TBR News December 9, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., December 9, 2017: “For an act of utter stupidity, I doubt if there is much that can compete with Trump’s declaration of his intent to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. By doing so he pleased his Jewish son-in-law and Fat Bibi but others are not pleased. Trump’s erratic behavior is causing serious unhappiness in European governmental circles as well as Mid-East capitols. Apologists keep telling us that we should ignore the faux pas because they are really manifestations of Trump’s cunning. And his actions in openly and determinedly supporting a heavily accused child molester for a Senate seat are not those of someone who ought to be in the White House.”

 

Table of Contents

• The Nutball the Neocons Wanted in NATO
• The West Backed the Wrong Man in Ukraine
• In Jerusalem, Three Religions Collide and Violence Is Never Far Away
• Palestinian youth fight to defend right to Jerusalem as capital
• The modern bloody foundations of Israel
• Iraq declares war with Islamic State is over
• Germans say Russia is more reliable than the United States
• Syrian City’s Survivors Describe Three Years of Siege Under the Islamic State
• Jared Kushner is wreaking havoc in the Middle East
• The Neo-Nazi Renaissance

 

The Nutball the Neocons Wanted in NATO

December 8, 2017

by Patrick J. Buchanan

AntiWar

Even interventionists are regretting some of the wars into which they helped plunge the United States in this century.

Among those wars are Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest in our history; Libya, which was left without a stable government; Syria’s civil war, a six-year human rights disaster we helped kick off by arming rebels to overthrow Bashar Assad; and Yemen, where a U.S.-backed Saudi bombing campaign and starvation blockade is causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Yet, twice this century, the War Party was beaten back when seeking a clash with Putin’s Russia. And the “neo-isolationists” who won those arguments served America well.

What triggered this observation was an item on Page 1 of Wednesday’s New York Times that read in its entirety:

“Mikheil Saakashvili, former president of Georgia, led marchers through Kiev after threatening to jump from a five-story building to evade arrest. Page A4”

Who is Saakashvili? The wunderkind elected in 2004 in Tbilisi after a “Rose Revolution” we backed during George W. Bush’s crusade for global democracy.

During the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, Saakashvili sent his army crashing into the tiny enclave of South Ossetia, which had broken free of Georgia when Georgia broke free of Russia.

In overrunning the enclave, however, Saakashvili’s troops killed Russian peacekeepers. Big mistake. Within 24 hours, Putin’s tanks and troops were pouring through Roki Tunnel, running Saakashvili’s army out of South Ossetia, and occupying parts of Georgia itself.

As defeat loomed for the neocon hero, U.S. foreign policy elites were alive with denunciations of “Russian aggression” and calls to send in the 82nd Airborne, bring Georgia into NATO, and station U.S. forces in the Caucasus.

“We are all Georgians!” thundered John McCain.

Not quite. When an outcry arose against getting into a collision with Russia, Bush, reading the nation right, decided to confine U.S. protests to the nonviolent. A wise call.

And Saakashvili? He held power until 2013, and then saw his party defeated, was charged with corruption, and fled to Ukraine. There, President Boris Poroshenko, beneficiary of the Kiev coup the U.S. had backed in 2014, put him in charge of Odessa, one of the most corrupt provinces in a country rife with corruption.

In 2016, an exasperated Saakashvili quit, charged his patron Poroshenko with corruption, and fled Ukraine. In September, with a band of supporters, he made a forced entry back across the border.

Here is the Times’ Andrew Higgins on his latest antics:

“On Tuesday … Saakashvili, onetime darling of the West, took his high-wire political career to bizarre new heights when he climbed onto the roof of his five-story apartment building in the center of Kiev…

“As … hundreds of supporters gathered below, he shouted insults at Ukraine’s leaders … and threatened to jump if security agents tried to grab him.

“Dragged from the roof after denouncing Mr. Poroshenko as a traitor and a thief, the former Georgian leader was detained but then freed by his supporters, who … blocked a security service van before it could take Mr. Saakashvili to a Kiev detention center and allowed him to escape.

“With a Ukrainian flag draped across his shoulders and a pair of handcuffs still attached to one of his wrists, Mr. Saakashvili then led hundreds of supporters in a march across Kiev toward Parliament. Speaking through a bullhorn he called for ‘peaceful protests’ to remove Mr. Poroshenko from office, just as protests had toppled the former President, Victor F. Yanukovych, in February 2014.”

This reads like a script for a Peter Sellers movie in the ’60s.

Yet this clown was president of Georgia, for whose cause in South Ossetia some in our foreign policy elite thought we should go to the brink of war with Russia.

And there was broad support for bringing Georgia into NATO. This would have given Saakashvili an ability to ignite a confrontation with Russia, which could have forced U.S. intervention.

Consider Ukraine. Three years ago, McCain was declaring, in support of the overthrow of the elected pro-Russian government in Kiev, “We are all Ukrainians now.”

Following that coup, U.S. elites were urging us to confront Putin in Crimea, bring Ukraine, as well as Georgia, into NATO, and send Kiev the lethal weapons needed to defeat Russian-backed rebels in the East.

This could have led straight to a Ukraine-Russia war, precipitated by our sending of U.S. arms.

Do we really want to cede to folks of the temperament of Mikhail Saakashvili an ability to instigate a war with a nuclear-armed Russia, which every Cold War president was resolved to avoid, even if it meant accepting Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern Europe all the way to the Elbe?

Watching Saakashvili losing it in the streets of Kiev like some blitzed college student should cause us to reassess the stability of all these allies to whom we have ceded a capacity to drag us into war.

Alliances, after all, are the transmission belts of war.

 

The West Backed the Wrong Man in Ukraine

President Petro Poroshenko is sacrificing Westernization to a personal political agenda. 

December‎ ‎5‎, ‎2017‎

by Leonid Bershidsky

Bloomberg

It’s become increasingly clear that Obama-era U.S. politicians backed the wrong people in Ukraine. President Petro Poroshenko’s moves to consolidate his power now include sidelining the anti-corruption institutions he was forced to set up by Ukraine’s Western allies.

Poroshenko, who had briefly served as Ukraine’s foreign minister, looked worldlier than his predecessor, the deposed Viktor Yanukovych, and spoke passable English. He and his first prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, knew what the U.S. State Department and Vice President Joe Biden, who acted as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, wanted to hear. So, as Ukraine emerged from the revolutionary chaos of January and February 2014, the U.S., and with it the EU, backed Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk as Ukraine’s next leaders. Armed with this support, not least with promises of major technical aid and International Monetary Fund loans, they won elections, posing as Westernizers who would lead Ukraine into Europe. But their agendas turned out to be more self-serving.

While Ukraine was in existential need of Western money, Poroshenko and his political allies followed the conditions attached to the aid. Among other things, parliament voted to set up an independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) that was supposed to investigate graft, and a special anti-corruption prosecutor.

Gradually, however, it became clear that though the agency and the prosecutor could make loud noises and investigate hundreds of cases (about 400 so far), they found it hard to make charges stick because the largely unreformed court system pushed back. Ukraine’s European and U.S. allies demanded that a special anti-corruption court be set up. Poroshenko, however, has been lukewarm about the idea, pointing out that few countries had such an institution. Despite repeated Western demands, backed by a group of young pro-Western legislators, Poroshenko still hasn’t submitted a legislative proposal on the court — even though the Venice Commission, which analyzes legislation for the EU, has provided detailed recommendations on what the bill should look like.

At the same time, Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko, a close Poroshenko ally, began an open war against NABU. An agent of the Anti-Corruption Bureau was detained last week while trying to hand over a bribe to a migration service official, and the bureau’s offices were searched. NABU chief Artem Sytnyk claimed in response that the bribe was part of a sting operation Lutsenko hadn’t known about. That didn’t stop Lutsenko from continuing to attack Sytnyk and his bureau, accusing them of illegal operations and unauthorized cooperation with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Poroshenko, while not officially taking Lutsenko’s side, denounced the whole squabble: “There’s so much noise and screaming, so many feathers flying that it’s sometimes reminiscent of some Latin American carnival. It would seem funny if it weren’t so sad.”

The U.S., however, is openly siding with NABU in the conflict. On Monday, the State Department issued a statement condemning “the disruption of a high-level corruption investigation, the arrest of officials from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, and the seizure of sensitive NABU files.” It quoted Secretary Rex Tillerson as saying, “It serves no purpose for Ukraine to fight for its body in Donbas if it loses its soul to corruption. Anti-corruption institutions must be supported, resourced, and defended.”

Poroshenko, however, appears to have other plans.

This year, Ukraine has paid $270 million more back to the IMF than it has received from it. Government finances have stabilized on the back of modest economic growth, which, according to the Bloomberg consensus forecast, should reach 2 percent this year. At the same time, the Western position on the conflict in eastern Ukraine has congealed. There is a greater chance than ever that the U.S. will supply Ukraine with lethal weapons. Poroshenko has clearly concluded that he won’t lose Western political backing as long as he maintains an anti-Russian stance, and he no longer has a pressing need for financial backing on a firm schedule. As long as Western leaders see Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia, he can act domestically as any other old-school Ukrainian politician, for whom the borders between power, money and brutal force are blurred.

His harsh actions against his most vocal opponent, former Georgian president and former Odessa governor Mikheil Saakashvili, show Poroshenko can be as ruthless as Yanukovych. After a failed attempt to kick Saakashvili, an anti-corruption firebrand, out of Ukraine for allegedly obtaining its citizenship under false pretences, Poroshenko’s law enforcement apparatus has harassed and deported the Georgian-born politician’s allies. Finance Minister Oleksandr Danilyuk, who helped Saakashvili set up a think tank in Kiev — which is now under investigation for suspected financial violations — has accused law-enforcement agencies of “putting pressure on business, on those who want to change the country.” Danilyuk himself is being investigated for tax evasion.

On Tuesday, investigators arrived to search Saakashvili’s Kiev apartment, and, for a few minutes, the former governor was on the roof of his eight-story building threatening to jump unless left alone. He was then held for hours in an unmarked police van next to his building as hundreds of his supporters prevented the vehicle from driving off. At the time of this writing, Saakashvili, freed by his captors, was holding a rally in front of the Ukrainian parliament.

At this point, even the most vocal Western supporters of the post-revolutionary Ukrainian government have realized that something is wrong with Poroshenko. “President Poroshenko appears to have abandoned the fight against corruption, any ambition for economic growth, EU or IMF funding,” economist Anders Aslund, who has long been optimistic about Ukrainian reforms, tweeted recently.

Ukraine’s opaque, corrupt, backward political system today — without Western support. No amount of friendly pressure is going to change him. If Ukrainians shake up their apathy to do to him what they did to Yanukovych — or when he comes up for reelection in 2019 — this mistake shouldn’t be repeated. It’s not easy to find younger, more principled, genuinely European-oriented politicians in Ukraine, but they exist. Otherwise, Western politicians and analysts will have to keep acting shocked that another representative of the old elite is suddenly looking a lot like Yanukovych

 

In Jerusalem, Three Religions Collide and Violence Is Never Far Away

December 5, 2017

by Patrick Cockburn

The Unz Review

I lived in Jerusalem for four years in a flat with a fine view of the Mount of Olives, which will supposedly split apart on Judgement Day and the dead in the vast cemetery on its slopes will rise again.

I found parts of the city like the Dome of the Rock exquisitely beautiful but overall it was a city filled with hatred.

One day a nurse was knifed to death at the bottom of Elisha Street where I was living. Several times there were bombs on buses or in markets on Jaffa Road, which lay a couple of hundred yards in the other direction.

The violence ebbed and flowed, never as great as many other cities in the Middle East, but never entirely absent.

Three religions

There was always a contrast between Jerusalem as a small shabby city and its status as a great symbolic centre for three religions. It seemed to be dwarfed by its history.

The main friction was between Jews and Muslims, but also within communities as the ultra-orthodox Jews grew in number and secular Jews moved to cities on the coast.

Hopes of a compromise peace were at their height after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, but were always undermined by the disparity in strength between the two sides.

Israel simply had no reason to compromise to a sufficient degree to satisfy the Palestinians, unless it was put under great and sustained pressure by the US – and this was never likely to happen.

Such hopes flickered out after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an ultra-nationalist religious zealot opposed to the peace terms.

After a brief hiatus, Rabin was followed by Benjamin Netanyahu, who is back in the prime minister’s office today.

The embassy

The issue of the US embassy being moved to Jerusalem or even US recognition of Jerusalem has been raised at election time in America for decades.

It served as a diversion or smokescreen concealing the establishment and expansion of Israeli settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Though Israeli governments regularly raised the issue as one of their grievances, it never seemed to be a major concern.

Capital of the sovereign state of Israel

I arrived in Jerusalem just as the right-wing mayor Ehud Olmert was opening a festival to celebrate 3,000 years since King David captured it from the Jebusites.

Olmert said that the purpose of the celebration was to highlight Jerusalem as “the eternal, united capital of the sovereign state of Israel and of the Jewish nation”.

Palestinians worried about the impetus this would give to new settlements, and with good reason as 20 years later there are 200,000 Israeli settlers and 370,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

What chance of a resolution?

The mood of rancour and intolerance has worsened over the years. It is difficult to see what good it will do Israel to have President Donald Trump recognise Jerusalem as its capital or move the US embassy there.

Its most likely impact will be to help revive the moribund Palestinian cause in the Muslim world. It will make it more difficult for states such as Saudi Arabia to cultivate closer relations with Israel and President Trump to unite regional Sunni powers against Iran.

It might have been a good idea from the point of view of Israel and the White House to let the issue lie.

 

Palestinian youth fight to defend right to Jerusalem as capital

The US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has sparked protests across Gaza and the West Bank. Young Palestinians feel compelled to defend their right to the city and resist Israeli occupation.

December 8, 2017

by Tessa Fox

DW

Black smoke can be seen rising above buildings in the north of Ramallah, approaching Beit El checkpoint. The thick smell of tear gas and burning rubber hangs in the air. Young Palestinians are collecting stones in buckets and running them to their brothers at the front line, crouching behind metal bins and reloading their slingshots. Israeli Defense Force soldiers stand no more than 50 meters away, equipped with tear gas grenades and guns loaded with rubber bullets.

Crouching down behind a wall alongside an apartment building, after fleeing tear gas canisters shot into the air, Palestinian men in their early twenties share a bottle of perfume to spray on tissues. Sniffing the alcohol helps counter the effects of the gas. “This is occupation,” 21-year-old Issa says, sniffing and holding back tears from his bloodshot eyes.

It is the second day of protests and clashes across East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in reaction to US President Donald Trump declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. “I’ve never been to Jerusalem. It’s my dream to, but the occupation rejected [my permit application],” Issa says. “It makes me angry,” Issa’s friend Samir interjects. “We love it so much. It’s our capital,” Issa adds.

Jerusalem ‘in the hearts of all Palestinians’

The youth clashing with Israeli soldiers in Beit El on Friday are fed up. The US has further legitimized Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, specifically, the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem. Issa explains that many young people feel it is necessary to resist Israeli occupation.

“We will not move from here, we will continue to defend our country,” he says, adding that even knowing the Israeli soldiers have already used a combination of live and rubber bullets on protesters does not deter him. “The love of our country keeps us here, it’s the one thing that makes us happy today.”

Yelling and screaming closer to the clashes breaks the conversation. Everyone involved shouts at once as soon as someone is injured by rubber bullets, calling for medical attention from the Red Crescent Society. If the paramedics are busy with other patients, the nearest people to the newly injured pick them up and run them for treatment at the ambulance.

Two people were killed and dozens more injured during protests across the West Bank and Gaza on Friday.

At times, even the paramedics at Beit El have to take cover behind the nearby service station, overcome by tear gas inhalation. Local Palestinians offer their cars to hide in. Others run into apartment blocks, coughing and collapsing in the stairwell.

Hiding behind a Palestinian flagpole, 21-year-old Ali explains Jerusalem is in his heart. “It’s in the hearts of all Palestinians,” he says, crouching down every time a gunshot is heard. “We don’t have magic or anything, [but] I’ll be here every day. We need everyone here every day because we need to free not just Jerusalem, but the whole of Palestine.”

Frustration with PA

The youth at the protest in Beit El seem to have reached a boiling point with the occupation and the lack of action from their leaders. “Everyone here rejects the Palestinian Authority (PA) and President [Mahmoud] Abbas,” Issa says. “For years he has lied and broken promises.” Issa believes the PA is giving away the Palestinian country and history to the Israelis.

Issa and his friends instead align more with Hamas. “Hamas actually resists the occupation,” Samir explains. “They have [in the past] captured and killed Israeli soldiers in Gaza. This is why we like Hamas.”

“On the other hand, Gaza has no electricity and no water, because of the Palestinian Authority,” another man says, referring to the sanctions the PA imposes on Hamas.

Hamas’ leader, Ismail Haniyeh, called Trump’s declaration a “war against Palestinians” and said “we should work on launching an intifada in the face of the Zionist enemy.” Some of the youth could be following this direction, though more likely their personal burning frustration with the occupation and lack of change is pushing them toward an uprising. “We will kick out the occupation, this is important. This is the Third Intifada,” Issa says.

 

The modern bloody foundations of Israel

December 9, 2017

by Christian Jürs

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 Ottoman 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 Ottoman 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.

 

Iraq declares war with Islamic State is over

December 9, 2017

BBC News

Iraq has announced that its war against so-called Islamic State (IS) is over.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a conference in Baghdad that Iraqi troops were now in complete control of the Iraqi-Syrian border.

The border zone contained the last few areas IS held, following its loss of the town of Rawa in November.

The US state department welcomed the end of the “vile occupation” of IS in Iraq and said the fight against the group would continue.

Iraq’s announcement comes two days after the Russian military declared it had accomplished its mission of defeating IS in neighbouring Syria.

The jihadist group had seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, when it proclaimed a “caliphate” and imposed its rule over some 10 million people.

But it suffered a series of defeats over the past two years, losing Iraq’s second city of Mosul this July and its de facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria last month.

Some IS fighters are reported to have dispersed into the Syrian countryside, while others are believed to have escaped across the Turkish border.

By Sebastian Usher, BBC Arab affairs editor

This is undeniably a proud moment for Mr Abadi – a victory that once looked like it might only ever be rhetorical rather than real.

But if the direct military war with IS in Iraq is genuinely over, and the country’s elite forces can now step back after a conflict that’s taken a huge toll on them, it doesn’t mean the battle against the group’s ideology or its ability to stage an insurgency is finished – whether in Iraq, Syria or the wider world.

Attacks may be at a lower level than they once were, but Iraqi towns and cities still fall prey to suicide bombers, while the conditions that fuelled the growth of jihadism remain – even in the territory that’s been recaptured.

Presentational grey line

Mr Abadi said on Saturday: “Our forces are in complete control of the Iraqi-Syrian border and I therefore announce the end of the war against Daesh [IS].

“Our enemy wanted to kill our civilisation, but we have won through our unity and our determination. We have triumphed in little time.”

The Iraqi armed forces issued a statement saying Iraq had been “totally liberated” from IS.

US state department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement that Iraqis who had lived under the jihadists’ “brutal control” were now free.

“The United States joins the government of Iraq in stressing that Iraq’s liberation does not mean the fight against terrorism, and even against Isis [IS], in Iraq is over,” she added.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May congratulated Mr Abadi on a “historic moment” but warned that IS still posed a threat, including from across the border in Syria.

Last month, the Syrian military said it had “fully liberated” the eastern border town of Albu Kamal, the last last urban stronghold of IS in that country.

On Thursday, the head of the Russian general staff’s operations, Col-Gen Sergei Rudskoi, said: “The mission to defeat bandit units of the Islamic State terrorist organisation on the territory of Syria, carried out by the armed forces of the Russian Federation, has been accomplished.”

He said Russia’s military presence in Syria would now concentrate on preserving ceasefires and restoring peace.

The collapse of IS has raised fears that its foreign fighters will escape over Syria’s borders to carry out more attacks abroad.

Iraq’s war with IS

January 2014: Forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant capture the cities of Falluja and Ramadi

• June 2014: The jihadists take Mosul, Iraq’s second city, after a six-day battle
• 29 June 2014: ISIL changes its name to Islamic State, announcing a new caliphate under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
• August 2014: IS captures Sinjar. Some 200,000 civilians, mostly Yazidis, flee to the Sinjar mountains, prompting US-aided air drops
• March 2015: Iraqi forces and allied Shia militias retake Tikrit
• December 2015: Ramadi recaptured
• June 2016: Falluja retaken
• October 2016: Iraqi forces, Shia militias, Kurdish units and international allies lay siege to Mosul
• July 2017: Mosul retaken
• December 2017: Iraq’s PM announces an end to the war with IS

 

 

Germans say Russia is more reliable than the United States

A new survey published by German public broadcaster ARD shows Germans trust Russia more than the US. America’s brand appears to have suffered considerably since the election of Donald Trump as US president last year.

December 9, 2017

by Alexander Pearson

DW

Germans increasingly see Russia as a more reliable partner than the US, a new study released on Saturday has found.

The poll of 1,004 people by research institute Infratest dimap showed that 28 percent of respondents felt Moscow was a reliable partner, compared to 25 percent for Washington.

The result is the first time the public’s trust in the US has fallen below Russia in over a decade. An Infratest survey of public trust in Germany’s global partners in June found both countries tying at 21 percent.

France and Britain fared far better in the German public’s eyes. More than 90 percent said Paris was a reliable partner, while more than 60 percent said Britain, which has been trying to exit the European Union (EU), was a reliable partner.

US favorability falling

The new results align with the findings of an August poll by the Pew Research Center that surveyed the public’s confidence in different world leaders.

Whereas 25 percent of Germans had confidence in Russian President Vladimir Putin, only 11 had confidence in US President Donald Trump.

America’s brand, Pew noted in an earlier study, has suffered in Germany since the election of Donald Trump in November 2016.

Nearly 60 percent of Germans had a favorable view of the US when Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, left office. That dropped to 35 percent at the beginning of Trump’s presidency.

The decline in Germany has reflected a worldwide trend. “Attitudes have taken a dramatic turn for the worse, especially in Western Europe and Latin America,” the surveyors said.

Pew noted that the US’s favorability had only dramatically improved in one country: “Only in Russia has the image of the United States improved by a large margin.”

 

Syrian City’s Survivors Describe Three Years of Siege Under the Islamic State

December 8 2017

by Nour Samaha

The Intercept

Twelve-year-old Mustafa grinned as he bit into an apple, munching away excitedly. Only a month ago, he sunk his teeth into a piece of fresh fruit for the first time in three years. Mustafa, along with his family, survived a siege.

Mustafa’s mother, Sara, her face gaunt like that of her teenage daughter, described how they made it. “We would have to buy tomato paste by the gram,” said Sara, whose family name The Intercept is withholding for security reasons. “Our daily food consisted of rice or lentils. Get meat, fruit, or vegetables out of your head, they didn’t exist. Forget the fridge, there was never any power to keep it running. Forget everything.” Pointing to Mustafa, she asked, “Look at him. Does he look like a normal 12-year-old? Look at the girls. Do they look healthy?”

Mustafa looked like a child of eight or nine years old. All the children in Deir al-Zour appear small for their ages. Sara’s daughters had dark circles under their eyes, their skin tinged yellow, and their cheeks ever so slightly sunken in.

Since the end of 2014, the residents of the city of Deir al-Zour in Syria had been all but cut off from the outside, besieged by the Islamic State as it attempted to consolidate its power base across northern Syria and Iraq. Water, fuel, electricity, and channels for communication slowly disappeared. Basic food products like tea, sugar, meat, and fresh produce became unaffordable luxuries, held hostage by a handful looking to profit off the siege.

After months of intense battles, the Syrian army and its allies broke the Islamic State siege on Deir al-Zour in early September. It took another three days for Syrian forces to reach the main entrance of the city; the Islamic State had surrounded the nearby military post with thousands of landmines.

The city is the capital of a region of the same name. Deir al-Zour Governorate, too, was mostly freed from the Islamic State’s grip following months of heavy fighting by both the Syrian government and its allies on one side of the region and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on the other. Today, control of the province is split along the Euphrates River: The government and its allies control the territory south of the river, while the Syrian Democratic Forces and its allies control the territory north of the river.

Sections of the road to reach the city of Deir al-Zour still remained under Islamic State control for a few weeks after the siege ended. Traveling by air remained the only way to access the city. By mid-October, however, according to Syrian military officials, the road leading directly to Deir al-Zour was cleared of standing threats. Aid trucks, civilians, and, finally, journalists were finally able to travel by land to the city.

Deir al-Zour is a shell of what it used to be. Once a bustling city home to around 700,000 people, now the city’s roads are pockmarked by years of shelling; its buildings lie crumbling, caught between destruction and abandonment; and the city still wants for basic services, such as electricity and communication lines. Mobile phone reception is sporadic at best, and most houses are running full-time on generators or large battery packs. A World Bank report released in July 2017 estimated that Deir al-Zour province suffered the highest housing destruction as a result of the war.

Residents who stayed behind, approximately 100,000 by January 2017, as the blockade drew on endured a double siege: One siege by the Islamic State, which prevented people or supplies from entering or exiting; and the other inside city limits, perpetrated by those who saw in the misery an opportunity to turn a profit.

Today, they are war-weary, undernourished, and frustrated. While some neighborhoods are pushing to return to normal, there is an underlying concern that, just as the city had been overlooked during the siege, its residents will quickly be forgotten about as the cries of liberation and victory fade away.

Situated between the two former Islamic State capitals, Raqqa and Mosul, the city of Deir al-Zour, on the banks of the Euphrates River, was a flashpoint in the conflict, yet its residents were overlooked by all the warring parties. As a result, residents suffered at the hands of local war profiteers inside the city while also fending off attacks, infiltrations, and onslaughts from the Islamic State, which sought Deir al-Zour to consolidate its control over the surrounding area.

At the outset of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Deir al-Zour was a hotbed of opposition activity, and was attacked by the Syrian army. By 2013, rebels from the Nusra Front and other groups held the city, jostling for control with other rebel factions and fighting off government offensives. By 2014, the Islamic State took over much of the surrounding area and laid siege to the city — until its defeat this fall.

The road to Deir al-Zour, a nine-hour drive from Damascus through a vast expanse of unfriendly desert, reveals how much still needs to be done before civilians can return to any sort of normalcy following the Syrian government’s recapturing of territory from both the Islamic State and the Syrian opposition. Palmyra, the last major town before Deir al-Zour that was recaptured from the Islamic State — for the second time — in March 2017, is still in ruins. Only a handful of civilians remain. Instead, pro-government militiamen — from the Lebanese group Hezbollah, to the Afghan Fatemiyoun group, to local Syrian forces — dot the streets, with each faction commandeering its own residence from what buildings still stand, while Russian troops guard the ancient ruins.

Most of the vehicles traveling beyond Palmyra have a military purpose. The Russians are here, along with Syrian regular forces and pro-government paramilitary groups. Pickup trucks with Syrian, Afghan, and Lebanese fighters pass by, their flags flapping in the wind. One particular checkpoint on the main thoroughfare connecting the province of Homs to northeastern Syria — the cities of Deir al-Zour, Al Mayadeen, and Abu Kamal — is manned by a Syrian soldier, a Russian soldier, and an Afghan fighter. At the entrance of the recently recaptured town of Sukhnah stands a massive billboard with the words “Death to America and Israel” plastered across it, with Fatemiyoun flags at its edges.

As the road approaches Deir al-Zour, the landscape is scattered with small clusters of flat, one-story houses, now abandoned and derelict. Just beyond the main Syrian army checkpoint, an arch with large pieces of its mosaic tile design missing welcomes visitors to Deir al-Zour. According to local residents and Syrian military, landmines still dot the vast expanse of desert stretching out around the city entrance, making it unsafe to travel by foot. After another Syrian army checkpoint, a large statue of a jug welcomes visitors, but no one stops here — Islamic State snipers still lurk in the distance.

As the city turns to residential blocks, Syrian army checkpoints dot the streets. Jeeps with young men in military fatigues — a mix of Syrian army and local pro-government forces — can be seen driving through the connecting neighborhoods. They are keeping close watch over what is left of Deir al-Zour; in the western outskirts of the city, entire neighborhoods are completely destroyed, the enormous scars of the Islamic State’s presence and the subsequent battles that forced them out.

On a recent night, the market on Wadi Street inside Deir al-Zour was full. The city was pitch-black, except for the flicker of battery-powered bulbs. Explosions could still be heard in the near distance above the din of generators but were not threatening enough to stop people from socializing. Before they were routed, shelling from the Islamic State drove people to take cover, for fear of becoming one of the thousands of civilians killed in 2017 during the battle for the city. Now, smoke-filled coffee shops bustle with young men puffing hookah, gathered around the few TV sets currently operational in the city. Others pause by the market stalls, inspecting the fresh produce, now more readily available.

Loud whispers of the “tujjar” — the Arabic word for traders or anyone who demands money in exchange for something, including services — float between shoppers in the souk, as residents, vegetable sellers, and even children talk of how they were, as one shopkeeper described it, “under siege on the outside and the inside.”

The tujjar tended to be locals, either from the city or the countryside, who capitalized on the Islamic State siege. They sold everything from bread, wheat, rice, bulgur, and canned food, to aid, diesel, wheat, oil, government passes, and spaces on planes or helicopters to be airlifted out. The tujjar hailed from many different backgrounds. Some were from local gangs who had been absorbed into the different branches of the National Defense Forces, a pro-government militia; others, like Hossam Qaterji, were high-powered businessmen who organized aid drops and allegedly negotiated trade deals over wheat with the Islamic State.

Sara described how the tujjar lined their pockets. “The aid drops we got were collected by the tujjar, divided into two, of which half was put into warehouses to expire” — in order to inflate prices — “and the other half would be sold at exorbitant prices to the residents in the souks,” she explained. They “are also responsible for our suffering.”

Once the sun set, gangs would often loot the neighborhoods and houses of those who had fled. According to one resident, his neighbor found his entire kitchen, including the fridge, for sale off the back of a pickup in a nearby city.

“Just watch now, the pickup trucks coming back from Al Mayadeen, full of goods looted from the homes there,” said Abu Mohammad, who asked his proper name not be used because of security risks. “These gangs did the same here, inside our city.”

“Everything was for sale in Deir al-Zour,” explained Mohammed Saleh Alftayeh, an expert on the Syrian military and politics, who is from Deir al-Zour. “Everyone had something that others needed.”

In order for a government employee to be able to leave the city, for instance, he would have to get official permission, which came at a price. Once the government employee left, he would have to pay his way through checkpoints on the outskirts of the city to allow him to travel by land or pay even more to be allowed to use helicopters or a cargo plane. And the fees increased as the siege went on.

In February 2015, the fee to get airlifted out was around 25,000 SYP (around $100 at the time) per person, according to a number of residents both inside and outside the city, including those who left via airlift. In the fall of 2015, when Islamic State forces crept too close to the airport, airlifts by cargo plane stopped entirely. With only smaller planes — and therefore fewer seats — making the flight out, prices skyrocketed. By October 2015, the fee had increased tenfold: A family of three would have to pay 700,000 SYP — and, even then, a waitlist remained, full of people waiting to escape.

Those who could not afford to be airlifted risked their lives by attempting to cross by land through Islamic State territory.

With most of Deir al-Zour liberated from the Islamic State siege, attention has now turned to reconstruction and returning civilians. But based on how little attention was paid to Deir al-Zour during the siege, some residents feel the city’s reconstruction needs will again be overlooked.

“I doubt it will be a focus for the government in terms of reconstruction,” said Alftayeh, the military and political analyst. He pointed to the government’s retaking of the war-torn city of Aleppo in December 2016. “It has been almost a year now for Aleppo, and there is no organized, government-led reconstruction,” Alftayeh said. “As long as there is no international funding, I doubt there will be serious reconstruction in Deir al-Zour, where the scale of destruction is huge.”

Residents are expected to come back to the city, yet two months after the siege was broken, only a slow trickle have returned. “There will be a flow back, partly because the section that was under the control of the government during the past years is in better condition that other parts, and it can accommodate significant numbers,” said Alftayeh, “and partly because the government wants internally displaced people to return to their original cities, Deir al-Zour included.”

In late September, the government issued a decree stating all public sector employees must return to their original workplaces within a month; in the case of Deir al-Zour, the deadline was extended to the end of the year.

Some humanitarian organizations are eager to see public sector workers return home, including to Deir al-Zour. “Public sector workers tend to fall into the poorest class bracket, and they are the ones who provide the basic services to any community for it to work properly again,” said one official working with an international organization across Syria, who asked for anonymity because he was not permitted to speak to the media, “so we are keen to see them return.”

Those who stayed behind and weathered the siege in Deir al-Zour, however, are less optimistic about the future. Haifaa, another resident in Qusour who was forced to stay behind while her husband left to seek medical treatment for their child in Damascus, said, “It will be another 10 years before anything can get back to normal here.”

 

Jared Kushner is wreaking havoc in the Middle East

In his role as the president’s special advisor, Kushner seems to have decided he can remake the entire Middle East. The results could be devastating

December 9, 2017

by Moustafa Bayoumi

The Guardian

The entire Middle East, from Palestine to Yemen, appears set to burst into flames after this week. The region was already teetering on the edge, but recent events have only made things worse. And while the mayhem should be apparent to any casual observer, what’s less obvious is Jared Kushner’s role in the chaos.

Kushner is, of course, the US president’s senior advisor and son-in-law. The 36-year-old is a Harvard graduate who seems to have a hard time filling in forms correctly.

He repeatedly failed to mention his meetings with foreign officials on his security clearance and neglected to report to US government officials that he was co-director of a foundation that raised money for Israeli settlements, considered illegal under international law. (He is also said to have told Michael Flynn last December to call UN security council members to get a resolution condemning Israeli settlements quashed. Flynn called Russia.)

In his role as the president’s special advisor, Kushner seems to have decided he can remake the entire Middle East, and he is wreaking his havoc with his new best friend, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old who burst on to the international scene by jailing many members of his country’s ruling elite, including from his own family, on corruption charges.

Days before Salman’s unprecedented move, Kushner was with the crown prince in Riyadh on an unannounced trip. The men are reported to have stayed up late, planning strategy while swapping stories. We don’t know what exactly the two were plotting, but Donald Trump later tweeted his “great confidence” in Salman.

But the Kushner-Salman alliance moves far beyond Riyadh. The Saudis and Americans are now privately pushing a new “peace” deal to various Palestinian and Arab leaders that is more lop-sided toward Israel than ever before.

Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian parliamentarian in the Israeli Knesset, explained the basic contours of the deal to the New York Times: no full statehood for Palestinians, only “moral sovereignty.” Control over disconnected segments of the occupied territories only. No capital in East Jerusalem. No right of return for Palestinian refugees.

This is, of course, not a deal at all. It’s an insult to the Palestinian people. Another Arab official cited in the Times story explained that the proposal came from someone lacking experience but attempting to flatter the family of the American president. In other words, it’s as if Mohammed bin Salman is trying to gift Palestine to Jared Kushner, Palestinians be damned.

Next came Donald Trump throwing both caution and international law to the wind by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

But it’s not just Israel, either. Yemen is on the brink of a major humanitarian disaster largely because the country is being blockaded by Saudi Arabia. Trump finally spoke out against the Saudi measure this week, but both the state department and the Pentagon are said to have been privately urging Saudi Arabia and the UAE to ease their campaign against Yemen (and Lebanon and Qatar) for some time and to little impact. Why? Because Saudi and Emirati officials believe they “have tacit approval from the White House for their hardline actions, in particular from Donald Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner,” journalist Laura Rozen reported.

The Kushner-Salman alliance has particularly irked secretary of state Rex Tillerson. Kushner reportedly leaves the state department completely out of his Middle Eastern plans. Of special concern to Tillerson, according to Bloomberg News, is Kushner’s talks with Salman regarding military action by Saudi Arabia against Qatar. The state department is worried of all the unforeseen consequences such a radical course of action would bring, including heightened conflict with Turkey and Russia and perhaps even a military response from Iran or an attack on Israel by Hezbollah.

Here’s where state department diplomacy should kick in. The US ambassador to Qatar could relay messages between the feuding parties to find a solution to the stand-off. So what does the ambassador to Qatar have to say about the Kushner-Salman alliance? Nothing, since there still is no confirmed ambassador to Qatar.

What about the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia? That seat’s also vacant. And the US ambassador to Jordan, Morocco, Egypt? Vacant, vacant, and vacant. What about assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, a chief strategic post to establish US policy in the region? No one’s been nominated. Deputy assistant secretary for press and public diplomacy? Vacant.

It’s partly this vacuum of leadership by Tillerson that has enabled Kushner to forge his powerful alliance with Salman, much to the detriment of the region. And in their zeal to isolate Iran, Kushner and Salman are leaving a wake of destruction around them.

The war in Yemen is only intensifying. Qatar is closer to Iran than ever. A final status deal between Israel and the Palestinians seems all but impossible now. The Lebanese prime minister went back on his resignation. And the Saudi state must be paying the Ritz-Carlton a small fortune to jail key members of the ruling family over allegations of corruption.

There’s a long history of American politicians deciding they know what’s best for the Middle East while buttressing their autocratic allies and at the expense of the region’s ordinary people. (The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has traditionally provided the rationale for America and its allies in the region, and his recent sycophantic portrayal of Salman certainly didn’t disappoint!)

But the Kushner-Salman alliance also represents something else. Both the US and Saudi Arabia are concentrating power into fewer and fewer hands. And with fewer people in the room, who will be around to tell these men that their ideas are so damaging? Who will dare explain to them how they already have failed?

 

 

The Neo-Nazi Renaissance

December 9, 2017

by Christian Jürs

In the main, fraud, counterfeiting and deceit are certainly immoral  and very often felonious but in some instances, the essential ludicrous nature of some frauds manages to overcome the gravity.

Such is the case of the enormous industry devoted to the creation, manufacture and sale of faked items of German militaria and elevated personality items from the Third Reich period, purporting to belong to such people as Hitler and Hermann Goering.

There is an abiding fascination with the trappings of the Third Reich but the number of actual and original relics is much smaller than a burgeoning demand. Nature abhors a vacuum and if original pieces are no longer available, the vacuum is filled with creations to satisfy the demand.

Not only are legitimate pieces of German militaria copied and marketed, a number of outrageous fantasy pieces have also been created and merchandised like the Reverend Ernie’s Holy Healing Cloths on Christian television stations.

There is an interesting parallel here between the manufacture and sale of Nazi relics and the manufacture or misidentification of relics of the Catholic church.

In the latter we can find the knuckle bones of a pig being passed off as having once been a part of Saint Rosa of Compostella or the ever-popular St. Nicholas. Expert study has proven that the notorious Shroud of Turin is a 13th Century fake and it has been said that there are enough pieces of the True Cross around to build a small hotel.

Fraud and chicanery are the hallmarks of any marketplace, be it Wall Street, Carnaby Street or the Internet auctions.

It is amazing that so many of these neo-Nai fraud merchants are able to find either end of themselves in a dark room or, as the author’s sainted Granny used to say, ‘Too lazy to work, too stupid to steal and completely unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

The hallmark of the German military and personality collectors is, in the main, a fascination with a period they are constantly reminded is the very essence of terrible evil. In spite of countless reams of utter nonsense produced about German wickedness (as opposed to American, British or Russian asocial behavior) German items are far more in demand that anything else and of all the items most sought after and commanding the highest prices are relics of the awful SS.

So much for failed propaganda which has only made its sworn enemy so attractive.

One dealer bought the iron gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp from a Polish scrap dealer and tried to sell them to the American Holocaust Museum. They were most eager to obtain this dubious relic but on principle (or perhaps because of a lack of it) absolutely refused to pay for the massive entrance to the netherworld.. A tax-free gift would be much more to their liking but the greedy and uncharitable  dealer merely cut the gates into small pieces and sold these off like souvenirs of  the Berlin Wall (or fragments of the True Cross).

The author once spoke with a very wealthy dealer in Nazi fakes and he said, with some humor, that when he has had occasion to visit various highly prestigious military collections in the past as he walks down the line of glass cases filled with the cream of Third Reich militaria, such as Hitler’s dinnerware or Goering’s swords, he keeps hearing tiny voices that say, “Papa, papa!” as he passes.

Items which are purported to have belonged to Adolf Hitler are quite naturally, worth a great deal of money and Hitler fakes abound in the market place. It should be noted that Hitler wrote very few personal letters and signed almost nothing at all after the outbreak of the war. Such items as original caps, uniforms and the like are non-existent because Hitler ordered their destruction at the end of the war and in the main, this order was faithfully executed.

Hitler was 5 foot, 8.5 inches in height and weighed in the vicinity of 150 pounds. Any uniform alleged to be the property of Hitler would conform to these requirements. On the Party uniforms, the buttons on all items were silvered, but on the post-1939 uniforms, the buttons were gold.

Until 1938 Hitler wore the Iron Cross First Class and the black wound badge on the left hand pocket and, on some occasions (such as the ceremonial march in Munich on 9 November of each year) the Blutorden on the flap of the right breast pocket. After 1938, Hitler discarded the Blood Order ribbon and medal and added the Gold Party Badge on the left breast pocket, above the Iron Cross.

Hitler’s visor cap had a long, brown leather visor (worn because he was very sensitive to light) and the top piping of the cap was twisted gold cord. The lower two pipings were white, the cap band brown velvet and the cap cords in gold. The eagle was always embroidered directly into the cap as was the wreath, which was added after 1938.

Hitler’s uniforms were made by the Berlin military tailoring firm of Wilhelm Holters and his caps were made by Robert Lubstein of Berlin under the trade name of eReL. Contrary to amusing myths circulating after the war, Hitler did not wear a bullet-proof vest nor was there a steel liner in his cap.In the First World War, Hitler won the Iron Crosses 1st and 2nd Classes, the Bavarian service medal, fourth class, the wound badge in black. As a member of the Bavarian army, did not wear any Austrian army decorations.

Hitler wore French-cuff shirts with gold links depicting the civic arms of the city of Danzig, the swastika motiv picked out in diamonds. Before the war, he wore a party eagle on his tie in solid gold, no wristwatch and no other jewelry.

Occasionally, gaudy pictures of Hitler’s mother, grotesque «ruby” rings and the like show up, allegedly Hitler’s property but all of these were birthday gifts and in all probability, never even seen by him. An alleged suicide pistol which has appeared in several publications is a fake. The Walther with the ivory grips once had the maker’s name, Carl Walther, and their post-war address in Ulm/Donau on the slide but this has since been replaced with the proper wartime address. in Zella-Mehlis. This piece was made by the Walther factory for Colonel James Atwood in the early 1960s as the still-extant serial number proves. It has been seen in many post-war militaria publications but its present whereabouts is unknown.

Hitler carried a Belgian Browning 7.65mm pistol in his pant’s pocket and the right hand pocket of all of his trousers had a leather lining to hold the gun.

There are no surviving original Hitler paintings and sketches. Everyone from Konrad Kujau to Alfred Speer took a hand at copying Hitler’s style, with various degrees of success. Speer’s sketches come much closer to the mark as he was an architect and very familiar with Hitler’s style.

An example of the Speer drawings can be seen in a biography of Hitler by British writer, David Irving.

A book edited by Billy Price of Texas on Hitler’s artwork (Hitler as Maler und Zeichner) is crammed to the plimsoll line with fakes but is quite valuable in that it shows a very few known original Hitler pieces (those he himself authenticated before the war and marked as being from the NS archives. In the Price book, original Hitler pieces have the BA or Bundesarchiv numbers) with fakes. Hitler’s style is most distinctive and anyone with an eye for design can easily spot the hundreds of fakes.

Aside from some items held by the U.S. Army, no known original Hitler pieces exist in the United States and one of the largest collections in England is stuffed with fakes.

When Hitler joined the D.A.P. in 1919, his party number was 555, there being fifty five members and the numbers starting at 500 for propaganda reasons. When the Party was reorganized in later years, Hitler carried the number one and no medal or pin with the number seven is original.

In “Mein Kampf” Hitler indicates that he was the seventh member of the central committee and stupid forgers have seized on this to assume that he carried the party number of seven.

“Hitler silverware” was made up in some quantity and exists in two patterns; so-called formal and informal. This silver, which bears the state eagle and the letters A H was actually state silver and was used in governmental cafeterias. Reichskanzelei silver was marked R K.

It should be noted that all manner of State silver existed. One dealer in militaria claims to possess “Adolf Hitler’s” silver cigarette case. The price for this relic is somewhat less than the national debt of Mexico but since Hitler was a vehement non-smoker, the attribution is sadly in error.

Aside from personality items, yards of fake tapestries are offered, claimed to be from Hitler’s house or from Heinrich Himmler’s office and huge eagle and swastika bronze table decorations, jostle the auction house catalogs, cheek by jowl with oil paintings made in China of top level Nazi officials, fake dinnerware, honorary citizens awards, napkin rings engraved with Eva Braun’s initials, lavishly embroidered Hitler standards, copies of Mein Kampf with fake dedications and on and on.

Jewish holocaust professionals and other left-wingers spend a good deal of time informing anyone bored enough to listen, that Hitler was an evil monster. And in spite of these fulminations, dealers and auction houses worldwide, many of which are Jewish-owned and operated, are reaping a huge profit from selling his counterfeit possessions