TBR News May 6, 2018
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. May 6, 2018;” In these times, as earlier, many of the public thrive on conspiracy theories because it gives them a feeling of being part of something large and thrilling.
I have studied conspiracy stories for years and have come to the conclusion that 99% of them are the result of stupidity and the attempts to cover it up.
Bureaucracies are filled with people who couldn’t get a real job and whose government paychecks ought to be gift-wrapped.
Governments are desperate to prevent any kind of a public uproar that might disturb the status quo so they lie, not to cover up plots but to cover theirs, and others, political asses.
Now, look for both management and government to conspire to blame the Mid-Eastern problems on something that won’t expose them for the conspirators they are.
And how will they accomplish this? By use of the friendly media and, most important, by having their pet “bloggers” and paid website managers concoct wierd stories about death rays, missing cell phones, secret gas leaks, alQuadea trained gophers intent on industrial sabotage and on and on.
The credulous public, ever frantic for more and increasingly thrilling conspiracies to nurture their small egos, will get their hands on these inventions, water and fertilize them and send them around to others with their own little invented additions.
In the end, the criminal stupidity is effectively masked by the created images and management and government can prepare for the next disinformation campaign.
Those who believe in mysterious conspiracies ought to recognize that they have become unknowing parts of a real conspiracy, the conspiracy of obfuscation, lies and official disinformation.
This applies, equally, to the Katrina disaster, the SEA tsunami, 911, the Kennedy assassination, severe weather events, ship sinkings, evil Russians and on and on. Pick one of the above and Google it to see that the number of breathless conspiracy sites proliferate like fungus after a good rain.”
Table of Contents
- The Latest Act in Israel’s Iran Nuclear Disinformation Campaign
- Anger in France, Britain over Trump’s gun law speech
- Trump would have had lawyer pay off more women ‘if necessary’, Giuliani says
- Another week of lies and still Trump, the huckster, keeps his tawdry show going
- More facts to hide
- Historical background of the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’
- Israel attacks on Iran
- Turkey threatens retaliation against US if Washington halts weapons sales
- Top 5 Ways to Avoid Fake Coins on eBay
- The Second Coming
The Latest Act in Israel’s Iran Nuclear Disinformation Campaign
May 5, 2018
by Gareth Porter
AntiWar
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim in his theatrical 20-minute presentation of an Israeli physical seizure of Iran’s “atomic archive” in Tehran would certainly have been the “great intelligence achievement” he boasted if it had actually happened. But the claim does not hold up under careful scrutiny, and his assertion that Israel now possesses a vast documentary record of a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program is certainly fraudulent.
Netanyahu’s tale of an Israeli intelligence raid right in Tehran that carted off 55,000 paper files and another 55,000 CDs from a “highly secret location” requires that we accept a proposition that is absurd on its face: that Iranian policymakers decided to store their most sensitive military secrets in a small tin-roofed hut with nothing to protect it from heat (thus almost certainly ensuring loss of data on CDs within a few years) and no sign of any security, based on the satellite image shown in the slide show. (As Steve Simon observed in The New York Times the door did not even appear to have a lock on it.)
The laughable explanation suggested by Israeli officials to The Daily Telegraph – that the Iranian government was afraid the files might be found by international inspectors if they remained at “major bases” — merely reveals the utter contempt that Netanyahu has for Western governments and news media. Even if Iran were pursuing nuclear weapons secretly, their files on the subject would be kept at the Ministry of Defense, not at military bases. And of course the alleged but wholly implausible move to an implausible new location came just as Netanyahu needed a dramatic new story to galvanize Trump to resist the European allies’ strong insistence on preserving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Act (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran.
In fact, there is no massive treasure trove of secret files about an Iran “Manhattan Project.” The shelves of black binders and CDs that Netanyahu revealed with such a dramatic flourish date back to 2003 (after which a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said Iran had abandoned any nuclear weapons program) and became nothing more than stage props like the cartoon bomb that Netanyahu used at the United Nations in 2012.
Disinformation Campaign
Netanyahu’s claim about how Israel acquired this “atomic archive” is only the latest manifestation of a long-term disinformation campaign that the Israeli government began to work on in 2002-03. The documents to which Netanyahu referred in the presentation were introduced to the news media and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) beginning in 2005 as coming originally from a secret Iranian nuclear weapons research program. For many years US news media have accepted those documents as authentic. But despite the solid media united front behind that narrative, we now know with certainty that those earlier documents were fabrications and that they were created by Israel’s Mossad.
That evidence of fraud begins with the alleged origins of the entire collection of documents. Senior intelligence officials in the George W. Bush administration had told reporters that the documents came from “a stolen Iranian laptop computer”, as The New York Times reported in November 2005. The Times quoted unnamed intelligence officials as insisting that the documents had not come from an Iranian resistance group, which would cast serious doubt on their reliability.
But it turned that the assurances from those intelligence officials were part of an official dissimulation. The first reliable account of the documents’ path to the United States came only in 2013, when former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt, who retired from his longtime position as coordinator of German-North American cooperation, spoke with this writer on the record.
Voigt recalled how senior officials of the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachtrendeinst or BND, had explained to him in November 2004 that they were familiar with the documents on the alleged Iran nuclear weapons program, because a sometime source – but not an actual intelligence agent – had provided them earlier that year. Furthermore, the BND officials explained that they had viewed the source as “doubtful,” he recalled, because the source had belonged to the Mujahideen-E Khalq, the armed Iranian opposition group that had fought Iran on behalf of Iraq during the eight year war.
BND officials were concerned that the Bush administration had begun citing those documents as evidence against Iran, because of their experience with “Curveball” – the Iraqi engineer in Germany who had told stories of Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs that had turned to be false. As a result of that meeting with BND officials, Voigt had given an interview to TheWall Street Journal in which he had contradicted the assurance of the unnamed US intelligence officials to the Times and warned that the Bush administration should not base its policy on the documents it was beginning to cite as evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, because they had indeed come from “an Iranian dissident group.”
Using the MEK
The Bush administration’s desire to steer press coverage of the supposedly internal Iranian documents away from the MEK is understandable: the truth about the MEK role would immediately lead to Israel, because it was well known, that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad had used the MEK to make public information that the Israelis did not want attributed to itself – including the precise location of Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility. As Israeli journalists Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar observed in their 2007 book on the Iran nuclear program, based on U.S., British and Israeli officials, “Information is ‘filtered’ to the IAEA via Iranian opposition groups, especially the National Resistance Council of Iran.”
Mossad used the MEK repeatedly in the 1990s and the early 2000’s to get the IAEA to inspect any site the Israelis suspected might possibly be nuclear-related, earning their Iranian clients a very poor reputation at the IAEA. No one familiar with the record of the MEK could have believed that it was capable of creating the detailed documents that were passed to the German government. That required an organization with the expertise in nuclear weapons and experience in fabricating documents – both of which Israel’s Mossad had in abundance.
Bush administration officials had highlighted a set of 18 schematic drawings of the Shahab-3 missile’s reentry vehicle or nosecone of the missile in each of which there was a round shape representing a nuclear weapon. Those drawings were described to foreign governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency as 18 different attempts to integrate a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3.
Netanyahu gave the public its first glimpse of one of those drawings Monday when he pointed to it triumphantly as visually striking evidence of Iranian nuclear perfidy. But that schematic drawing had a fundamental flaw that proved that it and others in the set could not have been genuine: it showed the “dunce cap” shaped reentry vehicle design of the original Shahab-3 missile that had been tested from 1998 to 2000. That was the shape that intelligence analysts outside Iran had assumed in 2002 and 2003 Iran would continue to use in its ballistic missile.
New Nose Cone
It is now well established, however, that Iran had begun redesigning the Shahab-3 missile with a conical reentry vehicle or nosecone as early as 2000 and replaced it with a completely different design that had a “triconic” or “baby bottle” shape. It made it a missile with very different flight capabilities and was ultimately called the Ghadr-1. Michael Elleman, the world’s leading expert on Iranian ballistic missiles, documented the redesign of the missile in his path-breaking 2010 study of Iran’s missile program.
Iran kept its newly-designed missile with the baby bottle reentry vehicle secret from the outside world until its first test in mid-2004. Elleman concluded that Iran was deliberately misleading the rest of the world – and especially the Israelis, who represented the most immediate threat of attack on Iran – to believe that the old model was the missile of the future while already shifting its planning to the new design, which would bring all of Israel within reach for the first time.
The authors of the drawings that Netanyahu displayed on the screen were thus in the dark about the change in the Iranian design. The earliest date of a document on the redesign of the reentry vehicle in the collection obtained by US intelligence was August 28, 2002 – about two years after the actual redesign had begun. That major error indicates unmistakably that the schematic drawings showing a nuclear weapon in a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle – what Netanyahu called “integrated warhead design” were fabrications.
Netanyahu’s slide show highlighted a series of alleged revelations that he said came from the newly acquired “atomic archive” concerning the so-called “Amad Plan” and the continuation of the activities of the Iranian who was said to have led that covert nuclear weapons project. But the single pages of Farsi language documents he flashed on the screen were also clearly from the same cache of documents that we now know came from the MEK-Israeli combination. Those documents were never authenticated, and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, who was skeptical of their authenticity, had insisted that without such authentication, he could not accuse Iran of having a nuclear weapons program.
More Fraud
There are other indications of fraud in that collection of documents as well. A second element of the supposed covert arms program given the name “Amad Plan” was a “process flow chart” of a bench-scale system for converting uranium ore for enrichment. It had the code name “Project 5.13”, according to a briefing by the IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen, and was part of a larger so-called “Project 5”, according to an official IAEA report. Another sub-project under that rubric was “Project 5.15”, which involved ore processing at the Gchine Mine.” Both sub-projects were said to be carried out by a consulting firm named Kimia Maadan.
But documents that Iran later provided to the IAEA proved that, in fact, “Project 5.15” did exist, but was a civilian project of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, not part of a covert nuclear weapons program, and that the decision had been made in August 1999 – two years before the beginning of the alleged “Amad Plan” was said to have begun.
The role of Kimia Maadan in both sub-projects explains why an ore processing project would be included in the supposed secret nuclear weapons program. One of the very few documents included in the cache that could actually be verified as authentic was a letter from Kimia Maadan on another subject, which suggests that the authors of the documents were building the collection around a few documents that could be authenticated.
Netanyahu also lingered over Iran’s denial that it had done any work on “MPI” or (“Multi-Point Initiation”) technology “in hemispheric geometry”. He asserted that “the files” showed Iran had done “extensive work” or “MPI” experiments. He did not elaborate on the point. But Israel did discover the alleged evidence of such experiments in a tin-roofed shack in Tehran. The issue of whether Iran had done such experiments was a central issue in the IAEA’s inquiry after 2008. The agency described it in a September 2008 report, which purported to be about Iran’s “experimentation in connection with symmetrical initiation of a hemispherical high explosive charge suitable for an implosion type nuclear device.”
No Official Seals
The IAEA refused to reveal which member country had provided the document to the IAEA. But former Director-General ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs that Israel had passed a series of documents to the Agency in order to establish the case that Iran had continued its nuclear weapons experiments until “at least 2007.” ElBaradei was referring to convenient timing of the report’s appearance within a few months of the US NIE of November 2007 concluding that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons-related research in 2003.
Netanyahu pointed to a series of documents on the screen as well a number of drawings, photographs and technical figures, and even a grainy old black and white film, as evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons work. But absolutely nothing about them provides an evidentiary link to the Iranian government. As Tariq Rauf, who was head of the IAEA’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office from 2002 to 2012, noted in an e-mail, none of the pages of text on the screen show official seals or marks that would identify them as actual Iranian government documents. The purported Iranian documents given to the IAEA in 2005 similarly lacked such official markings, as an IAEA official conceded to me in 2008.
Netanyahu’s slide show revealed more than just his over-the-top style of persuasion on the subject of Iran. It provided further evidence that the claims that had successfully swayed the US and Israeli allies to join in punishing Iran for having had a nuclear weapons program were based on fabricated documents that originated in the state that had the strongest motive to make that case – Israel.
Anger in France, Britain over Trump’s gun law speech
May 5, 2018
by Sarah White and David Milliken
Reuters
PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump caused anger in France and Britain by suggesting looser gun laws could have helped prevent deadly attacks in Paris in 2015 and linking knife crime in London to a handgun ban.
In a speech to the National Rifle Association (NRA) on Friday, Trump mimicked the shooting of victims in the Paris rampage and said if civilians had been armed “it would have been a whole different story.”
The French government issued its strongest criticism of Trump since he took office and one minister urged the leader to apologise, at a time when President Emmanuel Macron has been reinforcing bilateral ties following a state visit.
“France expresses its firm disapproval of President Trump’s comments about the Paris attacks on Nov. 13, 2015 and demands that the memory of the victims be respected,” the foreign office said in a statement.
“France is proud to be a country where acquiring and carrying firearms is strictly regulated.”
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said he hoped Trump “would come back on his words and express regret”.
“His comments are shocking and not worthy of the president of the world’s greatest superpower,” Le Maire told BFM television on Sunday.
Other French politicians, including the mayor of Paris, took issue with Trump’s comments, after he acted out the scene of the massacre by Islamist assailants at Paris’ Bataclan concert hall, where 90 of the 130 victims of the attacks died.
“They took their time and gunned them down one by one. Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom!,” Trump said, using his hands in a gun gesture.
Francois Hollande, who was French president at the time, said on Twitter Trump’s remarks were “shameful” and “obscene”.
‘KNIVES, KNIVES, KNIVES, KNIVES’
Trauma surgeons in London, meanwhile, said Trump had missed the point when, in the same speech, he linked knife crime there to an absence of guns.
Comments by Trump have caused upset before in Britain. Relations with Prime Minister Theresa May cooled last year after she criticised him for retweeting anti-Islam videos by a British far-right group.
Trump, who is due to visit Britain on July 13, told NRA members that a “once very prestigious” London hospital, which he did not name, had become overwhelmed with knife attack victims
“They don’t have guns. They have knives and instead there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital,” he said. “They say it’s as bad as a military war zone hospital. Knives, knives, knives, knives,” he said, making stabbing gestures.
London suffered a spike in knife crime early this year, and saw more murders during February and March than New York.
Last month, trauma surgeon Martin Griffiths told the BBC some of his colleagues had likened the Royal London Hospital in east London where he works to the former British military base Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.
But on Saturday he indicated Trump had drawn the wrong conclusion from his remarks.
Griffiths posted his comment next to an animation of a stick figure with the phrase “The Point” flying over its head and also linked to a statement on the hospital’s website by fellow trauma surgeon Karim Brohi.
“There is more we can all do to combat this violence, but to suggest guns are part of the solution is ridiculous. Gunshot wounds are at least twice as lethal as knife injuries and more difficult to repair,” Brohi said in the statement on Saturday.
Britain’s government effectively banned handgun ownership in England, Scotland and Wales after a school shooting in 1996.
Editing by John Stonestreet and Janet Lawrence
Trump would have had lawyer pay off more women ‘if necessary’, Giuliani says
Latest interview: Trump attorney says he is ‘still learning’
- Stormy Daniels’ lawyer says president’s team has ‘lost track of truth’
- ‘Trump’s going to be forced to resign’: Daniels’ lawyer predicts fall
May 6, 2018
by Martin Pengelly
The Guardian
Donald Trump would have had attorney Michael Cohen make payments to women other than Stormy Daniels if “necessary”, the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said on Sunday as the White House sought without success to impose order on an increasingly chaotic and damaging scandal.
In response, Daniels’ lawyer said Giuliani and Trump had “lost track of the truth” and were undermining their own attempted “coverup”.
Daniels, an actor in adult films, claims to have had a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006, a claim Trump has denied. Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in October 2016, shortly before the presidential election, as part of a non-disclosure agreement. Daniels is suing Trump and Cohen to be released from the agreement and for defamation
In April, Trump told a reporter on Air Force One he had no knowledge of the payment to Daniels. But this week, on Fox News, Giuliani said the president in fact did know of the deal and had reimbursed Cohen. Trump did not contradict Giuliani in three Thursday morning tweets, but then said on Friday Giuliani had not had time to “get his facts straight”.
On Sunday Giuliani told ABC’s This Week he was “not really involved in the Daniels thing” and added, when confronted with inconsistencies between his statements and the president’s: “Right now I’m at the point where I’m learning.”
As part of that learning process, Giuliani may have read reports by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported on Friday that Trump knew about the payment “several months” before he spoke on Air Force One. The Journal, meanwhile, said public records showed Cohen “gained access to as much as $774,000 … during the 2016 presidential campaign as he sought to fix problems for his boss”.
Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, told the Guardian in an interview he thought there could well be “multiple” other women with similar issues to his client.
On ABC, Giuliani said he had “no knowledge” of any other payments to women, “but I would think if it was necessary, yes. [Cohen] made payments for the president, or he conducted business for the president, which means he had legal fees, monies laid out, and expenditures which I have on my bills to my clients.”
On CNN’s State of the Union, the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway attempted to explain Trump’s Air Force One remarks by saying she was “relaying what the president has told me” .
“When the president said no on Air Force One,” she said, “he was talking about he didn’t know when the payment occurred. It was a very fast-moving exchange … and so he’s saying he didn’t know about it when the payment occurred, he found out about it after the fact.”
Any payments to women, Conway added in a characteristically combative and confusing interview, “did not cross my desk as campaign manager”.
Cohen’s New York home, office and hotel room were raided by FBI agents last month, on a tip-off from the special counsel Robert Mueller and with documentation about the Daniels payment reportedly among material seized. Giuliani said on Sunday Cohen would cooperate with investigators because he “doesn’t have any incriminating evidence about the president”.
A presidential pardon for Cohen was “not on the table”, Giuliani added. “That isn’t a decision to be made now. There’s no reason to pardon anybody now … It has not been discussed.”
Avenatti also spoke to ABC, calling Giuliani’s interview “an absolute, unmitigated disaster for Rudy Giuliani and the president, a train wreck”.
“I can’t believe that actually just happened,” he said. “I mean, what we witnessed by Rudy Giuliani may be one of the worst TV appearances by an attorney on behalf of a client in modern times.”
He added: “I think it is obvious to the American people that this is a cover-up; that they are making it up as they go along. They don’t know what to say because they have lost track of the truth.”
In his interview with the Guardian, Avenatti paraphrased a famous question from the Watergate hearings when he said he was searching “for the truth about what the president knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it”.
Another week of lies and still Trump, the huckster, keeps his tawdry show going
Even as scandal succeeds scandal, this ‘ignorant, undignified and uncouth’ president escapes the consequences of legitimate criticism
May 6, 2018
by Sarah Churchwell
The Guardian
Earlier this year, a Saturday Night Live skit featured a gameshow called What Even Matters Anymore?, “the show where I tell you something our president did or said, and you have to tell me: does it even matter any more?”. In the final round, contestants have to write down what they think “would actually lead to any kind of consequences” for Donald Trump. One idea is “sex tape with Don, Jr”.
But would that even matter? Trump has weathered endless scandals by creating a new one to distract from the last. He’s a carnival huckster running a three-ring circus; there are constant reports that he thrives on chaos, which is nice for him, and devastating for democratic norms and the rule of law. Trump has made it abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that he is amoral. He has no motive other than self-aggrandisement; his only principle is power. When I suggested on Question Time, two days after his election, that Trump had no interest in serving, David Dimbleby scoffed at me, demanding why else he would have run. My recollection is that I goggled and then said: “Power?” Or maybe I said “money”. They both ran through my head, as I tried to absorb the news that an intelligent, experienced BBC journalist was being blinded by norms.
There is a clear bias among the media towards normality. We see this every time a journalist announces that Trump became “presidential” when he read a few words written by someone else. Trump is not “presidential”. He is ignorant, impulsive, undisciplined, undignified, uncouth. This makes him popular with some of his electorate but it does not make him presidential. We see the bias towards normality every time a journalist asks about a given aspect of his “policy”. Trump doesn’t have policies. He is an opportunistic chancer who changes his story with the wind and listens to whoever last spoke to him. We see it when newspapers refuse to say the president lied, hiding behind euphemisms such as “misrepresented”, “reversed his position”, “told an untruth”.
We saw it when the White House Correspondents’ Association turned on the comedian they had hired to roast the administration. After Michelle Wolf called out White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for her routine falsehoods and distortions, Wolf was attacked for criticising Sanders’s appearance. But what she said was: “I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies.” That is not deriding Sanders’s looks, it is deriding her mendacity and that of the administration she serves. But it merely prompted retaliatory falsehoods and distortions.
The lies are working. Last week, a Gallup poll showed that the American president has a 42% approval rating. It was the same week he hired Rudy Giuliani, one-time mayor of New York and one of Trump’s surrogates during the campaign, as an attorney (after yet another resignation). Giuliani’s ties to the New York FBI office are widely held to have led to the pressure that prompted James Comey to announce he had reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton, a decision that, on clear evidence, turned the 2016 election.
Giuliani promptly went on television and declared that Trump had been aware that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 and that Trump had repaid him. This despite Trump’s repeated denials that he knew anything about the case and his and Cohen’s insistence that Cohen had paid the porn star with whom (they said) Trump had not had sex, out of his own pocket and just before the election, for no particular reason. Trump then said that the 73-year-old former mayor of New York “had just started a day ago” and “would get his facts straight”. In other words, as many tweeted, he would get his lies straight. Then Trump tweeted some more about Robert Mueller’s “witch-hunt” and later called Mueller a Democrat, despite his being a lifelong Republican, in order to claim that the investigation into him is party political.
That was just the last three or four days.
A few months ago, a journalist reported that Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, told him: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” The Trump administration has taken this lesson to heart. There is so much clamouring for our attention in the three-ring circus that no one knows where to look. But we can’t ignore it, for they will keep flooding the zone with shit.
Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany who knew quite a lot about how lies and chaos buttress fascism, has been finding new currency lately. In her book The Human Condition, she wrote: “The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.”
The social contract is based on the faculty to make and keep promises. Trump is setting fire to it, because he doesn’t recognise promises, or the presence or acting of others, while too many of those others, blinded by ambition or deluded by the lies, support him.
Trump may not be ideological – or consistent – enough to be a fascist. But he is clearly an authoritarian, as his “jokes” about becoming a president for life and demands for military parades attest. He claims to prize loyalty above all else (although he seldom demonstrates it), insisting that government officials offer unquestioning loyalty to him, rather than to their offices, that they worship their “dear leader”. (It’s not a coincidence that he’s so interested in Kim Jong-un.) This is the allegiance demanded by fascists and mafia capos.
In 1937, a journalist named Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the voices of the American anti-fascist cause, wrote: “The enemy of Fascism is reason… Its enemy is humanism.” When they flood the zone with shit, we must counter it with reason and humanism. We have no choice, because of course it matters.
More facts to hide
May 6, 2018
by Joel Timmerman
We mustn’t forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish
Here’s a particularly forlorn historical date: Over 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.
Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.
We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.
Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, “opposition members” who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.
In his highly praised book “The War of the World,” historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University ‘s Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.
Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined “terror officials,” cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.
All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union ‘s archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD’s and KGB’s service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of “How could it have happened to us?” As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.
And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name “Genrikh Yagoda,” the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU’s deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin’s collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the “bloodthirsty dwarf.”
Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book “Stalin: Court of the Red Star”, Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.
Stalin’s close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the “first Stalinist” and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine , an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao’s terror in China , did not move Kaganovich.
Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We’ll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD’s special department and the organization’s chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.
In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a “carnival of mass murder,” “fantasy of purges”, and “essianism of evil.” Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.
The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and “Soviet people.” Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and “play dumb”: What do we have to do with them? But let’s not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.
Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of “our hangmen,” who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.
The Rabbi Joel Timmerman can be reached care of his Holocaust Survivor’s Association at 350 5th Ave , New York , NY 10018
Historical background of the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’
May 6, 2018
by Christian Jürs
The word “Protocol” signifies a précis attached to a document, or a draft of a document or minutes of proceedings.
In this instance, “Protocol” means minutes of the proceedings of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion
The origins of the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,’ in its present state, dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. At this time, social and political upheaval was clearly evident in the Russian Empire and as the activist left wing was predominately Jewish in composition, the Imperial secret police, the Okhrana, decided to find a means to discredit Russia’s left wing movements with the general population.
They had no difficulty in convincing Tsar Nicholas II of the importance of neutralizing the Jews. Like many of the aristocracy and upper levels of the Russian society, Jews were not popular and were the victims of prejudice and often, physical persecution. That Jewish extremists murdered the Tsar’s grandfather and later, his uncle, did nothing to endear them to the Russian Imperial family.
The head of the Russian Okhrana, or secret state police, in Paris, one Piotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, discovered a small book published in Brussels (although the text was alleged to have been printed in Geneva, Switzerland.) This was later called ‘The Geneva Dialogs’ but was in reality titled Dialogues aux Enfers entre Machiavelli et Montesquieu. (Dialogs between Machaivelli and Montesquieu in Hell) It had actually been published anonymously in Brussels in 1864. The title page reads: “Geneva, October 13, 1865”.
This book, taken from earlier sources, was a liberal work attacking the policies of the French Emperor, Napoleon III. The Italian writer, Machaivelli, was portrayed as the French ruler and the entire work was a strong political satire. It was soon discovered by the Emperor’s secret police that the author of the book was a certain French lawyer, Maurice Joly, who was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (April 1865), as it was averred that he had written his book as an attack against the government of Napoleon III to which he had lent all the Machiavellian plans revealed in the Dialogues.
This work of political propaganda, however, made no mention whatsoever, of Jews.
When Rachkovsky discovered the banned work, he had it rewritten, between 1895 and 1899, by a Mathieu Golovinski, a propagandist, who put together the 24 “protocols” or minutes, of an alleged international meeting of Jewish bankers, journalists and financiers meeting in a Jewish cemetery in Prague and outlining their plans to gain international political and economic control for themselves.
The creator of the ‘Protocols’, Golovinski, simply plagiarized the Joly work. Protocols 1 through 19 strikingly correspond with Joly’s first 17 dialogues. In nine cases, the borrowing amounts to more than half of the Joly text; in some cases, they constitute three-quarters of the test, and in one case, Protocol 7, almost the entire text is plagiarized. Moreover, the very order of the plagiarized passages remained the same as in the Joly work. The main change in the forged Protocols, of course, was the insertion of anti-Semitic content and language into the Joly dialogues.
There were no such references in the original.
While the ‘Protocols’ are overtly anti-Semitic it has always been believed that the Russian minister of finance, Sergei Witte, was also a target of the ‘Protocols’ forgers. At the time, Witte was the leader of the movement to modernize Russia and limit the influence of the old Russian aristocracy. The ‘Protocols’ attempted to discredit Witte’s reforms of the Russian economy by linking Witte’s program to a Jewish plot to destroy western civilization.
This work was then sent by Rachkovsky to the appropriate ministry in St. Petersburg, where a partial transcript ended up in the hands of a Russian monk named Sergei Nilus, who once had connections with the Imperial family. The latter further enhanced it and had it privately published in 1901 in a book called ‘The Great Within the Small’ and this book was reprinted in 1905 by order of the Russian Red Cross at the specific instructions of Tsar Nicolas but the ‘Protocols’ had also publicly been published earlier in a St. Petersburg periodical, the St. Petersburg newspaper ‘Znamya’, Russian for Banner, from August 26 to September 7, 1903.
Pavel Krushevan, editor of the paper, was known for his ultra-rightist anti-Semitic views and found common cause with the so-called Black Hundreds, a militant group active on behalf of extremist causes. And responsible for a number of bloody anti Jewish pogroms in the latter part of the 19th century.
All copies of the Nilus book that were known to exist in Russia after the Revolution were destroyed by orders of the Kerensky regime, and under his successors, the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet territory was a deemed a crime sufficient to ensure the owner’s being shot.
A few copies of Nilus’s second edition were saved and sent to other countries where they were published: in Germany, by Gottfreid zum Beek (1919); in England, by The Britons (1920); in France, by Mgr. Jouin in La Revue Internationale des Societes Secretes, and by Urbain Gohier in La Vieille France; in the United States, by Small, Maynard & Co. (Boston 1920), and by The Beckwith Co (New York 1921). Later, in the 1920s, editions appeared in Italian, Russian, Arabic, and even in Japanese.
In 1921, after copies of the forgery had appeared in the press, the Times of London published a series of articles demonstrating that the actual source for the text was a French political satire published in 1864 by Maurice Joly, in which Machiavelli and Montesquieu, meeting in hell, discuss a plan for world domination by Napoleon III.
It should be considered that at that time, Communism had taken control of Russia and was seeking by overt subversion, to spread their doctrines throughout a Europe that had been badly destabilized by the First World War and the complete collapse of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.
At that time it was generally believed that Jews were the dominant factor in the creation of the USSR.
Three of the six members of Lenin’s first Politburo – Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev – were of Jewish origin. … Kamenev and Zinoviev became members of the triumvirate (along with Stalin) that ruled the Soviet Union immediately after Lenin’s death in 1924. In other words, of the three who ruled the USSR after Lenin’s death, Stalin was the only non-Jew; although when he later secured sole power, he purged the Jews from the leadership and in 1953, shortly before his death, was planning a mass, and very permanent, transporting of all Moscow’s huge Jewish community to the steppes of Siberia where Stalin anticipated they would freeze to death during the terrible Siberian winter months.
Israel attacks on Iran
Israel is now planning to attack Iran from Georgian airfields. Of course, since this would imply that the United States would be complicit in such an attack, the usual supporters of the government (generally employees) have expressed their shopworn objections to any negativity about Israel or the United States. ‘Shopworn’ is probably too mild a word The neocons and garbage like Bolton jump up and down and squeal like outraged pigs if anyone dares to question not only the right of Israel to exist but to torment and kill large numbers of the detested Palestinians; and make every effort to control American foreign policy. And loot the U.S. Treasury.
Israel has supplied arms to Georgia, delivering weapons systems including eight types of unmanned aircraft and about 100 anti-tank mines. The Israeli presence consisted of IDF special forces, Israeli Air Force personnel, detachments of the Mossad and other Israeli groups, to include mercenaries, were all working, in complete cooperation with American forces, to train and equip the new Georgian armed forces. At the same time, Israel is preparing to move some of its attack aircraft into Georgia, base them on Israeli-controlled airfields in southern Georgia and arm and equip them for a strike on Tehran.
It should be noted that the distance from Tel Aviv to Tehran is 1,600km one way, and the distance from Southern Georgia is 1,149 km one way. Slip tanks add 600-800 miles to the overall range
The aircraft designated for the attack are the Israeli Air Force’s (IAF) F-16I Sufa (Storm), a two seater, designed and built solely for Israel by Lockheed Martin. The F-16I has a 23,600-kilogram [52,000 pound] take-off weight, considerably more than the earlier F-16s in IAF service, and may be is armed with the AMRAAM air-to-air missile. The AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, or AMRAAM, and the AIM-9 Sidewinder or the AGM-65 Maverick which are air-to-ground tactical missile (AGM) designed for close air support. These missiles are effective against a wide range of tactical targets, including armor, air defenses, ships, ground transportation, and fuel storage facilities. There were to be twelve units belonging to the Israeli Air Force 107 Squadron, the so-called ‘Knights of the Orange Tail’ which was nominaly stationed at Hatzerin AFP (LLHB) .
The air strike is to be aimed at Iranian government buildings with one Israeli group striking where top Iranian officials are known to be working, at housing for the top leadership, at any identified laboratory where nuclear work was being carried on and a second flight is to strike at Iranian oil wells, pipelines and Persian Gulf oil terminals. Once the dual strike is completed, the aircraft will head towards Israel and are slated to be refueled in mid-air by an American tanker aircraft.
That Putin is aware of the pending Georgian-based Israeli attack on Iran is certain and the strong probability is that someone connected with the CIA’s Russia desk gave sensitive material on this subject to the Russians and an Israeli IDF member is positively known to have given very specific information to the Russian GRU.
The incredible earlier security leaks from both U.S. and Israeli sources, were sent to Moscow for evaluation and eventually, Putin then saw an excellent chance to wreak havoc on his Georgian enemies, crush their military, capture the vast stocks of American military equipment stored in Georgia, force both the Americans and the detested Israelis out of the country under humiliating circumstances. Russian units also took over a part of the vital trans-Caucasus pipeline, secured the former Russian break-away province of the Crimea with its enormous offshore oil deposits and drew a strong line in the sand.
Following the total debacle in Georgia, which resulted in the hasty withdrawal of all American and Israeli military and intelligence units and the subsequent capture by the Russians of huge quantities of American weapons, technical signals equipment, unmanned drones and trucks full of secret documents, the American press was filled with statements of ‘stunned shock’ by American military personnel, denying they had any knowledge of the Georgian attack but common sense would dictate that with over two thousand active American military personnel closely involved with each and every Georgian army unit, the preparations for, and the actual logistics of, the massed Georgian army artillery attack on South Ossetia could simply not have passed totally unnoticed.
Turkey threatens retaliation against US if Washington halts weapons sales
The US and Turkey are at odds over the prospect of Ankara buying high-tech missiles from Russia. Turkey accuses Washington of bullying but also is also eyeing advanced US fighter jets.
May 6, 2018
DW
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Sunday warned the US against blocking planned weapons sales to his country, insisting that Ankara would respond to such an action with reprisals.
Cavusoglu’s comments came in reaction to the release of the annual defense policy bill Friday by the US House of Representatives. The $717 billion (€598.62 billion) bill includes a provision that foresees temporarily cutting off weapons sales to Turkey.
Cavusoglu dismissed the idea as illogical and inappropriate for NATO allies.
“If the United States imposes sanctions on us or takes such a step, Turkey will absolutely retaliate,” Cavusoglu said. “What needs to be done is the US needs to let go of this,” he added.
Buying from all sides
The proposed US National Defense Authorization Act is still a few steps away from becoming law, but it calls on the Defense Department to file a report to Congress on bilateral relations between the two countries — and would halt large-scale military sales to Turkey until the report is submitted.
Turkey plans to buy more than 100 F-35 Joint Strike fighter jets that are manufactured by Lockheed Martin. In addition, the countries are also negotiating Ankara’s possible purchase of US Patriot missiles.
But in December, Turkey also agreed to buy S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia, which Ankara sees as necessary to combat potential threats from Kurdish and Islamist militants both at home and abroad, particularly in neighboring Syria and Iraq.
Russia is thorn among NATO allies
The prospect of Turkey buying Russian missiles, which are incompatible with NATO systems, has unnerved Ankara’s alliance partners, who are already wary of Russia’s military presence in the Middle East.
NATO officials have warned Turkey of unspecified consequences if it moves ahead with the Russian missile purchase.
Cavusoglu scoffed at such warnings, saying Turkey’s ties with Russia were not an alternative to its membership in NATO and accusing Washington of trying to control Turkey.
“Turkey is not a country under your orders; it is an independent country. […] Speaking to such a country from above, dictating what it can and cannot buy, is not a correct approach and does not fit our alliance,” he said during an interview with CNN Turk.
Strategic air base
Cavusoglu did not elaborate on how Turkey might retaliate against the US, and the Foreign Ministry’s press office was closed on Sunday. But one of Turkey’s most valuable military assets is its air base at Incirlik in southern Turkey.
The base is a major hub for US military aircraft operating in the region and is also home to dozens of US nuclear weapons.
Cavusoglu said he expected to meet with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington next week, although a firm date has not been set.
Top 5 Ways to Avoid Fake Coins on eBay
Learn How to Buy Coins Safely From Internet Auctions
by Susan Headley,
About.com Guide
Thousands of fake coins, gold and silver, are sold every month on eBay. If coin collectors would follow these five simple steps, not only would they not get saddled with fakes, they’d help put the counterfeiters out of business!
Never Buy Coins From Chinese Sellers
When you buy coins, look to see where the person is shipping the coin from. If it is China or Hong Kong, do not bid! No matter how appealing the coin looks, no matter how great a deal you think you are getting, no matter how good the sales pitch is, do not buy any coins from China or Hong Kong based sellers. Following this one guideline will prevent you from becoming a victim 90% of the time, since 90% of all fake coins on eBay come from Chinese sellers.
Never Buy Coins From Sellers Who Buy From Chinese Sources
Before you buy any non-PCGS or non-NGC coin on eBay, always check the seller’s feedback to see who he does business with. If the seller has done transactions with China and Hong Kong based sellers, do not buy coins from him!
This might seem to be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many dishonest people do all of their buying and selling from the same eBay account. Check the feedback to see who they buy from by clicking on the “Feedback as a Buyer” tab on their feedback page (which you can reach by clicking on the number in parentheses next to their eBay handle). If they have ever bought coins from China, even once, do not buy from them! Most Chinese counterfeiters sell off-eBay after the first purchase.
Never Spend More Than $50 for a Raw Coin
A raw coin is a coin that hasn’t been graded and authenticated by a reliable grading service such as PCGS or NGC. Even though a coin might be in a plastic holder of some kind, unless it is in a top grading service holder, it doesn’t offer any protection against counterfeiting.
It is very difficult to judge the authenticity and quality of a coin based on photographs alone, especially the less-than-expert photos often seen on eBay. And even if the photo is great, who’s to say that you will actually receive that coin? Counterfeiters are known to use genuine coin images but then send out fakes. Avoid becoming a victim by never spending more than you can afford to lose when you buy raw coins on eBay.
Don’t Fall for Stories and Always Get a GuaranteeA favorite practice of fake coin sellers is to claim that they aren’t a coin expert, so you should judge the photo for yourself. They might claim that the coins belonged to a recently-deceased aunt or that they were bought at an estate sale. What these claims have in common is that they usually disclaim responsibility for the authenticity or grade of the coin, selling the coin “as is.”
Never buy raw coins on eBay unless the seller will guarantee their authenticity! Don’t be a sucker for tall tales, thinking that maybe you’ll make a score. More often than not, it’ll be the seller laughing all the way to the bank rather than you, the buyer.
Always Pay With a Credit Card
I thought about making this tip #1, but I put it last hoping you will remember it even if you forget everything else: Always pay for coins on eBay using your credit card! Even if you use PayPal, use a credit card to fund the transaction.
The reason is that under current U.S. banking laws, you always have the final say on that money when you use credit (not debit cards, either; credit only!) The eBay and PayPal Buyer “Protection” plans are weak, and I hear complaints all the time about how difficult they make it to collect on a claim. But credit card transactions can always be charged back as a last resort. Even PayPal cannot override a credit card chargeback!
If you pay with a credit card, the final power is always in your hands.
The Second Coming
by Thomas Shutt, DD
Christian Journals Feb/March 2018
In the great push by the American President and his eager Administration to launch a brutal military attack on Iraq, the reasons speculated for this almost hysterical hawkish behavior are varied and uncertain.
Some attribute this unilateral example of naked military aggression to a desire for revenge on behalf of the first Bush president while others consider the vast oil fields of Iraq are a believable goal for the President’s controlling Brain Trust.
Others firmly believe that blind support for the state of Israel is the primary motive for the pending invasion and certain massive loss of life.
It is reasoned that because Israel is afraid of Hussein’s potential to attack them with rockets, American support is vital to protect Israeli lives and property.
It does not matter, of course, how many Americans might die in this process or what kind of domestic terror might be unleashed against the continental United States as long as Israel is made safe.
All of these postulations contain a great deal of logic and, no doubt, truth, but the real reason for the Bush savagery is based upon one word and one word only.
That word is not ‘oil’ or ‘Israel’ but Parousia.
Parousia refers to the Second Coming of Christ as understood by the Christian Pentecostal sect.
This second coming assumes a first coming (here, the facts are not in evidence ) but the fixation on bringing about the latter appearance is intense and determined.
It is the belief of Pentecostals that when certain conditions are met, Jesus Christ will return to earth, take his elect (the Pentecostals) physically to Paradise in an event known as Rapture. Those not belonging to the Pentecostal elect will have to remain behind for Satan to deal with.
When Parousia happens, there will be a great battle fought at Armageddon between the forces of Jesus and the Devil and his antichrist and Jesus, quite naturally, will be triumphant.
All of this, the Pentecostals assure their membership, can be found in the book of Revelation.
Unfortunately for this interesting thesis, the struggle between good and evil at Armageddon is not found in the book of Revelations. Revelations 16:16 only mentions the name of the long-forgotten town but there is nothing about an epic struggle mentioned anywhere else other than twisted interpretations in Pentecostal cult literature.
In establishing their strange dogma, Pentecostals have had no problem whatsoever eagerly inventing Biblical passages, thoroughly misinterpreting original ones and in general producing a body of belief that is rivaled in fictional utterances and strange beliefs only by L. Ron Hubbard’s manic Scientologists.
The basis for the Pentecostal dogma is the Book of Revelations which reads like a chapter in a textbook on mental disorders.
This strange book was allegedly written by St. John the Devine, a disciple of Jesus when, in fact is believed by most reputable Biblical scholars to have been written by a certain John of Patmos who lived many years after the period ascribed to Christ’s ministry.
John of Patmos was a hermit/monk on the Greek island of Patmos and contemporary historical reference briefly dismisses him as a lunatic. No one has been able to understand a word of what he wrote, and his confused and mystic writings easily lends themselves to all manner of interpretations by various dimwitted and obsessed religious fanatics.
When Martin Luther prepared the Protestant Bible, he discarded Revelations, and other books then found in the Bible, as being ‘unworthy and filled with nonsense.’
The Second Coming has as one of its primary requirements that a Jewish nation must be reestablished in Palestine (which it was in 1948) and, even more important, that the great Jewish temple of Solomon must be rebuilt before Christ can return to earth and elevate his elect.
The first temple of Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians and the more elegant second, by the Romans when they crushed the Jewish revolt in the first century.
Unfortunately for the Pentecostals, the former site of this temple is now occupied by the much-revered Muslim Dome of the Rock mosque.
The Jewish temple cannot be rebuilt, therefore, as long as the Muslim mosque occupies its space and therefore, it would be necessary to destroy this very holy building and replace it with a new edifice of another religion.
However, if this lunatic act were consummated , there would be an immediate and terrible rising in the Muslim world and a savage religious war would burst forth on an already-ravaged Middle East.
The Pentecostals are, by their very nature, uncaring and fierce fanatics and such a war would, to them, be a fulfillment of the spurious prophecy of the manic Revelation’s non-existent Battle of Armageddon.
Already we can hear comments from prominent Pentecostals that the Muslims are the forces of the anti-Christ and must therefore be engaged by the forces of Jesus in a final hecatomb of blood and destruction. This pending bloodbath means nothing to Pentecostals because, according to their beliefs, they will be safe in Paradise and those left behind are of no consequence
These God-intoxicated fanatics have tried time and again to capture the White House and place their people in high official positions within the Bush Administration.
In the face of all reason and logic, they are pushing a suicidal, hidden agenda that will have terrible consequences for everyone concerned.
In light of this, perhaps it is now far easier to understand what really stands behind the Administration’s apparent fierce determination to invade a shattered and disorganized Iraq while studiously ignoring a very real danger from North Korea’s declared intentions of building nuclear weapons.
After all, North Korea is not mentioned in Pentecostal dogma and there would be no Parousia because of a terrible nuclear war launched by that country.
Jesus is quoted as saying that he did not come to “bring Peace but a Sword,” and this seems to be the real motivation of his more deranged followers.