Saudi crown prince demands Israel not attack Iran
MEMO | November 12, 2024
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman yesterday demanded Israel respect Iran’s sovereignty and refrain from attacking its territory, highlighting the friendly relations between Riyadh and Tehran.
Speaking at the Joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit in Riyadh, Bin Salman stressed that the international community must force Israel to “respect the sovereignty of the sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran and not attack its territory.”
Saudi Arabia and Iran have maintained high-level contact as part of efforts to contain Israel’s war on Gaza.
That diplomatic outreach led to the first phone call between Bin Salman and then-Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, just five days after the war broke out.
In October, Saudi Arabia announced it had conducted naval exercises with Iran and other countries in the Gulf of Oman.
Bin Salman and current Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian spoke on the phone on Sunday ahead of yesterday’s summit.
Trump taps pro-Israel stalwart to be next US envoy to UN
MEMO | November 11, 2024
President-elect, Donald Trump, announced Monday that he has selected staunchly pro-Israel Representative, Elise Stefanik, to be the US’s next envoy to the UN, Anadolu Agency reports.
“I am honoured to nominate Chairwoman, Elise Stefanik, to serve in my Cabinet as US Ambassador to the United Nations. Elise is an incredibly strong, tough and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement, according to multiple reports.
CNN reported Sunday that Trump offered Stefanik the job.
The lawmaker from upstate New York is the fourth-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives where she chairs the Republican Conference. A graduate of Harvard University, Stefanik has been a rising star among Trump’s allies after refashioning herself from a moderate Republican to a MAGA stalwart.
Stefanik has long been a vocal critic of the UN, where she is slated to set up shop after Trump assumes office on 20 January, 2025, and has accused the international body of anti-Semitism for its criticism of Israel’s war on the besieged Gaza Strip.
Just last week, Stefanik called for the US to defund the UN’s Palestine refugee agency after Israel’s parliament passed a pair of laws strictly curtailing UNRWA’s ability to function in Israel. She accused the Agency, which provides vital services to millions of Palestinian refugees displaced across the Middle East, of being “Hamas-infiltrated”.
Stefanik has also staunchly criticised the UN’s opposition to Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, using Israel’s moniker “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
“I am demanding Joe Biden show strength on the world stage and clearly condemn the blatant anti-Israel bias in the United Nations,” she said in a February 2023 statement as the UN Security Council was preparing to vote on a resolution condemning Israel’s settlements.
“Joe Biden must not abandon our ally and shamefully cave to the UN’s agenda. I am proud to always stand with our ally, Israel, and call on the Biden Administration do the same,” she added.
Was Amsterdam a Mossad Operation?
“Hamas is hiding in Amsterdam”
By Mike Whitney • Unz Review • November 10, 2024
https://twitter.com/pacifistenNL/status/1855262838312296501
Was the Maccabi soccer fan rampage in Amsterdam a Mossad operation?
That’s not an easy question to answer, but there are clues suggesting that there’s more here than meets the eye.
Let’s start with Max Blumenthal’s observation that the Maccabi fans did not seem to be randomly blowing off steam like young men in crowds tend to do but appeared to be under a loosely-organized command structure. Here’s what Blumenthal posted on X:
The footage is notable not only because it exposes the Maccabi thugs provoking violence, but because they can be clearly seen coordinating their actions like a military unit, while reportedly escorted by Mossad agents. At one point, an Israeli thug threatens the young journalist and orders him not to film their rampage. Meanwhile, local police disappear for long periods. @MaxBlumenthal
This phenomenon was noticed by a number of other observers and can be seen in the 17-minute video that was taken by the young Dutch boy (Bender) who has become a celebrity overnight for his relentlessly intrepid journalism. He followed the Israeli mob through the streets of Amsterdam for hours recording their erratic and violent activities until the end when they were corralled by Dutch police and bundled off to the hoosegow. A careful viewing of this video shows the Maccabi throng stopping from time to time and being directed by the leaders in the group. Were they Mossad agents?
We can’t say for sure, but it certainly looks suspicious; and others have drawn the same conclusion, like Adam who posted this:
It has been confirmed Mossad was in attendance on the night in question. It has also been confirmed that provocation was endless. Now we know why. To increase both Islamophobia and Jewish victims status.@AdameMedia
Or Peter:
This was a planned operation by Israel to drag Europe into it’s insane warmongering.
A city where Jews and Arabs get on with life was the ideal opportunity.@PeterPetermac1
Or Mirror:
It looks planned. They want their Zionists to look like victims. They want to scare the Jews back in Palestine, to stay in Palestine. Antisemitism is a zionist art @mirroraqsa
Or ASE:
Israel media reported that the Mossad was joining Israeli hooligans in Amsterdam. The goal was known, provoke, attack locals and ordinary citizens, particularly those supporting Palestinian humanity, like taxi drivers @ASE
Or Alberto:
The Dutch police seemed to be very concerned with PROTECTING the Israeli thugs. I have no doubt that this was planned and coordinated between Netanyahu and Wilders as excuse to expel Muslims out of the Netherlands. @AlbertoD2022
Or Rich:
Sounds like it was an Israeli public relations operation from the beginning – to stir trouble with locals which would then ensnare bystander Jews so they could then be harmed & framed as victims of Islamo-fascism. Meanwhile then Israel has another reason to go hard against Arabs. @richseng
Or Diane:
It is a classic maneuver I saw often during the Bosnian conflict, where a group deliberately provokes and then blames the other side. That said, I want to be clear I condemn all violence.@DianePaul593823
Of course, all this is just speculation, but what’s certain is that Mossad agents did accompany the Maccabi fans to the Netherlands. We know that because it was posted as a headline at the Jerusalem Post. Check it out:
So, the Mossad was present. The question is whether they were actively engaged in what-amounts-to a massive psyops using the footballers to advance their dark agenda?
We can’t answer that, but we can say that it is highly unusual for a government to deploy its intelligence agents to a football match in a foreign capital. Who else does that?
No one, which begs the question of whether they were enlisted to participate in a covert “dirty tricks” operation that required their professional supervision. What might that involve?
Let’s say, Netanyahu wanted to improve Israel’s public image—that has been dragged through the mud due to its genocide in Gaza—he might approve a plan to provoke social unrest in Amsterdam so he could use his vast media connections to decry the (inevitable) Muslim retaliation as a sudden surge of antisemitism. He might even be able to persuade his media lackeys to downplay the contemptible behavior of his racist soccer team and focus instead on the reaction of the Muslim cab drivers. (who were the targets of Maccabi’s hostility.) Check this out article from NBC News:
Roving gangs on scooters attacked and beat Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam, the Dutch capital, overnight in an outburst of what authorities called antisemitic violence.
Footage circulating on social media showed supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team being chased down and assaulted on Thursday night, with one video geolocated by NBC News to near Amsterdam’s central station that showed fighting on the streets between the Israelis and their attackers.
“Boys on scooters crossed the city in search of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said. “It was a hit-and-run. Football fans were beaten and scared, after which the rioters quickly left again, fleeing the police force that was on the move en masse yesterday….
The violence unfolded in a city that was once home to a young Anne Frank and her family as they hid from Nazi occupiers during World War II.
“Yesterday there was an outburst of antisemitism such as we had hoped to see no more in Amsterdam,” Halsema said. “I express the strongest condemnation of the violence that has taken place. Among our Jewish Amsterdam residents there is fear, dismay, anger, disbelief.”…
“Rioters” had “actively sought out Israeli supporters to attack and assault them,” Halsema’s office said in a statement. – Israeli soccer fans attacked in Amsterdam, NBC News
OMG! Are they actually dredging up the memory of Anne Frank to defend the violent thuggery of racist hooligans?!?
Yes, they are.
Did the journalist who wrote this nonsense even check the internet to see what actually took place? Does he realize that even the official Amsterdam police report conflicts with his absurdly inaccurate version of events?
This article is so divorced from reality and, yet so similar to the many other cookie cutter articles now appearing in the MSM, that there must be a coordinated effort to twist the truth and convince the public that the perpetrators are actually the victims. Is that why the Mossad accompanied Maccabi to Amsterdam, to create an incident that could be used shore up Israel’s battered image as the perennial victim? Here’s how political analyst Kevork Almassian summed it up:
Observe carefully: every single Israel supporter has been parroting the exact same words since the Amsterdam street clashes. Coincidence? Hardly. They’re following a script—a coordinated media campaign, plain and simple. And now, ask yourself: What were Mossad agents and Israeli soldiers doing among the football hooligans? Were they there to ignite the violence? Let’s not pretend that foreign intelligence agents were just on a casual visit. @KevorkAlmassian
Does that sound convincing to you? It does to me. This is from an article at The Cradle:
Mainstream Dutch media, amplified by Israeli and Western outlets, rapidly reframed the events as a “pogrom” targeting Jews, erasing the context of hooligan provocations that had sparked the clashes. Reports sensationalized the violence, describing it as premeditated antisemitic attacks. In an almost farcical twist, some claimed emergency evacuation flights were arranged to rescue the supposed victims, conjuring images of 19th-century Russia with mass murders and burning villages.
The exaggerated narrative conveniently shifted the focus from the hooligans’ provocations to a carefully constructed portrayal of victimhood…. Together, their voices turned a night of chaos into a carefully crafted crescendo of victimhood, obscuring the provocations that had sparked the backlash.
By the end of November 8, the story was no longer about hooligan aggression but had been rewritten to serve political and media agendas, shifting attention from the truth to a spectacle of moral outrage. – The manufactured ‘pogrom’: Weaponizing chaos in Amsterdam, The Cradle
“Premeditated antisemitic attacks”? “A pogrom targeting Jews”? In liberal Amsterdam; are you kidding me?
So, what’s really going on here, and why do so many of the commenters think that this oddball (Mossad?) operation in Amsterdam has something to do with strengthening the idea of Jewish victimhood?
They feel that way because all the legacy media and all the powerful western politicians have deliberately misrepresented what actually took place in order to cast the Israeli bullies as helpless victims. That’s why.
So, naturally, many people have concluded that Israel greatly values its designation as the “perennial victim”, which makes sense, after all, a victim is “one that is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment” (Merriam-Webster). He is not the one who oppresses or inflicts hardship or oppression. And a victim can act with complete impunity, because he is the target of abuse and not the perpetrator. Thus, a victim can carry out the most heinous crimes imaginable—even genocide—while claiming to be completely blameless because—as the victim—he acts only in self-defense.
See? Victimhood is the perfect alibi for bad behavior.
Is it any wonder why Israel would opt to strengthen that ‘gold-plated’ designation by provoking an incident that would resurrect the ghost of European antisemitism?
Israeli ministers want issue of captives in Gaza to be solved ‘naturally and tragically’: Report
The Cradle | November 10, 2024
The Israeli government is waiting and hoping for the captives held by Hamas in Gaza to die while expanding the military occupation of territory in Gaza as part of a broader effort to cleanse the strip of Palestinians and to build Jewish settlements, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on 10 November.
The Hebrew media paper reported that “According to every intelligence report that is submitted to the cabinet ministers, the situation of the dozens of abductees who are still alive in the captivity of Hamas is getting worse from week to week.”
“As long as the negotiations are not restarted, the problem of the abductees will be solved naturally and tragically, according to some right-wing ministers. The resistance of those ministers to release hundreds of terrorists will be redundant,” the paper added.
Since Hamas’ Qassam Brigades took around 250 Israeli soldiers and civilians captive on 7 October last year, it has sought to release them in exchange for a ceasefire, the release of thousands of Palestinians held captive in Israeli prisons, and an end to the Israeli siege of Gaza that began in 2007.
However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have successfully sabotaged ceasefire negotiations, preferring to extend the war, destroy Gaza, and annex its territory to ultimately build Jewish settlements.
Israeli forces have killed many of the captives, both by bombing the locations in Gaza where Hamas was holding them and by opening fire and killing them directly.
If ceasefire negotiations are not quickly resumed, the remaining 70 captives who remain alive will likely die, providing Netanyahu with the pretext to move forward with the permanent occupation of Gaza.
“The deaths in captivity of another 20-30 hostages will be swallowed up in the sea of mourning for the fallen soldiers, and then, when public anger is channeled against Hamas, the Israeli leadership will not be in a hurry to withdraw from the Gaza territory that the IDF captured from the terrorist organization – ministers and MKs on the right do not hide their ambitions to establish [Jewish] settlements there,” Yedioth Ahronoth wrote.
The Hebrew paper adds that the slow death of the captives and Israel’s increased control over Gaza territory are moving forward in tandem.
“These are actually two trends that are expanding quietly … One is the expansion of the occupied IDF territory and establishment [of military bases] within it. The second is the government’s ignoring of the abductees’ death throes. The two trends, unfortunately, will merge at some point in the future.”
The expansion of territory occupied by the Israeli army is illustrated by the construction of a massive military base in the Netzarim Corridor, Yedioth Ahronoth says.
The corridor was initially constructed as a road to bisect Gaza from north to south. However, in recent months, the corridor has doubled its area to about 56 square kilometers, making it a large Israeli military enclave in the heart of the northern Gaza Strip.
Today, the army is pressuring the approximately 300,000 Gazans remaining in the north of the Gaza Strip to cross to the south, Yedioth Ahronoth says.
“The most important part of this base is the innovative coastal barrier through which, the army hopes, a large mass of the Palestinian population will soon pass to the south of the strip, with the expansion of pressure on the Jabalia area.”
“The army established a large outpost on the beach to identify the tens of thousands it hopes will arrive soon and cross south. This will happen, the army hopes, with the expansion of the ground raid in Jabalia to other areas and neighborhoods in Gaza itself. In the base, apart from the interrogation rooms and the temporary detention cells.”
The Israeli army has been abducting Palestinian men en mass at checkpoints as they move south. The men are then stripped to their underwear and taken on trucks to detention facilities, where they are regularly tortured and raped.
In addition, the army plans to copy the Netzarim Corridor model and implement it at the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border as well, specifically in the area where the Gush Katif settlement bloc was located before the 2005 evacuation plan, Yedioth Ahronoth says.
Israel’s Economic Implosion: “Genocide Blowback” Threatens the Zionist Entity…
… And the US empire
By Kevin Barrett | November 10, 2024
When a nation becomes known as a genocide perpetrator it suffers reputational damage. And reputational damage has economic consequences. A whole branch of the public relations industry specializes in such matters: Well-paid damage-control hacks are hired by wealthy individuals, corporations, and governments when reputations propping up fortunes are threatened.
By murdering tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza in a transparent effort to steal more and more Palestinian land, the illegitimate state of “Israel” has labeled itself genocidal in the eyes of the world. And a nation that is genocidal, like an individual who is a serial killer, cannot expect to be treated as a respectable member of the community. Just ask the Germans, who were labeled “genocidal” after World War II and have been suffering economic consequences ever since.[i]
Partisans of Israel have used ethnic nepotism to gain control over western media. Due to its disproportionate media influence, the zionist entity has thus far managed to evade critical scrutiny of its long list of outrageous crimes. But as social media and international media erode the power of the zionist monopoly on western mainstream media, Israel’s hasbara flacks have entered ever-more-desperate damage-control mode.
Their uphill battle is not winnable in the long term. Today, well-informed people in all of the world’s nearly 200 countries know that “Israel” is committing genocide in Gaza. That knowledge is now a permanent part of humanity’s collective consciousness, and will remain so for generations.
“Israel” has become an international pariah due to the Gaza genocide. And even if it stopped committing genocide and other crimes tomorrow, the damage has already been done. The zionist entity is tainted and unsustainable. The only question is the timing of its forthcoming collapse. And economic data reveal that the collapse could happen sooner rather than later.
Since Hamas’s “most successful military raid of this century” on October 7, 2023, the Israeli economy has lost roughly 50,000 businesses to bankruptcy. According to some estimates as many as 500,000 zionist squatters (aka settlers) have fled the country, leaving shuttered businesses and unfilled positions in their wake. What’s worse, from the zionist perspective, is that the people fleeing “Israel” are, by and large, its most productive citizens. Or make that “former citizens.” These disgruntled expatriates are the well-educated engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, technicians, and above all, the computer professionals who run Israel’s high-tech sector, the most productive element of its economy. Shir Hever writes:
Prof. Dan Ben David, a famous economist argued that the Israeli economy is held together by 300,000 people (the senior staff in universities, tech companies, and hospitals). Once a significant portion of these people leave he says “We won’t become a third world country, we just won’t be anymore.”
So who will remain in “Israel” after its most highly-educated and productive citizens leave? Increasingly, the zionist entity is becoming dominated by millenarian-messianic religious fanatics. These are the people who vote for ultra-genocidal lunatics like Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and who make up the bulk of the illegal squatters on stolen West Bank land.
This ultra-zionist segment of the population is characterized by extremely high birthrates, with families routinely reaching double figures. They get little or no education in history, math, science, and other non-religious subjects. The ultra-zionists are exempt from military duty and often evince no interest in work, preferring to live on public subsidies.
Handouts to messianic settlers are “widely unpopular among secular Israelis but ultra-Orthodox parties are a key pillar of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition” according to the Washington Post. The messianic maniacs long for the day their Messiah will return, conquer the world for the Jews, and give every Jew 2800 non-Jewish slaves. The demographic explosion of these unproductive, parasitical lunatics spells doom for the zionist settler colony.
Though western economic institutions are disproportionately run by Jews sympathetic to “Israel,” that systemic bias can’t hide harsh reality. Foreign investments were down 60% by the first quarter of 2024 and have gone even lower since then. The zionist entity’s credit rating has sunk to almost junk-bond levels. Multinational corporations like Intel, which recently canceled its plan for a $25 billion dollar factory, are increasingly aware that the genocidal zionist entity has no future.
Desperate for funds, the zionists have begun swindling local governments in the United States by having their mobbed-up agents purchase worthless “Israel bonds” that will ultimately be paid for by US taxpayers. The worst offender, Florida’s Palm Beach County, is now facing a lawsuit of epic proportions.
Proverbial wisdom has it that if you find yourself deep in a hole, you should stop digging. But the deeper the hole gets, the faster the zionists dig. When I wrote the original version of this article on October 21, 2024, “Israel” had all but announced plans to launch a huge and devastating attack on Iran. Israeli leaders vaunted their plans to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, while others hinted they might “only” destroy oil refineries and other energy infrastructure. But when the attack finally came on October 26, it was anticlimactic. Israeli planes were forced to turn back before entering Iranian airspace, reportedly after being locked onto by a new Iranian air defense system, and their standoff missiles killed four soldiers and damaged radar systems. Iran says it will retaliate with a “crushing response… involving more weapons and more powerful warheads than the 1 October attack… the new barrage would come between Tuesday’s US elections and the inauguration of the next US president in January.”
In the wake of the upcoming (November or December) Iranian retaliation against Israel, which will be larger and more destructive than the two previous Iranian rocket barrages, the Zionists will once again threaten to target Iranian leadership, nuclear, or energy facilities. But if Tel Aviv conducts a major attack by targeting Iranian leadership, nuclear facilities, or energy infrastructure, the Iranian response—even a limited one—could push the zionist settler colony off the cliff.[ii]
If the zionists attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran will almost certainly retaliate in kind. The sight of Iranian rockets pulverizing Israeli nuclear sites, with ensuing concerns about radiation, would accelerate the flight of the zionist entity’s most productive citizens and intensify the financial world’s disinclination to invest in an obviously doomed settler colony. And since Iran would likely react to an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities by changing its principled anti-WMD stance and quickly developing and deploying nuclear weapons, thereby destroying the zionists’ regional monopoly, such an attack would amount to raising a self-inflicted radioactive mushroom cloud of doom over the zionist entity. (Indeed, it is not unlikely that Iran has already secretly changed its doctrine and now has a covert nuclear weapons capability waiting to be announced in the wake of regional escalation.)
The Biden regime, knowing this, has succeeded in convincing “Israel” to refrain from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. But even if the zionists “only” attack Iran’s leadership or energy infrastructure, the response could be just as devastating. Iran has demonstrated its ability to defeat the so-called Iron Dome and land its missiles, beginning with hypersonic ones, anywhere it likes inside “Israel.” And if the zionists attack Iran’s leadership or infrastructure, Iran will likely target the Achilles heels of the zionist energy grid. In a worst case (for the zionists) scenario, “Israel” could lose most of its transformers and find itself without reliable electricity for up to two years.
Any Axis of Resistance attack on Israel’s energy infrastructure would intensify already-existing vulnerabilities. Shir Hever writes:
The biggest supplier of coal to Israel is Colombia which announced that it would suspend coal shipments to Israel as long as the genocide was ongoing. After Colombia the next two biggest suppliers are South Africa and Russia. Without reliable and continuous electricity Israel will no longer be able to pretend to be a developed economy. Server farms do not work without 24-hour power and no one knows how many blackouts the Israeli high-tech sector could potentially survive.
If South Africa and Russia follow Columbia and cut off Israel’s coal supply, pressure on Turkey will mount to do the same to the zionists’ oil supplies. “Israel” is running its genocide on oil from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which Erdogan is under pressure to turn off. One way or another, the lights in “Israel” will soon be going out.
The election of the uber-genocidal Donald “finish the job” Trump may hasten the process of Israel’s destruction. Trump, true to his promises to Miriam Adelson and other poorly-informed and emotionally-overwrought ultra-zionists, will likely give Netanyahu enough rope to hang himself and his genocidal settler colony. By wading ever-deeper into a conflict he can’t possibly win, Netanyahu, obeying orders from messiah-awaiters Smotrich and Ben Gvir, is courting national suicide. And even rabid-zionist-owned Trump won’t be able to save Israel from its own hubris. If the US doesn’t sever its bonds with the zionists and cut its losses, it too will go down.
The zionists think they can terrorize the world into submission in perpetuity. But reputational damage will gradually erode their impunity and impose accountability. Israelis, due to their own actions, have become global pariahs. Genocidal war criminals, they are despised wherever they go. No-one wants to deal with them, and no-one thinks they have a future. The economic blowback from their crimes will doom the blood-soaked settler colony and finally end its abominations in the Holy Land of Palestine.
[i] Germany was a genocide victim as well as perpetrator. Millions of Germans were murdered by the partially-implemented Morgenthau plan and by ethnic cleansings orchestrated by the Jewish-dominated US and Soviet occupiers in the wake of World War II. Today’s emasculated Holocaust-reparations-paying Lesser Germany, whose economy was devasted by its American masters’ destruction of the Nordstream pipeline, is a pale shadow, both economically and culturally, of what a sovereign Germany would have become. For more information on the anti-German holocaust see Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm and James Bacque’s Other Losses.
[ii] Most Zionist settlers, especially those who are educated and economically productive, are (1) rootless cosmopolitans who could live reasonably well in any large Western city, and (2) relatively intolerant of pain and insecurity. By initiating a long-term genocidal war that will inevitably make “Israel” the target of billions of people’s wrath for generations, the Zionist entity’s leaders are rendering the colonists’ lives insecure, and inadvertently “cleansing” Occupied Palestine of the very people who make the settler colony economically sustainable.
Sky News apologises for telling the truth about Israel
Laura and Normal Island News | November 10, 2024
In a disgusting lack of dishonesty, Sky News has caused outrage by telling the truth about Israel. The broadcaster later corrected its reporting, editing out the truthful parts, but the Israeli lobby says this is “too little, too late”.
The controversy took place on the Sky News Twitter account where a video that had not been approved by Mossad was mistakenly shared. Thankfully, I’m told Sky’s social media guy was taken outside and beaten to within an inch of his life. It’s only what he deserved.
The punishment beating comes after Israeli hooligans, I mean innocent supporters attended a football match in Amsterdam. For some reason, Sky thought it was necessary to report that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans tore Palestinian flags from people’s homes and attacked the locals in front of a police car. It even mentioned that Israelis were singing “racist and anti-Arab songs” with charming lyrics such as “let the IDF win to fuck the Arabs”.
Sky even highlighted that Israeli fans disrupted the minute’s silence for Valencia flood victims with chants, whistles and fireworks. Thankfully, the reporter did not mention that Mossad agents had joined the Israeli fans in order to provoke a riot. This was purely for self-preservation because Mossad would probably have bombed her family home.
The idiots at Sky have totally undermined our narrative that the citizens of Amsterdam did a “pogrom” for no reason other than they’re evil anti-Semites, proving there is no safe place in Europe for Jews. The social media response was unanimous: “Clearly, Sky was attempting to justify violence towards Jews.”
Sky therefore panicked, deleted their video and posted a comment explaining they’d edited and reuploaded the video because the original didn’t meet their “standards for balance and impartiality.” They then deleted the explanation because it made them look like fucking idiots.
In case you’re unclear, “balance” is when you leave out important context that shows the truth, and “impartiality” is when you crumble to pressure from the people who are made to look bad by the truth.
Reassuringly, Sky News editor Sandy Rashty is so unbiased, she contributes to the Jewish Chronicle and retweets all the finest Zionist cranks. This explains why Sky bends over backwards for Israel, but only makes minimal effort for anyone who opposes genocide.
For example, Sky was previously forced to admit to “potentially misleading information” for smearing the Palestinian ambassador by claiming he said things he hadn’t said. Thankfully, Sky did not apologise because he is an Arab.
All that matters is that we provide cover for Israel so it can get away with doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. Israel is meant to be able to launch incursions into any territory it likes, including the Netherlands, and thankfully, the Netherlands agrees.
Israel has therefore bombed three schools and seven hospitals in Amsterdam, following reports that Ajax fans had built tunnels beneath them. The Dutch government insisted there were definitely no tunnels but apologised for making Israel do this. Sky News would like to reiterate these bombings definitely counted as self-defence.
The Zionist regime front and the Beren family
By David Miller | Al Mayadeen | November 9, 2024
“With partnerships encompassing over 850 interfaith organizations, influential decision-makers, and a network of more than five million activists and 250 social media influencers CAM leads a united front against Jew hatred.”
This is how the Combat Antisemtism Movement describes itself.
It sounds like an independent campaign group at the head of a global movement. But does it actually “lead anything”?
Let’s get into it.
The movement advertises that its “Key initiatives” include “the Global Coalition of Cities Fighting Antisemitism and specialized collaborations with U.S. governors and State Legislators.”
They say that they “reach millions through digital campaigns, influencer partnerships, and an innovation lab.”
They have “partnerships” with “nearly a thousand” groups.
The movement started with a pledge to fight antisemitism.
It now has more than 850 organisations signed up as “members”, from across the globe.
Here are a selection of them, with the preponderance being based in the US, but a range of others throughout Latin America, Europe, Australasia and further afield, including South Africa and Russia. There are hardly any in other parts of Africa and none in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, North Korea, China, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, or Iraq.
It looks like a very extensive global network. But who is behind it?
Answering that question requires peeling back several layers of the onion.
First there is no organization registered in the US with that name. There is, though, a Combat Hate Foundation which is the organizational vehicle which runs the movement. It is registered with the Internal Revenue Service. Public documents show that it is funded by a variety of Zionist Foundations. The largest contributors seem to be foundations associated with the Kansas based Beren family, which made its fortune in the oil and gas industry.
During a 2021 controversy about the movement, The Forward reported that it functioned as a “dark money” front group for the Kansas oil billionaire Adam Beren. But this revelation only gets us so far. Palestine Declassified revealed that the Combat Hate Foundation is part of a “joint venture” run by the Israeli regime.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is in charge. The joint venture is run via the ministry’s deniable corporate intermediary Voices of Israel, though there is no mention of this relationship on the website of Combat Antisemitism Movement.
But the relationship is spelled out on the Voices of Israel website: “Voices of Israel has a joint venture agreement with the State of Israel led by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combat Antisemitism.”
The Combat Antisemtism Movement, in other words, is part of the covert Zionist regime network. The impressive nature of the 850 “partner” organisations takes on a rather more sinister hue, given this revelation.
The Combat Antisemitism Movement is, in fact, a front for the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the regime department responsible for the global fight against the Palestine liberation movement.
It has over 850 partner organisations – a formidable centrally directed network.
But though it’s a front for the genocidal regime, most of the resources that support it come from another source.
When it was created in 2019 the Combat Antisemtism Movement was opaque on who was behind it. By mid 2020 it began to disclose staff and senior advisors.
Unsurprisingly, two of its four senior advisers came straight from the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the department in charge of worldwide targeting of pro-Palestine activists.
They were Brigadier General Sima Vaknin Gil, formerly an Israeli intelligence officer and the former Chief Censor of the entity. At that stage, she was Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs;
Revital Yakin Krakowsky. CAM was reticent about admitting that she too worked for the Ministry, saying only that she had advised presidents, government ministers, mayors, international organizations, etc, in no specific country. In reality, according to her own LinkedIn page, she worked full time at the Ministry of Strategic Affairs from January 2017 until it was closed in May 2021.
Other direct connections with the regime are that the Director Sacha Dratwa used to work for the occupation forces’ New Media Operations Team. In fact, he has a career long history in propaganda work for the regime. Dratwa is Belgian. He joined the IOF after becoming a settler colonist and was a student at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC). He headed the French language online monitoring campaign at the HelpUsWin.org situation room set up at the IDC in support of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008/09. Help Us Win was sponsored by the regime and run at the IDC with support from regime asset StandWithUs. He worked at the IOF Spokesperson’s Unit between May 2010 and November 2014, rising to the position of head of the New Media Desk. In 2016 he moved to New York to run digital propaganda efforts for the World Jewish Congress, a post he left in 2019. Dratwa attended the Ministry of Strategic Affairs Digitell19 Conference in 2019.
Advisors and staff disclosed, it took another three years for the moving force behind the organisation to admit he was involved, and then it was only after the connection was exposed by The Forward.
But even then attempts to disguise the source of the funding of the groups were made.
Asked whether Beren was in fact financing Combat Antisemitism, a spokesperson and senior adviser to CAM Misha Galperin said, “we have a number of funders who want to stay anonymous, so it’s not anything that I would want to get into.”
The Forward also revealed that efforts had been made to suppress the Beren connection:
When a left-wing blog called Jewish Worker posted screenshots on Twitter in December 2019 connecting Adam Beren and Berexco to the Combat Hate Foundation, Twitter said it violated rules “against posting private information.” “Someone got Twitter to force me to delete my tweets specifically about this topic,” explained the editor of Jewish Worker, who blogs and tweets anonymously and spoke on the condition that this maintained.
Asked about the secrecy, Galperin said the group’s donors preferred anonymity to keep the focus on antisemitism — rather than on themselves or their specific politics. “It’s not about transparency, it’s about not wanting an ego to be part of the thing,” he said.
Research in documents submitted to the Internal Revenue Service, however, reveals that foundations run by the Beren family have spent millions of dollars in bankrolling the CAM. Three separate Beren foundations (Israel Henry Beren Charitable Foundation Inc, Israel Henry Beren Charitable Trust, Robert M Beren Foundation Inc), have ploughed millions into a fourth, the Beren Sea Foundation. It, in turn, has gifted $6.6 million to the Combat Hate Foundation in the three years from 2020-2022, nearly 70 per cent of its total income in the period.
Other donations by the Beren family foundations indicate the full support the family gives to the genocide in Palestine. These include over half a million dollars to the Friends of the IDF, over 2 million to the genocidal Chabad cult, and almost 9 million to Ohr Torah Stone which directly trains Ultra-orthodox recruits to the occupation forces in so called “Hesder” Yeshivas in illegal settlements. These are a mechanism to induct ultra-orthodox recruits into the occupation forces by allowing them to study Torah part time and then spend time with the occupation forces killing Palestinians. There is even a specific Hesder Yeshiva built on stolen land near Efrat in the West Bank which is named after the family patriarch: Robert M. Beren Machanaim Hesder Yeshiva
Yet again we find that campaigners against antisemitism are actually militant supporters, in fact agents, of the genocide in Palestine.
Iran denies plotting to kill Trump
RT | November 9, 2024
Iran has denied US accusations that it attempted to orchestrate a plot to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump before the November election. It has dismissed the allegations as a hoax orchestrated by pro-Israel actors in a bid to exacerbate tensions between Washington and Tehran.
On Friday, the US Department of Justice claimed that Iranian officials had asked a man named Farhad Shakeri to “provide a plan” to kill Trump, adding that he was also tasked with carrying out assassinations of US and Israeli citizens inside the US. Shakeri was described as an Afghan national residing in Tehran after being deported from the US in 2008 following a lengthy prison sentence for robbery.
The indictment also implicated two American citizens, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt, who were accused of helping Tehran track a US citizen of Iranian origin. “The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target US citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
On Saturday, the spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, categorically rejected the accusations, calling them “completely baseless.” “Such claims at this juncture [are] a malicious conspiracy orchestrated by Zionist and anti-Iranian circles, aimed at further complicating the issues between the US and Iran,” he added.
Baghaei also recalled that Iran had denied similar “false” allegations in the past. He was apparently referring to an indictment by the US Department of Justice from August in which a Pakistani national was accused of being sent to the US by Iran to carry out murders. One of the planned attacks was allegedly aimed at Trump.
Trump was the target of two assassination attempts this year prior to the election. The first one occurred in July when Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on him at a Pennsylvania rally, with one bullet grazing Trump’s ear. The would-be assassin was killed on the spot by the Secret Service.
The second incident took place in September, when a suspect identified as Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly tried to assassinate Trump at his Florida golf course but was intercepted by security.
Israel über alles
By Ricardo Nuno Costa – New Eastern Outlook – November 8 2024
“Germany has only one place, and that’s on Israel’s side,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the Bundestag, justifying the delivery of arms to Tel Aviv.
One wonders if this partial stance is what is expected of a country that claims to be the leader of the European project, with geopolitical ambitions in an increasingly multipolar world. For the global majority, the answer is no, but in Germany, the subject is thorny and shrouded in taboos. To top it off, the Federal Republic has just passed a law to prevent it from being debated.
Berlin’s inability to call Tel Aviv to account on its international obligations only confirms Germany’s increasingly secondary role in the international arena. If the “engine of Europe” is constrained in its military role, it could at least be a diplomatic power, making use of its economic status. But its role is diminishing. Why is that?
In his latest book, “Krieg ohne Ende?” (War without end?), international political scientist Michael Lüders masterfully summarises the hypocrisy surrounding Germany’s involvement in the Zionist project from the beginning to the present day. The author suggests, in the form of a subtitle, “why we need to change our attitude towards Israel if we are to have peace in the Middle East.”
Germany is losing the credibility it has built up over decades in the eyes of the global majority. Today, the country is no longer seen with the same seriousness that we have become accustomed to in recent decades, but rather as a mere instrumental piece of the US in international relations. This is also the visible result of the “feminist foreign policy” that Annalena Baerbock has pursued as foreign minister over the last three years.
Defence of Israel is ‘Staatsräson’ of the Federal Republic
Germany has adopted the defence of Israel’s existence as ‘Staatsräson’ (raison d’État). It was during a visit by Chancellor Merkel to the Israeli Knesset in 2008 that this concept was first mentioned.
In the above-mentioned bestseller, it becomes clear that this principle is no accident, as it corresponds to the fact that Israel’s ‘raison d’État’ is the Holocaust, for which Germany is to blame. According to Mr. Lüders, the Jewish state used the Eichmann case to launch its ‘raison d’État’, while many other Nazi officials responsible for the persecution of the Jews had passed into the new Bonn nomenclature without being called to account. The most notorious case was that of Hans Globke, the eminence grise of the new regime, a key player in the USA’s fight against the USSR. He had previously drafted the Nuremberg race laws and was now Adenauer’s number two, protected by the new BND intelligence services and the CIA.
The SS officer Adolf Eichmann, kidnapped in Argentina by the Israelis, symbolically bore all the blame for Germany’s 1933-45 National Socialist’s period. After his hanging in 1962 for crimes against the Jewish people during the Holocaust, in the only judicial execution carried out in Israel to date, the FRG finally officially recognised Israel in 1965, after years of collaboration (since 1952). This marked the beginning of a complex relationship that remains opaque to this day.
An important part of this relationship has been the multi-billion dollar military industry within the Atlanticist framework. The most significant case, again unclear, was the corruption scandal over the sale of three nuclear-capable submarines and four corvettes sold during the Merkel governments to the Netanyahu government in 2016 for almost 4 billion euros, which ended up being paid for in part by German taxpayers.
In a current example, political scientist Kristin Helberg, who specialises in the Middle East, expressed her surprise on the public channel in October that Berlin was not helping Israel with defensive weapons against a hypothetical Iranian attack – which in her view would be legitimate – but by delivering ammunition to be used on civilian populations, contrary to the Geneva Convention.
Germany involved in a genocide
With its arms support for Israeli attacks on civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, Germany is not only committing an international offence that is costing it the current cases opened at the ICC and ICJ, but is also seeing its reputation stained in the biggest international forums by the global majority, on which its industrial export model depends.
On 14 October, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer said at a press conference in Berlin that the German government “sees no signs that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza” and that “Israel undoubtedly has the right to self-defence against Hamas”, and two days later Chancellor Scholz said loudly in the Bundestag that “there will be more arms deliveries – Israel can always count on that.”
Criticising Israel will be banned
In its increasingly radical philo-Zionist course, the German political class passed a new resolution “to protect, preserve and strengthen Jewish life in Germany”, to which only the parties of the governing coalition and the CDU/CSU were called, without consulting the AfD and BSW. The controversial and non-transparent resolution promises to pursue “increasingly open and violent anti-Semitism in right-wing and Islamist extremist circles, as well as a relativising approach and the rise of Israel-related and left-wing anti-imperialist anti-Semitism.”
The document mentions that “cases of anti-Semitism have increased” since the Hamas attack on Israel a year ago, but fails to mention that German law has since come to consider anti-Semitic the manifestation of various expressions in favour of the Palestinian cause such as the slogan “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” among other slogans, chants, insignia or even posts published on the internet, which are now considered and counted as punishable anti-Semitic crimes.
“The German Bundestag reaffirms its decision to ensure that no organisation or project that spreads antisemitism, questions Israel’s right to exist, calls for a boycott of Israel or actively supports the BDS movement receives financial support,” the document goes on to say.
Recently, the rector of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, complained that the freedom of study of the scientific community is under massive threat. “What distinguishes antisemitism from legitimate criticism of the Israeli government?” she asked. “And above all, who defines what antisemitism is? This is not at all clear. The definition is vague and leaves enormous room for legal uncertainty,” she asserted.
The divorce between the political class and public perception
It’s clear that the text of the new law aims to exclude the AfD from public debate, using the magic buzzword of the “far right”, but it also weighs heavily on the BSW, where the Palestinian cause and the multipolarist vision are obvious. A recent study by the Forsa research institute for Stern/RTL corroborates the clear rift between real and institutional Germany. Whilst the former doesn’t want the country to be involved in the Middle East war, the political class has guaranteed its indispensable support for Israel as a ‘national interest’. Voters from all German parties are therefore unequivocally opposed to further arms deliveries to Tel Aviv. The BSW electorate (85 per cent) is in the lead, followed by the AfD (75 per cent), but also 60 per cent of SPD voters, 56 per cent of CDU/CSU voters and 52 per cent of FDP voters. Interestingly, the Greens’ electorate showed a 50-50 tie. In the national total, this corresponds to 60 per cent of the citizenry, with the difference in the east being more significant (75 per cent against).
The case of the AfD is more curious because as a party that was born out of contestation with the system on the issues not only of immigration, but also of foreign policy and others, and its electoral base is clearly critical of Berlin’s pro-Western policy, its leadership also has a disproportionate presence of the philo-Zionist element, which is no different from the rest of the political class.
According to another poll also from October, by Infratest Dimap for public television ARD and WELT daily, only 19 per cent of AfD supporters consider Israel to be a reliable partner, a noticeably lower percentage than in the CDU/CSU (34 per cent) the SPD (36 per cent) and the Greens (38 per cent).
AfD distances itself from the Zionist consensus
Probably because he knew how to interpret this discrepancy between leadership and base, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla called for an end to aid to Tel Aviv and Germany’s ‘one-sided’ relationship with the Jewish state. “By supplying arms to Israel, you are accepting the dehumanisation of all civilian victims on both sides. They are not contributing to détente, but rather throwing fuel on the fire”, he said. It is “time to take a critical and objective look at the Israeli government”.
These statements come at a time of a clear move towards multipolarity within the party. Moreover, the principle of neutrality is the AfD’s official line. Its 2024 European electoral programme states that “the supply of arms to war zones does not serve peace in Europe”. At the risk of becoming just another political party, the AfD seems to want to meet the feelings of the majority of Germans and its social support base on foreign policy issues, which are now much debated by the general public.
It seems clear that after decades in the room, the elephant can no longer be hidden in the German political debate.
Canada faces legal action over complicity in Gaza genocide
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march during a protest in downtown Toronto,Canada on August 3, 2024 [Mert Alper Dervış/Anadolu Agency]
MEMO | November 7, 2024
The Trump mandate
By Daniel MCCARTHY | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 7, 2024
Donald Trump has won a victory even more stunning than his upset defeat of Hillary Clinton eight years ago. Two impeachments, relentless lawfare and innumerable criminal charges, two assassination attempts, and an unceasing chorus of the nation’s most powerful media calling him a “fascist” could not stop Trump. In the teeth of all that adversity, Trump has only grown stronger. And now he has the symbolic yet potent mandate of a popular-vote majority.
That majority adds psychological force that makes the Trump revolution cultural as well as political. Before, it was easy for Trump’s critics to believe his 2016 victory was a fluke. They might have to deal with its consequences, including the impetus his election gave to a populist turn within the institutions of the conservative movement. But once Trump was out of office, those institutions would sooner or later revert to their former character. After all, populism didn’t have money behind it. If it didn’t have people, either, it wouldn’t be around for long.
Trump has shattered the laws of political physics. Realignments that had already begun as a result of Trump’s earlier success are accelerating. To appreciate the magnitude of what Trump achieved in this election, look beyond the states he won—in blue state after blue state, Trump made enormous, often double-digit gains. He made deep inroads into the Hispanic vote, particularly among men. Meanwhile, neoconservatives who held out hope of retaking the commanding heights of the Republican party if Trump was defeated have little choice now but to accept a place in the Democratic coalition. But they may not be comfortable there, either, as Democrats crack up over Israel’s war with Hamas.
This does not mean that four years from now the Republican nominee will be competitive in every blue state or will win a majority of Hispanics, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the GOP will be without a hawkish wing and some ostensibly pro-Trump neoconservative influences. The changes that Trump brings about are not necessarily linear. But they will afford opportunities hardly imaginable before this point. And J.D. Vance is well-equipped to make the most of them in 2028.
Although foreign policy was not voters’ top priority either this year or when Trump first won the presidency, war and the way leaders in both parties respond to it—or fail to respond—establishes conditions conducive to ideological mutation. How Trump handles the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East that he inherits from President Biden will be a watershed. Democrats who were reluctant to criticize U.S. support for Israel while that support was coming from the Biden-Harris administration will now hammer Trump over Israel’s actions. Can Trump make good on the faith placed in him both by Arab-American voters in Michigan and by ardent supporters of Israel? Can the green shoots of a return to realism in Republican foreign policy survive the burdens of responsibility that the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine impose? The wars themselves may not be America’s responsibility, but the administration will face tough choices about what not to do as well as what to do.
The possibility of wide-ranging new tariffs exists alongside the possibility that the Federal Reserve may be audited and compelled to answer to the public by the new administration. Moves in either of these directions would send shockwaves through Wall Street. Could the Trump administration be skillful enough to remake the fiscal and monetary systems without causing panic? If not, what milder measures could the administration undertake that would still address trade imbalances and inflation? Trump is open to considering a much wider range of possibilities than conventional politicians would dare to imagine, and even if his administration doesn’t avail itself of those possibilities, the mere fact the president would consider them will redraw the boundaries of policy discourse in Washington and beyond.
The president will be confronted by stiff opposition within the federal bureaucracy as well as from Democrats in Congress. He should not flinch from forcing reform on the administrative state and dismantling entire departments of the federal government. In this, too, Trump can be transformative. His experiences during his first term with leaks and policy sabotage originating from the bureaucracy should inform his handling of the civil service this time. It has been a power unto itself for far too long, and it has pursued not a disinterested agenda in the service of the public but a partisan agenda in the service of liberal elites.
New electoral maps, new issue coalitions, a new balance of power within the executive branch—all of these are just some of the domestic effects of Trump’s triumph. It also has the potential to inspire, or amplify, such changes all around the world. The precedent Trump has set is not only one that populist parties in Europe and elsewhere will take to heart. Mainstream parties that until now had looked to elite liberal opinion in the United States for guidance and guidelines will henceforth have to do some new thinking of their own, incorporating something of Trumpism into their dealings with America and perhaps into their politics at home. Emmanuel Macron joined Benjamin Netanyahu as the first of the world’s leaders to congratulate Trump on X last night.
The political and cultural aftershocks of Trump’s victory will not by themselves be enough to make the new administration a success—much hard work and resilience in the face of inevitable setbacks will be necessary, as in more pedestrian administrations. There is also a need for conservatives outside of government to answer the call, the moment presents to be both creative and disciplined. The right needs renovation, including in the way it approaches art and literature. Just as Trump has shown that a new majority can be forged in battles no one else would dare fight, the right may be capable of achieving greater things in the realm of culture and philosophy than it has so far been brave enough to imagine. What’s needed is not just a Trumpist or populist cultural program—though Hulk Hogan certainly has his place in America’s affections—but a cultural program as bold as Trump’s political challenge to the obsolete elite.
Trump should reawaken conservatives’ spirit of endeavor. Because he has dared greatly and succeeded.
Trump’s Victory & the Decline of Liberal Hegemony: “Unburdened By What Has Been”
By Professor Glenn Diesen | November 7, 2024
The election victory of Trump should not have been a surprise. The era of liberal hegemony has already come to an end, and a correction is long overdue. The liberal hegemony is no longer liberal, and the hegemony is exhausted. Trump is often denounced for being transactional, yet the de-ideologization of America and return to pragmatism is exactly what the country needs.
Change or Preserve the Unsustainble Status-Quo?
The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction, which placed Harris as the incumbent in an unfavourable position. Harris as the Vice President could not distance herself sufficiently from President Biden’s policies, which meant that she had to own the failures of the past four years. The message of “turning the page” did not resonate, and she was left with the meaningless slogan of “joy” – which only demonstrated her detachment from the growing concerns of Americans.
The borders have been wide open, media freedom is in decline, the government’s overreach is growing, US industries are no longer competitive, the national debt is out of control, social problems and culture wars are going from bad to worse, the political climate becomes increasingly divisive, the US military is overstretched, the global majority rejects Washington’s simplistic and dangerous heuristics of dividing the world into liberal democracy versus authoritarianism, the US is complicit in a genocide in Palestine and is heading towards nuclear war with Russia.
Who would vote for four more years when the status quo entails driving off a cliff? It is a good time to be in opposition and offer change. Being a populist with a bombastic demeanour, seemingly immune to consequences from breaking social norms, is a good feature when breaking free from decades-old ideological dogmas that constrain necessary pragmatism.
Neoliberalism Exhausted the US
“Make America Great Again” is likely a reference to 1973, when the US peaked and has since been in decline. Under the neoliberal consensus, society became an appendage to the market and politicians became impotent to deliver the change demanded by the public. The political Left could not redistribute wealth, and the political Right could not defend traditional values and communities. Globalisation gave birth to a political class loyal to international capital without national loyalties, and accountability to the public disappeared. Globalisation often contradicts democracy, and there is a growing division between illiberal democracy versus undemocratic liberalism.
A key lesson from the American System in the early 19th century was that industrialisation and subequent economic sovereignty is a necessity for national sovereignty. Tariffs and temporary subsidies are important tools for infant industries to develop maturity, and fair trade is thus often preferable to free trade. Trump’s tariffs to re-industrialise and advance technological sovereignty are noble ambitions that even the Biden administration attempted to emulate. However, Trump’s flaw is that excessive tariffs and the economic war on China will severely disrupt supply chains to the extent it undermines the US economy. The excesses of Trump’s tariffs and economic coercion derive from the effort to break China and restore US global primacy. If the US can accept a more modest role in the international system as one among many great powers, he could embrace a more moderate economic nationalism that would have greater prospect of succeeding.
Trump’s Vice President J.D. Vance correctly noted the self-defeating moralising of the US: “We have built a foreign policy of hectoring and moralising and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it. The Chinese have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people”. It is a good time for pragmatism to triumph over ideology.
Critics of Trump are correct to point out the paradox of a billionaire claiming to represent the people against a detached globalised elite. Sitting in flashy buildings with his name on the side in large golden letters, Trump has nonetheless taken the role of representing the American workers by calling for re-industrialisation. Raised in the excesses and hedonism of America’s cultural elites, Trump calls for preserving America’s traditional values and culture. Is Trump a saviour? Probably not. But policies are more important than personalities, and Trump is kicking open a door that was seemingly closed by liberal ideology.
An End to Liberal Crusades – Including Ending the Ukraine Proxy War
Trump’s appeal to end the forever wars resulted in invaluable support from former democrats such as Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy and Elon Musk. The liberal crusades over the past three decades fuel unsustainable debt, they finance the deep state (the blob), they alienate the US across the world, and incentivise the other great powers to collectively balance the US. The forever wars are costly mistakes that never end well, yet the US could absorb these costs during the unipolar era in the absence of any real opponents. In a multipolar system, the US must scale back its military adventurism and learn how to prioritise foreign policy objectives.
It is not unreasonable to argue that preserving the empire in its current format could cost the US its republic. Trump is not in favour of dismantling the empire, but being a transactional pragmatist, he would like a better return on investment. He believes allies should pay for protection, regional arrangements such as the former NAFTA and TPP that transfer productive power to allies are rejected, and adversaries should be engaged to the extent it serves US national interests. Trump is condemned for befriending dictators, yet this is surely preferable to the so-called “liberal” diplomats who no longer believe in diplomacy as it is feared to’ “legitimise” adversaries.
Trump would like to put an end to the proxy war in Ukraine as it is very costly in terms of both blood and treasure, and the war has already been lost. The liberal crusaders never defined a victory against the world’s largest nuclear power that believes it is fighting for its survival. Washington’s elites have repeatedly stated it is a good war as Ukrainian soldiers are dying rather than American soldiers, thus it is difficult to morally shame Trump when his main argument is that the killing must stop.
The liberal crusaders in Washington also frequently argue that the strategic objective of the proxy war was to knock out Russia from the ranks of great powers so the US could focus its resources on containing China. Instead, the war has strengthened Russia and pushed it further into the arms of China. A humanitarian disaster is taking place and the world is pushed to the brink of nuclear war. The economic coercion, including the theft of Russia’s sovereign funds, has triggered the global majority to de-dollarise and develop alternative payment systems. Trump is hardly innocent as he started the economic war against China. However, without ideological constraints, there may be room for course correction as he noted that the weaponisation of the dollar threatens the foundation of US superpower status. Yet again, pragmatism can triumph over ideology.
Will Trump be successful? He will certainly not end the war in 24 hours. Trump has the tools to influence Ukraine as the US is financing the war and arming Ukraine. However, Trump’s maximum pressure is unlikely to work against Russia as it considers this to be a war of survival, and the political West has broken nearly all agreements. Trump withdrew from strategic arms control treaties and armed Ukraine, which contributed to triggering the war. Russia will demand an end to NATO expansion in accordance with the Istanbul agreement, plus territorial concessions as a result of almost three years of war. Trump has previously signalled the willingness to offer an end to NATO expansionism, which could lay the foundation for a wider European security agreement. The conflicts between the West and Russia derive from the failure to establish a mutually acceptable settlement after the Cold War. The West instead began expanding NATO and thus revived the zero-sum bloc politics of the Cold War, and there has ever since been conflicts with Russia over where to draw the new militarised dividing lines.
Concerning Israel, there is an obvious exception to Trump’s aversion to war. Trump, Vance, Musk, Gabbard and Kennedy are all reluctant to take a hard line against the genocide in Palestine or even criticise Israel. Trump will likely continue to offer unconditional support for Israel and take a hostile stance against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. Pragmatism and “America First” will likely be lacking in this part of the world.
Panic Across the Liberal Empire
The opponents of Trump demonstrate a remarkable difficulty in articulating the case for Trump. Even if they know why people voted for him, they would feel morally compelled to refrain from articulating the reasons in fear of “legitimising” his policies with understanding. The inability to articulate the position of an adversary is a good indication of being propagandised. Have we been exposed to propaganda? There is clearly a tendency for ideological fundamentalists to present the world as a struggle between good and evil, in which mutual understanding and pragmatism are demonised as a betrayal of sacred values.
The panic and confusion is also caused by a dishonest media. The media has almost exclusively negative coverage of Trump, while Harris can do no wrong. Trump did not win despite the bad media coverage but because of it. A populist claims to be the real representative of the people, who will defend them against a detached and corrupt elite. The animosity towards Trump and his supporters was therefore worn as a badge of honour. The political-media elites used the judiciary system against the political opposition during the election cycle, they impeached Trump twice and tried him as a private citizen, and they attempted to remove Trump from 16 state ballots.
Trust to the media is not an advantage when it is not trustworthy. The Russiagate hoax from the 2016 election has been exposed as a fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story from the 2020 election was censored by the media under the false pretence of being “Russian propaganda”. During the 2024 election, the removal of Biden was largely a non-issue. The undemocratic selection of Harris was ignored, and the media instead converted her into a rockstar after ignoring her due to her failures over the past four years. The first assassination attempt against Trump went down the memory hole with remarkable haste, while most people are likely unaware that there was a second assassination attempt. Desperate media stories, such as Trump threatening Liz Cheney with a firing squad, were so desperate and dishonest that they had the opposite effect. The liberal machine, represented by an obedient media and Hollywood elites, has run out of steam.
Europe is in panic as they lost their ally in the White House and thus fear for the future of the liberal international order. Yet, the liberal international order is already gone and an ideological Europe is suffering from Stockholm Sydrome. Biden is complicit in genocide in Palestine, he attacked Europe’s critical energy infrastructure, lured European industries to relocate to to the US under the Inflation Reduction Act, brought major war to Europe by provoking a proxy war in Ukraine and sabotaging the peace negotiations in Istanbul, he intensified censorship around the world, and pressures the Europeans to reduce economic connectivity with China. After years of aspiring for strategic autonomy and de-vassalisation, the Europeans have subordinated themselves and accepted diminishing relevance in the world. The European political-media elites present Trump as the new Hitler, yet are in a great hurry to subordinate themselves economically, militarily and politically to the US. The Europeans are also worried that a similar leadership crisis has come to their own continent. Political elites committed to liberal hegemony have neglected national interests, and will be swept away in the years to come.
How will it all end?
The second Trump presidency will not be like the first term. The first Trump presidency was constrained as the Democrats largely contested the election results in 2016 by denouncing him as an illegitimate leader who had been placed in the White House by the Kremlin. The RussiaGate hoax has since been exposed and Trump even won the popular vote by 5 million votes, giving him a powerful mandate to pursue his agenda. Furthermore, Trump the first Trump government was infiltrated by neocons as he was dismissed as too radical. Over the past 8 years, a powerful MAGA movement has emerged that also consists of former Democrats.
One should be careful looking into the crystal ball and make predictions, and this is especially true with Trump. Professor Richard Rorty predicted in 1998 that the excesses of liberalism and globalisation would eventually be met with a fierce correction:
“Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots… Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen”.[1]
Trump has identified many of the problems plaguing the US and the world, although he may not have the answers. He will make many mistakes and his maximum pressure approach from business is not always transferrable to international politics. After decades of criminalising opposition to liberal hegemony, it should not have been a surprise that a “strongman” would be elected to throw a wrench into machinery. Trump is a wild card and the world is undergoing immense transformation, so to quote Rorty: “no one can predict what will happen.”
[1] Rorty, R 1998. Achieving our country: Leftist thought in twentieth-century America, Harvard University Press.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
Blog Roll
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- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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