AP | The House passed legislation Wednesday that would establish a broader
definition of antisemitism for the Department of Education to enforce
anti-discrimination laws, the latest response from lawmakers to a
nationwide student protest movement over the Israel-Hamas war.
The proposal, which passed 320-91 with some bipartisan support, would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism
in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal
anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination based on shared
ancestry, ethnic characteristics or national origin. It now goes to the
Senate where its fate is uncertain.
Action on the bill was just
the latest reverberation in Congress from the protest movement that has
swept university campuses. Republicans in Congress have denounced the
protests and demanded action to stop them, thrusting university
officials into the center of the charged political debate over Israel’s
conduct of the war in Gaza. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been
killed since the war was launched in October, after Hamas staged a
deadly terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.
If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the bill would broaden
the legal definition of antisemitism to include the “targeting of the
state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” Critics say the
move would have a chilling effect on free speech throughout college
campuses.
“Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful
discrimination,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said during a hearing
Tuesday. “By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into
Title VI’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.”
Advocates of the proposal say it would provide a much-needed,
consistent framework for the Department of Education to police and
investigate the rising cases of discrimination and harassment targeted
toward Jewish students.
“It is long past time that Congress act to protect Jewish Americans
from the scourge of antisemitism on campuses around the country,” Rep.
Russell Fry, R-S.C., said Tuesday.
The expanded definition of
antisemitism was first adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental group that includes the
United States and European Union states, and has been embraced by the
State Department under the past three presidential administrations,
including Joe Biden’s
Previous bipartisan efforts to codify it
into law have failed. But the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas militants
in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza have reignited efforts to
target incidents of antisemitism on college campuses.
Just
before midnight, a large group of counterdemonstrators, wearing black
outfits and white masks, arrived on campus and tried to tear down the
barricades surrounding the encampment. Campers, some holding lumber and
wearing goggles and helmets, rallied to defend the encampment’s
perimeter. The violence occurred hours after the university declared
that the camp was “unlawful and violates university policy.”
Videos
showed fireworks being set off and at least one being thrown into the
camp. Over several hours, counterdemonstrators threw objects, including
wood and a metal barrier, at the camp and those inside, with fights
repeatedly breaking out. Some tried to force their way into the camp,
and the pro-Palestinian side used pepper spray to defend themselves.
A
group of security guards could be seen observing the clashes but did
not move in to stop them. Authorities cleared the area around 3 a.m.
Some
in the camp were being treated for eye irritation and other wounds. The
extent of the injuries was unclear, though The Times saw several people
who were bleeding and needed medical attention. At least one person, a
26-year-old man suffering from a head injury, was taken to the hospital
by paramedics, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
UCLA
administrators and law enforcement are facing scrutiny from students,
professors and the broader community for not intervening faster.
“The
limited and delayed campus law enforcement response at UCLA last night
was unacceptable — and it demands answers,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office
said in a statement.
UCLA officials decried the violence and said
they had requested help from the Los Angeles Police Department. It is
not clear whether police made any arrests. UCLA police did not
immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
“Horrific
acts of violence occurred at the encampment tonight and we immediately
called law enforcement for mutual aid support. The fire department and
medical personnel are on the scene. We are sickened by this senseless
violence and it must end,” Mary Osako, vice chancellor for UCLA
Strategic Communications, said in a statement.
A law enforcement
source told The Times on Wednesday that the LAPD reached out to campus
police shortly after the violence broke out. They were told not to bring
in anti-riot police, but eventually UCLA agreed to accept help from the
larger police force. The discussion unfolded over several hours until
officers with the LAPD and California Highway Patrol were given the
green light to intervene around 1 a.m., the source said.
At
around 1:40 a.m., police officers in riot gear arrived, and some
counterprotesters began to leave. But the police did not immediately
break up the clashes at the camp, which continued despite the law
enforcement presence.
One representative of the camp said the
counterdemonstrators repeatedly pushed over barricades that outline the
boundaries of the encampment, and some campers said they were hit by a
substance they thought was pepper spray. As counterprotesters attempted
to pull down the wood boards surrounding the encampment, at least one
person could be heard yelling, “Second nakba,” referring to the mass
displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948
Arab-Israeli war.
Daily Bruin News Editor Catherine Hamilton said
she was sprayed with some type of irritant and repeatedly punched in
the chest and upper abdomen as she was reporting on the unrest. Another
student journalist was pushed to the ground by counterprotesters and was
beaten and kicked for nearly a minute. Hamilton was treated at a
hospital and released.
“I truly did not expect to be directly
assaulted. I know that these individuals — at least the individual who
initiated the mobilization against us — knew that we were journalists,”
she said. “And while I did not think that protected us from harassment, I
thought that might have [prevented us from being] assaulted. I was
mistaken.”
At around 3 a.m., a line of officers arrived at the
camp and pushed the remaining counterprotesters out of the quad area.
The police told people to leave or face arrest.
“What we’ve just
witnessed was the darkest day in my 32 years at UCLA,” said David Myers,
a professor of Jewish history at UCLA who is working on initiatives to
bridge differences on campus. He called the situation a “complete and
total systems failure at the university, city and state levels.”
“Why
didn’t the police, UCPD and LAPD, show up? Those in the encampment were
defenseless in the face of a violent band of thugs. And no one,
wherever they stand politically, is safer today,” Myers said.
Ananya
Roy, a professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography,
echoed concerns about the university’s lack of response when faced with a
violent counterprotest.
“It gives people impunity to come to our
campus as a rampaging mob,” she said. “The word is out they can do this
repeatedly and get away with it. I am ashamed of my university.”
nakedcapitalism | Many US papers are giving front-page, above the fold treatment to
university administrators going wild and calling in the cops on peaceful
campus protests, first at Columbia, followed by Yale and NYU.
Harvard, in a profile in courage, closed its campus to prevent a
spectacle. Demonstrations are taking hold at other campuses, including
MIT, Emerson, and Tufts.
This is an overly dynamic situation, so I am not sure it makes sense
to engage in detailed coverage. However, some things seem noteworthy.
First, in typical US hothouse fashion, the press is treating protests
as if they were a bigger deal than the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I am
not the only one to notice this. From Parapraxis (hat tip guurst; bear with the author’s leisurely set-up):
I am employed as a non-tenure-track professor
in a university department dedicated to teaching and research about
Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. One day, I arrived at work to find
security cameras installed in my department’s hallway. I read in an
email that these cameras had been installed after an antisemitic poster
was discovered affixed to a colleague’s office door. I was never shown
this poster. Like the cameras, I learned of it only belatedly. Despite
the fact that the poster apparently constituted so great a danger to the
members of my department as to warrant increased security, nobody
bothered to inform me about it. By the time I was aware that there was a
threat in which I was ostensibly implicated, the decision had already
been made—by whom, exactly, I don’t know—about which measures were
necessary to protect me from it. My knowledge, consent, and perspective
were irrelevant to the process…
The prolepsis of the decision did more than protect me—if, indeed, it
really did that. It interpellated my coworkers and myself as people in
need of protection…. I was unwittingly transformed, literally overnight,
into the type of person to whom something might happen.
My employer has a campus—three, actually—meaning that it has a
physical plant. I navigate one of these campuses as my workplace, but it
almost never figures for me as “the campus.” In fact, the
first time since beginning the job when I felt myself caught up in an
affective relation, not to the particular institution where I work, but
rather to “the campus” was when I looked up into that security
camera and felt myself being “watched” by it. Only then did I think, a
couple of months into my temporary contract, that I was not just at my
workplace. Now I was on “the campus.”
This incident with the poster and the camera occurred, of course,
some weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza. Against so horrific a
backdrop, and relative to the intimidation and retaliation to which
those who speak out against the war (including—indeed, especially—in the
academy) have been subjected, my story sounds banal. And it is. In its
very ordinariness, however, the anecdote is quite representative: first,
of how decisions get made at contemporary institutions of higher
education (generally speaking, without the input of those whom they
impact); and second, of the logic of a peculiarly American phenomenon I
call campus panic….
The months since October 7 have aggravated the most extreme campus
panic I have witnessed. To judge by the American mass media, the campus
is the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world. What is
happening “on campus” often seems of greater concern than what is
happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed
by the IDF. When all the Palestinian dead have been counted, it seems
likely that these months will be recorded as having inflamed a campus
panic no less intense than the one that accompanied the Vietnam War.
Second, many otherwise fine stories, like Columbia in crisis, again
by the Columbia Journalism Review, and Columbia University protests and
the lessons of “Gym Crow” by Judd at Popular Information, start off
with the 1968 protests at Columbia as a point of departure. And again,
consistent with the Parapraxis account and being old enough to remember
the Vietnam War, I find the comparison to be overdone. Yes, there are
some telling similarities, like the role of right-wing pressure in
getting campus administrators to call out the cops, the device of
dwelling on the earlier uprising seems to obscure more than it reveals.
The Vietnam War, unlike Gaza, tore the US apart. Today’s campus students
are, with only the comparatively small contingent of Palestinian
students, acting to protest US support of slaughter in Gaza. In 1968,
for many, the stake were more personal. The risk of young men having to
serve was real.
Similarly, conservatives then supported the military and were
typically proud of their or any family member’s service. Draft dodging
and demonization of armed forces leaders was close to unconscionable. It
took years of the major television networks and the two authoritative
magazines, Time and Newsweek, showing what the war looked like, and
intimating that the US was not succeeding, that shifted mass opinion.
davidstockman | What Johnson’s impending Waterloo means, therefore, is not merely the
prospect of another wild and wooly succession battle, but actually that there is no point at all in the preservation of a Republican majority and GOP House Speaker. After all, the Washington GOP has become so infected with neocon warmongers and careerist pols
who spend a lifetime basking in the imperial projects and pretensions
of the world’s War Capital that apparently the best the House GOP caucus
could do when it ejected the previous careerist deep stater from the
Speaker’s chair was to tap the dim-witted nincompoop who currently
occupies it.
The Republican party is thus truly beyond redemption. As JFK once said about the CIA, its needs to be splintered into a thousand pieces and swept into the dustbin of history.
Indeed, when you look at the calamitous fiscal trajectory embedded in the CBO’s latest 30-year fiscal outlook, you truly have to wonder about what miniature minds like Congressman Johnson’s are actually thinking. That
is to say, the latest CBO report published in March presumes that there
will never be another recession and no inflation flare-up, interest
rate spike, global energy dislocation, prolonged Forever War or any
other imaginable crisis ever again—just smooth economic sailing for the
next 30 years.
And yet, and then. Even by the math of this Rosy Scenario on steroids the public debt will reach $140 trillion
at minimum by 2054. In turn, that would cause interest payments on the
public debt with rates no higher than those which prevailed between 1986
and 1997 to reach $10 trillion per year.
You
simply don’t need paragraphs, pages and whole monographs worth of
analysis and amplification to understand where that is going. The
nation’s fisc is now on the cusp of descending into the maws of a
doomsday machine. So how in the world do these elements of Johnson’s
offering make even the remotest sense?
Speaker Johnson's Foreign Aid Boondoggle:
Indo-Pacific aid: $8.1 billion.
Israel: $26.4 billion.
Ukraine: $60.8 billion.
Total: $95.3 billion.
Apparently,
it’s because Johnson and a good share of the Washington GOP have
succumbed wholesale to neocon paranoia, stupidity, lies and hollow
excuses for warmongering. For crying out loud, Putin has no interest in molesting the Poles, to say nothing of storming the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
He is certainly no Ghandi, but well more than smart enough to recognize
that with Russia’s GDP of $2.2 trillion and war budget of $80 billion
there would be no point in going to war with NATO’s $45 trillion of GDP
and combined war budgets in excess of $1.2 trillion.
Likewise,
China’s $50 trillion debt-ridden Ponzi would collapse in months if its
$3.5 trillion flow of export earnings were disrupted after attempting to
land its single modern aircraft carrier on the California coast. And
Iran has no nukes, no intercontinental range missiles and a GDP equal to
130 hours of US annual output.
So, some Axis of evil!
Yet
that’s exactly what the Speaker said this morning after going to too
many Deep State briefings and apparently having his own johnson yanked
once too often. The Swamp creatures surely see the lad’s naivete and
blithering ignorance as a gift that doesn’t stop giving. That is to say,
a “mark” who knows nothing at all about the world from sources not
stamped, “Top Secret (lies)”.
Speaker Mike Johnson: “We’re
going to stand for freedom and make sure that Putin doesn’t march
through Europe… we’re the greatest Nation on the planet, and we have to
act like it”,
This is a critical time right now, a
critical time on the world stage. I can make a selfish decision and do
something that’s different but I’m doing here what I believe to be the
right thing. “I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is
critically important. I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we've gotten.
I believe Xi, Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil.
I think they’re in coordination on it. “So I think that Vladimir Putin
would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he
might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.
To
put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American
boys. My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a
live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is
not a game, this is not a joke.
Needless to say, our dufus Speaker doesn’t know the “Baltics” from the “Balkans” where Serbia and other Russian friendlies are definitely not quaking in their boots about Putin.
In
point of fact, however, it is not hard to see that the civil war and
territorial dispute between Kiev and Moscow over the Donbas and rim of
the Black Sea from Mariupol to Odessa is a one-off of Russian and
regional history and Washington’s mindless push of NATO eastward to
Russia’s very doorstep.
The light-yellow area of this 1897 map
gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there
was no doubt as to the paternity of the Donbas and the lands adjacent to
the Azov Sea and the Black Sea. Already then, they were part of the 125
years-old New Russia, which had been assembled by purchase and conquest
during the reign of Catherine the Great.
Indeed, it was only in
1922 that the yellow area—essentially demarcating the four provinces of
Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which recently voted to
rejoin Russia—was appended to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by
the great humanitarian and map-maker, V. Lenin.
And yet
Speaker Johnson now wants to crash the Republican Party on enforcing a
map drawn by one of history’s bloodiest monsters. It’s come down to that.
US officials are touting Israel’s defense of Iran’s attack as a
victory, and that’s the message Biden conveyed to Netanyahu, a sign the
US doesn’t want the situation to escalate. Iran fired over 300 missiles
and drones at Israel, which was a response to Israel’s bombing of Iran’s
consulate in Damascus on April 1.
“Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange. It took out the
IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp] leadership in the Levant, Iran
tried to respond, and Israel clearly demonstrated its military
superiority, defeating this attack, particularly in coordination with
its partners,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters, according to The Times of Israel.
In a statement on the attack released by the White House, Biden said he would convene with other G7 leaders to “coordinate a united diplomatic response to Iran’s brazen attack.”
Israeli officials claimed 99% of the Iranian missiles and drones were
intercepted by Israeli air defense systems and with assistance from the
US, Britain, and Jordan. Some missiles got through and damaged the
Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel. Only one person was injured in the
attack, a seven-year-old Bedouin girl in the Negev, and nobody was
killed.
Iran gave Israel plenty of time to respond to the attack by
announcing it fired the drones hours before they reached Israeli
territory, and Tehran said it gave other regional countries a 72-hour notice. Iranian officials said the attack was “limited” and made clear they do not seek an escalation with Israel.
But Tehran is also warning it will launch an even bigger attack if
Israel responds. “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate
reckless behavior, they will receive a decisive and much stronger
response,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a statement on Sunday.
While the US is signaling it seeks de-escalation and won’t support a
potential Israeli attack on Iran, it’s unclear what Israel will do next.
The Israeli war cabinet convened to discuss the situation on Sunday, and Israeli media reports said they agreed a response would come but didn’t decide on where or when.
Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz vowed Israel would respond
but signaled it wouldn’t be imminent. Gantz said the “event is not
over” and that Israel should “build a regional coalition and exact a
price from Iran, in a way and at a time that suits us.”
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Biden also told Netanyahu
“that the United States is going to continue to help Israel defend
itself,” signaling the US would intervene again to help Israel if it
does choose to escalate the situation and comes under another attack.
Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria killed 13 people,
including seven members of the IRGC. Israel has a history of conducting
covert attacks inside Iran and killing Iranians in Syria, but the
bombing of the diplomatic facility marked a huge escalation.
nakedcapitalism | I recently came across this piece
from the Century Foundation titled “A Bolder American Foreign Policy
Means More Values and Less War.” Its central argument is that the US
must “recenter values” like “multilateralism and human rights that are
core to its identity.”
The Century Foundation calls itself a “a progressive, independent
think tank,” and this particular piece appears to mean well but is just
as disconnected from reality than all the neocon think tanks’ war
mongering policy papers saying Washington will prevail as it takes on
Russia, China, Iran, and whoever else it feels like.
The Century Foundation authors possess a Hollywoodized idea of
America that isn’t a land filled with brutal class struggle but virtue,
which flow out into its foreign policy that stands for international
humanitarian or human rights law. I think anyone with a basic
understanding of current events or recent history knows how ridiculous
this is, and yet it is repeated ad nauseam by every purported think
tank. I suppose this is a classic example of Upton Sinclair’s saying
that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salary depends on his not understanding it,” but I think the Century
Foundation is onto something with its focus on values. It’s just that it
has it backwards. The problem is that values are what has the US on
the brink of starting World War III in multiple locations.
So what are the core values that do have it such a position – and whose are they?
I think the story of former US President Herbert Hoover is
instructive. He had interests in mines in Russia until they were seized
by the Bolsheviks. [1] Hoover never forgot about it and remained terrified of Communists for the rest of his life – and for good reason considering how much he stood to lose.
Though Hoover got booted out of office in 1932, he played a central
role in organizing capitalists to counter worker organization both in
the US and abroad. His legacy lives on at Stanford’s neocon Hoover
Institution. Throughout his life, he remained a major admirer of
pre-Soviet Russia: “At the top was a Russian noble family and at the
bottom 100,000 peasants and workers with nobody much in between but the
priesthood and the overseers.”
That pretty much sums up the capitalist class’ enduring vision not
just for Russia, but everywhere. Ownership of Russian mines or Opium
Wars in China might not factor much into my or your everyday life, but
you can bet it’s an important part of American ruling class ideology.
Whose values? The dominant value at play there is a belief that as
Western capitalists they have a right and a duty to exploit and profit
off of every corner of the globe. Just like capital must dominate labor,
it must expand and find new sources of revenue. If governments in
Russia and China impede that progress, they must be destroyed.
Rather than bromides like more American “values,” the following are
some questions or thought exercises for think tanks to consider –
whether they want to win another war or maybe even quit starting so many
of them.
Can You Practice Realpolitik with Gangsters?
The US is a market state that is dominated by and run for
transnational capital. Its foreign policy and the military are a tool of
the American oligarchy. Therefore, any serious policy discussion needs
to deal with the fact that national interests as they’re expressed today
are not in any real sense national but representative of the interests
of a small cohort of the super wealthy.
When US officials go on about spreading “freedom,” they’re not lying.
It’s just their idea of freedom is a state devoted to high profits – free from the political whims of local populations that could degrade an investment’s expected return.
Let’s remember there likely wouldn’t be any problem with Russia had
Putin not put an end to the 1990s shock therapy administered by the
Western finance capitalists who were making a killing by pillaging
Russian resources. Like Bert Hoover, they’re haunted by that opportunity
snatched away from them, and they’ve been trying to get it back for a
quarter century now.
The question is will American capital ever voluntarily give up? Will
it ever say “okay, we’re satisfied with what we’ve got here, you do your
thing in your sphere of influence”?
It’s not like Moscow and Beijing haven’t tried. Russia for example
floated the idea of joining NATO or working out some other security
arrangement. For decades after the end of the USSR, Russia tried to be
accepted into the West’s club to no avail.
China, too, constantly repeats the refrain that the world is big enough for both Beijing and Washington. It invited the US to join it in its Belt and Road Initiative.
The US could have helped steer projects that would have benefited both
countries. While such cooperation between the two big powers wouldn’t be
a panacea for all the world’s problems, it would likely mean a lot
better spot than current one. Instead the US wanted the whole pie and
instead we got the TPP, sanctions, export bans, a new Cold War, a spy
balloon scandal, the disastrous effort to weaken Russia before taking on
China, the successful effort to sever Europe from Eurasia to disastrous
effect for Europe, and the desire to see a Ukraine sequel in Taiwan
and/or the South China Sea.
There is a lot of confusion over why the West keeps escalating in a
losing effort. Why, for example, are Western governments going around
begging for shells to send Ukraine rather than accepting the L? The
desperation seems to stem from the creeping realization that their
system is coming undone. The entire post-WWII elite American mindset is
built on the foundation of worldwide profit expansion via silicon and
fire, and if they throw everything at Russia and lose, well a whole new
domino theory could come into play – one where parasitic Western finance
capital is driven back. (Granted it might in most cases be replaced by a
more local form, but it’s nonetheless frightening for the Western
honchos.) Just look at what’s happening to France in Françafrique! And
the US in the Middle East!
The fact that the West can no longer even manufacture enough weapons
to supply its proxy wars almost certainly means that the dominoes will
keep falling.
Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks are, like, way better than Warren Buffett's. How does that happen?"
sputnik | Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) raised eyebrows
recently with the revelation the former US House Speaker placed a big
bet on a little-known San Francisco tech startup. A disclosure made last
week showed the powerful Democratic Party politician purchased $5
million in stock of the privately-held company Databricks, a cloud data
company. The stake is one of dozens Pelosi holds in US tech companies,
some obscure and some well-known such as Tesla and Microsoft. The
lawmaker has reportedly invested more than $120 million in stock
purchases since entering federal government in 1987. Her net worth is
thought to be over $100 million, although her current salary as a US
congresswoman is just over $220,000. Pelosi has never been convicted of
criminal wrongdoing in her investment activity, although her portfolio’s
impressive return of 65% last year might suggest the legislator is more
informed than average traders. US stock indices grew an average of 26%
in 2023.
“From an ethical perspective, I believe it is extremely harmful for
politicians to trade individual stocks,” said Chris Josephs, the founder
of a stock trading service, to US media. “There are numerous jobs out
there that don’t allow employees [to conduct] trading, yet our most
powerful Americans can.” Pelosi opposed attempts to ban lawmakers from
buying and selling stocks in 2021 under the claim such activity could be
viewed as insider trading. “We are a free-market economy,” she said at
the time. “They [Congress members] should be able to participate in
that.” Former director of the US Office of Government Ethics Walter
Shaub slammed the argument as “ridiculous.” “She might as well have said
‘let them eat cake,’” said Shaub, referring to famous comments by the
French queen Marie Antoinette. “Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But
your average schmuck doesn’t get confidential briefings from government
experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the
price of stocks.”
Late last week it was announced that an activist involved in
pro-Palestine protests at the California lawmaker’s home had been
arrested on felony vandalism charges. Cynthia Papermaster, 77, is
reportedly being held on a $50,000 bond. “We want to see a permanent and
immediate ceasefire,” said Papermaster in an interview recently. “We
can’t control what the Israelis do, but we can control what our own
government does, or at least that’s the aspiration.” Pelosi called for
the anti-war activists to be investigated by the FBI in an appearance on
US television after the incident earlier this year. Pelosi first
claimed the demonstrators were being paid by China, then later clarified
she believed Russia was behind the act of civil disobedience. The
former House speaker joins the ranks of opponents of US civil rights
with her comments; detractors frequently claimed racial justice protests
in the 1960s and 70s were fomented by Russia to sow discord in the
United States.
strategic culture | Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to
the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources
in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of
investigation.
December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA
mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to
sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the
middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign
behind the lines.”
January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets
Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an
empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for
asymmetric war.
February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty
surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive
signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.
February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.
Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been
in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter
alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State
factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or
another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the
dots.
Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in
Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to
be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).
Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in
place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.
March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.
March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.
March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies
simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling
their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two
days.
March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman
performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion
targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before
the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus
was massive, so the op is postponed.
March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.
ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms
The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to
previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir
Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a
dash for the border.
And that brings us to the Tajik connection.
There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the
ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on
Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand
rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a
concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a
weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.
The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were
accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective
use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away,
almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the
border to Ukraine.
All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty
counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all –
quite literally.
A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish
intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat
Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told
the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the
op.
And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.
The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah
Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the
Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in
Pakistan.
Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen
Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad
al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the
government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a
crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those
classic inter-jihadi squabbles.
Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent
attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another
vector of the “nasty surprises”.
Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired
citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty
motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens
worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually
indistinguishable from ISIS.
Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the
classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by
the CIA and the Pentagon.
Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed
ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by
Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.
The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon
Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando.
Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.
The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never
features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom.
Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the
500 thousand ruble reward.
After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat
– the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have
been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not
identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then
Afghanistan.
That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have
been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the
client.
The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs
Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror
galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s.
Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the
past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.
Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with
assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these
connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus
outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR
routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat
rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.
One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of
the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine,
Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.
The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by
pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by
ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under
the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.
The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi
of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile;
adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides
him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor
become disposable.
Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the
Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware
of what he was carrying,
As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a
gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring
ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then
to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project
ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS
goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the
Taliban.
Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).
The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking
most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established,
there will be hell to pay.
But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are
not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western
intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with
Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.
The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists
from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in
terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will
be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of
managing these networks.
But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems
to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial
middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.
Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators”
chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority –
Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a
multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for
centuries.
In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the
Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment –
whatever and wherever it takes.
TAE | From what I’ve read so far, ISIS is about the least likely suspect
for the Crocus massacre. If only because the CIA fingered them within
minutes of the event. Russia will need to do a very thorough
investigation, and hard evidence, to keep its people calm. Andrew
Korybko has more:
Andrew Korybko:
Speculation has swirled since Friday night’s terroristattack
at the Crocus City Hall venue in Moscow over whether ISIS-K was really
responsible like the group claimed or if Ukraine’s military-intelligence
service GUR orchestrated everything under the cover of its agents
posing as members of that group. The Mainstream Media is running with
the first scenario while doing their utmost to discredit the second, but
recalling the GUR’s terrorist history and ties with radical Islamists
shows that it’s not above suspicion.
For as lethal as the GUR has become over the past decade, it’s still a
CIA knockoff, which is why it’s expected to make sloppy mistakes from
time to time. This is relevant when it comes to the latest attack after
ISIS-K claimed responsibility using an outdated news template,
thus suggesting that someone else claimed credit in their name at first
but then ISIS-K opportunistically ran with it for clout. Considering
its terrorist history and ties with radical Islamists, that mysterious
actor was arguably the GUR.
What likely happened is that their agents posed as members of that
terrorist group in order to retain plausible deniability in case the
planned attack was foiled or the terrorists were caught afterwards. One
of the Tajiks who was captured in the car that was racing towards the
Ukrainian border claimed
that they were recruited by the curators of a radical Telegram channel
just a month ago to carry out the attack using already cached arms in
exchange for a debit card payment of around $5000 each.
These nationals were probably chosen by the GUR since some of them
are predisposed to religious radicalism due to the lingering legacy of
Tajikistan’s Islamist-inspired civil war from the 1990s, their country
abuts ISIS-K’s Afghan headquarters, and they have visa-free travel privileges to Russia.
Accordingly, they were allegedly recruited via a radical Telegram
channel, ISIS-K’s involvement doesn’t seem entirely implausible, and
they were able to easily enter Russia with minimal scrutiny.
They weren’t radical enough to go out with guns blazing or in a
suicide blast like ISIS-K is known for, however, but were still
sufficiently sympathetic with that group’s ideology to carry out what
they believed was its latest mission in exchange for money. This
explains why they fled from the scene of the crime, which is contrary to
what any affiliate of that group would ever do, after machine-gunning
dozens of people and setting fire to the venue.
Had they reached Ukraine, where the FSB confirmed that they had contacts and President Putin said
that “a window was prepared for them…to cross over”, then they’d likely
have been killed by the GUR to cover everything up. It shouldn’t be
forgotten that this group learned how to conduct terrorism from the CIA,
which in turn perfected this practice in Syria over the past 13 years
of the Hybrid War that it’s been waging there, but the GUR is still a
knockoff and that’s why they made three sloppy mistakes.
In the order that they occurred, their first mistake was recruiting
people who weren’t ready to fight to the death at the scene of their
forthcoming terrorist attack. This led to the culprits being captured
and spilling the beans about how they were recruited in exchange for
money, which is one of the signs that ISIS-K wasn’t behind what happened
since their members always expect to die as “martyrs”. Accordingly, the
fact that this mistake was made suggests that the GUR was desperate to
go through with their plans.
The second mistake was that they didn’t tell their proxies to flee to
a safe house right after the attack to meet a contact that’ll then help
them reach the border later on but who’d actually kill them once they
meet in order to cover everything up. This led to them racing towards
the Ukrainian border, thus showing everyone that they at the very least
felt that they’d find sanctuary there, which made Russia’s claim of
Ukrainian involvement much more believable for many skeptical
Westerners.
And finally, the last mistake was that the GUR used an outdated news
template to claim credit for the attack on behalf of ISIS-K, who they
correctly predicted would opportunistically run with it for clout. By
doing so, however, they signaled that the group itself didn’t play a
role in organizing what happened otherwise their more modern template
would have been used instead. Taken together, these three sloppy
mistakes discredited the Mainstream Media’s narrative and drew attention
to the GUR instead.
Coupled with its terrorist history and ties with radical Islamic
groups, which respectively prove that it has the capabilities and intent
to carry out the Crocus attack as well as the knowledge required to
impersonate extremists online for recruiting purposes, all of this makes
the GUR the prime suspect. It learned everything about terrorism from
the CIA, but since it’s still a knockoff, it made a series of sloppy
mistakes that resulted in incriminating Ukraine instead of lending false
credence to the ISIS-K narrative.
strategic culture |Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has
a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it,
not to mention the territory of new regions.”
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way
or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail
and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers
leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes,
this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a
music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots
people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on
fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing,
all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in
southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least
five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in
Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is
among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan
next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they
have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring
China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb,
Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total
political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no
one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of
course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers.
A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday
during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a
mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it
with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this
ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an
all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real
Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in:
ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably
Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian
SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the
commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He
directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and
British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places
in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible
terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the
Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…
sonar21 | Americans are by-and-large decent, genial folks. But when it comes to
history, most have the memory of an Alzheimer’s patient. Sam Cooke was
speaking for most Americans when he crooned, “Don’t know much about
history …”. So I will make this simple — America’s hatred of Russia has
its roots in the U.S. Government’s post-WW II embrace of Nazis. Tim
Weiner writes about this in his essential book, Legacy of Ashes.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin, U.S. Army
intelligence recruited and relied on German General Reinhard Gehlen:
“During World War II, General Gehlen had tried to spy on the Soviets
from the eastern front as a leader of the Abwehr, Hitler’s military
intelligence service. He was an imperious and cagey man who swore he had
a network of “good Germans” to spy behind Russian lines for the United
States.
“From the beginning,” Gehlen said, “I was motivated by the following
convictions: A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every
German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that
Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for
the common defense of Western Christian Civilization.” The United States
needed “the best German men as co-workers…if Western Culture is to be
safeguarded.” The intelligence network he offered to the Americans was a
group of “outstanding German nationals who are good Germans but also
ideologically on the side of the Western democracies.”. . .
“But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA
took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside
Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his
circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet
intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels.
The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had
transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West
Germany. Gehlen’s longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working
for Moscow all along.”
In the wake of this debacle, the CIA failed to recruit and run any
significant sources in the Soviet Government. The CIA had very few
officers who spoke Russian and swallowed whole hog the belief that the
Soviets were intent on conquering the world and that it was up to the
United States — relying heavily on the CIA — to stop the Soviets. That
became the cornerstone of American foreign policy and explains the CIA’s
obsession with regime change. No one in the intelligence hierarchy was
encouraged or permitted to raise the alternative view — i.e., the
Soviets, fearful of a Western invasion, took firm control of the
European nations on its western border and installed governments that
would served the Soviet interest. The CIA started its life as a new
bureaucracy in Washington firmly committed to destroying the Soviet
Union.
One of its first projects was recruiting and funding an insurgency
with Ukrainians who had sided with the Nazis. While that effort was
crushed by the Soviets, it served to further convince Stalin and others
in the Soviet hierarchy that the West was in bed with Nazi survivors and
could not be trusted.
The failure of the CIA to predict critical world events was an early
distinguishing feature of the CIA from the start. The Soviets detonated
their first nuke on August 29, 1949. Three weeks later a U.S. Air Force
crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radiation beyond normal
levels. Weiner recounts what happened next:
“On September 20, the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union
would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.”
The CIA’s leaders knack for getting it wrong continued with the
failure to heed warnings that China was going to intervene on behalf of
North Korea in 1950. Here is Weiner’s account:
“The president left for Wake Island on October 11, 1950. The CIA
assured him that it saw “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese
Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in
Korea…barring a Soviet decision for global war.” The agency reached that
judgment despite two alarms from its three-man Tokyo station. First the
station chief, George Aurell, reported that a Chinese Nationalist
officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops
near the Korean border. Headquarters paid little heed. Then Bill Duggan,
later chief of station in Taiwan, insisted that the Chicoms soon would
cross into North Korea. General MacArthur responded by threatening to
have Duggan arrested. The warnings never reached Wake Island.
At headquarters, the agency kept advising Truman that China would not
enter the war on any significant scale. On October 18, as MacArthur’s
troops surged north toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the
CIA reported that “the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.” On
October 20, the CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were
there to protect hydroelectric power plants. On October 28, it told the
White H ouse that those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers. On
October 30, after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy
casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was
unlikely. A few days later, Chinese-speaking CIA officers interrogated
several prisoners taken during the encounter and determined that they
were Mao’s soldiers. Yet CIA headquarters asserted one last time that
China would not invade in force. Two days later 300,000 Chinese troops
struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into
the sea.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here? While it is true there were
some solid intelligence officers in the ranks of the CIA, any attempt to
raise a warning that flew against conventional wisdom or defied what
the leaders wanted to hear was ignored or punished. The failures of the
CIA leadership to correctly predict the Soviets producing a nuclear bomb
and the Chinese invasion of Korea are not isolated incidents. When it
comes to big, critical issues — e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tet
offensive, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Shah
of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, Saddam’s 1990 invasion
of Kuwait, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9-11 plot, weapons of
“Mass Destruction in Iraq” and Russia’s ability to survive western
sanctions and spin up its defense industry to outpace the U.S. and NATO
countries combined — the CIA missed them all.
SCF | Russian President Vladimir Putin was spot-on this week in his observation about why France’s Emmanuel Macron is strutting around and mouthing off about war in Ukraine. Putin remarked in an interview that Macron’s wanton warmongering over Ukraine was borne out of resentment due to the spectacular loss of France’s standing in Africa. One after another, France’s former colonial countries have told Paris in no uncertain terms to get out of their internal affairs. Since 2020 and the coup in Mali, there has been immense political upheaval on the continent, particularly in West and Central Africa, stretching from the vast Sahel region down to the equator. At least seven nations have undergone coups or government changes against Francophone rulers. They include Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Gabon, and Guinea. The continent-wide changes have come as a political earthquake to France. The new African governments have adamantly rejected old-style French patronage and have asserted a newfound national independence.
Paris has had to recall unwanted ambassadors, shut down military bases, and withdraw thousands of troops. Where to put these French troops? In Ukraine, pitted against Russia? Popular sentiment across Africa is exasperated with and repudiating “Francafrique” corruption. Meanwhile, with an unmistakable end-of-era sense, French media have lamented “France’s shrinking footprint in Africa.” A former diplomat summed up the momentous geopolitical shift thus: “The deep trend confirms itself. Our military presence is no longer accepted. We need to totally rethink our relationship with Africa. We have been kicked out of Africa. We need to depart from other countries before we are told to.” Africa analysts are now watching two key countries closely. They are Senegal and Ivory Coast. Both are currently governed by pro-France presidents but the rising anti-French political tide is putting those incumbents at risk of either a coup or electoral ouster.
The blow to the French political elite cannot be overstated. The loss of status in its former colonies is conflating multiple crises tantamount to the traumatic loss of Algeria back in the early 1960s. Financially, for decades after handing over nominal independence to African nations, Paris continued to exploit these countries through control of currencies and their prodigious natural resources. Most of France’s electricity, for example, is generated from uranium ore mined in Africa – and obtained like most other African resources for a pittance. The system of neocolonial suzerainty was typically sustained by France bribing local corrupt regimes to do its bidding and offering security guarantees from the continuance of French military bases. Not for nothing did Paris think of itself as the African Gendarme.
One of the extraordinary curiosities of this neocolonial arrangement was that African nations were compelled to deposit their gold treasuries in France’s central bank. Any African nation trying to resist the neocolonial vassalage was liable to be attacked militarily through counter-coups, or its nationalist leaders were assassinated like Thomas Sankara in 1987, who was known as “Africa’s Che Guevara”. Nevertheless, the halcyon days of France’s dominance over its former colonies are over. African nations are discovering a new sense of independence and purpose, as well as solidarity to help each other fend off pressure from France to reinstate the status quo ante. The collapse of France’s status in Africa is perceived by the French establishment as a grievous loss in presumed global power.
No French politician can feel more aggrieved than President Emmanuel Macron. Macron imagines himself to be on a mission to restore “France’s greatness”. He seems to harbor fantasies of also leading the rest of Europe under the tutelage of Paris. It was Macron who proclaimed one of his grand objectives as achieving a reset in Franco-African relations, one which would renew continental respect for Paris and promote French strategic interests. How embarrassing for Macron that a whole spate of African nations are asserting that they no longer want to have anything to do with the old colonial power. Chagrin indeed.
NYTimes | Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Thursday delivered a pointed speech on the Senate floor excoriating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and calling for new leadership in Israel, five months into the war.
Many Democratic lawmakers have condemned Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and his right-wing governing coalition, and President Biden has even criticized the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza as “over the top.” But Mr. Schumer’s speech amounted to the sharpest critique yet from a senior American elected official — effectively urging Israelis to replace Mr. Netanyahu.
“I believe in his heart, his highest priority is the security of Israel,” said Mr. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States. “However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Mr. Schumer added: “He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
The speech was the latest reflection of the growing dissatisfaction among Democrats, particularly progressives, with Israel’s conduct of the war and its toll on Palestinian civilians, which has created a strategic and political dilemma for Mr. Biden. Republicans have tried to capitalize on that dynamic for electoral advantage, hugging Mr. Netanyahu closer as Democrats repudiate him. And on Thursday, they lashed out at Mr. Schumer for his remarks.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on the Senate floor that it was “grotesque and hypocritical” for Americans “who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of the democratically elected leader of Israel.” He called Mr. Schumer’s move “unprecedented.”
“The Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “It has an anti-Israel problem.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Mr. Schumer’s remarks “earth-shatteringly bad” and accused him of “calling on the people of Israel to overthrow their government.” And House Republicans, gathered in West Virginia for a party retreat, hastily called a news conference to attack Mr. Schumer for his comments and position themselves as the true friends of Israel in Congress.
Mr. Schumer’s remarks came a day after Senate Republicans invited Mr. Netanyahu to speak as their special guest at a party retreat in Washington. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, asked Mr. Netanyahu to address Republicans virtually, but he could not appear because of a last-minute scheduling conflict. Ambassador Michael Herzog, Israel’s envoy to the United States, spoke in his place and also addressed the House G.O.P. gathering on Thursday.
In his speech at the Capitol, Mr. Schumer, who represents a state with more than 20 percent of the country’s Jewish population, was careful to assert that he was not trying to dictate any electoral outcome in Israel. He prefaced his harsh criticism of Mr. Netanyahu with a long defense of the country, which he said American Jews “love in our bones.”
roburie |While the Washington Post has long been considered the mouthpiece of the CIA,
the New York Times has been more effective at carrying water for it in
recent years. The recent longish Times article entitled The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin
contains recitation of CIA-friendly talking points that portrays it as
indispensable to ‘our’ ability to commit pointless, petty atrocities
against Russia as the US sacrifices more Ukrainians in its misguided
war. Missing from the piece is any conceivable reason for the US to
continue the war.
The oft ascribed motive (and here)
for the CIA’s existence is to act as the US President’s secret army
abroad. The wisdom of this arrangement has been debated over the years.
Former US President Harry Truman, who oversaw the founding of the CIA
from its predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), later regretted the decision
and argued that the CIA should be brought to heel. Later, the Cold War
presented cover for the CIA to act badly under the cover of national
defense.
In Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men,
the CIA paid people to pretend to be communists so as to convey the
fiction that the CIA’s effort was about ‘fighting communism’ rather than
stealing Iran’s oil. Similarly, in the US coup that ousted
Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz for daring to raise the minimum wage
paid by foreign-owned industries in Guatemala, also featured fake
communists intended to convince the American press that the CIA was
fighting for freedom and democracy rather than to steal wages from poor
people for the benefit of rich Americans.
Together, these
imply that fake communists had been more effectively demonized by
Federal agencies than other available out groups because of the threat
they didn’t pose to American capital. Recall, in 1919 Woodrow Wilson
sent the American Expeditionary Force to join the Brits, French, and
Japanese in trying to reverse the Russian Revolution. Later, through the
Five Eyes Alliance, ‘the West’ spent the post-War era attacking the
Soviets while alleging that they were responding to political violence
that they (Five Eyes) started.
Oddly, given recent history,
the claim that the CIA is the President’s secret army still appears to
be the received wisdom in Washington and New York. This is odd because
while the CIA appears to be acting as Joe Biden’s secret army
in Ukraine and Israel, it went to war with (the duly elected President
of the US) Donald Trump for his entire four years in office. While Mr.
Trump played the victim of the US intelligence agencies to perfection,
he didn’t do what many normal humans would have done in his
circumstance--- clear out the top few levels of management at CIA, the
FBI, and NSA and see where this leaves ‘us.’
Implied
is a reversal of political causality whose proof can only be deduced. Is
Biden directing the CIA, or is the CIA directing Biden? For instance,
while Biden was Barack Obama’s point-man in Ukraine before, during, and
after the US-led coup there in 2014, Mr. Obama was publicly arguing
that Ukraine was of no strategic value to the US. With Donald Trump
following Mr. Obama as President, the CIA likely saw its 2014 coup in
Ukraine going to waste. This interpretation sheds a different light on
the Hunter Biden laptop fraud perpetrated by 51 current and former CIA employees.
(FBI informant Alexander Smirnov has been convicted of nothing
related to the new charges of ‘Russian interference.’ As was proved
with Russiagate, charges are easy to make, difficult to prove. No one---
not a single person, was convicted on the now antique charges of
Russian collusion. Those who were convicted were convicted on process
charges unrelated to the collusion charges. This use of the law as a
political weapon is called lawfare).
The view in this piece
is that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 because Barack Obama threw
several trillion dollars at the malefactors on Wall Street who blew up
the global economy while he pissed on the unemployed, the foreclosed
upon, and every working person in the US. In so doing, an income and
wealth chasm was rebuilt between the public welfare recipients who run
Wall Street and Big Tech and the former industrial workers whose jobs
were sent abroad as the final solution to the ‘problem’ of organized
labor.
With the current panic in the US over the rise of the BRICS
(China and Russia), the same politicians and economists who thought it
wise in 1995 to gut the industrial base with NAFTA are now busy
launching WWIII. These people never learn from their mistakes. For
instance, it apparently never occurred to them that outsourcing military
production might come back to bite when geopolitical tensions
inevitably flared again. Likewise, just-in-time production and inventory
management produced economic brittleness / fragility that created
problems when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
So,
where is this going? With the CIA’s and FBI’s undermining of the
elected President’s (Trump) political agenda and its open efforts to rig
the 2020 election in favor of his opponent (Biden), it certainly
appears that the CIA is now running the US. Biden’s foreign policy
team---Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland emerged from
the Clintonite death cult buried deep within the bowels of the American
foreign policy establishment, That they appear to be as uninformed and
arrogant as their policy outcomes to date suggest they are is only a
surprise inside Washington and New York.
However, this is at best a
partial explanation. What is surprising about US foreign policy is how
ignorant of world history, US history, basic diplomacy, military
tactics, economic relations, and basic human decency the American
political leadership is. It’s almost as if the answer to every foreign
policy conundrum of the last century has been to bomb civilian
populations, kill a whole lot of people, and then pretend it never
happened. Vietnam? Check. Nicaragua? Check. Syria? Check. Iraq? Check.
Ukraine? How can the body counts be hidden from beleaguered, clueless,
citizens so effectively?
Some recent history: the US launched a war against Russia when it (the US) invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked coup there in 2014 (see here, here, here)
and ousted its elected government. The Russians had taken issue with
the US / NATO surrounding it with NATO-allied states (maps below). Years
earlier, as Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in his recent interview
with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Putin had approached former US President Bill
Clinton about Russia joining NATO. Mr. Clinton ‘spoke with his people’
before telling Mr. Putin no to joining NATO as he reneged on George H.W. Bush’ s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border.
A
bit of additional history is needed here. The USSR was dissolved in
1991 to be replaced by non-communist Russia surrounded by former Soviet
states. Ukraine is one such state. The political – economic reference
point of post-Soviet Russia was an anachronistic form of neoliberalism.
Recall, Americans had been told since at least the early twentieth
century that ‘communism’ was the ideological foe of Western liberalism.
Current Russian President Vladimir Putin is proudly anti-communist. But
the US MIC (military-industrial complex), of which the CIA is a part,
needs enemies to justify its existence.
Following the
dissolution of the USSR (1991), there was discussion inside the US
regarding a ‘peace dividend,’ of redirecting military spending inflated
by the Cold War towards domestic purposes like schools, hospitals, and
civilian infrastructure. However, the CIA had been so hemmed in by
Federal budget constraints that it had inserted itself into
the international narcotics trade forty years prior in apparent
anticipation of just such an event. With the (George H.W.) Bush
recession of 1991, an election year, the peace dividend was rescinded.
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