RBR News March 4, 2018

Mar 04 2018

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C. March 4, 2018: “The Polish objections to having the former concentration camp at Auschwitz referred to as a ‘Polish murder camp’ are causing outrage in liberal and Jewish circles.

This subject has peaked in the interest of most people but since the German government has been handing out monies to purported survivors of any prison camp, the motivation to maintain interest, and profitable sympathy, is very strong.

The Germans are known to keep records of almost every matter and today one can find in the US National Archives, highly detailed reports by German SD and Police units that were tasked to clean all dissident groups and individuals from their occupied eastern territories.

These included western Russia, Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. In these areas, Communists, partisans and Jews were rounded up and shot, not gassed.

The total number of Jews executed was about 200,000, not six million.

There were not six million Jews in all of Europe during the period involved.

In spite of their objections to being connected to alleged murder camps, the Poles did not have any love for Jews and in 1920, Polish president Pilsudski forcefully deported tens of thousands of Polish Jews from his country.

And in 1946 when a number of Polish Jews returned to that country after being freed from prison camps, the local Poles killed a number of them and chased the remainder to Israel.

There is no love lost between eastern European Jews and Russians, Balts, Ukrainians and Poles to this day and this enmity has now spread to many Arab countries and is seeping into the American political scene.”

 

Table of Contents

  • Missile-gate: U.S. Intel Misses Russia’s Big Advances in Nuclear Parity
  • US-Russia agenda now contains just one issue: the prevention of war
  • Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network?
  • The Cleansing of Unwanted American Immigrants
  • Netanyahu Is No Statesman
  • Zionists plot to kill President Truman
  • Polish group sues Argentine paper under new Holocaust bill

 

Missile-gate: U.S. Intel Misses Russia’s Big Advances in Nuclear Parity

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement on Thursday of major technological advances in nuclear weapons delivery systems appears to have caught the U.S. intelligence community unawares

March 2, 2018

by Gilbert Doctorow

consortiumnews

President Vladimir Putin’s two-hour long address yesterday to the Federal Assembly, a joint session of both houses of Russia’s bicameral legislature – plus large numbers of Russia’s cultural, business and other elites – constituted his platform for the upcoming presidential election on March 18. This, in lieu of participation in the televised debates on all federal television channels in which other seven candidates are busy these days.

But as is the case with many of Vladimir Putin’s major presentations, the speech yesterday was addressed to a far broader audience than the Russian electorate. Many of the estimated 700 journalists invited to attend were foreign correspondents.  Indeed, one might reasonably argue that the speech was directed abroad, precisely to the United States.

The final third of the address, devoted to defense and presenting for the first time several major new and technically unparalleled offensive nuclear weapons systems, established Russia’s claim to full nuclear parity with the United States, overturning the country’s withdrawal from superpower status dating from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. Some Russian commentators, in a burst of national pride, claimed that the power of the Soviet Union had now been restored and the wrongs of the 1990s were finally undone.

In its own way, this speech was as important, perhaps more important than Putin’s talk to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 at which he set out in length Russia’s grievances with U.S. global hegemony installed in the 1990s and the  utter disregard for or denial of Russia’s national interests. That speech was a turning point in U.S.-Russian relations which headed us to the deep confrontation of today. Yesterday’s speech suggested not the onset of a new arms race, but its conclusion, with outright Russian victory and U.S. defeat.

Putin’s address was a “shock and awe” event. I leave to others, more competent than I in military technology to comment on the specific capabilities of the various systems rolled out yesterday. Whether short range or unlimited range, whether ground launched or air launched, whether ballistic missiles or cruise missiles, whether flying through the atmosphere or navigating silently and at high speed the very depths of the oceans, these various systems are said to be invincible to any known or prospective air defense such as the United States has invested in heavily since it unilaterally left the ABM Treaty and set out on a course that would upend strategic parity.

Since 2002, U.S. policy has aimed at enabling a first strike knocking out Russian ICBMs and then rendering useless Russia’s residual nuclear forces which could be shot out of the air. Russia’s new highly maneuverable and ultra-high speed (Mach 10 and Mach 20) missiles and underwater nuclear drone render illusory any scenario based on non-devastating response to the US homeland following a US strike on Russia. In passing, the new systems also render useless and turn into sitting duck targets the entire US navy, with its aircraft carrier formations.

U.S. and Western media response to Putin’s address was varied. The Financial Times tried its best at neutral reporting, and midway through its feature article gave a paragraph each to two of Russia’s most authoritative politicians with special expertise in relations with the West: Konstantin Kosachev and Alexei Pushkov, both former chairmen of the Duma’s Committee on Foreign Affairs.

However, their reporters and editorial supervisors were out of their depth, unable to reach a consistent view on what the Kremlin is doing. On the one hand Putin’s statements about Russia’s “unstoppable” nuclear weapons are reduced to “claims,” suggesting a certain skepticism; on the other hand, the consequence is to “fuel concern about a new arms race with the U.S.” They cannot fathom that the race is over.

The Washington Post was fairly quick to post a lengthy article in its online edition yesterday. An unusually large part consisted of quotes from Putin’s speech. The editorial line tells it all in the title assigned: “Putin claims Russia is developing nuclear arms capable of avoiding missile defenses.” I would put the accent on “claims” and “is developing.” The reporter and newspaper management seem not to have gotten the point: that one of these systems is already deployed in the Russia’s Southern Military District and that others are going into serial production.  These systems are not a wish list, they are hard facts.

The New York Times was characteristically slow in posting articles on a development which caught its staff and management totally unprepared.  In the space of a couple of hours, it put up two articles in succession dealing with the defense section of Vladimir Putin’s address. In both, but more particularly in the article co-authored by reporters Neil MacFarquhar and David E. Sanger, the stress is on “bluff.”

It is blithely assumed that Putin was just delivering a campaign speech to rouse “the patriotic passions of Russians” and so consolidate his forthcoming electoral victory. The writers take solace in the notion that “deception lies at the heart of current Russian military doctrine,” so that “questions arose about whether these weapons existed.”

These speculations, especially in the New York Times tell us one thing: that our media willfully ignore the plain facts about Vladimir Putin.  First, that he has always done what he has said.  Second, that he is by nature very cautious and methodical.  The word “carefully” (?????????) is a constant element in his speech vocabulary.   In this context, the notion of “bluff’ in a matter that would put Russian national security at risk and possibly cost tens of millions of Russian lives if the bluff were called – such a notion is utter nonsense.

I would like to believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington will not be so giddy or superficial in judging what they heard yesterday from Mr. Putin. If that is so, they will be urgently recommending to their President to enter into very broad negotiations with the Russians over arms control.  And they will be going back to their staffs to completely revise their recommendations with respect to the military hardware and installations which the United States is financing in 2019 and beyond. Our present budget, including the trillion or so being appropriated for upgrading nuclear warheads and producing more low-yield weapons is a waste of taxpayer money.

However, still more importantly, the implications of Vladimir Putin’s address yesterday are that U.S. intelligence has been asleep at the wheel for the past 14 years if not longer. It is a national scandal for the country to lose an arms race it was not even aware was occurring.  Heads should roll, and the process should begin with proper hearings on Capitol Hill. For reasons that will be clear from what follows, among the first witnesses called upon to testify should be former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In the past such a revelation of a vast security gap with the country’s main geopolitical and military competitor would lead to political recriminations and finger pointing.  What came up yesterday is far bigger than the “missile gap” of the late 1950s that brought Jack Kennedy to the White House in a campaign to restore vigor to American political culture and wake it from the somnolent Eisenhower years with their complacency about security matters and much else.

Moreover, the roll-out yesterday of new Russian weaponry that changes the world power balance was just one in a chain of remarkable Russian achievements over the past four years that caught US leadership entirely by surprise.  The explanation has till now been the alleged unpredictability of Vladimir Putin, even if absolutely nothing he did could not have been foreseen by someone paying close attention.

One prime example was the Russian capture of Crimea in February-March 2014 without a shot being fired or a single fatality in circumstances where the 20,000 Russian troops based in their leased Sevastopol enclave confronted 20,000 Ukrainian forces on the peninsula. Western media spoke of a Russian “invasion” which amounted to nothing more than the Russian troops leaving their barracks. The Russians had used nothing more exotic than psychological warfare, old-fashioned “psy-ops” as it is called in the States executed to perfection by pros, all dating from the time of Von Clausewitz.

Then the Pentagon was caught with its pants down in September 2015 when Putin at the United Nations General Assembly announced the dispatch of Russian warplanes to Syria for a campaign against ISIS and to support Assad that would begin the next day. Why did we suspect nothing?  Was it because Russia was known to be too poor to execute such a challenging mission abroad to precise objectives and timelines?

In the same war theater, the Russians again “surprised” Americans by setting up a joint military intelligence center in Baghdad with Iraq and Iran.  And it further “surprised” NATO by flying bombing missions to the Syrian theater over Iran and Iraqi airspace after being denied flight rights in the Balkans. With thousands of military and diplomatic staff based in Iraq, how is it that the United States knew nothing about the Russian agreements with Iraqi leadership in advance?

My point is that the confusion over how to interpret Putin’s announcement of Russia’s new defense capability is a systemic failure of U.S. intelligence. The next obvious question is why? Where is the CIA? Where are the intel bosses when they are not investigating Trump?

The answer is not to be found in just one or two elements, for sure. Nor is it a failure that developed recently. There is a good measure of blinding complacency about Russia as a “failed state” that has cut across the whole US political establishment since the 1990s when the Russia was flat on its back. One simply could not imagine the Kremlin rising to the challenge of its missions in Crimea, in Syria, in development of the world’s most sophisticated high-tech armaments.

And it is not only blindness to things Russian. It is a fundamental failure to grasp that state power anywhere is not dependent only on GDP and demographic trends but also on grit, patriotic determination and the intelligence of thousands of researchers, engineers and production personnel.

This conceptual poverty infects some our most brilliant Realpolitik political scientists in the academic community who in principle should be open to understanding the world as it is, not the world as we wish it to be. Somehow we seem to have forgotten the lesson of David and Goliath.  Somehow we have forgotten the Israeli numbers of 4 or 5 million standing up militarily to 100 million Arabs. It was unimaginable to us that Russia would be the David to our Goliath.

But there are more objective reasons for the utter failure of US intelligence to grasp the scale and seriousness of the Russian challenge to US global hegemony. Specifically, we must consider the gutting of our Russian intelligence capabilities in the days, months, years following 9/11.

There are those who will say, with reason, that the decline of US intelligence capabilities on Russia began already in the second administration of Ronald Reagan, when the Cold War came to an end and the expertise of Cold Warriors seemed no longer relevant. Surely numbers of Russia experts were allowed to decline by attrition.

And yet, when 9/11 struck, many of those in higher positions in the CIA had come to the Agency as Russia experts. It was the CIA’s lack of skills in the languages and area knowledge of the Middle East that was glaring in the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers that guided the reshaping of priorities for intelligence. Clearly this deficiency and the necessary re-profiling of expertise could not augur well for the continued employment of holdovers from the Soviet desk.

But a still greater factor in the sharp decline in Russian expertise within US intelligence agencies was the shift from dependence on civil service employees to use of outside service providers, i.e., outsourcing of intelligence work.  This was totally in line with the preferences of the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who introduced outsourcing in a generalized way to deal with the new challenges of the War On Terror.

The same phenomenon affected the U.S. military, especially beginning in 2003 following the invasion of Iraq. Operational security tasks of the U.S. military were outsourced to companies providing mercenaries like Blackwater.  And normal procurement arrangements for materiel were short-circuited by the Vice President for the sake of quick satisfaction of urgent field requirements: hence the procurement of non-traditional but much needed fleets of armored troop transport and the like.

Several articles in Consortium News and elsewhere in recent months have called attention to the phenomenon of intel outsourcing. However, what was happening, why and to what effect was already clearly known a decade ago and promised nothing good.

In a sense, the commonality of all these changes in supply of intelligence, equipment and military force has been a quick-fix mentality and direct political intervention into processes that had been insulated in the civil service with its bureaucratic procedures. Political intervention means ultimately politicizing methods and outcomes. Outsourced intelligence is more likely to meet the demands of the paymaster than to have some intellectual integrity and broad perspective of its own.

To better understand the phenomenon, I refer the reader to an outstanding and well documented article dating from March 2007 that was published by the European Strategic Intelligence Security Center (ESISC) entitled “Outsourcing Intelligence: The Example of the United States.”

The author, ESISC Research Associate Raphael Ramos, tells us that at the time 70% of the budget of the American intelligence community was spent via contracts with private companies. At the time he wrote, outsourcing was said to be greatest among the agencies reporting to the Defense Department. The CIA was then said to have one-third of its staff coming from private companies.

Besides the changing priorities for foreign intelligence resulting from the end of the Cold War and the onset of the War on Terror, another factor in the changing structure of US intelligence was technologically driven. This relates to the modern communications technologies, with many start-ups appearing in the specialized fields of Signals Intelligence and Imagery Intelligence. The NSA availed itself of these new service providers to become a pioneer in outsourcing intelligence.

Other Pentagon agencies which followed the same course were the National Reconnaissance Office, responsible for space based systems of intelligence and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, charged with producing geographic intelligence from satellites.  Add to that the changing intel practices coming from the development of the internet, which prioritized open source intelligence. OSINT could flourish in the private sector because it does not require special security clearances. This soon accounted for between 35% and 90% of intelligence procurement.

As noted above, outsourcing enabled the intelligence community to modernize, gain skills quickly and try to meet urgent new needs. However, judging by the results of intelligence with respect to Putin’s Russia it seems that the outsourcing model has not delivered the goods.  The country has been flying blind while taking outlandish and unsupportable positions to bully the world as if we enjoyed full spectrum dominance and Russia did not exist.

 

US-Russia agenda now contains just one issue: the prevention of war

March 2, 2018

by Bryan MacDonald

RT

Vladimir Putin’s postponed annual address ruffled many feathers as he delivered some home truths: Russia intends to follow its own developmental path and wants the West to back off from its frontiers and vital interests.

There may be two sides to every story. But it’s not often we see a pair of completely different interpretations of a single political speech. However, it happened on Thursday, as Putin announced his vision for the upcoming years of Russia’s development.

Predictably, Western media reacted hysterically to Putin’s boasts about Russia’s improved missile capability, while the domestic audience focused on the real meat: the Kremlin is about to embark upon a massive renewal project which will kickstart its economy and hopefully increase the quality of life across the vast country.

This is precisely what Putin wanted. And his message to external observers was very simple: the West must face up to the fact that it has failed to contain Russia and it can’t defeat the country militarily. Thus, the president was basically saying “leave us alone or things will get worse.”

Home Truths

Because, truly, Russia just wants to worry about its own affairs now. The country urgently needs to modernize if it’s to prosper going forward. To this end, Putin promised to extend nationwide the kind of improvements already seen in Kazan, Vladivostok and Sochi – which are cities boasting infrastructure comparable to leading Western urban centers. At the same time, Putin spoke of investing in special schools for gifted children, establishing cultural, educational and museum complexes in the regions and splashing out $200 billion to improve Russia’s much-maligned road network.

This is what Russian voters care about. But Putin also wanted to tell the West to yield, and his trolling was magisterial in both its construction and the frenzy it prompted. As surely anticipated, foreign observers who listened to the latter part of the address immediately rushed onto various media platforms to say Putin is launching a new “arms race.” Meaning, of course, that the West must re-arm (and waste lots of money) to counter Moscow. But these “experts” forget how Russia already has most of the weaponry it needs for its own objectives and it doesn’t have to hike up spending.

Which is why the Kremlin has sharply cut the military budget, in order to divert capital to social programs. You see, Putin has learned from the demise of the USSR and he understands how Russia’s military needs to be lean and efficient because the country can’t afford grandiose imperial ambitions.

Thus, it’s all a game. The US announces new missile system and nuclear modernization plans and expects Moscow to follow suit, and then becomes confused when the Russians don’t take the bait. Right now, Donald Trump wants to spend $1.2 trillion on the US nuclear arsenal: an amount equivalent to about 26 years of Russia’s entire defense allocation. And, of course, this is $1.2 trillion the US could spend on schools, hospitals or real infrastructure but instead is lavishing on useless equipment that will never be used. So Putin has maneuvered the US into doing what the Soviets did, frittering away money on wasteful prestige projects while the social contract decays.

Boxing Clever

This is “rope-a-dope” stuff. The same strategy Muhammad Ali deployed against George Foreman in 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle.” And here’s the proof: CNN’s third highest placed article on Friday morning (Moscow time) was an op-ed by Nic Robertson, its international diplomatic editor, titled “Russia’s ‘invincible’ missile is chilling for everyone.” The piece exposed Robertson as a man who clearly couldn’t see the wood from the trees if he were standing in a lumber yard. He described Putin as “preening himself, preparing his gullible masses to vote for him later this month.” But the real gullible ones are Robertson and his editors who fell for Putin’s smokescreen.

This writer wasn’t alone, naturally. Headlines such as “Russia has ‘unstoppable’ supersonic nuclear missile that cannot be traced by Western defence systems, says Putin” (The Independent),“Putin claims new ‘invincible’ missile can pierce US defenses” (CNN) and “Putin threatens US arms race with new missiles declaration” (Guardian) all served to raise panic levels. Meanwhile, Putin’s own Twitter account was telling Russians how he was about to invest in Russia’s roads. As David Filipov, an actual American Russia expert, tweeted:“One way to look at it is that a guy who intends to destroy the earth 17 times over probably leaves the dirt paths the way they are.”

The Russian president knows his country can’t overtake America (with well over two times the population and five times the economic strength). Because the US has been top dog for around a century now, while Russia is recovering from years of financial and social chaos following the collapse of Soviet communism. As a result, all the Kremlin needs to do is invest in enough of a deterrence so that the US understands it can’t directly attack Russia’s key interests. And this is sufficient.

Successful Trap

James Mattis recently confirmed how Putin’s plan is working, with the US defense secretary telling American politicians that Washington’s plan to develop nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missiles was a bargaining chip against Russia. “I don’t think the Russians would be willing to give up something to gain nothing from us,” he said. Words which were evidently noted in Moscow.

Amid graphics showing rockets heading towards the US mainland, Putin warned: “we tried to talk to our partners. Russia is a major nuclear power. They kept ignoring us. No one was talking to us. So listen to us now.” Yet, he also made it clear how the Russians wouldn’t start a conflict and emphasized that the military buildup was forced on Moscow by Western policies.

Meanwhile, when it came to juicy stuff Russian voters care about, Putin was making a number of pledges: he’d reduce the amount of Russians living under the poverty line by half and he’d make housing more affordable. And the president also spoke of investing in education, healthcare, infrastructure and environmental protection. But he further emphasized that Russia first needed to guarantee its security and sovereignty in order to realize these ambitions.

As the respected analyst Dmitri Trenin put it: “for the foreseeable future, it looks that the US-Russia agenda will be limited to just one item: war prevention.” And the former Soviet Army colonel is right: Putin realizes there is no short-term hope of detente with the Americans. Thus, he feels the best strategy is to spook them into leaving Russia alone and ceasing the eastward expansion of their NATO military alliance, which will allow Moscow to concentrate on domestic challenges.

 

Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network?

March 1, 2018

by Norman Soloman

Truth Dig

The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.

More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network’s obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.

FAIR’s study, “MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic U.S.-Backed War in Yemen,” documented a picture of extreme journalistic malfeasance at MSNBC:

  • “An analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017. And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen.”
  • “Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.”
  • “All of this is despite the fact that the U.S. government has played a leading role in the 33-month war that has devastated Yemen, selling many billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, refueling Saudi warplanes as they relentlessly bomb civilian areas and providing intelligence and military assistance to the Saudi air force.”

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s incessant “Russiagate” coverage has put the network at the media forefront of overheated hyperbole about the Kremlin. And continually piling up the dry tinder of hostility toward Russia boosts the odds of a cataclysmic blowup between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

In effect, the programming on MSNBC follows a thin blue party line, breathlessly conforming to Democratic leaders’ refrains about Russia as a mortal threat to American democracy and freedom across the globe. But hey—MSNBC’s ratings have climbed upward during its monochrome reporting, so why worry about whether coverage is neglecting dozens of other crucial stories? Or why worry if the anti-Russia drumbeat is worsening the risks of a global conflagration?

FAIR’s report, written by journalist Ben Norton and published on Jan. 8, certainly merited a serious response from MSNBC and the anchors most identified by the study, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes. Yet no response has come from them or network executives. (Full disclosure: I’m a longtime associate of FAIR.)

In the aftermath of the FAIR study, a petition gathered 22,784 signers and 4,474 individual comments—asking MSNBC to remedy its extreme imbalance of news coverage. But the network and its prime-time luminaries Maddow and Hayes refused to respond despite repeated requests for a reply.

The petition was submitted in late January to Maddow and Hayes via their producers, as well as to MSNBC senior vice president Errol Cockfield and to the network’s senior manager in charge of media relations for “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Signers responded to outreach from three organizations—Just Foreign Policy, RootsAction.org (which I coordinate), and World Beyond War—calling for concerned individuals to “urge Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and MSNBC to correct their failure to report on the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the direct U.S. military role in causing the catastrophe by signing our petition.” (The petition is still gathering signers.)

As the cable news network most trusted by Democrats as a liberal beacon, MSNBC plays a special role in fueling rage among progressive-minded viewers toward Russia’s “attack on our democracy” that is somehow deemed more sinister and newsworthy than corporate dominance of American politicians (including Democrats), racist voter suppression, gerrymandering and many other U.S. electoral defects all put together.

At the same time, the anti-Russia mania also services the engines of the current militaristic machinery.

It’s what happens when nationalism and partisan zeal overcome something that could be called journalism.

“The U.S. media’s approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda,” the independent journalist Robert Parry wrote at the end of 2017, in the last article published before his death. “Does any sentient human being read the New York Times’ or the Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts?”

Parry added that “to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a ‘Putin apologist’ or ‘Kremlin stooge.’ Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many ‘liberals’ who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the assertions on faith.”

 

The Cleansing of Unwanted American Immigrants

March 4, 2018

by Christian Jürs

With the collapsing of the world’s economic bubble, the rising world-wide unemployment rates, and the financial threats to the economic security of the world’s middle classes (the backbone of modern society) there is a rising tide of extreme frustration and growing, unfocused, anger evident in all civilized countries.

Eric Hoffer said it best in his book on mass movements: When there is economic disaster, minorities suffer. And to the economic woes of the Western world, we can add the rapid population increase, the changing global weather patterns, the shrinking supplies of fresh water and, most important, food stuffs.

All of this was seen by Malthus and his late 18th century study on population should be read by more people.

Given all of these factors, the slow but sure, and increasing, growth of what, for want of a better term, can be called the Anti-Immigrant movement, is causing great fright in most Western governments. The last things governments want is racial scapegoating because it is inherently violent and destructive in nature and if it erupts, all kinds of unpleasant social violence can easily be spawned from it.

It is this deep-seated emotion that took over the French Revolution and the Terror was a direct result of the eruption, which started as a desire of equality from the middle class of France but ended in orgy of death and destruction on the part of the very poor and hopeless.

In both the United States and Europe, prolonged economic depression, loss of hope for the future and growing unemployment are fueling a blind, and potentially very dangerous, victimization of identifiable unassimilated foreigners. America has about 30 million illegal immigrants inside her borders, the great bulk of whom are recipients of government welfare, welfare that the citizens see as their right, not the right of illegal foreigners. And Europe has been overrun with an immense flood of  peoples from Third World countries, mostly Arabic Muslims but also many blacks from Africa and the West Indies.

These immigrants, legal and illegal, do not assimilate into the culture of their host countries and become hostile towards their hosts, jealous of their possessions and destructive of their institutions. We recently saw an eruption of civic violence in England which was instituted by black immigrants, demanding more and more public money. The media very carefully papered over this wave of arson and looting by calling the perpetrators “dissatisfied young people.” Their status as immigrants and their color was never mentioned. When the fanatic in Norway shot nearly a hundred young campers at a liberal summer camp to death, in this case as well, the media did not mention that he shot dark-skinned people.

In Eire, France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Sweden, there are large numbers of dark skinned and growingly unwanted inhabitants and they are very rapidly becoming the targets of nationalists and conservative action groups.

The report mentioned at the head of this commentary deals with an organization based in the United States that raises very large sums of money which are used exclusively to fund the various global right-wing Anti-immigrant groups.

This organization is called the ‘WAF’ and is ostensibly a forum for collectors of militaria such as military orders and decorations and other objects dealing with heroism in battle. Although many of the members are interested in, and collect, such diverse areas as Napoleonic, American Civil War and Imperial Russia, the majority of the members collect German military items.

It now appears, as the work of a French-based investigative journalist has uncovered, that the real motivation behind this WAF group is to raise money for the funding of worldwide extremist anti-Muslim, anti-Latino and anti-Black immigrant groups.

The funding is raised by the manufacture and sale of very, very expensive German World War II militaria rare “personality” pieces such as Adolf Hitler or Hermann Goering possessions as well as bejeweled orders and decorations, rare ceremonial daggers and swords, embroidered military standards and other valuable, and expensive, historical items. As an example, a thoroughly counterfeit fancy, jewel-studded leather case and parchment document for a very top military decoration allegedly presented to Hermann Goering was sold to an unsuspecting Chinese collector for one million dollars in cash. The same sum was paid by an American collector who thought he was purchasing a hand-written diary of Adolf Hitler’s’.

The WAF, which acts as a fund-raiser and front for the Anti-immigration groups, is owned by a George Petersen and a Craig Gottlieb. Mr. Petersen, according to our information, is a published expert on German militaria and runs a commercial business in northern Virginia catering to military collectors. He lives in Georgetown and, among other negative information, is wanted for questioning by the Russian government because of alleged thefts of very rare items of militaria from their military museum in Moscow.

It appears that Mr. Petersen and his co-owner, also a dealer in very expensive militaria, use this WAF as a front and that many of the collecting fraternity who have joined its ranks are totally unaware that they are serving as a respectable front for a money laundering scheme of considerable scope.

That the burgeoning Anti-immigration groups, both in the United States and the EU benefit from the infusion of large amounts of money is beyond doubt. It is also evident that many of the target countries law enforcement agencies are not aware of how these small groups can be so well funded for their increasingly violent activities.”

Recently under discussion here has been a series of observations about the methodology of equipping and funding disparate militant far-right groups in the EU whose main aim is the physical expulsion of all Muslim immigrants in a number of countries. Chief among these are Eire, France, Germany, the UK and Sweden. It appears that these groups, and corresponding American groups of the same persuasion, are basically funded with monies obtained by the sale of very expensive items of German militaria that have been manufactured in China with the specific intent to deceive. The sums involved run into the millions of dollars.

The basic facilitator of this is one George A. Petersen who has a front organization called the National Capital Historical firm of Springfield, Virginia. This entity operates out of a drop box and has no telephone answering system because Petersen spends most of his time in travel.

George A. Petersen was born in 1945., He served in the US Army from 1964 to 1967 as a Spec 4 with a 111 B Light Weapons MOS. He was a member of “B” Company, 3rd Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), The US Army’s Honor Guard, in Washington, D.C. (Fort Meyer, VA) and with the 765th Security Platoon in Vung Tau Airfield, Republic of Vietnam, December 1965 through December of 1966, as an Operations and Security Specialist.  Following his career with the U.S. Army, Petersen was heavily involved with the CIA in the purchase, shipping and distribution of automatic weaponry used in foreign civil insurgency. In 1979, Petersen formed NCHS, Inc.

Using his re-enactor business as a front, Petersen, through his Hong Kong middleman, Mr Chen, has purchased over five thousand Chinese rip-off copies of a light-weight shoulder-held German  rocket projector, and tens of thousands of rounds of rocket ammunition.

This is based on the late Second World War German weapon called the 2 cm Luftfaust which was designed to shoot down low flying aircraft or, in current times, helicopters. The piece, as made today in China, is 1308 mm overall. There are nine 2 cm rocket tubes and the shoulder-held weapon is designed to fire two and five salvos of rockets, 0.2 second apart. The full range of the projectiles is 2000 meters and the effective and practical range is 500 meters. The rocket projector weighs in at 6.6 kilograms.,

These weapons are painted with German wartime colors and are marked as “non-firing replicas for military re-enactors”

The shipment of these light weight weapons and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, were shipped from Nanjing, China by container ship to the ports of Antwerp and Stockholm by an old but still entirely viable CIA shipping route known to Petersen from his days of employment as a firearms specialist with Nelson and Cummings also of the CIA. .

A mass of very concrete evidence shows that Petersen and his cohourts have been arming dangerous anti-Muslim militant groups inside the EU (Eire, the UK, France, Germany and Sweden). It should be obvious that if a well-armed group, say in Uppsala, rose up against the Muslims and physically attacked them, the Swedish government would have to call out, first the local police and then, if they were unable to restore order, the Swedish Army.

And a restive pubic would either hide in their basements or come out as vigilante groups. This is what happened in London during the recent black riots. Once the locals, mostly workers, armed themselves with clubs and other weapons and formed local defense groups, they were passive defenders in the beginning but then decided to go over to the attack. Then, and only then, did the police start cracking down on the gentlemen of the coloured persuasion. Petersen made many trips to Russia and was later accused by Russian authorities of improperly removing “valuable nazi flags, standards and other valuable historical items from the Anti-Fascist Museum, Moscow and the Central Armed Forces Museum (Moscow, Russian Republic)

Petersen has contributed many pictures of historical militaria, many of questionable authenticity for the Time-Life series, ‘The Third Reich’, published between 1980 and 1990 He is well-known in government, military and intelligence circles.

 

Netanyahu Is No Statesman

March 3, 2018

by Uri Avnery

AntiWar

The flood of corruption affairs that is now engulfing the Netanyahu family and its assistants and servitors does not seem to diminish his popularity among those who call themselves “the People”.

On the contrary, according to the opinion polls, the voters of the other nationalist parties are rushing to the rescue of “Bibi”.

They believe that he is a great statesman, the savior of Israel, and are therefore ready to forgive and forget everything else. Huge bribes, generous gifts, everything.

Strange. Because my attitude is exactly the opposite. I am not ready to forgive “Bibi” anything for being a great statesman, because I think that he is a very minor statesman. Indeed, no statesman at all.

The final judgment about Bibi’s capabilities was passed by his father early in his career.

Benzion Netayahu, a history professor who was an expert on the Spanish inquisition, did not have a very high opinion of his second son. He much preferred the oldest son, Jonathan, who was killed in the Entebbe operation. This, by the way, may be the source of Bibi’s deep complexes.

Politically, Benzion was the most extreme rightist there ever was. He despised Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant leader of the right-wing Zionists, as well as his pupil, Menachem Begin. For him, both were liberal weaklings.

Benzion, who felt that his talents were not appreciated in Israel and went to teach in the United States, where he brought up his sons, said about Binyamin: “He could make a good foreign secretary, but not a prime minister.” Never was a more precise judgment made about Bibi.

Binyamin Netanyahu is indeed excellent foreign minister material. He speaks perfect (American) English, though without the literary depth of his predecessor, Abba Eban. About Eban, David Ben-Gurion famously remarked: “He can make beautiful speeches, but you must tell him what to say.”

Bibi is a perfect representative. He knows how to behave with the great of this earth. He cuts a good figure at international conferences. He makes well-crafted speeches on important occasions, though he tends to use primitive gimmicks a Churchill would not touch.

A foreign minister functions, nowadays, as the traveling salesman of his country. Indeed. Bibi was once a traveling salesman for a furniture company. Since traveling has become so easy, foreign ministers fulfill most of the functions that in past centuries were reserved for ambassadors.

As his father so shrewdly observed, there is a huge difference between the duties of a foreign minister and those of a prime minister. The foreign minister implements policy. The prime minister determines policy.

The ideal prime minister is a man (or a woman) of vision. He knows what his country needs – not only today, but for generations to come. His vision embraces the entire needs of his country, of which foreign relations is only one aspect, and not necessarily the most important one. He sees the social, economic, cultural and military aspects of his vision.

Benzion Netanyahu knew that his son did not posses these capabilities. A good appearance is just not enough, especially for a leader of a country with such complicated problems, interior and exterior, as Israel.

When one thinks about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one remembers his saying “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Thinking of Winston Churchill, one remembers: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Thinking about Bibi, what profound saying does one remember? Nothing but his comment about the many corruption cases in which he is involved: “There will be nothing because there is nothing.”

Binjamin Netanyahu’s main occupation, between criminal interrogations, is traveling abroad and meeting with the world’s leaders. One week in Paris meeting President Macron, the next in Moscow meeting President Putin. In between, an African country or two.What is achieved in these multiple meetings? Well, nothing to speak of.

That is very shrewd. It touches a deep nerve in Jewish consciousness.

For many generations, Jews were a helpless minority in many countries, West and East. They were entirely dependent on the graces of the local lord, count, Sultan. To remain in his good graces, a member of the Jewish community, generally the richest, took it upon himself to gratify the ruler, flatter him and bribe him. Such a person became the king of the ghetto, admired by his community.

As a phenomenon, Bibi is a successor of this tradition.

Nobody loved Abba Eban. Even those who admired his extraordinary talents did not admire the man. He was considered un-Israeli, not a he-man as a typical Israeli man should be.

Bibi’s public standing is quite different. As a former commando fighter he is as he-mannish as Israelis desire. He looks as an Israeli should look. No problem there.

But ask one of his admirers what Bibi has actually achieved in his 12 years as prime minister, and he will be at a loss to answer. David Ben-Gurion founded the state, Menachem Begin made peace with Egypt, Yitzhak Rabin made the Oslo agreement. But Bibi?

Yet at least half of Israel admires Bibi without bounds. They are ready to forgive him countless affairs of corruption – from receiving the most expensive Cuban cigars as gifts from multi-billionaires to outright bribes which may amount to many million dollars. So what?

The social composition of his camp is even odder. They are the masses of Oriental Jews, who feel despised, downtrodden and discriminated against in every respect. By whom? By the Ashkenazi upper classes, the “whites”, the Left. Yet nobody could be more Ashkenazi upper-class than Bibi.

Nobody has yet found the key to this mystery.

So what is Netanyahu’s “vision” for the future? How is Israel to survive in the next decades as a colonial power, surrounded by Arab and Muslim states which may one day unite against it? How is Israel to remain master of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, populated by the Palestinian people, not to mention East Jerusalem and the shrines holy to a billion and a half Muslims throughout the world?

It seems that Bibi’s answer is “Don’t look, just go on!” In his way of thinking, his solution is: no solution. Just continue what Israel is doing anyway: deny the Palestinians any national and even human rights, implant Israeli settlements in the West Bank at a steady but cautious pace, and otherwise maintain the status quo.

He is a cautions person, far from being an adventurer. Most of his admirers would like him to annex the West Bank outright, or at least large chunks of it. Bibi restrains them. What’s the hurry?

But doing nothing is no real answer. In the end, Israel will have to decide: make peace with the Palestinian people (and the entire Arab and Muslim world), or annex all the occupied territories without conferring citizenship on the Arab population. Ergo: an official apartheid state, which may turn in the course of generations into an Arab-majority bi-national state, the nightmare of almost all Jewish Israelis.

There is, of course, another vision, which nobody mentions: waiting for an opportunity to implement another Naqba, expel the entire Palestinian people from Palestine. However, such an opportunity seems unlikely to present itself a second time.

Bibi seems unconcerned. He is a man of the status quo. But having no vision of his own means that consciously or unconsciously he holds in his heart the vision of his father: get the Arabs out. Take possession of the whole land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan (at least), as the Biblical Israelites once did.

What will Bibi do in face of the corruption indictments closing in on him?

Hang on. Whatever happens. Indictment, trial, conviction, just hang on. If everything falls to pieces, democracy, the courts, law enforcement agencies – just hang on.

Not the course one would expect from a great statesman. But then, he is no statesman at all, great or small.

I repeat the suggestion I made last week: in due time have him confess, grant him an immediate pardon. Let him keep the loot, and – bye bye, Bibi.

 

Zionists plot to kill President Truman

March 4, 2018

by Harry von Johnston PhD

In 1946 the British were still in political control of Palestine, formerly ruled by the Ottomons, under an arrangement created in the wake of World War I and approved by the League of Nations in 1923. Prior to WW I, it should be pointed out, Palestine had been part of the Muslim Ottoman Syria since 1516, more than a century before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, and before that it had been part of the Muslim Mamluk Empire centered in Egypt. The Zionist movement, led primarily by Jews from Eastern Europe, was determined to drive the British out and terrorism of all sorts—assassinations, kidnappings, bombings, extortion, etc.—was at the very core of the effort.

The problem with the British was that they were carrying out their commitment under the Balfour Declaration far too conscientiously. As a means of gaining support from world Jewry, especially in the United States and Russia, against their enemies in World War I, which included the Ottomon Empire, the Balfour Declaration endorsed the idea of a Jewish home (not the Zionist objective of a “homeland” or “state”) in Palestine (still at that time under Ottomon control), “it being clearly understood that nothing would be done which would prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”

The Zionists wanted massive Jewish immigration from Europe and total political control of Palestine, with the apparent eventual goal of supplanting the entire non-Jewish population from the area. Such policies would certainly have been—and have been—prejudicial in the extreme toward the rights of the locals, and the British refused to institute them, incurring the murderous wrath of the terrorist Stern Gang, which counted future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (born Icchak Jeziernicky) among its leaders and its brother in terror, Irgun, one of whose leaders was future Prime Minister Menachem Begin (born Mieczysław Biegun). Why British government officials, and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in particular, would have been targeted for killing by the Zionist terrorists can be well appreciated by reference to Bevin’s Wikipedia page.

Although the attempted assassinations in Britain were unsuccessful, the terror campaign against the British worked. The British gave up their mandate and turned the whole question of Palestine’s future over to the United Nations to decide. Under heavy pressure from the United States, the majority of the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and non-Jewish sectors. This final arrangement, according to Bevin, was “…so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how we could reconcile it with our conscience.”

Terror had worked on the British, but why would anyone have thought it necessary against President Truman, of all people? With a village and an institute named for him there, he is regarded today as a hero in Israel for defying almost all his foreign policy advisers and recognizing the new Jewish state of Israel as soon as David Ben Gurion declared its existence in May of 1948. But in the summer of 1947 it was far from a foregone conclusion that Truman would come through for the Zionists. Some idea of his thinking on Palestine at the time can be gleaned from a letter he wrote to a friend, Edward W. Pauley, on October 22, 1946:

‘That situation is insoluble in my opinion. I have spent a year and a month trying to get some concrete action on it. Not only are the British highly successful in muddling the situation as completely as it could possibly be muddled, but the Jews themselves are making it almost impossible to do anything for them. They seem to have the same attitude toward the “underdog” when they are on top as they have been treated as “underdogs” themselves. I suppose that is human frailty.’ –Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman, A Life (1994), p. 307.

Some more evidence of his thinking in 1946 can be had from Truman’s memoirs:

‘My efforts to persuade the British to relax immigration restrictions in Palestine might have fallen on more receptive ears if it had not been for the increasing acts of terrorism that were being committed in Palestine. There were armed groups of extremists who were guilty of numerous outrages. On June 16 eight bridges were blown up near the Trans-Jordan border, and two other explosions were set off in Haifa. The following day there was a pitched battle between Jews and British troops in Haifa, other explosions had started a fire and caused great damage in the rail yards there. British officers were kidnapped. Others were shot at from passing automobiles. Explosions took place in ever-increasing numbers, and the British uncovered a plot by one extremist group to kidnap the British commander in chief in Palestine’. –Memoirs of Harry S. Truman, Vol. 2, Years of Hope (1956). pp. 150-151

Many of the signals being picked up by the Jewish leadership in the United States, as Truman expressed his exasperation over their heavy pressure campaign, could easily have made their way to the Stern Gang, persuading them that in this Missouri Baptist from a relatively humble background they had an American Bevin on their hands:

In June of 1946 he at first refused to see a delegation of all the New York Congressmen, and finally received them only with obvious impatience. He was no better when the two Senators from the state, Robert Wagner and James Mead, brought a former member of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (into Palestine) to see him. “I am not a New Yorker,” Truman is alleged to have told them. “All these people are pleading for a special interest. I am an American.” – Roy Jenkins, Truman (1986), p. 117

Particularly offensive to Truman was the attitude of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, who, with Stephen Wise, was co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council. A Republican and close ally of Senator Taft, Rabbi Silver had helped write a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform. At one point during a meeting in Truman’s office, Silver had hammered on Truman’s desk and shouted at him. “Terror and Silver are the causes of some, if not all, of our troubles,” Truman later said, and at one Cabinet meeting he reportedly grew so furious over the subject of the Jews that he snapped, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.” –David McCullough, Truman (1992), p. 599

Why Don’t We Know?

In 2006 The Times of London had what appeared to be a blockbuster revelation: “Jewish terrorists plotted to assassinate Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, in 1946, as part of their campaign to establish the state of Israel, newly declassified intelligence files have shown.” Five terrorist cells from the Stern Gang and Irgun were planning to descend upon London with bombings and assassinations, the MI5 files are said to have shown, but, in the end, only some 20 letter bombs were sent, with Bevin his Tory predecessor Anthony Eden mentioned as among the recipients.

The interesting thing here is that these are treated as brand new revelations, available only because some secret files have finally been declassified. But as we have seen, the essential facts about the letter bombs in Britain had been published—with even more detail given—in a book in the United States in 1949 and then repeated in outline form in a book by none other than the daughter of the American president. Another interesting fact is that the 2006 story in The Times was not picked up by a single mainstream news organ in the United States and was even taken down from The Times’ web site within a couple of weeks. The only reason we still have the full story up on the Internet is that it was picked up by the alternative news organ Information Clearing House (“news you won’t find on CNN,” indeed).

The Wikipedia page on the letter bomb is doubly revealing. First, for anyone entertaining the fantasy that a mere bomb small enough to be contained in a mail envelope is too trivial a thing to be treated as an assassination attempt, the list of historical examples given is instructive. The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, killed three people and wounded 27 others with his mailed bombs, and the list is full of other instances of people killed or seriously maimed by them.

Perhaps even more interesting is that as of the date of the publication of this article, eighteen examples of the use of letter bombs are given, but the attacks on such important figures as Truman, Bevin and Eden are not mentioned. The list even includes an attack on a U.S. vice president in 1915. Since anyone can put information on Wikipedia as long as it meets that page’s requirements for credibility—which the foregoing revelations certainly do—what we must conclude is that even with the 2006 report by The Times and the 1972 book by Margaret Truman, the fact of Zionist terrorist letter-bomb attacks on major political leaders in Great Britain and the United States is still hardly known by anyone.

We have noted how the U.S. press suppressed the relatively recent news of the attempts on Bevin and Eden. Writers of history (or is it their publishers?), at least in the United States, are at least as guilty of withholding this information. Perhaps I did not search diligently enough, but the only Truman biography that I could find that mentioned the letter bomb attack on Truman was that of his daughter. All those biographies that I consulted were written after hers, and, for some reason, they apparently found this attempted assassination unworthy of mention.

 

Polish group sues Argentine paper under new Holocaust bill

A Polish NGO has said it filed a complaint against Argentine daily Pagina 12 over its coverage of the Jedwabne pogrom. It appears to be the first legal action under Poland’s controversial “Holocaust bill.”

March 4, 2018

DW

Polish lawmakers from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party welcomed what appeared to be the first case filed under Poland’s new so-called “Holocaust bill” — a new legislation making it illegal to suggest Poland was complicit in the murder of Jews during World War II.

The Polish League Against Defamation, a non-governmental group that campaigns to protect Poland’s reputation abroad, said it filed a complaint against Argentine daily Pagina 12 on Friday, the day after the new law came into effect.

The newspaper’s website was accused of using a picture of Polish so-called “doomed soldiers” in an article on the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, where Poles are alleged to have collaborated with Nazi occupiers in the massacre of some 350 Jews.

The League said in a statement: “The combination of these two threads: information about the crime on Jews in Jedwabne during the German occupation and the presentation of fallen soldiers of the independence underground is manipulation, an act to the detriment of the Polish nation.”

The anti-communist doomed soldiers are widely regarded as national heroes in Poland for standing up against Soviet domination. However, records appear to show that some of them also led the killing of Jews, Belarusians  and  other minorities.

Argentine daily accuses Poland of ‘international censorship’

Pagina 12 published an article on its website on Saturday evening stating that it had not received “any legal communication and only learned of the information through international news agency reports.”

“If successful, this attempt at international censorship could threaten freedom of expression worldwide,” the article continued.

PiS welcomes legal action

Poland’s Deputy Justice Minister Michal Wojcik welcomed the lawsuit against Pagina 12, saying he hoped the case would go before the courts.

“The organization has a right to submit such a notice,” Wojcik told Polish broadcaster Zet.

“If the court decides the complaint is admissible — and it should do so — then there will be a court case.”

Why Poland’s “Holocaust bill” has stirred international criticism

The new bill criminalizing Polish complicity in the Holocaust went into effect on Thursday after Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into law last month.

Under the law, anyone found guilty of ascribing “responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich” could face up to three years in prison.

PiS Lawmakers say the bill aims to protect Poland from slander. However, critics have warned that it risks skewing historic research and suppressing free speech.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has said fears the legislation could lead to Holocaust survivors being persecuted for their testimony, should it involve Poles either killing or giving up Jews to the Nazis. The law has opened up an unprecedented diplomatic row between the two countries.

While thousands of Poles risked their lives to protect the country’s Jewish population from Nazi occupation forces during the war, research published since the collapse of communism has questioned national narratives.

Roughly half of the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust lived in pre-war Poland. Around 3 million non-Jews died also died during Nazi Germany’s six-year occupation of Poland.

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