and India.
Turkey is striving to boost its air defense, particularly after Washington decided in 2015 to withdraw its Patriot surface-to-air missile system from Turkey’s border with Syria, a move that weakened Turkey’s air defense.
Following a few mild words of dissent by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the US House of Representatives was almost united in affirming the special relationship between Israel and the US. (See, for example.) So how is “our most reliable and most important ally” treating us? If ‘our’ includes the US treasury, the answer is that Israel’s banks have been accused of and have admitted to actively colluding with wealthy US taxpayers to avoid US taxes.
On March 12, Israel’s third largest bank, Mizrahi Tefahot, agreed to pay $195 million to the United States to settle charges that the bank knowingly aided tax evasion by US citizens from 2002 until 2012.
Israel’s largest bank, Leumi paid a $400 million dollar fine for similar “criminal activity” that spanned the period from at least 2000 to 2011. Hapoalim, Israel’s second largest bank is presently negotiating a settlement with the US Justice Department. The total settlement from all three banks will amount to over $1 billion.
As conceded by the banks, these tax avoidance schemes have been going on for decades. Israel’s Supervisor of Banks, Hedva Ber, noted the longevity of this practice: “Twenty years ago, Israeli banks did not ask customers about the source of their money and did not ask if they had paid taxes or not.” But the issue is not limited to banks failing to inquire about the source of funds, these admissions of actively aiding tax evasion show that “Israeli banks… for decades helped Diaspora Jews evade taxes and launder money on a major scale.”
According to Hevda Ber, for many years Israeli banks provided essentially the same services to foreigners that Swiss banks gave, minus Switzerland’s banking secrecy laws. Actually, according to the settlements and to criminal cases against US taxpayers, Israel’s banks not only did indeed offer American customers secrecy for bank accounts, (Leumi admitted to failing to send statements to the US addresses of over 2,400 customers) but also provided ways for US citizens to bring untaxed income back to the US without paying US taxes.
For instance, for over twelve years in the 1970s and 1980s, the Antar family, owners of the discount electronics chain Crazy Eddie, laundered money through Bank Leumi. Sam Antar described to the Times of Israel how he and his family transferred a total of about $10 million in unreported cash by handing a briefcase full of cash to a Bank Leumi employee in New York and then receiving an equivalent suitcase the next day on an El Al flight to Israel.
Here was the challenge of withdrawing that money as described by Anton. “Say I had $10 million in Israel, and I needed to use that money over here in New York. They couldn’t wire me the funds because the account is secret. This money is hidden from the US government to evade income taxes.” So, according to Antar, Bank Leumi in New York would give him a low interest rate loan secured by Antar’s assets in Israel. The paperwork for the loan concealed the fact that Antar had money deposited in Israel.
Similarly, and according to court documents, Elie Waknine, of Huntington Beach, California, held millions of dollars in an account at Bank Leumi. Waknine’s tax returns falsely claimed he did not have any foreign accounts. Bank Leumi did not send bank mail to Waknine’s home in the United States. Leumi allowed Waknine to access his accounts through certain ‘loans’ issued by Leumi’s U.S. branch that were secretly secured by funds in his undeclared accounts in Israel.
The Times of Israel notes that the fact that three of Israel’s major banks have been under criminal investigation by the US Justice Department for allegedly helping thousands of US citizens launder money and evade taxes has garnered remarkably little public attention. The Jewish press covered the Mizrahi Tefahot settlement, but the New York Times gave only a short summary and I could find no mention in the Wall Street Journal.
In comparison, the 2016 Panama Papers leak of offshore bank account holders led to street protests around the world, the resignation of Iceland’s prime minister, and countless investigations.
According to David Shuster, a lawyer who represents a number of American citizens who had undisclosed bank accounts in Israel, the lack of publicity is understandable because none of the actors involved are interested in the limelight. The Department of Justice’s goal is tax enforcement and the banks are “going to say as little as possible. The more they say, the more evidence can be brought against them.”
Mr. Shuster may be right, but he fails to account for the dearth of reporting about Israel’s banks as compared to the Panama Papers or even the recently uncovered money laundering activities of certain European banks. I suspect in the present atmosphere of heightened paranoia over anti-Semitism, the press may be reluctant to touch a financial scandal in which most of the participants are Jewish. Maybe they have taken into consideration that much of the outrage over Omar’s observations about Israel was over her accusation that “it’s all about the Benjamins.”
The banning of four Nation of Islam Black history books by Amazon, the largest bookseller in the world, provides a perfect opportunity to examine the wickedly racist ways Jewish power is wielded in America. Amazon provided no warning, no reason, no hearing, and no opportunity to respond—it was a blatant mockery of Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos’s own creed, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It is, however, perfect proof of what The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad said: the mental resurrection of Black people will anger our oppressors and cause them to react punitively and viciously.
Bezos’s book purge came in the midst of the extraordinary political spectacle engineered by an awakened Congressional wonder woman named Ilhan Omar. Her exposé of the Zionist-Judaic underbelly of the American political system happened in the most unflattering way. Rep. Omar asked, “Why is it ok for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil fuel industries, or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby that is influencing policy?” She was referring to AIPAC, of course, the most powerful foreign lobbying group, which, while protesting that it was powerless, promptly brought ALL the business of the United States of America to a screeching halt to demand an instantaneous group hug from the 535 Congressional members on its payroll!
The tweet heard ’round the Jewish world.
Rep. Omar’s adroit maneuver exposed the fact that 12 of the top 20 political donors to the American election system are Jewish Zionists, their money amounting to a whopping 78% of the total contributed. What began as a campaign to officially repudiate, isolate, and control this freshman Muslim phenom, dramatically backfired. In effect, she forced the nearly all-white boys’ club to go on record to condemn “discrimination and bigotry against minorities as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contrary to the values and aspirations of the United States.” Symbolic, for sure—but Dr. King couldn’t do it; Pres. Obama couldn’t do it. It took but a few weeks and a tweet for Ilhan Omar. She even signed the resolution. For the first time, the annual March meeting of the AIPAC caliphate will have far more attention than it wants, and Omar’s political star rises ever higher.
It’s been that kind of year for the satanic “Jews,” who have had a hell of a time trying to keep alive a plausible mythology about themselves while maintaining control over their gentile brethren and over the non-white world. From all angles and directions new research has chipped away at the holy patina that almost everywhere surrounded in solemn reverence these unholy imposters. A review of the litany of recent Jewish and Israeli crises is in order:
The United Nations issued a report that accuses Israel of “war crimes” when its forces killed 189 people and shot more than 6,100, most clearly unarmed. Israeli “snipers shot at journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities, knowing they were clearly recognizable as such.”
Jewish historians now admit that today’s brutal occupants of Palestine are genetically unrelated to any of the good people in the Bible, thus establishing that their 71-year tyranny in the holy land is but another white supremacist colonization scheme.
Though Israel is one of 200 nations on earth, a google search of the general term “apartheid state” results in nothing but Israel-related articles. And that is reinforced by a damning United Nations report concluding that Israel “has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
There is the increasing momentum of charges that Israel masterminded 9/11 and that Israeli operatives are the likely suspects in the continuing false-flag terrorism attacks around the globe.
So despised is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that it was run out of its “racial mediator” role in last year’s Starbucks incident by a single tweet from activist Tamika Mallory.
The Women’s March continues to grow in influence and power despite Jewish attempts to undermine its progress.
American police departments with atrocious records of racism and shootings in case after case are shown to have been “trained” by ADL and Israeli forces.
Artists and athletes are refusing to perform in Israel, and Black Lives Matter blindsided the ADL with their policy statement on Israel which says that Israel is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”
The manipulation of “anti-Semitism” statistics by the ADL—which were found to be inflated by thousands of “anti-Semitic incidents” that were committed by a single Israeli Jew—has been exposed.
A series of sexual harassment and human trafficking crimes by Jewish men of wealth and prestige has been exposed as epidemic. Names like Weinstein, Lauer, Epstein, Dershowitz, Moonves, Kraft are appearing with unseemly regularity.
Morris Dees was unceremoniously fired from the organization he founded, the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC is the “race issues” arm of the ADL, and has scammed millions from unsuspecting and fearful Blacks and Jews, claiming to be America’s “hate watchdog.” Dees was fired for sexual harassment and for creating an intolerable climate of racism toward the group’s Black staff.
The opioid epidemic—which is now said to be responsible for at least 100 deaths a day—is being laid at the doorstep of the billionaire Jewish Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, makers and relentless pushers of OxyContin. The devastation on the workforce is so extensive that Fed chairman Jerome Powell said in a recent 60 Minutes segment that the OxyContin scourge is negatively affecting the U.S. economy.
Harsh Jewish condemnations of the awakening voices of Black critics of Israel, like Angela Davis, Tamika Mallory, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Marc Lamont Hill, Michelle Alexander, and Alice Walker, have only brought them Black hero status.
The exposure of Israel’s secret and ongoing espionage operation against Black youth in America, called “Israel Cyber Shield,” was a fatal blow against the alleged Black–Jewish “alliance.” The COINTELPRO-like operation is responsible for the attacks on the above-mentioned Black thinkers, as well as the instigation of Amazon’s book purge.
Israel’s longtime face of Apartheid, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was indicted for corruption. His leadership of the now internationally acknowledged genocide against the Palestinians has made it nearly impossible for Israel to maintain international toleration.
Netanyahu merged his right-wing party with the “Jewish Power” Party, the most racist party in Apartheid Israel. And this follows the Knesset’s passing of the nation-state law giving civil rights only to Jews.
The Talmud, the ancient Jewish rabbinical writing that the Israelis would like to make the law of the land, has come into intense scrutiny as a document that says Jesus deserved death by being boiled in excrement and that his blessed mother, Mary, was “a whore.” Israel’s chief rabbi called Black people monkeys, admitting that he learned that from the Talmud.
The college cheating scandal to admit less-than-deserving rich kids to elite schools was masterminded by a Jewish man and brought focus on other, past college scams that benefitted Jews.
Black Jews in America are now in open revolt against white Jews, with their main spokesperson, Nylah Burton, publicly declaring, “that the only way to fix the Black-Jewish alliance is to destroy it….We need to destroy the idea that Black people owe white Jewish people support because some Jews marched with Martin Luther King more than half a century ago…” Black Jews in Israel have long suffered discrimination, poverty, and police violence.
Boston Globe columnist S.I. Rosenbaum had to admit what the Nation of Islam has always known: “A shocking number of Jews have become willing collaborators in white supremacy.”
Nothing in the above litany of recent racist Jewish horrors says “Chosen.”
In 2010, The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan wrote a letter to the ADL’s Abraham Foxman and copied all the major Jewish organizational leaders. His warning to them was most certainly prophetic:
“[T]he more you fight and oppose me rather than help me to lift my people from their degraded state, Allah (God) and His Messiah will bring you and your people to disgrace and ruin and destroy your power and influence here and throughout the world. I pray that you will make the wise and best choice.”
Clearly, that “disgrace and ruin” is now here. To this arrogant and intractable Jewish leadership, however, the problem IS NOT their objectionable, detestable behavior—what disturbs them is the mental awakening that they can neither control, curtail, nor redirect.
The above review of recent history is dreadful enough, but it is the long-term Jewish record of wickedness that eats away at the carefully crafted and generationally protected mythology. The sanctimonious Amazon notice is almost comical: Amazon says it prohibits
“[p]roducts that contain violent or offensive material that has no historical significance. Amazon reserves the right to make a determination on the historical value of the item….”
All of academia ought to be frightened at these words, because The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews series by the Nation of Islam is carefully constructed to present the words of the most respected Jewish scholars, and if the “historical value” of these books is now left in the hands of Amazon’s own backroom “historians” (read ADL), and not determined by readers themselves, we have a book burning of the Nazi variety. Each of the NOI books delves into the lengthy and contentious history of interactions of Blacks and Jews—through the eyes of Jewish scholars, historians, and rabbis. No matter the scholarly source, Jews MUST control the intellectual diet of the goyim at any cost and create the false idols they worship.
An accompanying ADL-Amazon notice: “We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience and remove that content from sale.” Each of the NOI books had hundreds of reader reviews with a collective rating of 5 of 5 stars. So the “customer experience” is evident—by Amazon’s standards, such as they are. It is entirely understandable that some of Amazon’s customers may have had a poor or even shocking experience with the content of the 4-book Secret Relationship series. But that, in truth, is only proof that they are woefully ignorant of the voluminous works of their own Jewish scholars.
Sins of the Fathers
It is useful, then, for those who have not seen or read the four controversial Nation of Islam books, to present some of the most provocative content to understand why in 2019 Goliath—after nearly 25 years of selling Secret Relationship—has now outlawed slings and smooth stones (1 Samuel 17:40). And though the book series is fully footnoted, replete with literally thousands of citations, references, and sources, for this exercise we pick a few examples from the most celebrated of Jewish scholars (all of them PhDs with impeccable academic credentials, two of them rabbis) that allow the reader to weigh the import of the works—and Amazon’s deceitful ban—in their proper contexts:
(1) In the trans-Atlantic slave trade nine out of ten Africans were shipped to Brazil. Dr. Arnold Wiznitzer described the early Jewish presence there:
“Besides their important position in the sugar industry and in tax farming, they dominated the slave trade….The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices.”
Dr. Wiznitzer was a professor at Jewish Theological Seminary of America and president of the Brazilian-Jewish Institute of Historical Research—even though his words and authority rewrite the popular mythological version of Black–Jewish relations.
(2) According to Simon Wiesenthal Center scholar Dr. Harold Brackman, during the 1600s “slave trading in Brazil became a ‘Jewish’ mercantile specialty in much the same way it had been in early medieval Europe.” Here, almost unwittingly and in a single sentence, Dr. Brackman places Jews at the center of both African and European slavery. Dr. Brackman also wrote, “Jews were about twice as likely to be slave owners as the average white Southerner.”
(3) Rabbi and historian Dr. Bertram W. Korn was the acknowledged expert on 19th-century American Jewry, and a president of the American Historical Society, and on the executive board of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. He wrote:
“It would seem to be realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had need for their services would do so…. Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks.”
Rabbi Korn gives a lecture on the subject that can be heard on the Nation of Islam Research Group website.
(4) Columbia University professor Jonathan Schorsch wrote, “some Jewish merchants routinely possessed enormous numbers of slaves temporarily before selling them off.”
(5) Dr. Abraham Peck was the director of both the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the American Jewish Historical Society in New York, the two leading institutions on American Jewish life and history, as well as the director of the Holocaust Museum Houston. Dr. Peck was unmistakably clear:
“The first two centuries of the Black–Jewish encounter in America were highlighted by a fairly extensive record of Jewish slave-holding. Indeed, during the colonial period, in the small Jewish community of the time, almost every Jewish household of any form, North or South, possessed at least one slave.”
(6) At the office of the British Jewish Historical Society, there is a bronze bust of the celebrated Jewish historian Dr. Cecil Roth, who with his many awards and honors was the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Judaica. He wrote that the Black slave revolts in parts of South America “were largely directed against [Jews], as being the greatest slave-holders of the region.” Jews set up militias with the sole purpose of destroying Africans who had escaped from Jewish plantations. The Jewish militias murdered the escaped slaves and cut off their hands to award to their fellow Jews as trophies.
(7) In his 1983 book Jews and Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Dr. Marc Lee Raphael, the longtime editor of the most prestigious of Jewish historical journals, the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, published one of the most definitive statements on Jewish involvement in the Black Holocaust. In Brazil, “Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade.”
“In fact,” he stated, “in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.” He continues:
“This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the ‘triangular trade’ that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies…”
(8) The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that “Jewish commercial activity” in the time of the Triangular Trade and its Middle Passage included a “monopoly of the slave trade.” It also states: “[T]he cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them.”
The fact is that Amazon and the ADL can no longer conceal the incredible collection of facts in The Secret Relationship Series that place the Jewish people among the Black man’s worst historical enemies. What had previously been considered the racist acts of white Christians alone are now shown to have had significant Jewish culpability. Jewish merchants owned, insured, and financed slave ships and Jewish chandlers outfitted them with chains and shackles. Jews became the major traders in “refuse slaves”—Africans who were weak and sick from the Middle Passage voyage. Jewish traders bought them cheap, “fattened them up,” and sold them at a profit. The Gradis family of Jewish shippers had a monopoly on trade to the notorious slave dungeon at Gorée Island—the Auschwitz of the Black Holocaust. They owned 26 ships and extensive plantations in the French colonies St. Domingo and Martinique, and they developed a plan to import 10,000 slaves into Louisiana. When early New Yorkers decided to start slavery in the colony, records show they contacted “the jobbers and the Jews,” who were the recognized international dealers. The largest shipments of Africans arriving in New York in the first half of the 1700s were commissioned by Jewish merchants.
These are irrefutable examples of the Jewish scholars whose works on this subject are represented in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, Volume One. And all of those Jewish works remain unassailed and ready to purchase at Amazon.com, where they face no “community standards,” sanctions, or even a review. In stark contrast to the massive evidence of slave-trading Jews is this damning 1853 statement by America’s leading abolitionist organization: Jews “have never taken any steps whatever” against slavery. Dr. Brackman adds that the most influential rabbi in America, Isaac Mayer Wise, believed that abolitionism “was the major threat to Jewish existence.”
And that just covers a small portion of the contents of The Secret Relationship, Vol. 1. Volume Two of The Secret Relationship series, released in 2010, quotes B’nai B’rith officials like Bernard Postal, whose 1928 Jewish Tribune article is titled “Jews in the Ku Klux Klan: Klan-Like Organizations Have Existed Since the Adoption of the Constitution; Jews Played a Part in All of Them.” Volume Two traces the earliest investment in the KKK to the Jewish slave owner and Confederate leader Judah P. Benjamin. Nation of Islam researchers uncovered a photo of a proud Jewish merchant receiving 50 roses from hooded klansmen in a public park to celebrate his “golden business anniversary.”
The post-slavery sharecropping system that kept the ex-slave in desperate poverty and ignorance for decades after emancipation was a product of the vast network of Jewish bankers, moneylenders, and cotton traders, who flooded the South to reap the immense cotton profits.
The Jewish wealth generated from these slavery- and Jim Crow-based enterprises helped finance Jewish community development, built synagogues, homes, schools, businesses, and institutions, and in many untold ways enriched their lives, congregations, and communities. Actually, one is hard-pressed to name a single prominent American Jew in the slavery era who did not own slaves or profit from Black African slavery.
Over centuries Jews built this prodigious and ill-gotten wealth, then wrote themselves out of the history of slavery, and left the white Gentiles to take the entire blame for the slave trade, slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow.
The 144-page companion volume to the Secret Relationship series is titled Jews Selling Blacks: Slave-Sale Advertising By American Jews. In effect, this collection of Jewish advertisements—the largest collection of its kind ever published—is the “dashcam video” of Black–Jewish history. The value of these original documents is that they are not filtered through any historian, rabbi, or scholar. Jewish slave traders PAID to place these ads, and the graphic detail can not be explained away.
For instance, some Jewish scholars have used U.S. census records, which show “modest” Jewish slaveholding, to diminish the role of Jews as major “owners” of Black human beings. This, however, is highly misleading. The 1830 census shows that all the Jews of Charleston, South Carolina, claimed to “own” a total of 104 Black human beings. But a single Jew, Jacob Cohen, on a single day in 1857, offered for sale “125 rice negroes.” That same year, the same Mr. Cohen teamed with a Gentile and advertised almost twice that number—210—in a single day. Those warehoused Africans were not counted in the census records as slaves owned by Cohen, a prominent member of Charleston’s Jewish community. Today, Mr. Cohen might have a seller page on Amazon.com selling slaves as both “new” and “used” and then encouraging 5-star customer feedback.
The third and latest volume of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews was released in 2016 and focuses entirely on the notorious Leo Frank case of 1913–1915, the problematic episode that purportedly started the ADL and the KKK and is reputed to be the worst incident of “anti-Semitism” in American history—except that such claims are untrue. Leo Frank was the B’nai B’rith president in Atlanta and arguably the South’s most important Jew. He was convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old Gentile girl named Mary Phagan and he was ultimately lynched for the crime. She was a child worker at Frank’s factory who came to get her pay and was later found dead. The NOI’s ground-breaking work explodes the notion that Frank was innocent and powerfully refutes the claim that there was any anti-Semitism in the case at all. The common belief in the oppression and victimhood of the Jews in America is based almost entirely on that 1913–1915 incident, and through it they created an entirely new sympathetic image of themselves as friends of and co-sufferers with the racially oppressed.
The NOI’s 536-page meticulously footnoted book (2,000 footnotes and many more citations and references) refutes this century-old propaganda point by point. Frank is proved to be a lecher who had a sordid history of sexual harassment of his 100 gentile girl employees. Frank and his Jewish defenders committed massive perjuries and planted and tampered with evidence, among other felonies—all to frame two Black men for his crime. Court records show that Frank actually claimed that murder and rape were “negro crimes” and thus he, as a white man, could not be guilty! He further said that “negro testimony” was unreliable so the Black witnesses who testified against him should be ignored. As Frank’s lawyer so elegantly told the jury: “If you put a nigger in a hopper, he’ll drip lies,” after referring to one witness as “a dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger.”
Of course, this reality betrays as false the victimhood image that was carefully prepared for Leo Frank, who for a century has been used to portray Jews as friends of Blacks with a common white enemy. So well documented is the NOI research that the grand-niece of the victim and a scholar and author of her own book on the case, Mary Phagan-Kean, wrote this in 2019:
“The Nation of Islam volume is the most well-researched book published regarding the rape and murder of little Mary Phagan to date.”
So completely does the book uncover the hidden truths about this case that one might confidently speculate that it may have actually altered the Congressional “anti-Semitism” resolution that was originally intended to target Rep. Omar. The first draft of the document mentioned the Leo Frank case as the most egregious example of “anti-Semitism” in American history, yet the mention of Leo Frank was removed in the final draft voted on by Congress. After a century of parading an invented history of “anti-Semitism,” the Jewish propagandists may have been forced by the Nation of Islam book to retire the Leo Frank myth.
S.I. Rosenbaum’s assessment in the Boston Globe that “A shocking number of Jews have become willing collaborators in white supremacy” is only shocking in its understatement. This article provides but a page or two of direct Jewish testimony of Jews in the Black Holocaust, but the 1,600-page Secret Relationship Series goes much, much deeper.
And while all this rich and untapped wealth of data has now been banned, any number—even thousands—of books on the African slave trade that not only conceal the Jewish role but place the entire culpability on white gentiles are readily available at Amazon.com. Wholesome offerings to Amazon customers include the full retinue of Jerry Springer program “highlights” he calls “Undressed and Unleashed” and “UNCENSORED!” Also available is Elie Wiesel’s book Legends of Our Time, in which he counsels: “Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy, virile hate—for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.” Meir Kahane’s book The Ideology of Kach is available, even though his Kach party was on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
The Talmud can be purchased on Amazon, though the notorious Jewish “holy book” says some of the ugliest things about Blacks, gentiles, and women ever recorded. And, most significantly, an Amazon customer can still purchase Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with the introduction written by—wait for it—Abraham Foxman of the ADL. This is not to say that these books should be banned, but since Amazon arrogates to itself “the right to make a determination on the historical value of the item,” one can readily see Amazon and Jeffrey Bezos’s supreme hypocrisy.
“The Man of Sin MUST be revealed.”
We are at that moment in time The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us about in His Our Saviour Has Arrived:
The Bible says (Mt. 25:32) “Before Him shall be gathered all nations.” The Holy Qur’an says, “you shall see all nations kneeling before Him and they shall be judged out of their own books. [HQ 45:28]” The government keeps a record of their governmental accounts. They have books in the library and in the courts which tell how they have ruled the people. They have a record of how they have judged the people.
The Nation of Islam researchers are under the direction of The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, whose mission is to expose Satan—a dangerous assignment that necessitates a spiritual and mathematical grounding. 2 Thessalonians 2:3 emphatically states: “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed”—with his own books and his own Jewish scholarship.
The privatizing of the First Amendment and doling out its privileges to Jews alone are where this Satanic cabal is moving. Blacks and white Gentiles are taking a new look at the presumptions they have always taken as fact, and new racial alliances based on Truth are being formed and solidified in the process.
The banning of The Secret Relationship is a sure sign that victory is near.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has vowed retaliation to the new portion of economic sanctions rolled out by Washington and Ottawa over the November showdown near Crimean shores.
The ministry has called “groundless” the allegations by the US and Canadian governments that Russia was the aggressor in the November 25 incident in the Black Sea, when three Ukrainian warships sailed into Russian territorial waters.
Moscow said that the Ukrainian vessels had not obtained proper permits to cross the strait and ignored repeated warnings by the Russian coast guard to stop when they entered the Russian waters near Crimea. Three Ukrainian sailors were injured in the standoff, and a total of 24 Ukrainian personnel were detained and put on trial in Russia for violating Russian state borders.
The ships were later found to be armed and were reportedly intended on crossing the waterway that separates mainland Russia from Crimea in a “stealthy” manner.
On Friday, Washington imposed sanctions on six businessmen and politicians and eight enterprises, while Ottawa slapped economic restrictions on 114 individuals and 15 entities. The ministry specifically took aim at Canada for racing to keep up with the US’ Russia-bashing.
“It seems that from a normal logic standpoint, it would be more important for [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau’s team to concentrate on resolving rather complex problems at home, than play its ‘Russophobia card’ in vain.”
Both US and Canada continue to follow a “perilous course” aimed at a “total destruction” of relations with Russia, already at rock bottom due to “unhinged Russophobia that has engulfed Washington and Ottawa,” the ministry said.
Moscow has vowed to mount a “practical response” to the new sanctions.
Shipyards based in St. Petersburg and Crimea and Russian officials that were responding to the incident in the Kerch Strait were among those included in Washington’s black list. Canada also targeted prominent Russian politicians and business executives, such as the head of the Russian oil giant Rosneft, Igor Sechin, and the head of the National Guard, Victor Zolotov.
Oleg Deripaska, Russian aluminum tycoon, sanctioned by the US last year, is meanwhile taking the US government to court arguing that the restrictions were based “on false rumor and innuendo” and violated the US constitution.
Deripaska was forced to lower his stake in the aluminum giant Rusal to spare it from sanctions, but sanctions targeting him personally remain in place.
Artificial Intelligence is one thing. Artificial morality is another. It may sound something like this:
“First, we believe in the strong defense of the United States and we want the people who defend it to have access to the nation’s best technology, including from Microsoft.”
The words are those of Microsoft president Brad Smith, writing on a corporate blogsite last fall in defense of the company’s new contract with the U.S. Army, worth $479 million, to make augmented reality headsets for use in combat. The headsets, known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, are a way to “increase lethality” when the military engages the enemy, according to a Defense Department official. Microsoft’s involvement in this program set off a wave of outrage among the company’s employees, with more than a hundred of them signing a letter to the company’s top executives demanding that the contract be canceled.
“We are a global coalition of Microsoft workers, and we refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression. We are alarmed that Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the U.S. Military, helping one country’s government ‘increase lethality’ using tools we built. We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used.”
Wow, words of conscience and hope. The deeper story in all this is ordinary people exercising their power to shape the future and refusing to increase its lethality.
With this contract, the letter goes on, Microsoft has “crossed the line into weapons development. . . . The application of HoloLens within the IVAS system is designed to help people kill. It will be deployed on the battlefield, and works by turning warfare into a simulated ‘video game,’ further distancing soldiers from the grim stakes of war and the reality of bloodshed.”
This revolt was what Smith was responding to when he said he believed in a “strong defense,” implying that moral clichés rather than money are what drive the decisions of large corporations, or at least this particular large corporation. Somehow his words, which he attempted to convey as reflective and deeply considered, are not convincing — not when juxtaposed with a defense contract worth nearly half a billion dollars.
Smith goes on, acknowledging that no institution, including the military, is perfect, but pointing out that “one thing is clear. Millions of Americans have served and fought in important and just wars,” cherry-picking such lauded oldies as the Civil War and World War II, where America’s enhanced lethality freed slaves and liberated Europe.
Fascinatingly, the tone of his blog post is not arrogant toward the employees — do what you’re told or you’re fired — but, rather, softly placating, seeming to indicate that the power here isn’t concentrated at the upper levels of management. Microsoft is flexible: “As is always the case, if our employees want to work on a different project or team — for whatever reason — we want them to know we support talent mobility.”
The employees who signed the letter demanded cancellation of the Defense contract. Smith offered their personal consciences an out: Come on, join another team if you don’t want to cross the line and work on weapons development. Microsoft honors employees of multiple moral persuasions!
Artificial Intelligence is a high-tech phenomenon that requires highly complex thinking. Artificial morality hides behind the nearest cliché in servitude to money.
What I see here is moral awakening scrambling for sociopolitical traction: Employees are standing for something larger than sheer personal interests, in the process pushing the Big Tech brass to think beyond their need for an endless flow of capital, consequences be damned.
This is happening across the country. A movement is percolating: Tech won’t build it!
“Across the technology industry,” the New York Times reported in October, “rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.
“That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs.”
What if moral thinking — not in books and philosophical tracts, but in the real world, both corporate and political — were as large and complex as technical thinking? It could no longer hide behind the cliché of the just war (and surely the next one we’re preparing for will be just), but would have to evaluate war itself — all wars, including the ones of the past 70 years or so, in the fullness of their costs and consequences — as well as look ahead to the kind of future we could create, depending on what decisions we make today. Complex moral thinking doesn’t ignore the need to survive, financially and otherwise, in the present moment, but it stays calm in the face of that need and sees survival as a collective, not a competitive, enterprise.
Moral complexity is called peace. There is no such thing as simplistic peace.
Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.
Rep. Ilhan Omar equivocally-unequivocally apologized for tweeting that Zionist power was “all about the Benjamins.” A few weeks later, she didn’t apologize at all for suggesting that American congressional representatives shouldn’t have to swear loyalty oaths to Israel.
But Rep. Omar did in fact issue one genuinely unequivocal apology. It involved this 2012 tweet:
“It’s now apparent to me that I spent lots of energy putting my 2012 tweet in context and little energy is disavowing the anti-semitic trope I unknowingly used, which is unfortunate and offensive,” Omar tweeted on January 21 in response to an attack from New York Times op-ed writer Bari Weiss.
As I recently wrote, Ilhan Omar’s other two “anti-Semitic tropes”—that the US supports Israel due to Jewish-Zionist money power, and that Congress has a dual-loyalty problem—are all-too-obviously true. But what about Israel hypnotizing the world? Is that a fair statement? An exaggeration? A racist calumny?
Actually, in some ways it is an understatement. Jewish tribal power has been “hypnotizing the world” in various ways since long before the modern nation state (or settler colony of genocidal squatters, if you will) called “Israel” was founded in 1948.
I put the expression “hypnotize the world” in quotes not only because it was Omar who said it, but because it is obviously a figure of speech, not a literal statement. But as figures of speech go, this one is unusually accurate and revealing.
Literal hypnosis, of course, involves inducing a trance state during which the hypnotized subject becomes highly suggestible. The hypnotist can not only elicit amazing feats of rote obedience, but can also implant post-hypnotic suggestions in the subject’s mind which can influence, or even completely control, subsequent behavior.
An intergenerational Jewish tribal elite has spent the past 2500 years perfecting ways to bypass the rational faculties of their victims (the first of whom are non-elite Jews) while inculcating irrational beliefs and behaviors that bring wealth and power to that same elite. Many of their control techniques are reminiscent of hypnotism.
Laurent Guyénot’s magisterial From Yahweh to Zion “unveils the process by which Yahweh, through the voices of his priests, prophets, and scribes (the ‘cognitive elite’) shaped the vision and collective psychology of his chosen people” (p.18). That voice of the Jewish cognitive elite, masquerading as the voice of God, wielded the same kind of charismatic, irrational authority over its victims as the voice of the hypnotist wields over his hypnotic subjects.
The original victims of this “hypnosis” were non-elite Jews. Entranced by the masterful storytelling of the cognitive elite, they submitted to the authority of their priests, rabbis, and scribes in the same way a hypnotic subject submits to the hypnotist. And just as the hypnotist verifies and deepens the trance by commanding the subject to do something ridiculous—for example, by handing the subject an onion and saying “bite into this delicious juicy apple”—the Jewish cognitive elite ordered their subjects to obey all sorts of bizarre rules, from the Levitical to the downright Talmudic. And just as cult leaders “hypnotize” their followers into happily drinking the Kool Aid en masse by demonizing outsiders and fostering groupthink, the Jewish tribal elite created “A People That Shall Dwell Alone” by isolating their subjects, encouraging endogamy, and terrorizing the Tribe into separation from the goyim.
As Guyénot shows in From Yahweh to Zion, the Jewish cognitive elite hypnotized much of the world into believing that their tribal god Yahweh—a stand-in for the authority and interests of that same elite—was Lord and Creator of the entire universe. The ancient Jewish elite’s self-interested equivocation between presenting Yahweh as a tribal god on one hand, and the universal God on the other, resembles today’s Jewish elite’s equivocal presentation of Jewishness sometimes as a religion, sometimes as an ethnicity (depending on which version best serves Jewish elite interests). Both goyim and non-elite Jews accept such contradictions as unquestioningly as hypnotic subjects accept the commands of a master hypnotist.
Apocalyptic War: A Post-Hypnotic Suggestion?
The endgame of a certain Jewish elite’s effort to hypnotize the world into submission became apparent by around 1500, when the messianic-yet-worldly Zionism of Isaac Abarbanel drew the blueprint for the creation of the state of Israel more than four centuries later—and the apocalyptic war between Muslims and Christians it would instigate. To understand the significance of Abarbanel, we must remember that Jewish messianic thought has always awaited the coming of the Messiah, viewed as a king and warlord who will lead the Jews to a military triumph over all other tribes (the goyim) and institute 1000 years of pax Judaica. (Obviously this involves a severe rejection of the Christian and Muslim doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah.)
Abarbanel was a key figure in the heretical, Satanic turn in Jewish millenarianism: The transition between traditional orthodoxy, which held that God alone would institute the messianic age without human help, to the Zionist doctrine that Jews should “force God’s hand” by taking over Jerusalem, and the world, themselves—even if the price involved kabbalistic black magic, devious conspiracies, big lies, mass murder, weaponized usury, and other abominations. Today, Naturei Karta and other genuinely orthodox traditional Jews correctly view Zionism as a Satanic heresy. But most of the world’s Jewish communities, and the populations whose media they dominate, have been hypnotized into biting into the reeking rotten onion of Zionism and insisting it is a fresh, delicious apple.
Abarbanel’s plan for Jewish-triggered apocalypse, though produced five centuries ago, is as fresh as tomorrow’s headlines. The good rabbi recommended that Jews return en masse to the Holy Land and orchestrate an apocalyptic war between Christians and Muslims. After the Christians and Muslims had finished destroying each other, Abarbanel prophecied, the Jews—under the command of their Messiah—would rule the world from Jerusalem.
It is telling that Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion wrote a book about Abarbanel highlighting the plan to trigger an apocalyptic Christian-vs.-Muslim war to usher in a one-world state ruled by the Jewish Messiah (who would of course be called Antichrist by Christians and Muslims). Indeed, the plan to trick (post)Christian civilization into launching a global war against Muslim civilization, rolled out on 9/11/2001, is something of a Netanyahu family business.
More than a century after Abarbanel laid the groundwork for the Clash of Civilizations, the famous false messiah Sabbatai Zevi—whose career peaked in the numerologically significant year 1666—led the first wave of Zionism by convincing large numbers of Jews to emigrate to the Holy Land. Zevi’s thought was taken up in the next century by Jacob Frank (1726-1791) who codified Zevi’s madness into the doctrine of “purification through transgression”: the notion that individuals and communities should “religiously” commit sex crimes and other abominations. Rumors of kabbalistic black magic, human sacrifice, and bizarre sexual practices have attended the Frankists, who—according to such Jewish scholars as investigative journalist Barry Chamish and Rabbi Marvin Antelman—were behind both the fiat money magic of the Rothschilds and its seeming opposite, Communism. Taken together, Rothschild capitalism and Marxian communism form a sort of Hegelian dialectical one-two punch in service to the larger project of secularized, materialist Jewish millenarianism.
Even as they “hypnotized the world” into dividing into capitalist and communist camps, heretical Jewish elites were setting the stage for Zionism…and Abarbanel’s eventual Christian-vs.-Muslim apocalypse leading to the Messiah/Antichrists’s one-world planetary dictatorship. Though Albert Pike’s alleged late 19th century prophecy of three Zionist-freemasonry-orchestrated World Wars may be apocryphal, the Frankist-Jewish elite’s hand in World War I, World War II, and the current Clash of Civilizations is convincingly documented in the last four chapters of Guyénot’s From Yahweh to Zion.
Techniques of Hypnotism
Getting back to the question of hypnotism, it is obvious that Jewish elites have played an outsize role in the discovery and manipulation the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was weaponized by his nephew Edward Bernays and transformed into what is euphemistically known as “public relations,” many aspects of which involve the direct manipulation of the unconscious in a process reminiscent of mass hypnosis.
In reality, Bernay’s (and Freud’s) contributions were not original. They are best viewed as modern versions of centuries-old mind control techniques based on Kabbalistic “magic” as described in Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. (Couliano’s spilling of cabalistic secrets may have led to the spilling of his blood: he was murdered in a rest room at that neocon Mecca, the University of Chicago.)
Hypnosis is based on repetition: You gaze at the watch swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, or the spoon clinking round and round and round the teacup, and sink into a suggestible trance. The verbal equivalent of this kind of hypnotic repetition was admirably summarized by Lewis Carroll as: “What I tell you three times is true.” That is why the mass television audience on 9/11/2001, blasted into an awestruck trance by traumatic images, was treated to hundreds of replays of planes into buildings, planes into buildings, planes into buildings, then buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, as an endless parade of talking heads chanted “Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor” and “Bin Laden Bin Laden Bin Laden.” One cannot imagine a more shamelessly obvious example of a pre-scripted mass hypnosis operation.
Often the real point of inducing hypnotic trance is not anything that happens during the hypnotism session itself, but behavioral changes induced by post-hypnotic suggestion: The smoker quits smoking, that fat person loses weight, or the MK Ultra subject fires a gun at Robert Kennedy without the slightest inkling of what he is doing or why. The 9/11 mass hypnosis operation, which I have analyzed with the help of the wonderful Douglas Rushkoff (my kind of Jewish utopian) as a classic example of Coercion—was designed to implant Islamophobia as its primary post-hypnotic suggestion, in service to a Clash of Civilizations agenda whose primary beneficiary is Zionism. (I do hope that certain Unz readers will notice that they are still operating under that baleful post-hypnotic influence, and go about the business of deprogramming themselves.)
When someone like Ilhan Omar—who suffered horrific trauma as a result of the 9/11-triggered Zionist plan to destroy “seven countries in five years” one of which was Somalia—looks at the United States, a nation of 300 million people, obediently laboring for tiny Israel like some sort of zombie golem, it is understandable why the word hypnosis would enter her mind and her Twitter stream. As I have shown, and could show in a book-length or even encyclopedic treatise given world enough and time, her hypnosis metaphor is illuminating and apropos.
In conclusion, I offer an obligatory disclaimer that should go without saying: Obviously Jewish elites are not the only people in the mass hypnosis business. All governments and corporations hypnotize their subjects and personnel into loyal obedience. All religion involves a degree of mass hypnosis; and mysticism, the heart of religion, involves a degree of self-hypnosis. And even parents routinely hypnotize their children to sleep with repetitious storytelling. Some of this, perhaps much of this, is normal and healthy. My point is that Jewish elites have been unusually successful in employing hypnotic mass manipulation for self-aggrandizing purposes, and that today’s Zionist elites are doing so in strikingly immoral and destructive ways.
The US is determined not to issue visas to individuals who are behind any the International Criminal Court investigation of US personnel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday.
The new visa restrictions will not terminate Washington’s previous measures, and new economic sanctions may follow if the International Criminal Court (ICC) fails to change its course, Pompeo said during the briefing.
“I’m announcing a policy of US visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of US personnel,” Pompeo said. “This includes persons who take or have taken action to request or further such an investigation. These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis.”
The remark comes after Pompeo issued the warning after announcing that the US would impose visa restrictions on individuals linked to the ICC’s prospective investigation into alleged war crimes committed by US personnel in Afghanistan.
American tech giant Google has faced regulatory scrutiny on numerous occasions amid accusations of antitrust violations. Google’s relationship with the CIA, ranging from early financial support to collaborative efforts have been decried as undermining privacy rights and free speech in the digital landscape.
Google’s creation played a crucial role in the US intelligence community’s scheme to attain global dominance by controlling information. … continue
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