Since posting this, Vince Dhimos posted a similar article on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Is-Assad-a-fascist/answer/Vince-Dhimos

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/veteran-journalist-exposes-opcws-douma-evidence-suppression-on-bbc/
  
By
 
 News Desk
 -
October 10, 2019
 
On 23rd October, The Courage Foundation released the landmark findings of its investigation into the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) suppression of vital evidence in its investigation of the alleged 7th April 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria.
 
The Foundation’s expert panel met with a member of the OPCW’s Douma fact-finding mission, who provided the an “extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports” – in its resultant report, the team were unanimous in expressing alarm “over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma”, and concluded each of the key evidentiary pillars of the investigation (including chemical analysis, toxicology, ballistics and witness testimonies) were flawed and bear little relation to the facts”.
 
“We became convinced key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favour a preordained conclusion. We’ve learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments —a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports,” the panel said in an official statement.
 
The bombshell findings went entirely unreported in the mainstream media, however – until award-winning veteran journalist Jonathan Steele managed to slip a reference past the BBC censors five days later.
 
Steele was invited onto the World Service’s Weekend programme to discuss the elimination of Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – but partway through, he made a startling intervention, noting he’d attended the briefing given to the Foundation by the OPCW whistleblower, one of the inspectors sent to Douma in April 2018 “to check into the allegations by the rebels that Syrian aeroplanes had dropped two canisters of chlorine gas, killing up to 43 people”, who “claims he was in charge of picking up the samples in the affected areas, and in neutral areas, to check whether there were chlorine derivatives there”.
 
Amazingly, host Paul Henley didn’t change the subject or terminate the conversation, instead asking Steele for more information.
 
“[The investigator] found there was no difference. So it rather suggested there was no chemical gas attack, because in the buildings where the people allegedly died there was no extra chlorinated organic chemicals than in the normal streets elsewhere. And I put this to the OPCW for comment, and they haven’t yet replied. But it rather suggests a lot of this was propaganda,” Steele said.
 
“Propaganda led by?” Henley probed.
 
“By the rebel side to try and bring in American planes, which did happen. American, British and French planes bombed Damascus a few days after these reports. This is the second whistleblower to come forward. A few months ago there was a leaked report by the person who looked into the ballistics, as to whether these cylinders had been dropped by planes, looking at the damage of the building and the damage on the side of the cylinders. And he concluded the higher probability was these cylinders were placed on the ground, rather than from planes,” Steele explained.
 
“This would be a major revelation…Given the number of people rubbishing the idea these could have been fake videos at the time,” Henley noted.
 
“Well, these two scientists, I think they’re non-political — they wouldn’t have been sent to Douma if they’d had strong political views by the OPCW. They want to speak to the Conference of the Member States in November, next month, and give their views, and be allowed to come forward publicly with their concerns. Because they’ve tried to raise them internally and been — they say they’ve been — suppressed, their views have been suppressed,” Steele concluded.
 
It would be wrongheaded to assign too much significance to the broadcast – after all, Steele’s comments were made unbidden over the course of a minute or so on an hour-long programme listened to by an unknown number of people (although BBC World Service does boast an audience of 319 million globally overall).
 
​However, it notably marks the first time the whistleblowing of internally-silenced OPCW investigators has ever been mentioned in the mainstream media – and a small but growing number of journalists, including the British Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, and Italian La Repubblica’s Stefania Maurizi, have begun questioning the organisation on how and why these dissenting views came to be suppressed, albeit to little avail as yet.
 
With more people enquiring, the OPCW will become ever-more unble be to avoid commenting on the scandalous suppression of evidence contrary to what was increasingly clearly a preordained conclusion of the Assad government’s culpability for the apparent chemical weapons attack.
 

Vince Dhimos answered a question at Quora.
 
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-chances-of-Russia-invading-any-neighbouring-country-in-the-next-10-years-Which-country-is-most-likely-to-be-attacked/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Answered 12m ago
 
This question obviously arises from the Western media and political class constantly calling Russia an aggressor and from the Democrat party’s witch hunt that masquerades as an election campaign. I recently checked out the platforms of each of the Democratic candidates – that is all of those that the Democrats are allowing to gain publicity – and found that they all think the US should support Ukraine in order to “contain Russia.” Of course, need I mention that sites listing Democrat candidates generally omit any reference to Tulsi Gabbard, who is an embarrassment to the US Establishment because she has the cheek to state that US wars are unjustified and are waged for “regime change.” She has the strongest statement against US wars while Bernie, who sometimes also pretends to oppose war, gingerly dances around the issue.
 
Unlike the US government, which has been almost constantly at war since WWII, the Russian Federation has never been the aggressor in any standard, acceptable sense of the word.
 
In the Georgian war, for example, Russia was named a peace keeper and its intent was to protect its neighbours S. Ossetia and Abkhazia, who were being abused by Georgia under the mentally unstable Saakashvili, acting on behalf of the US-dominated West.
 
In retrospect it appears as if Georgian president Saakashvili was baiting Russia by invading these small provinces. At any rate, reacting to the murder of civilians, Russia attacked the invaders and drove them deep into Georgian territory. Although some Western analysts accuse Russia of aggression for not stopping closer to the border, it is generally acknowledged even among Western scholars, that Georgia was the aggressor.
 
In Ukraine, the instigators the Maidan coup were not Russian, they were the US and allies, who entered via State Department reps, members of European governments and agencies (eg, the German NGO Konrad Adenauer Stiftung) and NGOs such as a Soros Open Society foundation, the NED and USAID to start and actively participate in an illegal and violent coup. These were the real violators of international law, acting in the open, but virtually the entire Western media still insist that Russia “invaded” Ukraine. It did no such thing. What really happened was that the new US-installed Kiev government made laws outlawing the official use of Russian, even though Russia was until then one of the official languages, and BTW, before the coup, most Ukrainians spoke Russian at least as a second language, though many deemed it their mother tongue. It was and is the lingua franca in ex Soviet Bloc countries, who would be hard put to communicate with each other without it. It is vastly easier to learn than English for a Ukrainian because it is a very closely related Slavic language. In fact it makes no sense to artificially ram English down the throats of the countries at Russia’s border, though this is what Washington wants to do.
 
This draconian law triggered a backlash particularly in the Donbass where Russian was the mother tongue of most residents, and in Crimea, where almost everyone considered himself Russian. Recall for background that Russian author Anton Chekhov had written the short story The Lady with the Little Dog (Дама с собачкой), which was set in Crimean Yalta, then considered a Russian resort area, and all the characters in the story spoke their native Russian (when I visited Yalta in the early 70s, everyone I spoke with spoke perfect Russian). Recall also that Yalta was the site of the signing of the peace accord by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at the close of WW II. Stalin chose this town because it was a Russian site comfortably accessible to Europe and was an attractive tourist site that he no doubt wanted to promote.
 
So when the government not of Russia but of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (you see it was never a regular Ukrainian province) held a referendum and over 90% of the voters said they wanted to accede to the Russian Federation, it was no surprise to knowledgeable folks. But alas, there are precious few knowledgeable folks in the Western world, so the majority just swallow the media’s swill and dutifully parrot the line that Russia is a dangerous aggressor that must be held in check by NATO (after all, what would the alliance’s overpaid bureaucrats do if they hadn't invented an enemy? They’ have to find real jobs, poor things!).
 
The decision of Crimea to accede to Russia was made by ordinary Crimeans, not the Russians. How is that “Russian aggression”? Only Western politicians and media reps “know” that. They already called presidential candidate and Iraq veteran Tulsi Gabbard a Kremlin stooge for suggesting the US should work with Russia instead of treating it like a pariah.
 
As long as the Western grassroots keep believing that Russia is the enemy, the Democratic Party leaders, certain Republican politicians, the Pentagon and NATO will high on the hog, even as the little guy gets poorer.

Vince Dhimos has answered a question at Quora.
 
https://www.quora.com/Is-RationalWiki-a-trustworthy-source/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Is RationalWiki a trustworthy source?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Answered just now
 
I have read the RationalWiki article on Michel Chossudovsky and his Global Research site.
 
RationalWiki is annoyed with Chossudovsky in part because of his conspiracy theories. And it is true that Chossudovsky gets heavily into such theories, generally providing facts and arguments to back them up. I have no opinion on most of them and they are of little importance compared to his expert analyses of geopolitics. Of course, RationalWiki does not make any effort to debunk these theories, just assumes that the reader has a low opinion of them and will dismiss that author’s writings on that basis. But Chossudovsky is by no means easy to dismiss.
 
I have read the other answers to this question and agree with most, although almost all seem to think of RationalWiki as left-wing.
 
Here is the problem. The old left was anti-war. For example, a left winger was targeted by Nixon for his anti-war activity in the run-up to the Watergate scandal.
 
However, today’s Democrats have done an about-face and are no longer anti-war. In fact, they have driven the West to a dangerous confrontation with Russia and China that is reminiscent of the old right wing. For its part, the right has become more like the old left, with many conservatives opposing war and the confrontation with Russia and China.
 
So where does RationalWiki stand on this?
 
In their article on Global Research (Globalresearch - RationalWiki), RationalWiki lambastes that site for being “anti-West” and “anti-NATO”. Yet NATO is the most warlike organization in the world and has committed what the Old Left would call war crimes, eg, in Libya and Serbia.
 
I wrote about NATO before at Quora: https://www.quora.com/Why-hasn-t... (reposted at New Silk Strategies).
 
Further, the Left had always been more anti-American than the right. Yet another grievance of RationalWiki against Chossudovsky is that the latter is “anti-West” or in other words, anti-American.
 
So rather than call RationalWiki leftwing, I think we should say that they are pro-US Establishment and promote the US war machine.
 
As for Chossudovsky, here are his credentialls:
 
Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the Twenty-first Century (2009) (Editor), Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011), The Globalization of War, America's Long War against Humanity (2015). He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO's war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at crgeditor@yahoo.com
 
I have read several articles on geopolitics by Chossudovsky and find him to be one of the most erudite and best-read authorites, esp on the Middle East.
 
As the Western political class continues to degenerate into near-total illiteracy regarding world affairs (Pompeo is emblematic of this trend), Western scholars and news consumers need real experts like we never have before. Forget about the conspiracy theories. There is no one more qualified to discuss geopolitics than Michel Chossudovsky. I have often been amazed at his mastery of historical detail. 

VINCE ON QUORA: WHY DOES IRAN KEEP THREATENING ISRAEL WITH ANNIHILATION?
 
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-Iranians-keep-threatening-Israel-with-annihilation/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
The kind of “threat” by Iran is actually only a warning. Exactly the kind of warning Trump has made.

EXAMPLE:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49781350

“Iran is ready to destroy any country that launches an attack on its territory, a senior military official has said, after the US announced it was sending troops to support Saudi Arabia.”

Now, Iran has been making these warnings (or threats) for 40 years and has never launched an attack on Israel proper even though Israel has been busy firing missiles at Iranians and their installations in Syria, claiming as justification that Iran was about to fire missiles at Israel. But if Iran had really wanted to launch a missile attack on Israel, it had plenty of chances to do this from its own territory. It has over 100,000 missiles in Lebanon alone and many more in Iran that can reach Israel.

​https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/iran-reveals-huge-underground-missile-base-with-broadcast-on-state-tv. So why did it not use them? Partly because of the Iran Deal which Trump pulled out of. Iran knew back when the deal was intact that it had to be on its best behaviour to keep the deal alive. Trump spoiled that, making Israel and the entire Middle East infinitely less safe and secure (Trump is totally focused on politics and winning re-election in 2020, not on solving problems or easing tensions). And partly because it hopes to reinstate this deal. Iran is not stupid. It knows that destroying Israel would end its trade with most countries and even spoil its relationship with Russia. Iran cannot and therefore will not attack Israel unless Israel (or possibly the US) attacks Iran first. The leaders in Israel and the US must know this. Thus, their anti-Iran rhetoric is politically motivated and is irresponsible because it could easily lead to war and massive loss of human life. So regardless of what the supreme religious leaders may have said in the past, Iran is not a serious threat in itself. But US and Israeli politicians are a very dangerous threat to peace.
 
But is Iran the only powerful country that makes wild threats or warnings? Here are some of Trump’s threats (or warnings if you will):
 
EXAMPLES of Trump’s threats. Also just warnings:

https://www.vox.com/world/2019/7/22/20704248/trump-afghanistan-10-days-war

Trump: Could kill 10 million Afghans
 “I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth, it would be gone, it would be over in literally 10 days.”

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-u-s-and-north-korea-on-the-brink-a-timeline/

When he addressed the U.N. General Assembly in September, Trump said that if the U.S. was forced to defend itself or its allies, it would have “no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

So if the US-aligned countries also make wild threats, no US-aligned country is justified in claiming that Iran’s statements are serious threats.
 
Neither US threats nor Iranian threats are therefore justification for war.

https://stephenlendman.org/2019/08/killing-julian-assange-slowly/
 
Killing Julian Assange Slowly

By Stephen Lendman
 
Since April 11 when unlawfully dragged from Ecuador’s London embassy to captivity, Assange has languished under draconian conditions in a UK dungeon at the behest of the Trump regime, wanting him tried in the US for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism. More on this below.
 
Dark forces in the US, other Western states, Israel, and most everywhere else greatly fear widespread public knowledge of their wrongdoing against ordinary people to benefit privileged ones.
 
They want it kept out of the mainstream, notably not on television and in print publications with widespread readership.
 
If the fourth estate gave news consumers a daily diet of what’s vital to know about domestic and geopolitical issues, another world would be possible — plowshares replacing swords, social justice over neoliberal harshness, equity and justice for all, nations fit and safe to live in for all their citizens and residents.
 
Notably in hegemonic America, if ordinary people understood the bipartisan plot against their rights and welfare in service to monied interests, a national convulsion could follow, a possible revolutionary uprising, maybe yellow vest-type protests involving millions demanding justice.
 
That’s why dark forces in America want whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and investigative journalists like Julian Assange silenced and punished. Digital democracy is the last frontier of free and open expression, the only reliable independent space for real news, information and analysis – enabling anyone to freely express views on any topics.
 
Government censorship is an ominous possibility. In America and other Western societies, democracies in name only, the real thing prohibited, censorship increasingly is the new normal.
 
What’s going on is the hallmark of totalitarian rule – controlling the message, eliminating what conflicts with it, notably on major geopolitical issues.
 
Losing the right of free expression endangers all others. When truth-telling and dissent are considered threats to national security, free and open societies no longer exist – the slippery slope America and other Western societies are heading on.
 
On August 11, Activist Post.com reported that “leaked documents show (the) White House is planning (an) executive order to censor the Internet.”
 
If indeed planned, the Trump regime plot involves having the corporate-controlled FCC and FTC decide what’s permitted and banned online, a frightening prospect.
 
In America, Big Brother watches everyone. Will the same dark force henceforth end digital democracy as now exists by executive order — to become the law of the land if not judicially overruled.
 
Are things heading toward criminalizing truth-telling independent journalists, risking a fate similar to Assange.
 
John Pilger tweeted the following: “Do not forget Julian #Assange. Or you will lose him. I saw him in Belmarsh prison and his health has deteriorated.” 
 
“Treated worse than a murderer, he is isolated, medicated and denied the tools to fight the bogus charges of a US extradition. I now fear for him. Do not forget him.”
 
His mother Christine tweeted the following: “My son Julian Assange is being slowly, cruelly & unlawfully assassinated by the US/UK Govts for multi-award winning journalism revealing war crimes & corruption! I’m tweeting/retweeting #FreeAssangeNOW.”
 
In May, UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer said the following:
 
“My most urgent concern is that, in the United States, Mr. Assange would be exposed to a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” adding:
“In the course of the past nine years, Mr. Assange has been exposed to persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy, and from deliberate collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”
 
On May 9, Melzer visited him at London’s high-security Belmarsh prison, accompanied by two medical experts on the effects of torture and other forms of abuse, explaining the following:
 
“It was obvious that Mr Assange’s health has been seriously affected by the extremely hostile and arbitrary environment he has been exposed to for many years” — compounded by imprisonment at Belmarsh on orders by the Trump regime.
 
Besides poor physical health needing treatment not adequately gotten, Assange showed “all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.”
 
Three months later, he likely deteriorated further, last spring too weak and ill to communicate normally.
 
Britain in cahoots with the Trump regime may want him dead from prolonged imprisonment and neglect.
 
They may not want him extradited following a federal district court dismissal of a DNC suit against Russia, WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign.
 
Judge John Koeltl said “(t)he DNC cannot hold these defendants liable for aiding and abetting publication when they would have been entitled to publish the stolen documents themselves without liability,” he stressed, adding:
 
Its lawsuit was “entirely divorced” from the facts…(riddled with) substantive legal defect(s).”
 
“The Court has considered all of the arguments raised by the parties. (They’re) either moot or without merit.”
 
Absolving WikiLeaks of wrongdoing applies to Assange, its founder and editor-in-chief when active — meaning US federal courts at the district, appeals, and highest level could absolve him at trial, citing First Amendment free expression rights, defeating the Trump regime’s aim to imprison him longterm.
 
With this in mind, they may want him languishing behind bars in London, wanting him killed by neglect to avoid an embarrassing judicial defeat if US courts support First Amendment speech and media freedoms — what earlier Supreme Court rulings upheld.
 
WikiLeaks is an investigative journalism operation. Media freedom is a constitutional right — no matter how unacceptable or offensive views expressed may be to certain parties.
 
Abolishing the right jeopardizes all others. Injustice to Chelsea Manning and Assange threatens the right of everyone to express views freely.
 
It’s the most fundamental of all rights. Without it, anyone expressing views publicly that challenge the official narrative on vital issues is vulnerable to prosecution for the “crime” of speech or media freedom.
 
Stephen Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient. Visit his web site: - stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Stephen's newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” - www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
 

Our thanks to RT for the two viideos linked above.

​Vince Dhimos answered another question at Quora. His answer is shown below along with his commentary below the Quora post.


QUESTION: How was former Presidents Obama, Clinton, and Carter foreign policy better than President Trump’s foreign policy?

https://www.quora.com/How-was-former-Presidents-Obama-Clinton-and-Carter-foreign-policy-better-than-President-Trump-s-foreign-policy/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Answer: There is no such thing as “good” US foreign policy. Incompetence is a bipartisan feature of US government agencies including both the White House and Congress.
 
Obama, you will recall, declared he was at war with terror. Funny thing about that, because while the man had plenty of A-10 bombers and ordnance at his disposal, when those famous rows of Daesh white Toyota trucks were crossing the desert, in broad daylight mind you, and were intent on entering major population areas where they could take countless hostages and become almost invulnerable, Obama sat on his derriere and watched it all happen. Somehow in his addled brain, “peace” meant never fighting anyone, even if it meant thousands of deaths at the hands of merciless cut throats. After all, he got the Nobel peace prize. He was a genius at being peaceful. The upshot of all this peace stuff was that ISIS dominated major cities like Raqqa and Aleppo, where the US, Syria and Russia had no choice but to bomb and kill just about everybody. Trump made the decision to level the city. You will recall he and his followers blamed everything bad on Obama, but Trump managed to make things even worse. And his genius was superior. Never at a loss for words, he called the battle of Raqqa the “most precise air campaign in history.” His smart bombs killed almost every inhabitant but they died with smiles on their faces because they were blown to bits with smart bombs. So nice of Trump to do that.
 
But I see you mentioned Carter in there. Carter too was known as a man of peace. He did not believe in war, but his main foreign policy hack — er, adviser—Zbigniew Brzezinski, fed Carter this clever idea to send the CIA into Afghanistan and undermine the work of the Soviets there by supporting the Taliban. Now we need to understand something about the Soviets in Afghanistan. They did not go to harm the Afghans. That was the Americans’ specialty. Actually, the Soviets always supported the most rational and civilized governments in the Muslim world, ie, preferentially secular leaders who did not allow Shariah law and the horrors of severing hands and feet or making women subservient to men. They chose governments of the kind ordinary Westerners would approve of. So what did “Christian” Carter of “Christian” America do in Afghanistan? Thanks to his slavish obeisance to Brzezinski, he allowed a new terror group to come to power, the Taliban, whose leader would later come to thank him with the famous 9-11 attack that killed 3000 Americans.
 
Then there was the gifted foreign policy whiz kid Bill Clinton, who as a member of the US establishment, carried the seeds of Russophobia that have led to the new cold war raging today in America, and since Serbia was Eastern Orthodox like Russia, his rage percolated up into a war of hate on Serbia. Clinton decided – based on skimpy evidence – that the Serbs were committing genocide on the Kosovars and quickly, before an investigation could be conducted to see if this accusation was true, sent NATO to bomb Priština, Belgrade, Novi Sad, and other cities in 1998-9, killing mostly Serbian civilians and destroying billions in infrastructure, https://youtu.be/gelCe981y0I. After the war, Carla Del Ponte, the UN prosecutor for the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, stated that the alleged “genocide” on Kosovars, on which the NATO massacre was based, had not happened. She also found that the Kosovars were harvesting organs from hapless Serbs. Details are in her book The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals (Italian: La caccia: Io e i criminali di guerra) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt:_Me_and_the_War_Criminals. So to sum up, Clinton waged a war to save Muslim terrorists from a Serbian government that had fought terror, and as a result, a criminal government is now in power in Kosovo, which has broken away from Serbia. Thanks to the foreign policy talent of Bill Clinton.
 
Of Trump, I can only say that his salient foreign policy achievement was to stir up hate in America against Shiite Muslims and particularly Iranians, with which it is obvious he wanted to start WW III in order to please Israel and his "Christian" Zionist voters. Second in line is his warmongering against Venezuela, on which he has slapped sanctions that are starving the people of that country. The best thing I can say in this context is that he has so far managed not to start war with either country, almost certainly out of fear that Russia will eventually come to their defence. Other accomplishments include enraging the Muslim world by declaring East Jerusalem (the second most holy city in Islam) and Golan Heights to be Israeli territory even though they are not, and the UN says they are not. He has also encouraged the Israeli government to build illegal settlements on land belonging to Palestinians – a recipe for war in that areas as well. He has done this to please his “Christian” Zionist base and the lobby AIPAC, which wields staggering power over US politics and owns most politicians. I will refrain from writing more about Trump since the reader will have learned amply of his foreign policy expertise from the msm.          
 
END OF QUORA POST
 
NATO massacred an estimated 13,500 people in 1998-99 and destroyed the infrastructure of much of Serbia. The grief over this immense tragedy was felt not only by the Serbs but by their Slavic Orthodox brothers in Russia, many of whom would have rushed to their aid if only they could have. There was a sense of guilt at not being able to help. Russia did not have the wonder weapons it has today, but there can be no doubt that had it had had them, this tragedy would not have happened. The song in the background of the first above-linked video of the tragedy as it happened best expresses this guilt and sadness.
 
As I listened to the song sung in the background of the Yugoslav bombing video I was transfixed by the hauntingly beautiful melody and lyrics, and Googled them. First my semi-literal English translation (no translation can do it justice):
 
Above the evening Danube flashes
The colour white, the colour white, the colour white.
And a melody asks to be remembered
Of years gone by, years gone by, years gone by ...
But vanished like flocks of birds
Are the simple words of our songs.
You go into the fire, Yugoslavia!
Without me! Without me! Without me!
 
Overnight under a leaden hail
For not being by your side
Forgive me, my sister Yugoslavia!
For death in the spring rain
For not being your salvation!
Forgive me, my sister Yugoslavia!
Confused black-eyed girl
You are standing on the other shore.
But get to this shore
I cannot, I cannot, I cannot.
 
Above the evening Danube flashes
The colour white, the colour white, the colour white.
And a melody asks to be remembered
Of years gone by, years gone by, years gone by
Overnight under a leaden hail
Because I'm not by your side
Forgive my sister Yugoslavia!
 
For death in the spring rain
For not being your salvation!
Forgive me, my sister Yugoslavia!
 
Our previous post on NATO: http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/eurexit-from-nato-needed
 
In Russian:
 
Над вечерним Дунаем разносится
Белый цвет, белый цвет, белый цвет.
И на память мелодия просится,
Прошлых лет, прошлых лет, прошлых лет...
Но растаяли птичьими стаями, 
Нашей песни простые слова. 
Ты уходишь в огонь Югославия! 
Без меня! Без меня! Без меня! 
 
За ночь под свинцовым градом,
За то, что меня нет рядом,
Ты прости, сестра моя — Югославия!
За смерть под дождем весенним,
За то, что не стал спасением!
Ты прости, сестра моя — Югославия!
Черноглазой девчонкой растерянной
Ты стоишь на другом берегу.
Но добраться до этого берега
Не могу, не могу, не могу.


Над вечерним Дунаем разносится 
Белый цвет, белый цвет, белый цвет. 
И на память мелодия просится, 
Прошлых лет, Прошлых лет, Прошлых лет... 
 
За ночь под свинцовым градом, 
За то что меня нет рядом, 
Ты прости сестра моя - 
Югославия! 

За смерть под дождем весенним, 
За то что не стал спасением! 
Ты прости сестра моя - 
Югославия!

Image above, thanks to RT, shows US consulate agent with Hong Kong leaders of violent uprising.
 
https://stephenlendman.org/2019/08/nyt-cheerleads-us-color-revolution-attempt-in-hong-kong/
​
NYT Cheerleads US Color Revolution Attempt in Hong Kong

By Stephen Lendman

August 16, 2019 - China’s official People’s Daily broadsheet minced no words, saying: “There is no question that the (Trump regime) has its hand in what is going on in Hong Kong.”

It “signaled its support for protesters in” the city, what’s been ongoing for months, an attempt to destabilize the country at a time of Trump regime-instigated trade war — initiated to undermine its industrial, economic, and technological development.
China’s Global Times asked: “Is a color revolution taking place in Hong Kong? We think so…(rioters involved in the) ruthless destruction of the city’s rule of law.” 
“Radical protesters want to paralyze the city, undermine the authority of the government and police.” 

“Demonstrations are no longer a complementary way of expressing demands under the legal framework, but an attempt to overthrow the rule of law and reshape the city’s power structure. This is a typical color revolution.”

A statement by the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region said the following:
“The distortion of reality, the blind observance of double standards by American politicians is already close to hysteria,” adding: 
“They conspired with radical criminal elements and are insanely involved in anti-Chinese criminal cases in Hong Kong” — indicating Beijing’s fury toward the Trump regime over what’s going on and likely intention to respond in its own way at its own time.

China’s envoy to Moscow Zhang Hanhui warned foreign nations, notably the US, against “stick(ing) their noses in our affairs.”

In an August 13 article, I suggested what’s going on is a Trump regime attempt to destabilize China by targeting it soft Hong Kong underbelly — many residents in the city pro-Western. US dirty hands likely orchestrated and manipulated pro-Western 5th column elements Hong Kong to riot against its ruling authorities and Beijing.

Geopolitical/economic know-nothing Trump most likely doesn’t know or understand what’s going on in parts of the world disruptively because of his regime’s actions — run by Pompeo, Bolton and their henchmen.

On Tuesday, he nonsensically tweeted: “Many are blaming me, and the United States, for the problems going on in Hong Kong. I can’t imagine why?”

On Wednesday, he suggested a meeting with China’s Xi Jinping to discuss the ongoing protests, what won’t resolve a thing if held.

Beijing wants US meddling in its internal affairs stopped. US dirty hands are all over what’s going on in the city. The ball is in the court of Trump regime hardliners running his hostile geopolitical agenda.

The NYT never met a US war of aggression, color revolution, old-fashioned coup, or other hostile actions by its ruling authorities on the world stage it didn’t wholeheartedly support.

Addressing what’s happening in the city, its hostile to peace and stability right-wing editors turned truth on its head, calling US-manipulated/radicalized rioters largely “young people…who ardently don’t want to come further under the repressive rule of the Chinese Communists.”

So-called “Chinese Communists” are free market capitalists, heading the nation toward becoming the world’s leading economy one day.

Its successful system created longterm economic growth and development. Ellen Brown quoted Michael Hudson saying the US demands “economic regime change” in China, wanting it conforming to the failed Western model it rejects, adding:
“They should have the same kind of free market that has wrecked the US (and other Western) econom(ies).”

China embarrasses them by the efficiency and effectiveness of its economic and financial model it’s not about to let US bullying change.

Beijing’s system is “an economic threat to the Western neoliberal model, and it is this existential threat that is the target of the (Trump regime’s) trade and currency wars today,” Ellen Brown explained.

US color revolution tactics in Hong Kong, its ongoing trade war, and the Obama regime’s Asia pivot, continued by Trump, to establish a greater Pentagon military footprint in the Indo/Pacific are part of Washington’s war by other means on China.

The NYT pretends otherwise, supporting Hong Kong rioters, falsely claiming unacceptable disruptive tactics reflect free expression dissent.
​
If violent protests erupted in US cities and continued for days, especially if orchestrated and manipulated by a foreign power, there’d be state-sponsored blood in the streets putting them down.

Stephen Lendman
Stephen Lendman was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.
 
And if you want proof of Lendman’s accusation that the US is behind the Hong Kong violence, read this:
https://www.rt.com/news/466078-hong-kong-us-joshua-wong/

Below you will find our translation of an article from newzfeed.ru with commentary and notes [in brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
A blow below the belt: US allies refuse to go against Russia
 
July 23, 2019
 
As you already know, despite all the US threats towards Turkey regarding the purchase of Russian weapons, Ankara still bought the Russian S-400 systems.
 
After that, relations between the US and Turkey began to deteriorate markedly. Then the United States decided to find a new ally in the eastern Mediterranean. Without giving the matter much thought, it chose Greece. The US immediately transferred their army there and ordered all allies to forbid port service to Russia.
 
But unfortunately for the US, the Greek government announced that it would not refuse to allow Russia to call at its ports. The ban on Russia was also to be extended to Cyprus and Israel.
 
The American government was shocked by this behaviour on Greece’s part, calling them traitors.
 
Greece simply does not benefit from introducing such bans, because they get good profit from Russian shipping. It is also worth noting that recently the relations between Greece and Russia have been steadily improving, and it makes no sense for Greece to spoil relations with Moscow. Cyprus also denied the United States a ban.
 
All that remains is Israel, which has always been on the side of the United States. But experts insist that Israel most likely will not ban anything for Russia, since i there are a lot of people from the Soviet Union in the country [about 20% of Israelis are from there]. And if they begin to ban the Russians, then this could be regarded as an anti-Russian policy, and people from the former USSR would not understand.
 
Feel free to conclude that once again the plan of the United States against Russia failed. Nobody wants to quarrel with Russia, because things will only get worse in countries looking for a fight. Georgia is an example.
 
END TRANSLATION
 
[Yes, Georgia learned a hard lesson from the recent anti-Russian street protests in Tbilisi, after which Russia promptly suspended all flights to and from there, costing Georgia millions in tourist trade. Of course, Westerners who don’t read New Silk Strategies may have missed this news, which we reported here. But the big loser is Ukraine, whose US-instigated Russophobia wound up making it the poorest country in Europe, as we reported here. The big lesson here is that the US is losing allies right and left by bullying and is hurting mostly itself. The world fears the US somewhat, but is starting to fear – and respect – Russia even more. The most important clue as to the power shift in the world – from a monopolar to a multipolar world – is the fact that Netanyahu invited Russian and US officials to Israel for a tripartite conference on the problems in Syria and Iran. US news sources focused on Israel-US interest in dragging Russia away from its partnership with Iran but Russian delegate Nikolai Patrushev, the Russian National Security Council secretary, told the group that Iran is and always will be an ally of Russia. The message was “a war with Iran is a war with Russia,” as we wrote here. And then there is Germany, which was ordered by US ambassador Richard Grenell to stop the building of the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 and start buying overpriced US LNG. But Germany was not entrusted to build the pipeline. It was a European consortium and they were putting the last touches in the line, so it was too late. And besides, the Germans needed the inexpensive gas to maintain their economy and their ranking as the second exporter in the world after China. Obviously, the US was thinking only of itself and was trying to throw Germany under the bus.]

 
Below is our translation from the Spanish of an article from telesurtv.net, with commentary and notes [in brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
The main problem with the Western grassroots is not a lack of intelligence to analyse geopolitical events but a complete blockage of the part of the brain that has this capability. The difference between East and West nowadays is that, on the one hand, Westerners are imbued with the notion that, while the US makes serious mistakes, its leaders are generally good people and God is on their side, while Easterners know that the eternal wars, sanctions and regime change activities of the US are systemic, and the mischief they have wrought is intentional and devoid of any moral basis. This is because the US people are only peripherally involved in the decisions coming out of Washington, which are made almost exclusively by a coterie of gangsters that I have attempted to list here. I have also tried to explain here and here, in the simplest terms just why the main two foreign agents in US politics do as they do and why America, both the Establishment and the grassroots, almost never oppose them in the least.
 
The above-linked articles explain why most people reading about US sanctions will never admit that, in terms of its wars, sanctions and regime change activities, the US is actually acting illegally and immorally.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
Consequences of the US economic blockade against several countries
 
by Arnold August
 
The United States has imposed sanctions and economically blocked countries such as Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Yemen and Cuba, in order to strangle its population and force a regime change.
 
With the false flag of freedom, "to plague America with hunger and misery," as Simón Bolívar, would say, the US has economically and financially blocked countries that do not cater to its geopolitical interests.
 
A year ago it imposed the first round of sanctions against Iran to hamper the development of the Persian nation. Countries such as Cuba and Venezuela are also victims of the commercial, economic and financial blockade of Washington.
 
Iran blockade
The illegal economic blockade against Tehran, although hidden behind the idea of ​​seeking the prosperity of the Iranians, is intended to affect financial transactions with the Islamic Republic and the country's important oil sector.
 
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Washington's policy is destined to fail: “We are glad that, despite constant plots against the Islamic Revolution, the illegal US sanctions haven't achieved their goals.” Iraq has also been targeted.
 
Although the USA pressures oil exports and banking operations, the Iranian president said his country has several ways to market crude.
 
Iran is a main attraction for US interests in the region, because in the almost 40 years of the Islamic Revolution, oil reserves have doubled in the nation, which places Iran as an energy power in the American sights.
 
Eshaq Yahanguiri, first vice president of Iran, said the country "is currently selling as much oil as it needs," so the US sanctions regime is doomed to failure.
 
Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the administrations that have presided over the White House have tried to strangle the island’s economy, however, an absolute blockade against the largest island of the Antilles was imposed on February 7, 1962.
 
Former President John F. Kennedy had no second thoughts about dismembering the country's development in his eagerness to overthrow the nascent revolutionary government. Since then, no administration has lifted the genocidal policy against Cuba.
 
For almost 60 years, US administrations have insisted on immobilizing and isolating the Island, as well as provoking disenchantment of the population, which is economically limited by the consequences of the economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba.
 
The Cubans have been affected by a suffocating policy that has caused a total loss of more than 930 billion dollars since the policy was instated.
 
The blockade limits Cuba's exchange with third countries, and hinders the importation of materials, medicines and technical equipment for the development of the nation. It is a policy that violates international law and affects all sectors of the economy.
 
 
Venezuela on the list
 
As if the term "blockade" was the first in the White House dictionary, the current administration of President Donald Trump signed earlier this week a new executive order that limits Venezuela's transactions with the United States.
 
While Trump knows that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was democratically elected, he insists that the government is "illegitimate" and seeks to apply an economic blockade against Caracas.
 
The new decree attempts, once again, to be extraterritorial by imposing sanctions against countries that try to help Venezuela.
 
To the list are added countries like Nicaragua to complete Washington’s triangle in Latin America with Cuba and Venezuela.
 
Libya: a country in chaos
 
The USA did not suspend its sanctions on Libya until it received the news that President Muammar Gaddafi had been killed with the help of NATO.
 
To prevent Libyan state banks and companies from making transactions in the US, the Barack Obama administration imposed a series of trade sanctions against Tripoli to immobilize the country.
 
Since the fall of Gaddafi, Libya has been a country in chaos and systematic violence and instability, a country through which only migrants trying to flee to Europe travel.
 
Meanwhile, oil and the important natural resources of the African nation are put in the hands of Western powers through their business with transnationals.
 
Syria in the spotlight
 
In 2004 the US accused Damascus of possessing weapons of mass destruction and of offering help to rebel groups in Iraq, although Washington's aid to terrorists in the region was well known.
 
The sanctions imposed by the White House against Syria prohibited the export of most of the country's assets, as well as recurring paralysis of the country's accounts and companies in the US.
 
As justification the US claim that Damascus represented a threat to Washington, a title for which Venezuela and Cuba also qualify.
 
The current administration of Donald Trump has also had Syria targeted by the blockades it implements throughout the world. Measures against the nation bring the encirclement of crude oil supplies in the country's ports, and have recruited Lebanon to contribute to the sanctions.
 
"The medium and long-term US agenda is to transform Syria and Iraq into three separate territories, based on lies and ambiguities," says Michel Chossudovsky, an economist at the University of Ottawa, Canada.
 
[I need to insert a note here on Chosudovsky, whom I consider one of the best-informed and authoritative experts on geopolitics. Precisely because he is so undeniably brilliant, the Western Establishment has targeted him with a relentless defamation campaign. In fact, almost whenever I have mentioned his site Global Research as a reference, I have had emails belittling him as a “conspiracy theorist.” This is grossly unfair and none of the petty sites that condemn Chossudovsky have even a tenth of his knowledge and expertise in world affairs! Vince]
 
For his part, the Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Walid al-Moallem, argues that the economic blockade that the US maintains against Syria it is a kind of terrorism because it affects all of the Syrian people.
 
One of Washington's latest sanctions against Damascus, implemented this year, punishes anyone who attempts to establish economic relations with Syria or plays a decisive role in the project for the reconstruction of the country.
 
Despite being a country that has suffered from a war against US-backed terrorists since 2011, Syria is an important target of the American nation in its economic war.
 
Yugoslavia
 
In 1991, the USA supported the sanctions approved by the UN Security Council against Yugoslavia to block bank accounts abroad.
 
The financial blockade continued in 1998 when the population of Yugoslavia saw its licenses, accounts and assets blocked.
 
Companies that failed to comply with the US sanctions had to pay a fine of more than $500,000, while individuals who failed to comply with them were fined $250,000.
 
Yugoslavia was the objective to stimulate economically the mercenary movements that the CIA was already stimulating. 
 
[I had written had written that in Serbia, NATO had murdered over 13,500 Europeans, and yet not one European member dropped out of the alliance as a result of this atrocity. That is the extent of the brainwashing administered by the US!]
 
Yemen and the weight of a conflict
 
Frozen assets and denial of entry to US territory by the Yemeni government were some of the sanctions imposed by the US against Yemen in 2012.
 
Obama assailed the country again in 2014, preventing government officials from accessing their assets under US jurisdiction, and also prohibited US entities and citizens from conducting financial transactions with Yemen.
 
To this is added that the White House has been an ally of Saudi Arabia since it began its conflict with Yemen since 2015.
 
Although recently the Senate withdrew its military support to Saudi Arabia, the US supports the air and sea blockade imposed by the Arab country on Yemen, making it difficult for medicines and food to arrive.
 
Relevant:
 
https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/08/article/attack-on-iran-would-be-an-attack-on-russia/
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/vince-on-quora-economic-sanctions-are-immoral
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/economics-and-finance/europe-and-the-rest-of-the-world-shakes-off-the-chains-of-sanctions
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/economics-and-finance/sanctions-on-venezuela-boomerang-on-us
 
 

 
In the following you will find our translation of an article from the Russian language site rueconomics followed by our translation of an article from the German language site Stern, with commentary by Vince Dhimos.
 
We had already reported here that Ukraine’s guilt is proven, despite all the Russophobic pronouncements of the Dutch and other governments, based on nothing but speculation and the flimsiest of evidence. The Joint Investigation Team cited as the main “evidence” that the BUK missile that struck the plane was made in Russia, although they failed to mention that Ukraine has a large numbers of such missiles left over from Soviet times, all made in Russia once upon a time.
 
In addition, here is a video you need to see, based on the findings of an independent Dutch detective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEvUHfjS3Ig.
 
The articles presented below do not present much of the actual evidence that detective Josef Resch apparently found to exculpate the Russians or show that the Ukrainians were behind the shoot-down of Malaysian flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. However, the first article, from RIA Novosti, mentions the various types of evidence that Resch collected. The fact that this evidence from one of the most renowned detectives in Europe was flat-out rejected by the Netherlands, the country that lost the most lives due to the shoot-down, is strong evidence that the country was interested not in learning the truth but in supporting a case against the Russians and white-washing the Ukrainians. Why? Because the West had too much to lose by having the truth come out. US and various European NGOs had instigated the illegal and violent Maidan coup in Kiev that ultimately pitted the Russian speaking East (Donbass) against the US-backed Kiev government, whose first post-coup president was in fact initially hand-picked by US State Department representative Victoria Nuland (and which, shortly after the coup, started to bomb its residents in a kind of ethnic cleansing operation). Further, all European governments expressed wholehearted support for the coup. In other words, Kiev had a government controlled not by its people but by foreign powers in the name of “democracy.”
 
If it could be proved that the Ukrainians had shot down the airliner to make it look like the Russians did it so that NATO could invade Donbass to finish off the ethnic cleansing like it did in Serbia in 1998-99, killing off the brave Russian speakers defending their turf against the US-backed fascists, this would be a bombshell that could shake the foundations of Washington and Brussels. It would not be the first US-instigated false flag. The US entered the Vietnam War based on the Gulf of Tonkin false flag incident, the Iraqi theatre based on the mythical WMD narrative, and fired Tomahawk missiles into Syria based on a report from the highly dubious source White Helmets that Assad had used chemical weapons against his people there, launching the attack so quickly that no investigation of the alleged chemical attacks could be conducted. And the msm supported these narratives just as it supports the story that Russian speakers in Ukraine supposedly shot down flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014.
 
QUOTE from the Stern interview with Resch:
 
Who was your client? A secret service? A government?
 
I don’t know, the contact was via a Swiss middleman. Two years ago, I was approached and asked if I could put the message on my website: Whoever can provide clues as to who shot down the [Malaysian] plane, gets a $30 million reward. In addition, we have raised $17 million for anyone who can tell us which institution or state is covering it up. Many people answered. I not only got information, but also death threats.
 
So who do you, the reader, think is eager enough to know the truth about the MH17 shoot-down and rich enough to pay such a generous fee to Josef Resch?
 
Well, it could be the Malaysian government, the downed plane’s owner, which has repeatedly demanded that the Western news outlets and governments, especially the Netherlands, stop insisting, without evidence, that Russia or the Russian speaking defenders of Donbass, is behind the shoot-down.
 
But my best guess is that the Russian government, possibly Putin himself, is offering this reward to arguably Europe’s best sleuth. Because the insulating layers of secrecy point to a fastidiously careful person familiar with the workings of secret operations and the motive fits Russia to a t. If the Russian Federation can prove that the Ukraine government itself shot down the plane, that will destroy the Western Establishment’s credibility for a long time to come and at the same time, vindicate Russia of a false charge that has been hanging over its head for years and has given rise to unfair sanctions that have hurt the economy of the RF. This would up-end the whole edifice of lies on which the Western political Establishment and its wars and sanctions against essentially all countries not aligned with the US rests. Already the whole edifice is cracking, but the revelation of Ukraine’s guilt in this case would cause the whole Western world to turn their backs on a rotten Western media and political Establishment that has long been a thorn in Russia’s side. No one, absolutely no one, has more to gain from the truth about the MH17 affair finally coming to light. And no one deserves closure to this affair more than the Russian Federation.
 
Finally, if you are as disgusted by the Dutch handling of this “investigation,” you can sound off in an email to this address:  pers.amsterdam@om.nl
 
 BEGIN FIRST TRANSLATION, from rueconomics
 
Private detective reported that the Netherlands has refused to accept new data on the MH17 crash
 
July 30, 2019
 
A private detective from Germany, Josef Resch, explained why the Netherlands Prosecutor’s Office did not accept the materials he had obtained on the Malaysian Boeing crash (flight MH17) in July 2014 near Donetsk.
 
In the course of his investigation, Resch found documents that were not previously included in the evidence base of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT).
 
These include audio recordings of air traffic from fighter jets and air control towers made with special services, telephone conversations of the Ukrainian army, recordings of control towers after news of the crash, handwritten notes and personal audio recordings of military aircraft pilots.
 
In addition, the detective was prepared to disclose the name of the informant and information about the destroyed secret documents of high-ranking military and political figures.
 
However, his main condition was transfer of all information only in the presence of international media and representatives of the affected states – the only way he could ensure his security after repeated threats.
 
The JIT did not respond to the proposal in any way, and a letter was received from the Prosecutor’s Office of the Netherlands stating that the presence of the press and other persons could harm the investigation. Resh was told to apply with his "wide array of evidence" to the German prosecutor's office, reports RIA "Novosti".
Earlier, the Kremlin recalled that Moscow had repeatedly offered assistance in investigating the crash of flight MN17, but was not given this opportunity. Accordingly, Russia considers the conclusions of the investigation to be biased.
 
BEGIN SECOND TRANSLATION, from Stern
 
"The traitors are always good friends"
 
Josef Resch is Germany's most dazzling private investigator. A conversation about greed, bounty hunting and the weight of five million euros in big bills.
 
He looks like a weekend getaway and does not stand out in the lobby of the Arosa Hotel in  Travemünde.  Not what you’d expect a "man hunter" to look like. Josef Resch, 66, describes for the first time a parallel universe that most people don’t even know exists. He speaks calmly and with an Upper Bavarian accent. He has been a private investigator for over 30 years. Resch works alone or with a network of former detectives, SECs and security experts.
 
In search of fraudsters, he has repeatedly put up large sums for information and has caused a stir with his unusual actions. For example, when he put a bizarre video on YouTube in 2012, in which he put 1.5 million euros in 500-euro notes on a table – as a bounty for the fleeing Neckermann great nephew and stockbroker Florian Homm. Most recently, Resch made headlines two years ago, when he offered a total of $47 million for clues that could solve the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines' flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine.
 
Mr Resch, would you give us 50,000 euros in reward if we deliver you a Mr Levy? This is what it says on the website of your company "Wifka".
 
Not me, my client would pay you. I am to find Mr. Levy for him.
 
What does your client want from Mr Levy?
 
This Mr. Levy tempted my client with the possibility of a good real estate deal. My client met with him in Verona, and everything looked serious. Preppy man, expensive suit, expensive hotel, another man introduced himself as a notary. Then Levy proposed to swap money. He had a large amount of untaxed Swiss francs, but needed euros. You know the game.
 
No, we don’t know the game.
 
He says that of course the Swiss francs can’t be exchanged at the bank. He offers a generous commission. My client gives the scammer euros and gets Swiss francs. But in the bank rolls with the francs is counterfeit money. The swap goes fast, and the dupe notices too late that he’s left holding the bag. My client lost 150,000 euros in cash and gold coins.
 
You have to wonder why someone would travels to Italy with a suitcase full of cash and gold, expecting to make a respectable, lucrative deal in a hotel room.
 
This type of fraud has become very common. People think too little. GFG.
 
I beg your pardon?
 
Greed eats brain. [GFG = Gier frisst Gehirn]
 
What are you? A detective? Debt collector? Bounty hunter?
 
I'm just an investigator, I don’t think much of this bounty hunter crap. We investigate in cases of bankruptcy, investment and loan fraud. I find people, money or information. For that I get daily rates or commissions. If you have been cheated out of more than 50,000 euros, you can hire me.
 
Why are your customers paying you money and not just going to the police?
 
I'll get your money back. And sometimes it's not officially money they lost in the scam. Nevertheless, I advise my clients to also report if possible.
 
How do you get someone to cough up the money?
 
I find the person and arrange for him to accept an invitation, for example to a boat trip. Then we have time for a talk on the high seas. Then he has the choice: if he doesn’t come up with the money, I'll go to the authorities, so he'll lose the money and get a fine on top of it. People have always cooperated with me.
 
What do you have to offer as an investigator?
 
I’m a connoisseur of people. Even as a child I watched people. My parents managed the Schwaigeralm on the Tegernsee. There were no other kids to play with. Instead, I watched the adults. And when I was minding the cows, I slipped after walkers. When the cooks stole meat, I caught them and told my dad about it. That's how it started.
 
So that’s how you wound up in this business.
 
I started as a cook in the Schwaigeralm, with my parents. They worked hard for a modest amount of money and a life full of worries seven days a week. Later, I was a silent partner in several clubs in Munich.
 
During this time, you began to provide the authorities with information about drugs that were being traded in your and other establishments.
 
Exactly, I worked with the authorities for years. It was a dirty business.
 
As a secret informant.
 
Exactly.
 
What did you get for it?
 
Money, a good feeling. Adventure.
 
You don’t make friends.
 
No. That's why I went to Italy in 1995 and started a new life there. I had received a lot of threats, and the first people I had jailed were released. It got uncomfortable.
 
Why did you come back?
 
My son had to go to a German school and grass had grown over some things.
 
Who hired you to look for the securities fraudster Florian Homm?
 
I give no information about my clients. Sometimes I don’t even know them. For Mr Homm this was done through an intermediary attorney.
 
In any case, these were people Mr. Homm had cheated out of money.
 
The clients were after 30 million, which they figured Mr. Homm owed them.
 
You then made a spectacular video of the 1.5 million euros that were offered as a reward. Why?
 
I wanted to show that the money was there. And of course you increase the pressure as well. Homm later commented. He called this "inhuman." He could no longer trust anyone, even his closest friends. This is not a life. Even at the Liberian embassy, ​​where he had been staying for a while, plain-clothes workers began asking nicely what he planned to do in the evening.
 
Where did you get the money from?
 
From the mediating lawyer. There I picked it up, stuffed the 500-euro bills into a plastic bag, then into a backpack, so I drove to the hotel where we shot the video.
 
After that, a lot of people answered.
 
Yes. Some were even sent by Homm itself. To lay false trails. To keep me busy. To find out what I knew.
 
How many have registered?
 
About a hundred people. Most were telling phony stories. A shaman from Mombasa or Madagascar or something also showed up.
 
Who gave you useful information about Homm?
 
So-called friends. Traitors are always good friends, relatives and people you have worked with.
 
An important tip came from the domestic help of Homm’s mother.
 
We met the housekeeper a couple of times. She wanted to earn the reward. She said that Homm's mother wanted to meet Florian in France by ship. The domestic help was supposed to accompany them. We gave her a tracking device, which she was to deposit in her mother's handbag. Unfortunately, the transmitter eventually went dead.
 
Why?
 
The lady later wanted to make me believe that the transmitter had somehow fallen into the water when leaving the boat. Maybe she got scruples, maybe they saw through her. Maybe both.
 
What was your plan with Homm if you had gotten him? Torture him?
 
We might have put him on a ship, too. He would have been given the choice to meet the demands of my clients, or we would have driven into international waters. The FBI was after him with targeted investigators. But I would never have handed Homm over to the USA. I would have just threatened to.
 
The search order for Homm was later withdrawn. Why?
 
Mr. Homm phoned or had someone else call. There were perhaps five or six parties that could be considered for such an assignment. They were called one after another, and were offered a deal they could not refuse. If you know, what I mean.
 
We don’t know. What offer?
 
A scary one. They pooped their pants. A letter came from the lawyer asking me to stop the effort.
 
And how were you paid?
 
I would have gotten 20 percent of the returned capital.
 
Then you worked for free.
 
Let’s drop it. I don’t talk about financial matters.
 
So you didn’t work for nothing.
 
Stop your prying. I'm already onto my money.
 
The thing took a surprising turn. Homm was arrested in March 2013 after a meeting with ex-wife and son in Italy and was sent to extradition. He was very sick. Then his mother came straight to you.
 
She knew by now what I can do. I was supposed to release her son from prison if all legal and diplomatic efforts against surrender to America should not be fruitful.
 
And you said yes.
 
If he had attacked children or killed people, I would have said no.
 
But so did you engage a small army?
 
Of course not. You do that with money, and it's not cheap. There have to be a lot of pension funds to pay out.
 
What was your estimate?
 
Five million euros plus 150,000 euros for a corpse and a customized casket. Plus my fee. I planned to get Homm out of Italy in a hearse after his release.
 
All this would have been paid for by Mrs. Homm.
 
Yes. But it wasn’t necessary. He was released by legal means.
 
Five million - a lot of money that you would have had to recount very quickly. Everyone involved is in a certain hurry in that kind of situation.
 
Ten thousand 500-euro bills can’t even be counted. They are checked for authenticity by random sampling. And then weighed.
 
Aha. What does five million euros weigh?
 
11.2 kilograms.
 
Sometimes you are called the "man for the dirty jobs."
 
That's a joke. I’ve been in business for over 30 years. I’ve never been convicted. I work well with the authorities. They would not do that for a second if I used methods that are not legal.
 
You never even put someone in a van and tell him what might happen?
 
You never say that yourself anyway. I don’t want to threaten. I want to help. Sometimes you have to warn people. There are nicer ways.
 
The charm trick.
 
The security holes of every system are people. Their disappointments, their vanity, their yearning for attention. Bosses back up their data with the most complicated methods, and then they treat their secretary badly. Who has access to everything he’s got.
 
What’s the charm trick?
 
The oldest trick in the world. I want to get to the man so I go through his co-worker. I make it look like a coincidence. I put a dent in her car while drivign, am charming, pay, ask to see her again. So with patience you get what you need.
 
Would you still pay us $30 million if we knew who shot down MH17 over Ukraine a year and a half ago?
 
Although I had once offered a reward, the money came not from me, but from my client. The work is done right now. My fee was paid in cash.
 
Who was your client? A secret service? A government?
 
I don’t know, the contact was via a Swiss middleman. Two years ago, I was approached and asked if I could put the message on my website: Whoever can provide clues as to who shot down the plane, gets a $30 million reward. In addition, we have raised $17 million for anyone who can tell us which institution or state is covering it up. A lot of people answered. I not only got information, but also death threats.
 
How many people called?
 
2000. However, in the end I got only a hint as to who was covering up something about the shoot-down of the MH17.
 
Is there any evidence that this is true, what you’re telling us?
 
The customer has the supporting documents, and my records are with the notary.
 
It could all be made up. There are no external documents.
 
Come on, let's go to the bank, I'll show you that I got a commission for the MH17 order. I had to report this to the tax office in order to avoid suspicion of money laundering.
 
A week later Resch leads us into his home bank, the Deutsche Bank in Travemünde. An employee prepares posting documents. One has a deposit on Resch's account on September 1, 2014, a five-figure amount. Resch says it was a sort of down payment from his employer. On September 17, 2014, he was to put the reward online. In addition, the banker submits another extract, which comes from June 2015 and shows a six-figure amount. This is part of the commission, says Resch, the purpose is for MH17 and the name of a taxman and the tax office, where he has registered the deposit.
 
That's not proof. If someone comes along now and says: Resch is lying ...
 
... then he has to live with it. Believe me, my search for an informant about the shooting of MH17 went on for months. It was not a nice time.
 
Who shot down the plane?
 
I dont know. But even if I knew, I wouldn’t say, because I have committed myself to silence.
 
It's about a lot of lives. There is a lot of suffering.
 
But perhaps there would be much more suffering if people knew what had happened. I'm pretty sure about it. And also that much more is known internally than publicly.
 
How much would you have to pay to say what you know? 100 million?
 
What would I do with 100 million? I am firmly convinced that some governments would have a serious problem if it became public. And so would the populations. That's one reason why I am stopping. I underestimated the matter.
 
Can you still sleep peacefully?
 
I have never been able to sleep peacefully. Two, three hours at a time, that’s all I get.
 
That's because of your job?
 
It’s because of life.
 

From Counterpunch, APRIL 7, 2014
 
Why is the US Honoring a Racist Rabbi?
 
by ALISON WEIR
 
 
If things proceed normally, President Barak Obama will soon proclaim April 11, 2014 “Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A.” Despite the innocuous name, this day honours the memory of a religious leader whose lesser-known teachings help fuel some of the most violent attacks against Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers and soldiers.
 
The leader being honoured on this day is Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, charismatic head of a mystical/fundamentalist version of Judaism. Every year since 1978, a Presidential Proclamation, often accompanied by a Congressional Resolution (the 1990 one had 219 sponsors), has declared Schneerson’s birthday an official national day of observance.
 
Congress first passed a Resolution honouring Schneerson in 1975. Three years later a Joint Congressional Resolution called on President Jimmy Carter to proclaim “Education Day, U.S.A.” on the anniversary of Schneerson’s birth. The idea was to set aside a day to honour both education and the alleged educational work of Schneerson and the religious sect he headed up.
 
Carter, like Congress, dutifully obeyed the Schneerson-initiated resolution, as has every president since.  And some individual states are now enacting their own observances of Schneerson’s birthday, with Minnesota and Alabama leading the way.
 
Schneerson and his movement are an extremely mixed bag.
 
Schneerson has been praised widely for a public persona and organization that emphasized “deep compassion and insight,” worked to bring many secular Jews “back” into the fold, created numerous schools around the world, and had offered, in the words of the Jewish Virtual Library, “social-service programs and humanitarian aid to all people, regardless of religious affiliation or background.”
 
However, there is also a less attractive underside often at odds with such public perceptions. And some of the more extreme parts of Schneerson’s teachings – such as that Jews are a completely different species than non-Jews, and that non-Jews exist only to serve Jews – have been largely hidden, it appears, even from many who consider themselves his followers.
 
As we will see, such views profoundly impact the lives of Palestinians living – and dying – under Israeli occupation and military invasions.
 
Who was Rabbi Schneerson?
 
Schneerson lived from 1902 to 1994 and oversaw the growth of what is now the largest Jewish organization in the world. The religious movement he led is known as “Chabad-Lubavitch,” (sometimes just called “Lubavitch” or “Chabad,” the name of its organizational arm). Schneerson was the seventh and final Lubavitcher “Rebbe” (sacred leader). He is often simply called “the Rebbe.”
 
Founded in the late 1700s and originally based in the Polish-Russian town of Lubavitch, it is the largest of about a dozen forms of “Hasidism,” a version of Orthodox Judaism connected to mysticism, characterized by devotion to a dynastic leader, and whose adherents often wear distinctive clothing. (Spellings of these terms can vary; Hasid is also written as Hassid, Chasid, etc.)
 
There is an extreme cult of personality focused on Schneerson himself. Some followers consider him the Messiah, and Schneerson himself reportedly sometimes implied this was true. Some Lubavitch educators consider him divine, making such claims as, “the Rebbe is actually ‘the essence and being [of God] … he is without limits, capable of effecting anything, all-knowing and a proper object of worshipful prostration.”
 
While many secular Jews and Jews from other denominations disagree with its actions and theology, Chabad-Lubavitch is generally acknowledged to be a powerful force in Jewish life today. According to a 1994 New York Times report, it is “one of the most influential and controversial forces in world Jewry.”
 
There are approximately 3,600 Chabad institutions in over 1,000 cities in 70 countries, and 200,000 adherents. Up to a million people attend Chabad services at least once a year. Numerous campuses have such centers and the Chabad website states that hundreds of thousands of children attend Chabad summer camps.
 
According to the Times, Schneerson “presided over a religious empire that reached from the back streets of Brooklyn to the main streets of Israel and by 1990 was taking in an estimated $100 million a year in contributions.
 
In the U.S., the Times reports, Schneerson’s “‘mitzvah tanks’ – converted campers that are rolling recruiting stations whose purpose is to draw Jews to the Lubavitch way – roamed streets from midtown Manhattan to Crown Heights. And the Lubavitchers’ Brooklyn-based publishing house claimed to be the world’s largest distributor of Jewish books.”
 
Non-Jewish souls ‘satanic’
 
While Chabad sometimes openly teaches that “the soul of the Jew is different than the soul of the non-Jew,” Schneerson’s specific teachings on this subject are largely unknown.
 
Quite likely very few Americans, both Jews and non-Jews, are aware of Schneerson’s teachings about the alleged deep differences between them – and about how these teachings are applied in the West Bank and Gaza.
 
Let us look at Schneerson’s words, as quoted by two respected Jewish professors, Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in their book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (text available online here. This book, praised by Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and many others is essential reading for anyone who truly wishes to understand modern day Israel-Palestine. (Brackets in the quotes below are in the translations by Shahak and Mezvinsky.)
 
Some of Schneerson’s rarely reported teachings:
 
“The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: “Let us differentiate.” Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of “let us differentiate” between totally different species.”
 
“This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … The difference in the inner quality between Jews and non-Jews is “so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species.”
 
“An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.”
 
“As has been explained, an embryo is called a human being, because it has both body and soul. Thus, the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish embryo can be understood.”
 
“…the general difference between Jews and non-Jews: A Jew was not created as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews.”
 
“The important things are the Jews, because they do not exist for any [other] aim; they themselves are [the divine] aim.”
 
“The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews.”
 
Most people don’t know about this aspect of Schneerson’s teaching because, according to Shahak and Mezvinsky, such teachings are intentionally minimized, mistranslated, or hidden entirely.
 
For example, the quotes above were translated by the authors from a book of Schneerson’s recorded messages to followers that was published in Israel in 1965. Despite Schneerson’s global importance and the fact that his world headquarters is in the U.S., there has never been an English translation of this volume.
 
Shahak, an Israeli professor who was a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, writes that this lack of translation of an important work is not unusual, explaining that much critical information about Israel and some forms of Judaism is available only in Hebrew.
 
He and co-author Mezvinsky, who was a Connecticut Distinguished University Professor who taught at Central Connecticut State University, write, “The great majority of the books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter.”
 
According to Shahak and Mezvinsky, “Almost every moderately sophisticated Israeli Jew knows the facts about Israeli Jewish society that are described in this book. These facts, however, are unknown to most interested Jews and non-Jews outside Israel who do not know Hebrew and thus cannot read most of what Israeli Jews write about themselves in Hebrew.”
 
In Shahak’s earlier book, Jewish Religion, Jewish History, he provides a number of examples. In one, he describes a 1962 book published in Israel in a bilingual edition. The Hebrew text was on one page, with the English translation on the facing page.
 
Shahak describes one set of facing pages in which the Hebrew text of a major Jewish code of laws contained a command to exterminate Jewish infidels: “It is a duty to exterminate them with one’s own hands.” The English version on the facing page softened it to “It is a duty to take active measures to destroy them.’”
 
The Hebrew page then went on to name which “infidels” must be exterminated, adding “may the name of the wicked rot.” Among them was Jesus of Nazareth. The facing page with the English translation failed to tell any of this.
 
“Even more significant,” Shahak reports, “in spite of the wide circulation of this book among scholars in the English-speaking countries, not one of them has, as far as I know, protested against this glaring deception.”
 
Praised by Said, Chomsky, etc., Shahak is almost unknown today
 
This pattern of selective omission, it seems, applies to Shahak himself, whose work is largely unknown to Palestine activists today, even though he was considered a major figure in the struggle against Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and his work was praised by diverse writers.
 
While Shahak was alive, Noam Chomsky called him “an outstanding scholar,” and said he had “remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.”
 
Edward Said wrote, “Shahak is a very brave man who should be honoured for his services to humanity … One of the most remarkable individuals in the contemporary Middle East.” Said wrote a forward for Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion.
 
Catholic New Times said: ‘This is a remarkable book …[It] deserves a wide readership, not only among Jews, but among Christians who seek a fuller understanding both of historical Judaism and of modern-day Israel.”
 
Jewish Socialist stated: “Anyone who wants to change the Jewish community so that it stops siding with the forces of reaction should read this book.”
 
The London Review of Books called Shahak’s book “remarkable, powerful, and provocative.”
 
Yet, very few Americans today know of Shahak’s work and the information it contains.
 
American tax money & Jewish Extremism in Palestine
 
If they did, it’s hard to believe that Americans would allow $8.5 million per day of their tax money to be given to Israel, where such teachings underlie a powerful minority that is disproportionately influential in governmental actions.
 
Nor is it likely that a fully informed American public would allow donations to religious institutions in Israel that teach supremacist, sometimes violent doctrines to be tax-deductible in the U.S.
 
One organization raised over $10 million tax-deductible dollars in the U.S. in 2011 alone – removing money from the U.S. economy and enabling illegal, aggressive Israeli settlements in Palestine. And some of this money went to benefit individuals convicted of murder – including the murderer of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
 
The New York Times obituary on Schneerson reported that Schneerson was “a major political force in Israel, both in the Knesset and among the electorate,” but failed to describe the nature of his impact.
 
One of a sprinkling of writers willing to publicly discuss Shahak and Mezvinsky’s findings is Allan Brownfeld, who is less reticent. Brownfeld is editor of the American Council for Judaism’s periodical Issues and contributor to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
 
In a review of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Brownfeld describes Schneerson’s views on Israel:
 
“Rabbi Schneerson always supported Israeli wars and opposed any retreat. In 1974 he strongly opposed the Israeli withdrawal from the Suez area. He promised Israel divine favors if it persisted in occupying the land.”
 
Brownfeld reports that after Schneerson’s death, “[T]housands of his Israeli followers played an important role in the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu. Among the religious settlers in the occupied territories, the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups. Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer of Palestinians, was one of them.”
 
Another such Chabad Hassid is Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg (also sometimes written as “Ginzburg” and “Ginsburgh”), who studied under Schneerson in Crown Heights and who heads up a major Chabad institution in the West Bank.
 
Ginsburg praised Goldstein, the murderer of 29 Palestinians while they were praying, and considers all non-Jews subhuman.
 
According to author Motti Inbari, Ginsburg “gives prominence to Halachic and Kabbalistic approaches that emphasize the distinction between Jew and non-Jew (Gentile), imposing a clear separation and hierarchy in this respect.”
 
In his book Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? Inbari states, “[Ginsburg] claims that while the Jews are the Chosen People and were created in God’s image, the Gentiles do not have this status and are effectively considered subhuman.”
 
Professor Inbari, an Israeli academic who now teaches in the U.S., writes that Ginsburg’s theological approach continues “certain perceptions that were popular in medieval times.”
 
“For example,” Inbari writes, “the commandment ‘You shall not murder’ does not apply to the killing of a Gentile, since ‘you shall not murder’ relates to the murder of a human, while for him the Gentiles do not constitute humans.”
 
Inbari reports, “Similarly, Ginzburg stated that, on the theoretical level, if a Jew requires a liver transplant to survive, it would be permissible to seize a Gentile and take their liver forcefully.”
 
While the mainstream American press almost never reports this kind of information, an April 26, 1996 article in Jewish Week by Lawrence Cohler reported on Ginsburg’s teachings, including their problematic roots in Jewish texts.
 
Cohler reported that a professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, “called for radically revising Jewish thinking about some Jewish texts on the grounds that scholars such as Rabbi Ginsburgh are far from aberrant in their use of them.”
 
Cohler quoted Greenberg’s concerns:  “‘There’ll be a statement in Talmud… made in circumstances where it’s purely theoretical, because Jews then never had the power to do it,’ he explained. And now, he said, ‘It’s carried over into circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered.’”
 
A rabbi associated with Ginsburg coauthored a notorious Israeli book, The King’s Torah, which claims that Jewish law at times permits the killing of non-Jewish infants. American donations to the Chabad school Ginsburg heads up, and that published the above book, are tax-deductible in the U.S. Ginsburg, who endorses the book, teaches classes throughout Israel, the U.S. and France.
 
Such extremism is opposed by the majority of Israelis, and major Jewish religious authorities condemn it, a Chief Rabbi, for example, stating: “’According to the Torah, every man is created in God’s image.”
 
Yet, such extremist views continue to exert a powerful influence.
 
Israeli military manuals echo extremist teachings: “kill even good civilians.”
 
Israeli military manuals sometimes replicate extremist teachings. For example, a booklet authored by a Chief Chaplain stated, “In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians…” Such teachings by the IDF rabbinate were prominent during Israel’s 2008-9 attack on Gaza that killed 1,400 Gazans, approximately half of them civilians. (The Palestinian resistance killed nine Israelis during this “war.”)
 
Chicago writer Stephen Lendman has described these teachings, giving a number of examples.
 
Lendman writes, “In 2007, Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, called for the Israeli army to mass-murder Palestinians:
 
“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1000. And if they don’t stop after 1000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million.”
 
Lendman reports that some extremist Israeli rabbis teach that “the ten commandments don’t apply to non-Jews. So killing them in defending the homeland is acceptable, and according to the chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council:
 
“‘There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them…. A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.’”
 
Lendman writes, “Rabbi David Batsri called Arabs ‘a blight, a devil, a disaster…. donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn’t create them to walk on all fours. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean.’”
 
Another such rabbi is Manis Friedman, a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi inspired by Schneerson who served as the simultaneous translator for a series of Schneerson’s talks. (Friedman is currently dean of a Jewish Studies institute in Minnesota.)
 
A 2009 article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports, “Like the best Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis, Manis Friedman has won the hearts of many unaffiliated Jews with his charismatic talks about love and God; it was Friedman who helped lead Bob Dylan into a relationship with Chabad.
 
“But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.”
 
In Moment magazine’s article, “Ask the Rabbis // How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?” Friedman answered:
 
“I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.
 
“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).”
 
Lendman reports, “Views like these aren’t exceptions. Though a minority, they proliferate throughout Israeli society…”
 
They also, Lendman notes, work to prevent peace in Israel-Palestine.
 
Shahak and Mezvinsky note that when the book containing Schneerson’s statements quoted above about Jews and non-Jews was published in Israel, he was allied to the Labor Party and his movement had been provided “many important benefits” from the Israeli government.
 
In the mid-1970s Schneerson decided that the Labor Party was too moderate and shifted his support to the more right-wing parties in power today. The authors report, “Ariel Sharon was the Rebbe’s favorite Israeli senior politician. Sharon in turn praised the Rebbe publicly and delivered a moving speech about him in the Knesset after the Rebbe’s death.”
 
Roots in Some Early Texts
 
Brownfeld decries the fact that few Americans are properly informed about the fundamentalist movement in Israel “and the theology upon which it is based.”
 
He notes that Jewish Americans, in particular, are often unaware of the “narrow ethnocentrism which is promoted by the movement’s leading rabbis, or of the traditional Jewish sources they are able to call upon in drawing clear distinctions between the moral obligations owed to Jews and non-Jews.”
 
Teachings that Jews are superior and gentiles inferior were contained in some of the earliest Hassidic texts, including its classic text, “Tanya,” still taught today.
 
Brownfeld quotes statements by “the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism,” Rabbi Kook the Elder, and states that these were derived from earlier texts. [Kook, incidentally, was also an early Zionist, who helped push for the Balfour Declaration in England before moving to Palestine. He was the uncle of Hillel Kook, an agent who went by the name “Peter Bergson” and created front groups in the U.S. for a violent Zionist guerilla group that operated in 1930s and ’40s Palestine.]
 
Brownfeld quotes Kook: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
 
Brownfeld explains that Kook’s teaching, which he says is followed by leaders of the settler movement in the occupied West Bank, “is based upon the Lurianic Cabbala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late 16th to the early 19th century.”
 
Shahak and Mezvinsky state, “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”
 
Again, Shahak and Mezvinsky report that this aspect is often covered up in English-language discussions. Scholarly authors of books about Jewish mysticism and the Lurianic Cabbala, they write, have frequently “wilfully omitted reference to such ideas.”
 
Shahak and Mezvinsky write that it is essential to understand these beliefs in order to understand the current situation in the West Bank, where many of the most militant West Bank settlers are motivated by religious ideologies in which every non-Jew is seen as “the earthly embodiment” of Satan, and according to the Halacha (Jewish law), the term ‘human beings’ refers solely to Jews.”
 
Israeli author and former chief of Israeli military intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi touches on this in his 1988 book Israel’s Fateful Hour.
 
Harkabi writes that while such extremist beliefs are not “widely dominant,” the reality is that “nationalistic religious extremists are by no means a lunatic fringe; many are respected men whose words are widely heeded.”
 
He reports that the campus rabbi of a major Israeli university published an article in the student newspaper entitled “The Commandment of Genocide in the Torah,” in which he implied that those who have a quarrel with Jews “ought to be destroyed, children and all.” Harkabi writes that a book by another rabbi “explained that the killing of a non-Jew is not considered murder.”
 
Brownfeld writes, “Although messianic fundamentalists constitute a relatively small portion of the Israeli population [most Israeli settlers are motivated by the subsidized lifestyle US tax money to Israel provides], their political influence has been growing. If they have contempt for non-Jews, their hatred for Jews who oppose their views is even greater.”
 
Brownfeld cites the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had started to make peace with the Palestinians, writing that it was just one “in a long line of murders of Jews who followed a path different from that ordained by rabbinic authorities.” Brownfeld reports that Shahak and Mezvinsky “cite case after case, from the Middle Ages until the 19th century.”
 
The authors report, “It was usual in some Hasidic circles until the last quarter of the nineteenth century to attack and often to murder Jews who had reform religious tendencies…”
 
They quote a long article by Israeli writer Rami Rosen, “History of a Denial,” published by Ha’aretz Magazine in 1996. This article, which cannot be found online, at least in English, is also cited in the book Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination, by Israeli professor Ehud Sprinzak.
 
In his Ha’aretz article Rosen reported: “A check of main facts of the [Jewish] historiography of the last 1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually took place on Purim; cruel murders within the family; liquidation of informers, often done for religious reasons by secret rabbinical courts, which issued a sentence of ‘pursuer’ and appointed secret executioners; assassinations of adulterous women in synagogues and/or the cutting of their noses by command of the rabbis.”
 
While Rosen’s article may seem shocking, in reality, it simply shows that members of the Jewish population, like members of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and diverse other populations, have at times committed atrocities, sometimes allegedly in the name of their religion. The difference, as Shahak and Mezvinsky point out, is that such information is largely covered up in the U.S. Such cover-ups, however, don’t make facts go away. They merely bury them, where they smoulder and at times eventually lead to exaggerated perceptions.
 
U.S. media rarely report that some extremist Israeli settlers are intensely hostile to Christians, and in one instance threatened peace activists who came to the West Bank to participate in nonviolent demonstrations, “We killed Jesus and we’ll kill you, too.” There is also a record of official hostility. For example, a few years ago an Israeli mayor ordered all New Testaments to be rounded up and burned.
 
Schneerson’s “schools”
 
While Schneerson is honoured on national “Education” days, the reality is that the elementary schools he created often failed to teach children “basic reading, writing, spelling, math, science and history,” according to a graduate.
 
In his article “National Education Day and the Education I Never Had,” Chaim Levin reports on his experience at the Chabad school “Oholei Torah” (Educational Institute Oholei Menachem) in Crown Heights, New York – the site of Chabad’s world headquarters:
 
“I have profound respect for the late Rebbe and his legacy. However, I remember very clearly those talks that [Schneerson] gave – the ones we studied every year in elementary school about the unimportance of ‘secular’ (non-religious, formal) education, and the great importance of only studying limmudei kodesh (holy studies). As a result of this attitude, thousands of students were not taught anything other than the Bible throughout our years attending Chabad institutions.”
 
The goal of such schools, Levin writes, was to produce “schluchim,” missionaries who would promote Chabad all over the world.
 
Meanwhile, he notes, “Failure to provide basic formal education cripples children within Chabad communities. We cannot ignore the harm done…” Levin writes, “Until this day, Oholei Torah and many other Chabad schools — particularly schools for boys and a few for girls in Crown Heights and in some other places — do not provide basic formal education.”
 
Education and Sharing Day 2014
 
In his 2000 article, Brownfeld writes that Shahak and Mezvinsky’s book should be “a wake-up call “to Americans, particularly Jewish supporters of Israel.”
 
Fourteen years later, however, very few people are aware of these books and their powerful information, and U.S. tax money continues to flow to Israel. The main author, Israel Shahak, is now dead, as is Edward Said; Noam Chomsky rarely, if ever, mentions him; and Shahak’s co-author, Norton Mezvinsky (uncle of Chelsea Clinton’s husband), is a member of a Lubavitch congregation in New York.
 
In many ways, little seems to have changed since 1994, when Congressmen Charles Schumer, Newt Gingrich, and others introduced legislation to bestow on Schneerson the Congressional Gold Medal. The bill passed both Houses by unanimous consent, honouring Schneerson for his “outstanding and lasting contributions toward improvements in world education, morality, and acts of charity.”
 
And in two weeks, Americans will be officially called on to observe a day that honours Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Lubavitcher movement.
 
That is, unless masses of people contact their Congressional representatives to demand a whole new direction: a “National Education and Sharing Day” that honours an individual who values education, and who believes that all people – in the words of the Declaration of Independence – are created equal.
 
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. Her book, Against Our Better Judgment: How the U.S. was used to create Israel, contains additional information on Rabbi Kook’s family connection to American front groups for Israeli terrorists. (Kook was unusual in his support for political Zionism; most Jewish religious leaders at the time considered the movement heretical). Weir is NOT the British historian.)
 
 

Two articles here, first our translation of an article from news.rambler.ru followed by an older article from Zero Hedge that is mentioned in this article. Commentary and notes [in brackets] are by Vince Dhimos.
 
QUOTE:
 
“In the film, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Makhathia and the head of the Malaysian Government’s investigative team and Colonel Mohamad Sakri, director of the National Security Council, say that a 9,000-strong NATO contingent was ready to enter the Donbass.”
 
Is this planned NATO incursion into eastern Ukraine perhaps the motive for the shoot-down of the plane by the Ukrainian government? It has been pointed out that the Russian speakers of Donbass had absolutely no motive for murdering all those innocent people. But when you consider the over 100,000 mostly innocent civilians killed by the US air armed forces in Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed by the Wahhabist killers imported by the US and its Saudi allies into Syria under the pretext of saving Syrians from the government they mostly trust and approve of, you can see that the US government has absolutely no concern for the life and limb of innocents and will manufacture evidence even if it means murdering people. Further, the fake Iraqi WMDs used as a casus belli and the unproven stories of Assad “poisoning his own people” as a pretext to fire on his installations show how underhanded and sneaky the US government and its allies are in their fabrication of “evidence” to indict those it deems adversaries.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
The crash of MH17: entry of NATO forces in the Donbass was disrupted
 
Malaysian authorities disrupted an offensive by NATO forces in the Donbass in the summer of 2014, according to a film by Dutch director Max von der Werff about the investigation into the crash of the Malaysian Boeing. Material from the film was published in the blog Zero Hedge, and is posted in the publication "Ukraina.ru."
 
In the film, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Makhathia and the head of the Malaysian Government’s investigative team and Colonel Mohamad Sakri, director of the National Security Council, say that a 9,000-strong NATO contingent was ready to enter Donbass.
 
It is alleged that the troops of the Northern Alliance were to take control of the crash site of the Boeing, defeat the militias and enter Crimea. The plan was developed in Washington.
 
The the plan was not implemented due to the intervention of Germany after the black boxes from the crash site, claimed by the United States and Ukraine, were withdrawn by Malaysian investigators.
 
The film also reports that the Malaysian investigators were constantly hampered by other countries.
 
The Malaysian Boeing-777, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur as flight MH-17, was shot down in the sky over the Donetsk region in the summer of 2014. 298 people died. the plane was shot down by a guided missile from a Buk anti-aircraft missile system (SAM) [the US-backed Ukrainian military was equipped with these missiles but the West insisted on the absurd narrative that Russia smuggled them in to shoot down the plane]. On June 19, at the press conference of the Joint Investigation Team, the names of four people suspected of involvement in the crash were announced. According to the group, they are Russians Igor Girkin (Strelkov), Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and a citizen of Ukraine Leonid Kharchenko. The Russian Foreign Ministry called the accusations of the SSG against the Russians unfounded.
 
END TRANSLATION
 
 
We urge you to view this video linked in the article below.
 
https://www.rt.com/shows/documentary/197540-mh-17-crash-ukraine/
 
MH17 Turnabout: Ukraine's Guilt Now Proven
 
by Tyler Durden
 
Jan 2, 2019
 
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
 
Finally, a clear and convincing - and unrefuted - case can now be presented to the public, as to precisely who the guilty party was, that downed the MH17 Malaysian airliner over Ukraine on 17 July 2014, and why it was done. The complete case, which will be fully documented here, displays unequivocally who needed the MH17 murders (of 298 persons) to be perpetrated. This mass-murder was done for one leader’s very pressing obsession. For him, it simply had to be done, and done at that precise time. 
 
The full MH17 case will be presented here, to be judged by the public, because no court of law which possesses the power to bring this (or even any) case on the MH17 murders, is willing to do so, and because the evidence in this 17 July 2014 case has become overwhelming, and is unrefuted. This evidence is accepted by both sides. But it still remains effectively hidden from the publics in the United States and its allied countries. (The present news-report, which is the first ever to present this entire case, is submitted to all news-media in English-speaking countries, so that any of them that wishes to provide its audience access to this uncontested and conclusive evidence in the MH17 case can do so, by publishing this article. Any of them that won’t, don’t want their audience to have access to the conclusive evidence in this case, because this article is being made available to all of them to publish, free of charge; so there is no other reason not to publish it.)
 
The complete evidence will be described, and all of the conclusive evidence is linked-to, proving who perpetrated, and who demanded, the shoot-down on 17 July 2014 of the Malaysian airliner MH17. 
 
This article will start by demonstrating the most important thing, and will demonstrate it by means of links to the most conclusive evidence of all. This is the evidence which absolutely proves that the official Netherlands-headed investigation into this matter is an intentional and utter fraud — a fraud which has already been conclusively answered and exposed by the Russian Government. (Netherlands headed the investigation because 196 of the 298 murder-victims were Dutch.) Russia’s response provided, in excruciating detail, not only clear disproofs of the Netherlands-headed investigation’s conclusions of Russian guilt, but also (and on the basis of the very same evidence that the official investigation had made public on 24 May 2018) provided the still-unrefuted (but nonetheless still effectively hidden) proofs of Ukraine’s actual and incontestable guilt, in this mass-murder. This evidence, of the Netherlands team’s fraudulence, carries the investigation a large part of the way toward its ultimate conclusion, regarding who the person was who had demanded Ukraine to commit this crime. 
 
Incidentally, the Netherlands Government had partially funded the coup that in February 2014 overturned Ukraine’s Government and installed the new regime, which regime is allied with the United States Government and actually perpetrated the MH17 shoot-down. The Government of Netherlands is not a neutral in this case that it is judging. It had helped install the present regime in Ukraine. In fact, as you can see here, Netherlands’ Government had been the largest single contributor to Ukraine’s Hromadske TV, which was propagandizing to exterminate the residents in Ukraine’s former Donbass region, which breakaway region had voted over 90% for Ukraine’s Democratically elected President, whom Obama’s coup had just overthrown. This operation in Ukraine is an extension from the corrupt Nazi Prince Bernhard's having established in Netherlands in 1954 the secretive Bilderberg group to coordinate NATO’s efforts for the US and its allies to conquer ultimately the world. He got caught in 1976, for one of his skimming operations, a million-dollar kickback from Lockheed Corporation. Holland’s Deep State is anything but benign.
 
So, Russia’s response, on 17 September 2018, used that Netherlands-headed team’s own documentation, to disprove that team’s attribution of guilt to Russia, and to prove conclusively Ukraine’s guilt as having been the actual perpetrator of this mass-murder. Thus, the Netherlands-headed team includes the actual perpetrator, Ukraine, and not only the Netherlands Government, which had helped overthrow Ukraine’s prior and democratically elected Government and bring Ukraine’s current regime into power in February 2014, just months prior to the MH17 shoot-down, which resulted from that US coup. 
 
Most readers who click onto the links here will be shocked. What will shock them is the evidence, because it has not been published in The West (except summarized in less than a half-dozen obscure news-media — and, even there, generally not documented, such as it is here).
 
The links will document and fully prove this stunning turnabout, from Russia to Ukraine. The documentation that was cited by Ukraine and Ukraine’s fellow team-member (the team’s leader) Netherlands, against Russia, on May 24th of 2018, contained previously unrecognized details (which were first pointed out in the Russian presentation on September 17th of 2018) which irrefutably convict Ukraine. Consequently, Russia’s response was ignored in The West, despite that presentation’s having been based upon the very same items of evidence that had been introduced by the Netherlands-led team on May 24th. Thus, the items of evidence, there, are the same that the Netherlands-led team had themselves provided. The items of evidence here are not in dispute. 
 
The current article will be the first-ever to hone-in on the especially shocking key data in Russia’s data-packed September 17th response, the key evidence that Russia was calling attention to there, and which prove Ukraine’s guilt beyond any reasonable doubt — prove it on the basis of the very same evidence that had been introduced by Ukraine’s own team in their presentation four months earlier. Using the other side’s evidence to convict that other side is what makes this denouement the stunning turnabout that it is.
 
The Netherlands-headed Ukrainian team still refuses to answer the Russian presentation, which responds to the Ukrainian team’s May 24th presentation. Western ‘news’-media have likewise almost completely ignored Russia’s response. (One Dutch medium did report on it but dismissed it by focusing on a subordinate part: their report said and focused on “Russia now claims that the video images the investigators used to track the missile's transport to the Ukraine, were manipulated.” However, the part of Russia’s presentation that will be discussed in the present article was being entirely ignored in that Dutch news-report, which, as you will see here, has nothing to do with any claim of manipulated evidence. Britain’s BBC likewise focused-in on the “manipulated evidence” that Russia’s presentation had attacked. The Washington Post instead headlined “Who spread disinformation about the MH17 crash? We followed the Twitter trail”, and it focused-in on how polarized the public is over the MH17 case. The West’s ‘news’-coverage was virtually entirely misdirection and disinformation, as you will recognize from what follows here. And the evidence here is linked-to, so that you can see it for yourself.) 
 
Russia’s response documented beyond any question at all, that this airliner was shot down by the Ukrainian Government, and that Western (i.e., US-allied) ‘news’ media have been and are covering up this crucial historical fact and The West’s still-ongoing lies about the downing of MH17.
 
Those lies are the basis of US and EU anti-Russia sanctions, which remain in effect despite the basis for those sanctions having been exposed unequivocally, on September 17th, to be based on lies. Thus, continuing to hide those lies is crucial to the liars. This is the reason why Russia’s blazingly detailed presentation on September 17th has been virtually ignored — to protect the actually guilty. The evidence here proves that those sanctions, themselves, are nothing but frauds against the public, and crimes against Russia — ongoing additional crimes, which have been, and remain, effectively hidden till now.
 
The reader can see and consider here all of the conclusive evidence in the MH17 case — it can be reached via the present article’s links. Unlike the ‘news’-reports in The West’s ‘news’-media, the presentation here is not presuming readers’ trust, but is instead providing to all readers access to the actual evidence — evidence that is accepted by both sides. That’s what the links here are for: examination by any sceptics. 
 
Scepticism in judging anything is not only good; it is essential to justice. Trust should never be given; it should only be earned. Otherwise, no democracy can function. Only dictatorship can function in a country that’s controlled by lies, and by liars. Liars are believed by people who have faith in them. Thus, faith in anything or anyone can poison judgment. The way to test the case that is presented here is to click onto a link wherever one wants to see and examine the evidence. Without examining (usually by spot-checking) the evidence, no reader can intelligently judge any case. Dictatorship is almost inevitable in a country where spot-checking of the actual evidence isn’t the norm. Most ‘news’-media don’t even enable such spot-checking. This is why ‘news’-media are so often actually propaganda-media instead.
 
So, here’s the complete MH17 case, for any reader to judge:
 
The last announcement from the official investigation, the Netherlands-headed “Joint Investigative Team” (JIT), was on 24 May 2018, and it headlined “Update in criminal investigation MH17 disaster”. It said:
 
The JIT is convinced that the BUK-TELAR [missile and launcher] that was used to down MH17, originates from the 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile brigade (hereinafter 53rd brigade), a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation. … This fingerprint has been compared with numerous images of BUK-TELARS, both Ukrainian and Russian ones. The only BUK-TELAR on which this combination of characteristics also was found, is a BUK-TELAR that was recorded several times when it joined a convoy of the 53rd brigade on 23 – 25 June 2014.
 
Consequently, the JIT presumes that within the 53rd brigade and within the circle around it, people have knowledge about the operation in which that particular BUK-TELAR was deployed. … Already in September 2016, the JIT disclosed that MH17 was downed with a BUK missile of the 9M38 series. …
 
The missile engine’s casing shows the number 9 д 1318869032.
 
Typical of Western ‘news’-media’s coverage of that presentation, was CNN’s report the same day, May 24th of 2018. It was headlined "Missile that downed MH17 'owned by Russian brigade’". It stated: “‘At the time this area was under control of pro-Russian separatists,’ said Fred Westerbeke, chief prosecutor of the National Prosecutor’s Office of the Netherlands. The Buk launcher of the 9M38 series ‘was transported from the territory of the Russian Federation and was returned to that territory of the Russian Federation afterwards’.”
 
The Ukrainian side claimed they had finally found evidence which would enable them definitively to place the blame for the MH17 shoot-down on Russia. So, the very next day, May 25th, Britain’s Telegraph bannered "Netherlands and Australia call for compensation for MH17 victims as they accuse Russia of downing plane" and reported that “Australia and the Netherlands have said they hold Russia legally responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 and will seek reparations for relatives of the 298 people killed.” This demand against Russia was coming “the day after the Dutch-led international investigation concluded that the Russian military had deployed the Buk surface-to-air missile that shot down the plane.”
 
Four months later, on 17 September 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defense youtubed its response, which is titled “Briefing on newly discovered evidence pertaining to the crash of the MH17 flight”. It presented the actual history of the Buk missile and launcher which Ukraine and the other Governments on the JIT said had brought down the MH17. (The JIT includes four countries, Netherlands, Ukraine, Belgium, and Australia, with a fifth, Malaysia, having been brought in only later, after it finally agreed to allow Ukraine a veto over any conclusions that the team will publish. Malaysia’s participation started on 4 December 2014; but whether Malaysia has actually been allowed to play a role in the ‘investigation’ isn’t clear.) Russia, during the intervening months after the JIT’s May 24th presentation, had tracked down all of those serial numbers, 8868720, and 1318869032, and 9M38, and found (as you can see there by clicking on each, especially onto the “Briefing” itself) that after the acquisition of the launcher and missile, by Ukraine in 1986, from Russia, that missile and its launcher had always, and constantly since their transfer to Ukraine in 1986, remained in Ukraine, and never again were located in Russia. So: if the JIT’s supplied evidence is authentic — which the Ukrainian team asserts it to be — then it outright convicts Ukraine. This is an evidentiary checkmate, against the Ukrainian side.
--
With the passage now of years, the precise cause of the shooting-down of the Malaysian passenger plane MH17 on 17 July 2014 has been becoming clearer and clearer, despite the rigorous continuing attempts by Western ‘news’ media to cover it up and to hide from the public the growing and by-now irrefutable evidence (presented here) that clearly shows what and who actually brought down this airliner.
 
In the years since I headlined on August 24th of 2014 the news, “MH-17 ‘Investigation’: Secret August 8th Agreement Seeps Out: Perpetrator of the Downing in Ukraine, of the Malaysian Airliner, Will Stay Hidden”, the key fact about the official ‘investigation’ has actually been that the Government of Ukraine was, on 8 August 2014, granted veto-power over any official finding which would be produced by the Joint Investigative Team. On 20 November 2014, Russian Television headlined “Dutch government refuses to reveal ‘secret deal’ into MH17 crash probe” and reported that Holland’s science-publishers Elsevier had filed for this information under that country’s Freedom of Information Act, and the Government simply refused to comply with that law. The leaders of Western nations apparently want the black-box and much other basic data in their possession to remain hidden, and the four nations had signed this secret agreement to allow the Government of Ukraine to block any report that incriminates Ukraine in the MH17 shoot-down. But additional evidence has nonetheless become public, and all of it confirms and adds yet further details to the explanation that was first put forth by the retired German Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko, whose independent investigation had concluded that Ukrainian Government fighter-jets intentionally shot down this civilian plane. He did not rule out the possibility that a Buk missile had simultaneously been used there, but he made clear that at least one fighter-jet had been used in this shoot-down.
 
However, if those parts of a Buk missile, which were the focus of the Netherlands team’s presentation on May 24th, were indeed retrieved from the crash-site as that team claims, then a Buk missile had also hit the MH17. Serious question would nonetheless exist as to whether that Buk was fired by troops who were working for Ukraine, or instead for Russia (or else for Donbass separatists who were working in conjunction with Russia, which was Ukraine’s and America’s original version of the event).
 
Precisely what the method was, by which the direct perpetrators brought down the MH17, has gradually become clearer, despite this continuation of Western secrecy (and Ukraine’s veto-power over the ‘findings’) regarding the contents of the black boxes, and of the US satellite images, and of the Ukrainian air-traffic-control radar recordings, and of other evidence-sources that are still being held secret by The West and not made available to their ‘news’ media nor to anyone outside a tight official circle of those Western nations’ intelligence agencies. 
 
But now, Russia has actually — on 17 September 2018 — exposed the outright fraudulence of the JIT’s 24 May 2018 presentation, and The West (the US Government’s allies) entirely ignored the conclusive evidence that that presentation by the JIT itself actually contained and to which Russia was pointing, so that there can no longer be reasonable doubt about The West’s intentional and still ongoing fraudulence regarding the entire MH17 matter.
 
Also entirely ignored in the Ukrainain team’s ‘explanation’ of the event is why Ukraine’s air-traffic control had guided the MH17’s pilot to fly over the conflict-zone where Ukraine’s civil war was being waged and where Ukraine’s war-planes were bombing. The MH17’s pilot was instructed by Ukraine’s air-traffic control to take that path instead of the one that the airline had planned and that had become normal during the civil war. This was highly abnormal, and it doomed the MH17. Clearly, only Ukraine’s Government could, and did, do that — change the route, and for only that one plane. Yet, still, the Netherlands-headed team blames Russia and is trusted in The West, but Russia is not. (Now, why would that be?)
 
Russia has constantly been releasing its own investigations regarding MH-17; and, in the process, Russia on September 17th not only provided further details as to how the downing actually happened (it wasn’t by mistake, as the West contends it was), but they have also, in prior presentations, exposed the absurd impossibility of the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of this event (that only a Buk had been used), which is the ‘explanation’ that is still being parroted unquestioningly and unflinchingly by officials in Washington, Europe, and NATO, and also by Western ‘news’ media. (As my news-report on 24 August 2014 explained, that secret August 8th agreement was signed by the four governments which formed the JIT team and which had been handed by Malaysia the black boxes to study — Ukraine, Belgium, Australia, and Netherlands — and the JIT granted to the Ukrainian Government a veto over anything that the team’s official report would say. This is probably the reason why the subsequent officially released report on those black boxes said essentially nothing. It was a brazen insult to the 298 victims’ families. The presumption has been that all of them will have faith, not be sceptical, regarding the JIT team.) 
 
Though Russia doesn’t possess those black boxes (which, by chance, were handed by the pro-Russian separatists to the Malaysian Government’s representative, and yet that Government handed them to Netherland’s Government instead of to Russia’s — apparently trusting Netherlands more than trusting Russia or even themselves), Russia does possess, and publicly reveals, evidence that’s conclusive on its own; and it is 100% consistent with Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event, regardless whether a Buk was involved or not. Russian Television had issued in October 2014 a 25-minute documentary on the event, and it starts with people whom they interviewed in that region, who were describing their having seen at least one and perhaps two planes rising toward the airliner, and then the airliner coming down from the sky. Other witnesses told them that they saw an SU-25 fighter plane take off in that general area just minutes before the airliner came down. 
 
FIRST, THE MISSING BBC REPORT:
 
The BBC had previously posted to their website on 23 July 2014, just six days after the event itself, a news report in Russian via their Russian service (fortunately archived by Global Research), about the downing, but they quickly removed it without explanation. Fortunately, however, some Russian-speakers had managed to download it before it was yanked; and at least two of those downloads were posted to YouTube, the first one having been posted there on 28 July 2014, with English subscripts, and with the headline, “UKRAINE Eyewitness Confirm Military Jet Flew Besides MH17 Airliner: BBC Censors Video 25Jul2014”. (It’s gone now, but, actually, several witnesses, and not just one, were interviewed there — there wasn’t just one “Eyewitness”.) Furthermore, Global Research posted on 10 September 2014 a transcript of it, headlining, “Deleted BBC Report. ‘Ukrainian Fighter Jet Shot Down MHI7’, Donetsk Eyewitnesses.” (The video itself is still at YouTube and it will be linked-to just below here, so that you will be able to view it.)
 
The interviews by the BBC were done by their reporter Olga Ivshina. (Also see http://archive.is/vFoh9.) She had filmed local residents in the crash-debris area. In one passage of her 23 July 2014 news-report, there were two residents simultaneously who described what they had seen. One of them said, “And there was another aircraft.” The other continued immediately, in order to describe the other plane, “a military one, beside it [‘it’ being the airliner]. Everybody saw it. It was proceeding underneath below the civilian one.”
 
Here is the second, and clearer, version of that clip. (It’s the one that’s still live at youtube.) The key portion on it is at 0:38-042 in the video:
 
That was the 9 September 2014 repost of it, with the same subscript-translation into English, only the visual is sharper.
 
And here is an apology, dated 25 July 2014, by the BBC, for their having removed their original video of this interview — and yet they still didn’t repost it; they still continue to blockade it; even today the only versions available, of these, the earliest recorded interviews of people who said they witnessed the event, are the independently posted ones, but here is the BBC’s apology:
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/blogs/2014/07/140725_blog_editors_bbc_story_republished.shtml
 
Here, then, is that BBC apology google-translated into English: http://archive.is/kc291
 
So: clearly, BBC has done all that they could to remove evidence, which they had mistakenly broadcast, which had fit the retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event, and which contradicted the US-Ukrainian reconstruction of it — the reconstruction that Western ‘news’ media project, and on the basis of which US President Barack Obama won from the EU stiff increases in, and subsequent extensions of, the economic sanctions against Russia, all on the basis of lies.
 
(Subsequently, on 17 December 2018, South Front headlined “‘EDITORIAL BOARD DEMANDS BLOOD’: INSIDE LOOK AT HOW BBC TRIES TO FIND PROOF OF RUSSIAN INFLUENCE ON YELLOW VEST PROTESTS”, and they reported that Ivshina had texted to a BBC stringer, on the streets of Paris, instructions of what story-lines were wanted by BBC management regarding the “Yellow Vests” demonstrations against French President Emmanuel Macron, ”Yes, I’m searching for the angles))) The editorial board wants blood, yo)))”. “And if you find these ultra-rightists [at the protests], will they talk about Putin and Moscow? Well, at least the Russians go to the protests, right?” Ivshina was instructing her French stringer what to look for, in order for her to be able to report the type of ‘news’ that her bosses wanted to publish. Perhaps Ivshina had been chastised in 2014 and had learned to never again be caught reporting anything that challenges the UK Government’s anti-Russia propaganda-line.)
 
 
So, this valuable eyewitness-testimony to the MH17 event is available despite Western ‘news’ media (or, more-accurately, propaganda-media), and the reason for the news-suppression is clear to anyone who views that BBC 23 July 2014 report, which presents several eyewitnesses, interviewed separately as individuals, not as a group, and yet all of whose testimonies — perhaps despite Ivshina’s wish for them not to say this — report having observed the very same basic narrative, of at least one military jet rising toward the airliner just before it came down. 
 
In other words: it is clear that BBC had yanked this report because it didn’t confirm the West’s story-line, which says that Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists had fired a “Buk” ground-based missile at the airliner, thinking that the civilian plane was a Ukrainian Government war-plane about to bomb them and their families. But, first of all, the Ukrainian Government was virtually admitting there that they were bombing these villagers, which means that they were perpetrating an ethnic cleansing operation there, which indeed that Government was doing; but, secondly, the Ukrainian Government’s statement also acknowledged that if the event had happened in that way, it would have been unintentional, a tragic accident on the part of the rebels there. (The JIT’s line now is that it was instead an outright Russian attack against the MH17.)
 
So, then, why did “the international community” respond with massive economic sanctions against Russia on account of this downing — by, as it turns out, Ukraine? The whole Western propaganda position was designed for a public of sheer fools, if not of outright psychopathic ones, who cared not a bit about the plights of the victims of an ethnic-cleansing campaign. They cared only about victims in “The West.” The West’s basic story-line doesn’t make sense without recognizing that we were financing ethnic cleansing to clear the land in south-eastern Ukraine, and that any support that Russia would be providing to those separatists would have been defensive in nature, not offensive. Yet Russia gets the blame when this passenger jet goes down? Even though Ukraine’s air-traffic control had guided the pilot there? In any case, that story-line of Russian guilt is false, from start to finish. And now (at least after 17 September 2018) it is finished. But Western ‘news’-media still continue to broadcast the lies, as if it weren’t.
 
Here is how outright ludicrous it actually is, and sound reason in itself that anyone in the military had to have known, from the very get-go, that the “Buk” ‘explanation’ was a line of pure malarkey:
 
THE RUSSIAN DOCUMENTARY:
 
The 22 October 2014 Russian documentary was titled, “MH-17: The Untold Story,” and it presents, among much else, videos of several “Buk” missiles being fired on other occasions, just to show how utterly ludicrous the initial Ukraine-US-and-allied ‘explanation of the MH17 event was. On 5 November 2014, I summarized that, with screen-shots from the Russian documentary.
So, when even the BBC’s reporter wasn’t able to find anyone in that entire region who recounts having seen anything of the sort, just how likely would the Ukrainian Government’s line on that matter — that not only was this done by a lone Buk but it was fired by (at first) pro-Russian separatists, and (then) by the Russian army — actually be? Obviously, any person with any military knowledge whatsoever had to have recognized virtually immediately that the Ukrainian Government’s story-line on the MH-17 downing was a pile of sheer malarkey, but did anyone in the Western ‘news’ media report that it was — that the Western line there was not just a lie, but an absurd one, one that requires an ignorant public in order for it to be able to be taken seriously at all by the public? One that requires an ignorant public, to remain ignorant? This is supposed to be the Western ‘news’ media, with a free press, and a democracy, a truthfully informed citizenry, who can vote based upon truths, not on mere lies?
Here is the way that the Russian TV documentary opens:
Several of the locals there told Russian TV’s reporter that they had seen a military jet rise toward the airliner; and not a one of these individuals were any of the same ones who had testified the exact same thing to the BBC’s reporter, whose news-piece had been squelched by her managers.
HERE IS HOW MH17 WAS SHOT DOWN:
Now, to the substance of the explanation of how this plane was actually brought down:
Earlier, I had summarized the evidence for Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event, but I questioned his having accepted the eyewitness testimony to the effect that the planes that shot down the airliner were SU-25s. In Haisenko’s Russian TV interview, he stuck by his belief that it was probably SU-25s instead of SU-27s or Mig 29s, both of which are also in the Ukrainian Air Force, and all three of which use 30-millimeter machine-guns or “cannons.” But since the fact is that all three of those attack-plane models use machine-guns (“cannons”) with 30-caliber bullets (which is the size that clearly was used, especially on the cockpit), the effect would be identically-sized round 30-caliber entry-holes, no matter what. My last major report on that evidence, prior to the 8 August 2014 formation of the JIT and their mutual agreement to report nothing that would be incriminating to Ukraine’s Government regarding the MH17 incident, was “Systematically Reconstructing the Shoot-Down of the Malaysian Airliner: The Guilt Is Clear and Damning.” That basically fills in (and the links, in that report, document with pictures and videos that) the actual way that this plane was downed, and that why it was downed was “to get the EU to go along with stiffened sanctions against Russia”. Obama (via the regime that he had installed in a February 2014 coup in Kiev) succeeded there in getting the international sanctions against Russia that he had been wanting. Obama, and certainly not Putin — and now we know it wasn’t Russia at all (not even if a Buk was involved) — was the key person behind this. The 298 MH17 murder-victims on 17 July 2014 were murdered by Barack Obama (via his agents such as Victoria Nuland — she ran Obama’s Ukrainian operation), just as clearly as (if not even more clearly than) Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud (via his agents at the Sauds’ Istanbul Consulate) murdered Jamal Khashoggi on 2 October 2018.
International actions (such as economic sanctions) are based upon such fabrications, and ‘evidence’ taken out of its full context, as this from the far-right Forbes commentator Paul Roderick Gregory, but there are no such fakes, nor out-of-context items of evidence, in the case that has been presented here. That’s the difference between news-reporting versus propaganda; but, in the United States today, propaganda passes as if it were ‘news,’ and authentic news that doesn’t fit the regime’s cooked-up narrative is suppressed entirely. The scandal isn’t just Obama, and it’s not just Ukraine; it is also the propaganda-organs, and even (though to the least extent) their audiences who subscribe to such lying ‘news’-media.
Western governments, and their ‘news’ media, are treating their citizens, their own publics, not really as citizens, but as suckers. They are treating them as subjects, instead of as citizens. This is not authentic democracy. It is neo-feudal; it is, in fact, fascism.
The entire “Buk” ‘explanation’ of the downing of the Malaysian airliner (the idea that only a Buk missile caused the physical wreckage which was found) is for suckers only; and everyone in official circles, and in the press, who peddles it, is just as fake as the ridiculous story-line that he or she is peddling. To fall for it, after being provided all of the authentic evidence, which has been linked-to here, one would have to be a willing slave to psychopaths. In this case, the psychopath was Obama, who not only had perpetrated a bloody coup to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014 but who also was now struggling, and had a very pressing obsession, to get the EU to accept his sanctions against Russia for its having accepted the pleas of Crimeans (who had voted 75% for that President) to become restored again to Russia. The 14 July 2014 mass-murder that was set up to be blamed against Russia was Obama’s trick that enabled him to win his way on this.
CONCLUSIONS:
By no means do we know every detail about how the MH17 was shot down, but what we do now know for certain is that the narrative for that event which was supplied by Ukraine’s team on May 24th — the official account of how it happened — isn’t just false; it is outright fraudulent. Ukraine’s team supplied evidence which, if it is authentic, actually convicts Ukraine. And Western ‘news’-media hide this crucial fact.
So, now, we know why Western governments have hidden, instead of making available to the public, the black-box data and the other evidence that they still refuse to provide to the public. They are aiming to scam the public, not to inform it. Lying is their game. They might call it ‘patriotism.’ Traitors would likely do that. Traitors to any country could do it. And, so, they do. Their believers constitute their political base.
Unfortunately, anyone they fool becomes their tool, and everyone else is purely their victim — helpless to oust (much less, to replace) the tyrants who make things bad for everyone but themselves and their colleagues, the insiders at the very top.
Just the day before the MH17 shoot-down, Bloomberg News had headlined, on 16 July 2014, "EU Readies Russia Sanctions Amid US Pressure on Ukraine”, and reported that “the US urges the bloc to take a tougher stance against Moscow.” The day before that, on July 15th, Bloomberg’s headline had been “EU Leaders Weigh Sanctions Against Russia Over Ukraine”, and that report opened, “European Union leaders meeting in Brussels will consider expanded sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict, as the US urges the bloc to take a tougher stand against Moscow.” Was the July 17th event only coincidentally timed perfectly in order to achieve what Obama was determined to produce: the first Ukraine-based anti-Russia sanctions? The regime that Obama had installed in Ukraine in February 2014 needed not only his support, but also the support of the IMF (in order to obtain loans), and of the EU (which it was seeking to join). There was probably even more pressure placed upon the leaders in Ukraine than there was upon the leaders in the EU. But there was plenty upon them both. The EU was widely reported to be balking at increasing the sanctions against Russia. Obama needed the EU to approve quickly his increased sanctions, so as to keep the momentum going for his entire anti-Russian campaign, which had been the reason behind his February 2014 coup in Ukraine. Something dramatic now was needed, in order for Obama to win the EU’s full cooperation. After all, Obama had secretly started at least by 2011 his operation to take over Ukraine. This operation was, for him, one of the central objectives of his entire two-term Presidency. Ukraine — and Ukraine alone — now had within its power the capacity to deliver to him the EU’s participation. Ukraine delivered it, precisely when it was the most urgently needed. This was essential in order for Ukraine to be able to enter the EU. And entering the EU would be essential in order for Ukraine to be able to enter NATO — the next key step in the Bilderbergers’ plan. 
Continuing the sanctions is easier than originally imposing them was. On 22 December 2018, UAwire headlined “EU extends economic sanctions against Russia”, and reported that on December 14th, the EU’s sanctions against Russia, which are based upon alleged Russian aggressions in or against Ukraine, are being extended: UAwire noted “These measures were initially introduced on July 31, 2014 for one year in response to Russia's actions to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, and then strengthened in September 2014.” The EU supports, and participates in, the US regime’s lies and sanctions against Russia. These crimes and lies started as Obama’s, but continued under his successor Trump, and have been also the EU’s crimes throughout, by the EU’s joining, instead of condemning, not only those sanctions but also the lies upon which those sanctions are based. The EU thus indirectly shares the US Government’s guilt in the mass-murders that occurred on 17 July 2014. 
Perhaps the survivors’ families and Malaysia Airlines (which is owned by the Malaysian Government), and their Governments, will file both civil and criminal charges now initially against Ukraine and its President Petro Poroshenko, and ultimately against Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama, and the United States, but also against the Dutch Government, for its collusion with the United States Government in its fraudulent ‘investigation’ that had pre-established blame against Russia. (However, the secret agreement that Malaysia signed to join the JIT might prohibit Malaysia from joining such suits.) Netherlands pre-established Russian blame especially by means of its 8 August 2014 secret four-party agreement (joined later by Malaysia’s Government) to allow Ukraine, an actual suspect in this case, to hold veto power over the assignment of blame in this entire matter. However, not only the survivors of the 298 victims should be suing, but all of the victims should be represented in this case. There were also many violations of international laws. Obama’s coup against Ukraine was one such. The MH17 shoot-down resulted from that coup, couldn’t have occurred without it, and was an extension from it. That coup is thus an important part of the MH17 case.
On 20 September 2017, the now 5 countries in the JIT signed a joint “Memorandum of Understanding” saying “Arrangements for signatories and other grieving nations to make financial contributions to the national proceedings in the Netherlands will be laid down in a financial memorandum of understanding,” and that “This Memorandum will remain in effect for five years and will be automatically extended for successive five-year periods.” So, they intend to continue their ‘investigation’ into MH17 until they can present to the world evidence that Russia did it. Perhaps before that happens, however, all of the victims and their children will already have passed away and this fraud and farce will finally end, as secretly as it began, and only few people will even care, anymore, about it.
Or will victims and their families, instead, initiate whatever legal proceedings they can, right now, against all members of the JIT, for their cover-up, and against the ringleaders, in the US, who demanded this mass-murder to be done, and against the perpetrators in Ukraine, who actually ordered and did it?
Maybe they’ll even be able to get Barack Obama to return to the Nobel committee their 2009 Peace Prize.
The US regime masterminded this mass-murder in order to win the EU’s support for sanctions against Russia, and the EU knowingly complied, and continues to comply, with the American regime’s ongoing aggressions and lies against Russia. The 298 MH17 murder-victims are thus not only the US regime’s victims, but vicariously victims also of the EU — and not, at all, of Russia. Russia was instead the real intended target of the possible Ukrainian Buk missile, and of the Ukrainian fighter-jets, that brought down the MH17. The MH17 victims were merely “collateral damages” in the US regime’s secret decades-long and ongoing anti-Russia war. This is how today’s America competes in the world, by playing very dirty, and getting away with it, helped by its allies, which endorse, and join in, the US regime’s atrocities.
Now, which major news-media in The West will report these solidly documented facts? Isn’t it time, finally, that they should start doing that? Or, do they have no honor, at all?
 
##
Two articles here, first our translation of an article from news.rambler.ru followed by an older article from Zero Hedge that is mentioned in this article. Commentary and notes [in brackets] are by Vince Dhimos.
 
QUOTE:
 
“In the film, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Makhathia and the head of the Malaysian Government’s investigative team and Colonel Mohamad Sakri, director of the National Security Council, say that a 9,000-strong NATO contingent was ready to enter the Donbass.”
 
Is this planned NATO incursion into eastern Ukraine perhaps the motive for the shoot-down of the plane by the Ukrainian government? It has been pointed out that the Russian speakers of Donbass had absolutely no motive for murdering all those innocent people. But when you consider the over 100,000 mostly innocent civilians killed by the US air armed forces in Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed by the Wahhabist killers imported by the US and its Saudi allies into Syria under the pretext of saving Syrians from the government they mostly trust and approve of, you can see that the US government has absolutely no concern for the life and limb of innocents. Further, the fake Iraqi WMDs used as a casus belli and the unproven stories of Assad “poisoning his own people” as a pretext to fire on his installations show how underhanded and sneaky the US government and its allies are in their fabrication of “evidence” to indict those it deems adversaries.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
The crash of MH17: entry of NATO forces in the Donbass was disrupted
 
Malaysian authorities disrupted an offensive by NATO forces in the Donbass in the summer of 2014, according to a film by Dutch director Max von der Werff about the investigation into the crash of the Malaysian Boeing. Material from the film was published in the blog Zero Hedge, and is posted in the publication "Ukraina.ru."
 
In the film, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Makhathia and the head of the Malaysian Government’s investigative team and Colonel Mohamad Sakri, director of the National Security Council, say that a 9,000-strong NATO contingent was ready to enter Donbass.
 
It is alleged that the troops of the Northern Alliance were to take control of the crash site of the Boeing, defeat the militias and enter Crimea. The plan was developed in Washington.
 
The the plan was not implemented due to the intervention of Germany after the black boxes from the crash site, claimed by the United States and Ukraine, were withdrawn by Malaysian investigators.
 
The film also reports that the Malaysian investigators were constantly hampered by other countries.
 
The Malaysian Boeing-777, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur as flight MH-17, was shot down in the sky over the Donetsk region in the summer of 2014. 298 people died. the plane was shot down by a guided missile from a Buk anti-aircraft missile system (SAM) [the US-backed Ukrainian military was equipped with these missiles but the West insisted on the absurd narrative that Russia smuggled them in to shoot down the plane]. On June 19, at the press conference of the Joint Investigation Team, the names of four people suspected of involvement in the crash were announced. According to the group, they are Russians Igor Girkin (Strelkov), Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and a citizen of Ukraine Leonid Kharchenko. The Russian Foreign Ministry called the accusations of the SSG against the Russians unfounded.
 
END TRANSLATION

Israeli human rights group proves military used live fire to shoot 9-year-old child in West Bank townin Features, In the Media, Kafr Quddum July 19, 2019

July 19 2019 | International Solidarity Movement | Kafr Qaddum, occupied Palestine


An Israeli human rights group has proved that live fire was used by soldiers against the 9-year-old childwho was shot in the head last Friday in Kafr Qaddum, exposing Israeli Military lies that none was used. 
The report by B’Tselem, published yesterday, says that Abdul Rahman Shteiwi was shot with live ammunition during a protest in the West Bank town on July 12 “while sitting at the entrance of one of the homes on the edge of the village playing with a piece of wood.” 
It reads: “Now hospitalised in critical condition, he is the latest victim of the reckless open-fire policy that allows soldiers to use live fire even when neither they nor anyone else is in any danger.”
Many people turned out for the weekly protest in Kafr Qaddum today, which has been held every Friday for the past 8 years, to call for justice for Abdul who is fighting for his life in Sheba Hospital near Tel Aviv. 

At the demonstration, which was attended by leaders of the PLO, international observers and local and international media, Israeli soldiers bombarded protesters with rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas canisters. 

Paramedics from the Red Crescent told ISM that 40 protesters were treated for various injuries, 22 for rubber-coated steel bullet wounds and 18 for tear gas inhalation. 
​Ahead of today’s protest, a number of Palestinian politicians including PLO minister Walid Assaf declared that they will bring the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC). “The blood of our children is not cheap!” he said. “We will follow Netanyahu and the Israeli war minister in the ICC.”
The Israeli Military still insists that no live ammunition was used last week, despite the mounds of evidence stacking up against their hollow claims. 
Kafr Qaddum resident, Riyad Shtaiwi, was sitting under an olive tree with his two children when he witnessed the shooting of Abdul last Friday. 
He told ISM through an interpreter that he saw soldiers at the top of the mountain, “taking the position of sniping by lying on the ground,” just before Abdul was hit. 
“When I saw the soldiers on the top of a mountain aiming and taking the position of sniping and shooting by lying himself on the ground towards us, I feel real danger,” he said. “I decided to move away from this place and to speak with the child who was opposite me, to take him away from this danger. Before I reach the child, one of the soldiers, the one who was taking the position of shooting, he shot one live ammunition. At this moment I look around myself at my children and then I saw the child on the ground and the blood.”
Mr Shtaiwi ran towards Abdul to pick him up. While he carried the unconscious boy in his arms, soldiers fired 3 or 4 more rounds of live bullets towards them which hit a metal gate just behind. 
B’Tselem claims that Abdul’s severe injury is the “direct result of the open-fire policy implemented by the military in the Occupied Territories.”
“This policy illegally and without any justification permits the use of live fire against Palestinians who are not endangering anyone,” the report continues. “The policy remains in force despite the fact that it has resulted in hundreds of Palestinian deaths and thousands of injuries.”
This was not the first time the military has fired live ammunition at protesters in Kafr Qaddum in an attempt to suppress the popular struggle of the town’s residents. In January alone, five protesters were hit with live bullets including a child in the neck who was in a critical condition. 
For eight years, the residents have protested against the closure of the town’s main road to Nablus by the military in the early 2000s. The blocked road is now exclusively used by illegal settlers, forcing Palestinians to take the longer road which has impacted their economy.

In the following you will find our translation of an analysis from the Russian site Ria Novosti, with commentary and notes [in brackets] by Vince Dhimos. The political class and msm are constantly warning of “fake news” from Russia. The Ria Novosti article translations we publish at NSS are almost all based on US sources, however, so what part is fake? The one appearing below is no exception. Yet, without even making the effort to read and ponder such an article, professional mainstream Russophobes, which control most of the media and the American mind, immediately jump to the conclusion that anything like this published by a Russian outlet is “Russian propaganda.” Americans are thus virtually prohibited from reading articles by Russians – even if all the information sources are American – and making up their own minds. The translation below shows that liberal icon George Soros is co-founding a new organization based on the proposition of abandoning US interventionism.
 
George is the interventionist par excellence, so this is a shocking turn of events.
 
How a discussion of this could possibly be Russian propaganda is a mystery to me, but not to worry, the Neocons and Neoliberals will not hesitate to raise this accusation because, you see, being Russian is evil, reading anything from Russia is evil, and anyone who discusses Russia without saying something negative about the country and its government is also evil. But I wonder how many Americans or other Westerners actually buy this steaming pile of blather?
 
Now as for Soros, he is now organizing supposedly to oppose US interventionism, but he is probably the one mover and shaker who has done more than anyone to promote regime change in countries that the US Establishment considers too close, either physically to Russia. The latest attempts are in Georgia, Hong Kong and Kyrgyzstan.
 
Just to give you an idea of Soros’ influence in just these three countries, here is what I just now brought up in an internet search:
 
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/open-society-foundations-kyrgyzstan
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmqyArUU38U
 
This last link indicates that Soros, while no longer allowed to operate a foundation in Hong Kong, still has a presence there in the form of an investment fund. Note that there are also NGOs active in Hong Kong that are funded by US NGOs that are no longer intervening in politics there. This opens the door for under-cover intervention in protests of the kind occurring there now.
 
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/i6i998nmrio5fntw1mkmjw2
 
QUOTE from our translation below:
 
“It seems he understands that in order to bring the ideology of liberalism out of crisis, it is necessary to start searching for new meanings and abandon the well-established but hopelessly outdated clichés of the last century.
 
“Of course, one must be very sceptical of such attempts by the American elites to finally grasp the destruction of the aggressive policy of regime change around the world.”
 
Yes, in fact, I would go so far as to say that as long as Soros runs foundations (generally searchable using: “Open Society” plus country name) in any country in the world, he simply is not being sincere about abandoning interventionism. You can’t have your cake and eat it both. So if you want to see whether he is sincere about promoting non-intervention, you can investigate any uprising anywhere to see if it is home-grown and spontaneous or Soros-instigated by doing a search with the search term:
 
Soros foundation [plus country name]
 
and see if one of his foundations is still open and running. If it is, he is hardly sincere about his new Quincy Institute co-founded with the Koch brothers. Remember the proverb: Beware of Soros bearing non-intervention.
 
This Soros is broken. He’s suddenly begun to sponsor peace initiatives.
 
June 11, 2019
 
Another analytical centre of foreign policy orientation is being created in Washington. You might think this is hardly news. So many of these think tanks regularly open and close in America that they’re countless. But the emergence of this institute is very actively discussed in political and journalistic circles, since its main sponsors are prominent representatives of two antagonistic strata of the elite, the Koch brothers and George Soros.
 
In order for a novitiate in American internal affairs to understand the meaning of this event, let me clarify: this is as if a hundred years ago Lenin and Denikin had created an analytical centre for joint study of the results of the First World War. If the activity of Soros in connection with his whirlwind activity in the post-Soviet space is well known to our reader, the Koch brothers are not so familiar, since for the most part they are connected with domestic American politics. It can be said that billionaires Charles and David Koch are to Republicans and US libertarians what Soros is to Democrats. And maybe more so since they are much more active at the local level, constantly sponsoring election campaigns of various Republican candidates in individual states, districts and cities. The Kokhs have created a whole empire of media and analytical centres supported by them in different areas, and are almost officially called Kokhtopus – that’s how widely distributed the tentacles of this conservative monster are.
 
And now, according to the newspaper The Boston Globe, two incompatible camps are being showered with 500 thousand dollars to create the Quincy Institute of Responsible Government. The existence of such a union is striking in itself. But even more formally declared goals are being promoted, for the sake of which this institution is supposedly being created: "The Quincy Institute promotes the idea of ​​leading US foreign policy out of endless war and conducting active diplomacy in pursuit of international peace."
 
The institute has chosen a sentence from the speech of the sixth President of the USA John Quincy Adams as the main slogan, after which the centre is named: America "no longer searches abroad for monsters that must be destroyed." It is declared that this institution, which has planned a full-fledged start-up for November of this year, will promote the line of non-interference of the USA in the affairs of foreign countries and will try to develop a sound foreign policy. In general, this is a direct confession that the current aggressive behaviour of Washington abroad does not look very healthy even in the eyes of American political scientists.
 
Financier George Soros wrote an article in which he predicted the disintegration of the European Union and compared the EU leadership with the Soviet politburo. On radio Sputnik, an expert in international affairs, Dmitriy Ofitserov-Belsky, opined that it might be worthwhile paying attention to Soros’s position.
 
In principle, there is also nothing new in the calls to abandon interventionist policies. This kind of campaign was developed by various US presidential candidates. Donald Trump resorted to such appeals to some extent, and the ideologist of Trumpism, Steve Bannon, considers this idea to be fundamental. Moreover, Trojan horses have already appeared among the Democrats - urging abandonment of the regime change policy in the current campaign to nominate US President Congresswoman Democrat Tulsi Gabbard [I am puzzled as to why this author calls such support for Tulsi Gabbard a Trojan horse]. But for such ideas to be financially supported by George Soros, whose numerous centres and centrics around the world are engaged in the opposite policy, this is in fact something new and amazing. This phenomenon deserves separate study and analysis.
 
What prompted the notorious billionaire to take a step that is so unconventional for him? Yes, it was the very crisis of liberal ideology that Vladimir Putin pointed out in the recent sensational interview with the newspaper The Financial Times. This interview quite naturally triggered a violent and extremely negative reaction on the part of liberals of all stripes. The President of Russia stepped on their sore spots, outlining a clear problem that since 2016 has manifested in a series of defeats of the liberal establishment for which no solution can be found. As for the ideological outcry of the neoliberals, The Economist magazine even devoted the last issue to an in absentia dispute with Putin, stating on the cover that it was not liberalism that was in crisis, but rather conservatism.
 
The liberal establishment of major Western countries clearly lacks ideas and strategies. Instead of doing a serious analysis of its painful defeats of the last three years, it could not come up with anything better than to dig up a foreign enemy (and, as we know, Russia was cast in this role). On the one hand, this is the easiest way out, because otherwise you would have to admit responsibility for the current crisis. But, on the other hand, this approach does not solve the problem itself, just drives it into a remote corner.
 
Apparently, Soros has recently begun to realize the hopelessness of such approaches. This is evidenced by his last year’s speech about the "existential crisis of Europe" and the frankly panicky article this year entitled "Europe, please wake up." In these, the main sponsor of the liberal ideological centres openly opposes one of the fundamental principles of the neoliberals, namely, the European open-door policy for migrants. That same policy is staunchly defended by the the numerous rabid fledglings of Soros's nest in various countries throughout the continent.
 
Now, as we see, the billionaire has attacked the shrine of American liberals - the US policy of global interventionism. It seems he understands that in order to bring the ideology of liberalism out of crisis, they must start searching for new meanings and abandon the well-established but hopelessly outdated clichés of the last century.
 
Of course, one must be very sceptical of such attempts by the American elites to finally grasp the destruction of the aggressive policy of regime change around the world. A single analytical centre that will promote a sensible foreign policy strategy in Washington, does not at all mean that this voice will be heard by someone and taken into consideration. However, the very fact that the influential sponsors of two opposing ideological currents of America even thought about this possibility inspires cautious optimism. What if, with the formation of new, more robust strategies in American politics over time, there will eventually be more sensible politicians who seek, not confrontation with Russia and other global actors, but peaceful coexistence?
 
To some, these expectations seem naive - they say America still cannot exist otherwise. Perhaps this is so. But in any case, nothing in Washington’s policies will change without a search for new ideas and approaches. Therefore, all movements in this direction are welcome.

Vince Dhimos answered a question at the German-language sector of Quora. The following is a translation of the question and Vince’s answer.
 
https://de.quora.com/Warum-wurden-und-werden-Juden-gehasst/answer/Vince-Dhimos?__nsrc__=4&__snid3__=4784656529
 
Why were and are Jews hated?
 
Before we start this discussion about hating Jews, we have to realize that there is a real and significant difference between Jews and Zionists. The Israeli government and the Zionists - including the American and European Zionists - have made great efforts to make the world believe that hatred of the Jews and opposition to Zionism are one and the same phenomenon. However, this is illogical for the simple reason that there are a growing number of Jews in Israel, the US, and Europe who reject Zionism and no one would accept the idea that Jewish groups might be anti-Jewish.
 
The reason why the Jews were hated in the distant past is not very clear. We do not have reliable historical records explaining the grievances on both sides, and we need to be careful not to fabricate our own reports out of whole cloth.
 
Much of the hatred of Jews in the past centuries is attributed to European Christians. There can be little doubt that often so-called "Christians" were to blame. For instance, Jews who refused to convert to Christianity in Spain could be burned at the stake. However, the word "Christian" has never enjoyed a consistent definition and it is hard to imagine Jesus approving of executing people for failing to accept Him.
 
If we define Christians as people who love friends and enemies, as Jesus taught, then we cannot blame Christians, but hypocrites who pretended to be Christians, but were not. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is generally considered a semantic game.
 
Ironically, most Protestant Christians in the US are "Christian" Zionists, but they do not follow the teachings of Christ.
 
They tend to give more importance to the Old Testament prophecy than to the words of Jesus.
 
For example, they influence political life in the US so that the political leaders they vote for give Israel arms to wage war against their neighbours. These weapons are sometimes used to kill unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and Iranian militias in Syria whose mission is to fight Wahhabi terrorists. The Israeli missile attacks in Syria even target domestic airports and endanger the lives of passengers. What happened to love thy neighbour as thyself? Judaism teaches this. It is from Leviticus. The "Christian" Zionists are Donald Trump's most important constituency, and thanks to them, the US is now flirting with a major war that has the potential to become a world war. In other words, there are significant numbers of both Jews and Christians who reject their own scriptures.
 
In addition, these "Christians" have been brainwashed by ultra-rightwing propaganda teaching that Iran, a Shiite country that rejects Saudi Wahhabism (the religion of ISIS and Al-Qaeda) for religious reasons, is the "biggest terrorist sponsor in the world." This absurd lie supports Israeli propaganda that Iran is a dangerous enemy of civilization. But in reality, Israel has 300 nuclear weapons (Iran has none!) and promotes war, causing the US to wage war against several countries. Countries that are not enemies of the US population.
 
Fortunately, Europe has not yet fallen victim to this religious fanaticism based on a complete misinterpretation of the scriptures.
 
Let me be clear: anti-Semitism is morally wrong and violates the teachings of Jesus.
 
But Zionism in its radical form teaches racism, and this racism led to the killing of countless innocent Palestinians by Zionist terrorists like the Stern Gang, Irgun and Haganah in 1948 and earlier.
 
The following is an excerpt I translated from the Spanish-language book, "Violencia y terror de los sionistas, antes y después del Estado de Israel", Editorial Canaan, and posted at Quora:

 
"Dr. Teresa Aranguren [2] reports in an informative book about the events that have taken place. I just want to highlight a few touching paragraphs from her book:
 
On April 9, 1948, Irgun and Stern (whose leaders included future Israeli Prime Ministers Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir) carried out the massacres of the residents of Deir Yassin.
 
"A young man was tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man were shot. Girls were put on a wall and shot with a submachine gun. The statements of the filmmaker Neta Shoshani about the massacre in Deir Yassin are hard to understand even 70 years after the fact.
 
"The region's Red Cross delegate, Jacques de Reynier, was the first to arrive in this location when the [Zionist] Irgun militias were still present:" Among the troops were some very young people, almost adolescents, all in military clothing and helmets, men and women armed to the teeth with pistols, machine-guns, grenades and even big knives, most of them still dripping with blood. A very beautiful young woman showed me her blood, that dripped [from her knife] like a trophy...
 
"I went between them and entered a house. The first room was dark, everything was confused, but nobody was visible. In the next room I found several bodies under the furniture and the broken mattresses, which were already cold.
 
"The cleansing had been done first with machine guns, then with grenades, and finally with the long knives; they were not worried that they would be discovered. The same scene as in the next room, but when I was about to leave, I heard what I thought was a sigh.
 
"I moved the bodies until I touched a small foot that was still warm. She was a ten-year-old girl, badly injured by a grenade, but still alive. I picked her up and one of the men tried to block me at the door, I pushed him and left with my precious body ...
 
"We checked the other houses and found the same horrific scene in all of them. We only found two other people alive, two women, one of them an old woman, who had huddled in the kitchen and hidden there for hours ...
 
"The village had four hundred inhabitants, about fifty were able to flee, three survived, the rest had been massacred by order of the commanders, since they are admirably disciplined troops ..." [3]
 
"Jacques de Reynier cites the death toll of 347 from the murder of Deir Yassin. Other sources speak of 250. In any case, it is not about the number of victims - because in those months of 1948 there were similar massacres in many other villages in Palestine - but the echo that the murder had and the panic movement that it evoked that made Deir Yassin one of the keys to the exodus of Palestinian peasants.
 
[In my debates with Israelis and Zionists in Quora, I repeatedly encounter the argument that the Arabs had left of their own free will and that the Zionists were not responsible for their exodus. Of course, they never mention these massacres, which, as reported at Haaretz, is being systematically covered up by the Israeli government. What is the definition of evil? Vince]
 
"Indeed, one of the elements of military strategy has been to achieve the “spontaneous” evacuation of the Arab population in rural Palestine. One pattern that was constantly repeated was to surround the villages and send a message through loudspeakers to the inhabitants: leave the village, or you will suffer the same fate as Deir Yassin.”
 
Below is a link to a video that allows you to understand how the first Zionists got their “rights” to the land:
 
In light of the above, it seems that if the Israelis have a right to this land, the Arabs have no rights, not even the right to life, and the Israelis have the right to kill them with impunity.
 
That is the essence of Zionism, so the elites had better stop saying that Judaism and Zionism are identical! Because saying that is the height of anti-Semitism and it suggests that Judaism promotes murder, when it does not. The startling truth of the matter is that Israel has a shortage of Jews and a surplus of Zionists.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md9Yqff1C-Q
 
CHRISTIANS, IT’S TIME FOR A FRANK, LOVING DIALOGUE WITH OUR JEWISH FRIENDS
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/christians-its-time-for-a-frank-loving-dialogue-with-our-jewish-friends
 
U.S. EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS ARE THE STAUNCHEST SUPPORTERS OF ISRAEL’S CRIMES
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/international-relations/us-evangelical-christians-are-the-staunchest-supporters-of-ls-crimes
 
ISRAEL AND SAUDI ARABIA: SUSPICIOUSLY COZY BED FELLOWS
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/international-relations/israel-and-saudi-arabia-suspiciously-cozy-bed-fellows
 
HOW ISRAEL REPAYS U.S. KINDNESS
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/international-relations/how-israel-repays-us-kindness
(why US blindly supports Israel)
 
RUSSIA IS ONLY CHOICE FOR RESOLVING ISRAELI-ARAB CONFLICT
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/international-relations/russia-must-serve-as-arbiter-in-israeli-arab-conflict
 
I WARNED YOU ISRAEL WANTS TO DRAG THE US INTO ITS WAR AND HERE IT COMES
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/i-warned-you-that-israel-wants-to-drag-the-us-into-its-war-and-here-it-comes
 
RUSSIA: CHARLES SCOFIELD’S INVENTED ENEMY OF ISRAEL
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/russia-scofields-invented-enemy-of-israel
 
HOW JOHN BOLTON PAVED THE WAY FOR DESTRUCTION OF LEBANON BY ISRAEL
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/international-relations/how-john-bolton-paved-the-way-for-destruction-of-lebanon-by-israel
 
ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO EXIST=PALESTINIANS’ DUTY TO DIE
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/ls-right-to-existarabs-right-to-die

 
Below is our translation of another article by Ivan Danilov with commentary and notes [in brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
Putin’s explosive interview with the British paper Financial Times at the Kremlin the day before the Osaka G20 conference, arguably has caused an even bigger media splash than his monumental 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference and the heads of media moguls and Western politicians are exploding like never before. Perhaps the most iconoclastic segment was the following:

“I am not trying to insult anyone because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia. But we have no problem with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish,” he said. “But some things do appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can have five or six gender roles.” “Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that,” he added. “But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”
 
Western social media users and commentators have lost their user privileges and their jobs, and some have gone to jail for saying things less inflammatory than this, for example, in the Land of the “Free.” Yet the Western world breathed more freely after this no-holds-barred interview went to press. Westerners have felt this kind of liberation only temporarily on those rare occasions when a bold candidate stood up for the people and then was elected to high office, only to have this same leader compelled to his knees before powerful Establishment figures upon assumption of the office. The Establishment brings everyone down to its own sleazy level. No hero can survive the smears in the West. There is no such thing as a powerful personality any more. They all go in the meat grinder once they start to make waves. That’s why more than one conservative activist has commented, only half jokingly, “I want Putin for president.”
 
Slowly but surely, Putin is asserting himself not only at home but throughout the world. He took the reins in Syria and got the US-backed terrorists on the run. He is quite likely the reason there has been no war in Iran, at least so far. And now the British have even given him a platform to argue his case.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
https://ria.ru/20190629/1556021845.html
 
Major humiliation from Putin: he seems to be winning the media war
 
by Ivan Danilov
 
June 29, 2019
 
Vladimir Putin's interview with the Financial Times flagship of the world financial press literally blew up the global media field. Traditionally, traders, financiers and officials of economic ministries and departments of various countries usually watch the interviews of political leaders in financial media, but in this case, the theses of the Russian leader went far beyond financial issues and now we can safely predict that this interview with Putin will be a source of hard-hitting and pithy quotes for the widest western audience. Firstly, the Russian leader has demonstrated a level of political incorrectness that no Western politician can afford in the modern world. Secondly, Putin’s interview looks like an indictment of “global liberalism,” which shocked many in the West. And most importantly: the Russian president made a powerful bid for global ideological leadership. Millions of people around the world now have a politician who does not hesitate to say things that are forbidden to mention, and a politician who professes altogether classical values ​​that have been strictly prohibited in the West.
 
If we summarize the reaction of the Western media (at the time of writing this column), we see that in the western media world, three theses of the Russian leader aroused the most interest. This is quite noticeable in the headlines: "Vladimir Putin says liberalism is outdated” and praises Donald Trump as a" talented person" (British The Telegraph), "Putin assesses Trump as talented,” says liberalism is “outdated" (the American political publication The Hill), “Western liberalism is outdated, warns Putin on the eve of a meeting with Teresa May” (British The Guardian).
 
Almost all media (and there are a lot of reactions) are writing about “outdated liberalism” and only Euronews is interested in at least something other than criticism of liberalism and the assessment of President Trump’s political talents, and reports with reference to Reuters news agency: “Putin said that (shrinking. - Ed.) oil production has helped stabilize world markets."
 
From this brief study, two important conclusions can be drawn. First, there can be no question of any media isolation of Russia or the transformation of Russia to a secondary (and uninteresting) regional player. On the world stage, there are only three political leaders whose interviews with a foreign publication will immediately become top news on all continents, and they are Putin, Xi and Trump. The second conclusion: the Russian leader delivered a verbal strike at the sore spot of Western political discourse. The topic of criticism of modern Western "liberalism" has turned out to be so painful that it is absolutely impossible to ignore it.
 
Aside from the issue of the Donald Trump’s political talents, the Western media is generally extracting two quotes from the whole interview: “there is a modern so-called liberal idea, which, I think, has simply completely outlived itself. Regarding some of its elements, our Western partners have admitted that they are simply unrealistic: multiculturalism is one of them, for example. When the problem of migration began, many admitted that yes, this, unfortunately, does not work and we need to remember the interests of the indigenous population, and "this liberal idea implies that you [immigrants] don’t need to do anything at all. Kill, rob, rape - you have nothing to worry about, because you are an immigrant, we need to protect your rights. What rights? You break the law, you get punished. Therefore, this idea itself has become obsolete and contradicts the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population." From the standpoint of the editors and journalists working in the western media, these quotes are probably evidence that Vladimir Putin is the enemy of all that is good and enlightened in the western (liberal) world, but now we have a case where all the anti-Putin Western media efforts are engaged in improving the image of the Russian president.
 
If you look at the reaction of ordinary social network users, it is easy to notice that Putin had said out loud what many in the West would like to say, but cannot, for fear of losing their job, their reputation or even their freedom. Moreover, the Russian president was the only European politician who could afford such statements, and this interview shows that he is much freer in his statements than a certain Donald Trump, who (despite all his extravagance and flamboyant rhetoric) is obliged in most cases to demonstrate a respectful attitude towards liberal ideology and its values. From the entire interview, the Westerner will most likely remember a simple principle: where there is Putin, there is freedom, and he will note for himself that the Russian president is telling the truth that hurts the sensibilities of the Western political establishment.
 
When the western expert community recovers a little from the shock, it will surely accuse Putin of allegedly being the ideological inspirer or even the secret leader of the right wing (as well as the far right) everywhere and of the nationalist and the anti-Establishment movements of the planet. But even that would rather benefit his international image.
 
The main reason for the painful reaction of our Western partners lies in the fact that Vladimir Putin gave an ironic and rational explanation for the political phenomenon that tormented the consciousness of Washington, London and Brussels experts.
 
In their world, history should have ended a long time ago in accordance with Fukuyama’s forecasts, but instead, Brexit happened, Trump was elected, and the European Union plunged into a systemic crisis such that its continued existence after regular elections to the European Parliament has been called a genuine success. Of course, the public is allowed to believe in "explanations for the plebeians." This is along the lines of, for example, "Russian hackers bought advertising on Facebook and that’s why Brexit happened." But for their personal understanding, the expert community would like to hear something more reasonable, while no one has the courage to admit the obvious systemic problems. But Putin has the courage to do this, and his precisely articulated wording "the contemporary modern so-called liberal idea, it <...> has simply become obsolete itself" is, in fact, the correct answer to the main question of the modern Western world.
 
Even if Western politicians and experts do not want to accept this explanation, the reality will not change. Conservative and populist revenge is not just inevitable, it is already gaining momentum around the world, and instead of coarse “liberal idealism” (which declares humanism, but behaves like a cannibal), pragmatic realism, which is so beneficial to Russia and which is so disliked by many Russophobes in the West, will gradually come to dominate. This does not mean that Western partners in particular will love Russia in general and Putin in particular, and this is not necessary. It does mean, however, that at last there is a chance that world politics will be discussed by leaders for whom their real national values ​​and interests are more important than ideologies.
 
END TRANSLATION

Many Americans supported Trump only because he sounded like he wanted peace, although I was skeptical because of his anti-Iran rhetoric, which was aimed at pleasing Israel.

Tulsi Gabbard talks peace and not out of both sides of her mouth either. If you are sick of wars being foisted on you by lies and want peace, no one else in the race will deliver.

Already they have revved up the lie machine, calling her a Putin stooge. Can we ignore that nonsense this time around? After all, if Putin is the only one calling for peace and US candidates want war, why should anyone hate him?

The following is a publication produced by the Larouche PAC
 
https://larouchepub.com/pr/2019/190627_support_gabbard_warning.html
 
Americans Support Tulsi Gabbard’s Warnings against War in Democrats’ Debate
June 27, 2019 (EIRNS)—Rep. Tulsi Gabbard forced the great strategic issue of the danger of nuclear war, the urgency of ensuring that the U.S. does not go to war against Iran, and the need to end the current wars (e.g., Afghanistan) on the agenda in the first of the Democratic Party Presidential candidate debates last night.
Drudge Report, which is followed by many in President Donald Trump’s base, headlined the “shocker” result of its online survey after the debate: over 41% of the 75,000 people who answered its poll voted Gabbard the winner of the debate. In similar, if smaller surveys by the Washington Examiner, NJ.com (Newark Star Ledger), and Heavy, Gabbard also carried the day with between 30-40% of the “vote,” the other candidates coming in far behind.

Gabbard used the first question to her—about her position on equal pay—to force the war issue onto the agenda. After recounting her military experience—she is a war veteran who served one tour in Iraq, and a second in Southwest Asia, and now carries the rank of Major in the Army National Guard—Gabbard answered that our leaders have been leading us from one war to the next, and leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our taxpayer dollars and thousands of American lives.

Later, she hit the biggest danger: “We’re in a greater risk of nuclear war today than ever before in history.”

The American people need to understand that a war on Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly, than anything that we saw in Iraq, she stated at another point. It would take more lives, would exacerbate the refugee crisis, and would not be contained to Iran. This would turn into a regional war. She continued: “That’s why it is so important that everyone one of us, every single American, stands up and says no war with Iran.”

NBC, citing FBI agents and other known liars, immediately put out the line that Gabbard is being promoted by “the Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 U.S. election.” What worries them, as “former” FBI agent Clint Watts admitted to NBC, is that candidate Gabbard may be able to make such “positions” part of the Democratic primary debates—and thereby of the presidential election as a whole.
    

Below you will find out translation of an article by Ivan Danilov from RIA Novosti with commentary by Vince Dhimos.
 
Every Russian knows the history of the Georgia-Russia war but US news consumers are subjected to a version that is far from reality. I recommend this site for a decent summary. The gist of it is that the US seeks control of Georgia and much of Eurasia, but Russia has thrown a spanner in its plans. Mikheil Saakashvili was president of Georgia at the time of this war but had used questionable tactics to rise to that position. His rise to power was facilitated by the Rose Revolution that deposed the previous president Edward Shevardnadze. It is important to note that, while Western media insist that this revolution was due to the “spontaneous” Kmara youth movement, it in fact grew from a subsoil prepared far in advance by US NGOs, including USAID and a George Soros Open Society Georgia foundation (OSGF). A thorough academic investigation done after the revolution is reported here in PDF format and shows that this revolution was by no means home-grown. The idea is to control Eurasia and most of the rest of the world according to a nifty plan by Zbigniew Brzezinksi that keeps on failing.
 
At the outset of the Georgia-Russia war, the US-supported Saakashvili aggressively launched an offensive against two breakaway regions of Georgia that had been part of the Soviet Union and wanted no parts of Georgia. Same story as Crimea and the Donbass. Russia came to the defence of the two breakaway regions, whose citizens were being slaughtered by Georgia, and easily won a victory. The pro-US Georgian government is smarting to this day.
 
Eventually, the US-educated and US-backed Saakashvili turned out to be more authoritarian and anti-democratic than the Shevardnadze government that he replaced (same scenario as in Ukraine) and there was unrest in Georgia as a result. GlobalResearch writes:
 
“In 2007, similar demonstrations took place in Georgia. Back then, Saakashvili responded by imposing emergency rule and riot police was used to prevent this wave of discontent from escalating and some pro-opposition TV stations (Imedi and Kavkasia) were, apparently, forcibly closed.[2] What both episodes have in common is that Georgian opposition members have denounced the Saakashvili government as corrupt and arbitrarily authoritarian.”
 
The US narrative of “Russian aggression” in Georgia and the constant pressure of US NGOs in the country has maintained a smouldering Russophobia, just as it has in the Baltics, Poland and elsewhere.
 
We must always consider all actions of US NGOs in the former Soviet bloc as part of a grand plan aimed at depriving Russia of its influence in that region. This is part of a grand plan to control Eurasia and Asia, as described here:
 
“What’s at stake is what former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski described in his 1997 book “The Grand Chessboard.” He called Eurasia the “centre of world power extending from Germany and Poland in the East through Russia and China to the Pacific and including the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.” [My highlighting]  He continued: “The most immediate (US) task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.” Dominating that part of the world and its vast energy and other resources is Washington’s goal with NATO and Israel its principal tools to do it:
 
“— in the Middle East with its two-thirds of the world’s proved oil reserves (about 675 billion barrels); and
 
“— the Caspian basin with an estimated 270 billion barrels of oil plus one-eighth of the world’s natural gas reserves.
 
“New World Order” strategy aims to secure them. Russia, China, and Iran have other plans. India allies with both sides.”
 
The game the US is playing in Georgia today is ultimately doomed to failure because, thanks in part to US bullying in the form of tariffs, sanctions, embargoes and media slander, Russia and China are being pushed into each others’ arms. But without these two countries, Brzezinski’s “centre of world power” will never be theirs, and they know this. So what we are seeing in Eastern Europe, with regime change efforts, meddling by US NGOs, anti-Russian propaganda and NATO exercises at Russia’s border, is all just vain flailings much like the gasping and flopping of a landed fish at the bottom of a boat. The Middle East is also lost to the US thanks to US overreach in the region, ie, the near-total destruction of Iraq and Syria with US bombs and US-allied terrorists cynically called “moderates,” the hostility of US ally Israel toward the Iranians and Hezbollah in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, and Russia’s increasing military power to confront the US armed forces. Just this morning, for instance, we read that Israel – which has been itching for war with Russia partner Iran – is charging Russia with using its electronic warfare means to disrupt the GPS signals over Israeli airspace. Seen in this perspective, the Georgian protests were mere pinpricks, and Putin dealt swiftly with them by banning air travel between Russia and Georgia. The following translation adds up the reckoning for this move by the Kremlin.
 
We remind the reader that this economic backlash is at work all over Russophobic Eastern Europe, for example, in Latvia, as we showed here. We also showed here how Ukraine had been impoverished by its adventure with the US and its suicidal disconnect from the Russian economic sphere that once provided a fair share of the nation’s income. What the victims of anti-Russian propaganda need to wake up to is the fact that the US, despite its history of generosity, eg, via the Marshall Plan, has long been out of the business of actually helping people economically, even those states that have fallen for its regime change propaganda. Its modus operandi now is flat-out impoverishment.
 
The unspoken statement by Putin is “you want to hate on Russia, fine, but there is a price to pay.”
 
BEGIN TRANSATION
 
Russophobia costs at least 750 million dollars
 
June 25, 2019
 
Ivan Danilov
 
Thanks to the consistent efforts of Georgian politicians (and the Georgian voters who support them), we can finally answer the question: how much does Russophobia cost? If the data provided by the head of the Federation of Hotels and Restaurants of Georgia Shalva Alaverdashvili are true, then the approximate price is (for a start and without additional Russian sanctions) about 750 million US dollars. If we proceed from the population of Georgia at 3.7 million (according to the World Bank), it turns out that the anti-Russian actions and demonstrations with slogans about the Russian occupation, and indeed the whole bright carnival of gleeful Russophobia will cost $202 per resident of Georgia, that is, about half the average white collar salary, according to the government portal Investingeorgia.org. It is clear that the losses from the decline of the Russian tourist flow will not be evenly distributed across the population, but still the figure is already making an impression. Moreover, with the continuation of the anti-Russian policy, these losses (in the form of lost revenues) will be repeated from year to year.
 
In terms of Georgia’s GDP, the losses from a reduction in the number of Russian tourists look even more interesting. According to the World Bank, Georgia’s GDP is only $ 15.5 billion, so a loss of $ 750 million, or about 4.83% of gross domestic product, is a very serious blow to the national economy. The figures are especially impressive if you consider that the loss estimate of the Georgian side was taken not from a Russian official, but from a Georgian source - after all, who would know better than the founder of the Federation of Hotels and Restaurants of Georgia how much money the tourist sector of the country will lose?
 
However, it is definitely not necessary to dwell on tourism. There is no need to engage in lengthy polemics with arrogant politicians of foreign countries, and even more so we need not beat our breasts over the fact that a certain Kiev or Tbilisi at some point in its history does not see its future as being with Russia, does not want to respect Russian interests or show even minimal respect for Russians, who in some limiting countries are called “Moskals” [an ethnic slur of Russians in Ukraine], sometimes “occupiers,” or other pejorative terms.
 
All neighbours and partners need to convey (preferably with the help of the most painful measures of economic impact) a simple idea: good relations with Russia, which, among other things, make it possible to earn access to Russian markets and Russian money, is a privilege, and this privilege must be earned, and then carefully cultivated, groomed and cherished. Those who do not understand this will remain without access to Russian money and markets – this is not a matter of punishment, it is a matter of Russia's elementary self-esteem as a country. Paying money to a country whose leadership sincerely hates Russia and the "Russian occupiers" is, to put it mildly, a strange and extremely unproductive strategy.
 
The ultimate goal of this economic educational process can be considered a situation in which any anti-Russian statement by the president or prime minister will trigger an immediate reflex in the residents of a bordering country, namely:  you need to go to a rally and throw this president or prime minister out onto the street, otherwise there will be sanctions again, and again there will be expensive gas, again there will be no tourists, again there will be no money. If the residents of the neighbouring country do not do this, then economic pressure must be increased until the conditioned reflex becomes fixed. And this is not “imperial manners,” as lovers of the idea of ​​“returning Crimea in exchange for jamón” might think, but the best experience of our Western partners. [The mention of jamón references the Russian counter-sanctions against the first US sanctions imposed on Russia following the accession of Crimea to Mother Russia. Imported Spanish ham (jamón), a favourite of Russians, was missed at first, but was soon replaced by local delicacies when Russia embargoed European food imports].
 
Experience with Washington, especially if you look at the actions of the current US administration, shows how consistent the Americans are in using economic and power methods of putting pressure on those who show even the slightest anti-American intentions. An important point: for the introduction of economic sanctions or even holding actions of forceful influence, Washington, London or Brussels do not even need any special reason, and the set of pretexts is limited only by the imagination (and sometimes the sense of humour) of specialized officials. However, Russia is a more civilized state. And it uses coercive methods only in case of extreme necessity, that is, for self-defence or defence of allies, but measures of economic impact are definitely gentlemen's tools that must be applied often and wholeheartedly.
 
The practice of the Soviet Union convincingly shows that the elites (and a certain part of the population) of countries neighbouring Russia do not feel any gratitude for all the financial and human resources that were invested in bringing true European civilization to the backward regions that were once an individual country. And consequently, one should not repeat the mistakes of the past and look for some kind of magical mixture of attractive ideology and investments, which often slide into banal "subsidies in exchange for kisses." The inconsistent sympathies of politicians of neighbouring countries who betray Russia at the earliest opportunity (for example, after receiving the first more advantageous offer from Brussels or Washington), are not worthy of our even spending one rouble on them. The best way to make Russia an attractive partner is to invest in Russia itself, since our country is huge: every rouble invested in Kaliningrad and Samara, Perm and Vladivostok is not only an investment in the future of Russia, but also an investment in prompting the residents of neighbouring States to be jealous of the Russians, to desire that their children learn Russian and live in Russia. If this burning, total, all-pervading envy is combined with a keen sense that Russia will be quite well off without any love for Russophobic government formations at its borders, but it will be bad for them to lack access to Russian markets and money – this means that the missions of foreign policy in the so-called near abroad can be considered fulfilled.
 
Institutional Russophobia, contempt for Russia, statements about “Russian occupiers,” etc, are all luxury political goods that very few and very rich countries can afford (but with pain in the soul and in the wallet). Henceforth we will observe how Georgia gradually becomes aware of the high cost of the political position taken by those politicians for whom the Georgian voters massively voted. We can assume that those 750 million dollars, which Georgia may lose on reduced Russian tourism, will be augmented by losses from embargoes of Georgian wine to Russia (which is about 116 million dollars a year). Paraphrasing the well-known Russian saying, one can say that the miser pays twice, the fool thrice, and the Russophobe constantly, and it always will be so. Paraphrasing of the Russian proverb: Скупой платит дважды, дурак трижды а лох — по жизни, ie, the miser pays twice, the fool thrice and the dupe all his life]
 
END TRANSLATION

 
The following is our translation of an article from RIA FAN with commentary and notes [in brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
According to our translated article, the trigger of the recent uprising in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi was that the head of the Russian delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy in Tbilisi, the chairman of the meeting, Gavrilov, who also headed the Russian delegation, sat in the chair of the speaker of the Georgian parliament.
 
Almost every Western commentator referencing issues between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia takes the view that the Georgians are simply striving to be free of the nefarious influence of Russia and need US and European help. The implication is always that they need US NGOs and NATO to keep them “free.” I had shown here that  NATO certainly does not make any European nation free, but makes Europe a vassal of the warlike Washington government, and that it has already murdered 13,500 Europeans.
 
But “freedom” has a special definition in the West and in the US-aligned former Soviet republics. In Soviet days, it was easy to see that these republics were under Russian control and that their peoples understandably yearned to be free of this pernicious influence.
 
But today, in the absence of a Soviet Union, only the US tries to bring these peoples under its heavy-handed control. Yet the US NGOs and other agents there are strongly suggesting – without evidence — that nothing has changed since the Soviet Union fell and that today’s Russia is just as big a bully as the former Soviet bosses. One of the US agencies involved in the former Soviet states is USAID, which is a front for regime change that pretends to be helping the poor. USAID was one of the agencies that instigated and supported the illegal and violent Maidan coup that changed Ukraine from a rapidly developing state to the poorest country in Europe – according to IMF statistics. Let me point out that the European countries with the most anti-Russian sentiment, ie, the Baltic states and Ukraine, are the ones most strongly aligned with the US and are also the poorest countries in the region. Makes you wonder when their citizens will wake up and restore normal relations with Russia.
 
Even the NYT, which is generally seen by many as an Establishment screed, admits, in a short editorial here, that USAID has been meddling in European internal politics.
 
21stcenturywire.com calls USAID a CIA front. An article in The American Conservative lists several countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Slovakia and Ukraine, where USAID has worked to achieve regime change in the name of “democracy.”
 
USAID is active in almost all of the former Soviet republics and bloc, and the main thrust is not “democracy” but regime change and social change, as well as a the promotion of a toxic anti-Russian atmosphere. In Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, for example, thanks to the US influence, there are now laws that ban or discourage the teaching and/or official use of Russian even though some of these countries have very large populations of ethnic Russians and Russian has long been the lingua franca between non-native segments of the population and the locals. In Latvia, for example, 43.7% of the population speak fluent Russian as a second language. Ukraine also has a very high percentage of Russian speakers and one of the main sore spots that caused the republics of Lugansk and Donetsk to break away was the US-backed Kiev government’s anti-Russian language laws. The national languages of the tiny Baltic states are spoken by very small numbers of people and graduates with a higher education in any of these national languages are either limited to the professional job markets of those countries themselves, where unemployment is high, or are obliged to acquire a professional level of proficiency in the language of the country to which they emigrate. For many, Russian would be the most useful language because it is relatively easy for a citizen of a former Soviet republic or bloc country to immigrate to the Russian Federation, where jobs are abundant, and it is hard to ignore that Russian is the language with the most native speakers and the biggest cultural influence in their region. In Poland and Czechia, for example, where, fortunately, this Russian language ban does not exist, there is a high demand for the teaching of Russian. Thus, the anti-Russian influence of Washington not only causes economic problems but also denies cultural opportunities for the Baltic states. On a personal note, I was able to use Russian to communicate in Estonia, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 70s, and at that time, the language was preferred for communication between travellers and immigrants from various countries in the region. It makes no sense at all to discourage the use of this very practical language.
 
Thus the Baltic states are shooting themselves in the foot with these language restrictions and I strongly suspect this rejection of Russian language and culture is rooted in the teachings and propaganda of American NGOs like USAID, which boil down to simple anti-Russian racism.
 
I suspect that once the American campaign to discourage Russian language and culture and replace it with American everything subsides, Russian will once again recover its rightful place in the region.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
Expert explains who is behind the protests in Georgia
 
US globalists have launched in Georgia a new phase of the effort to separate that country from Russia. This was announced to the Federal News Agency by Valery Korovin, a member of the Izborsk Club and director of the Centre for Geopolitical Expertise.
 
“In Georgia, the next stage of military detachment from Russia has begun,” he stated. “After the establishment of the nationalist course launched by [the first president of Georgia] Zviyad Gamsakhurdia and the operation on behalf of the United States [by the country's former president] Mikhail Saakashvili, it was time to target orthodoxy, the last link between Russia and Georgia.”
 
According to the FAN interlocutor, the liberalization of Georgia occurs in stages: first, hard nationalism, which provoked the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia [Western media and pols insist this secession was all Russia’s fault], then the orientation towards NATO membership, and then - church reform, post-modernization and dehumanization, a scenario implemented more than once by globalist strategists.
 
“By creating their networks on the territory of various states, US globalists use any excuse to put pressure on the government, demanding greater liberalization, and if the state doesn’t want to make concessions, they demolish it entirely,” explained the Director of the CGE.
 
The IMF tranche allotted the day before, and the call to hold a gay pride parade in Tbilisi (amid the unrest) were no coincidence.  This is the political globalist machine that devours states and peoples. ”
 
Korovin is convinced that Georgia will be able to resist only if it rallies around Orthodoxy and traditional values and does not give in to minorities again.
 
Recall that the riots began on the evening of June 21, 2019 in the Georgian capital, in fact, because of a strange circumstance. After the State Duma deputy Sergei Gavrilov sat in the chair of the local parliament, infuriating Georgian radicals, the building began to be stormed.
US involvement was suspected in the riots. Earlier, the senior director of the Biden Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Michael Carpenter, stated that “one day Georgia may wake up and find not 20%, but 100% occupied territories,”
 
In addition, it is very symptomatic that the American Foundation “Free Russia” is located in Georgia, whose activities are openly anti-Russian. The United States Agency for International Development (United States Agency for International Development, USAID) is also likely behind the riots.
 
It is American internet activists, including those residing in the territory of the European Union, who incite Georgians to unrest, and so actively support the “struggle” of Georgians with Russia. Thus, the Web maintains the media background necessary for subsequent implementation of the mission of the US globalist elites.
 
END OF TRANSLATION

Cocky Netanyahu before US Congress:

"If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee that it will have enormous reverberations on the region. And I think that the people sitting right next door, in Iran, young people, will say that the time for such regimes, such despots, is gone. Something new is happening."

Er, Mister Netanyahu, was that a money-back guarantee by any chance?
 


I had shown before right here on May 18, 2019 at New Silk Strategies that Israel had admitted it wants to drag the US into its war on Iran.
 
As far as I know, no one in the msm and no blogger picked up the story. I am not trying to grab the limelight. I stumbled upon this Israeli op-ed by accident. Like in the old Peter Sellers movie “Being There,” I was just there. But I saw the danger in what I was reading. It was crystal clear that Israel – the Middle East nation with 300 nukes – was going to try its best to push the US into war, because it said so, in black and white. Israel, the warlike country with 300 nukes, admitted it wanted to punish non-nuclear Iran for even thinking about developing a nuclear bomb. Even though Iran had signed an agreement with multiple countries not to develop a nuke under a verifiable regime, and Israel friend Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement without cause, to the delight of the ultra-right in Tel Aviv, thereby giving rise to this current crisis. So of course, all of this is Iran’s fault and the whole world needs to punish that evil country for trying to defend itself. Right?
 
As I reported here on May 18, Israeli Major General Yaakov Amidror brazenly wrote in his op-ed at TV7israelnews in March 2019, scarcely 3 months ago that:
 
Israel must “win the struggle” against Iran “one way or the other” and
 
“Israel must enlist a reluctant US to take an active part in operations alongside it, and not only as a supportive observer from the sidelines.”  [my highlighting]
 
In the past, anyone who stated that Israel was behind US wars in the Muslim world was instantly flagged as anti-Semitic and was tarred with the smelliest brush in the box – before he had a chance to defend himself or continue exposing the Israeli military for its role in creating war and chaos in the Middle East.
 
And this despite the fact that prior to the disastrous Iraq war, Netanyahu spent 2 hours haranguing the US Congress to sell that war. Specifically, Amidror had said in his op-ed at TV7israelnews.
 
QUOTE:
 
“Israel’s opposition to Iranian entrenchment in Syria and Lebanon is twofold:  To prevent Iran from building a beachhead against Israel through its proxies on Israel’s borders, and to impede development of Iran’s nuclear and long-range missile capabilities. Israel is absolutely determined and prepared to act forcefully against Iran, which could lead to a full-scale war. Israel must win this struggle against Iran, one way or another.”
 
And so far, Amidror’s scheme is working. Israel has, “one way or the other,” enlisted the willing assistance of Lindsay Graham to pressure Trump into war. Graham blared out his overbearing statement on national TV, and at realclearpolitics, the headline reads:
 
“Graham: If Iran gets away with anything else, it is a signal to the world That Trump is ‘all talk’"
 
With these offensive words, aimed at a fellow Republican colleague, Graham has pushed Trump into a corner and Trump now has to act. Or do nothing and take it on the jaw.
 
Interestingly, Graham then said “If they do anything else against an American asset and this president doesn't respond like Ronald Reagan, that's a signal to North Korea and the entire world we're all talk.” Graham forgets that N. Korea already is working on developing a nuke, already seeing Trump as all talk. Further, though the US public may have forgotten, Reagan never started a war with or attacked a militarily powerful nation, even when provoked. For example, he did nothing when the Soviets shot down US commercial flight 007 over Kamchatka in 1983. Unlike Trump. Reagan did not make threats against the USSR at that time, nothing. He let if blow over. And no one dared question his authority – the whining mouse from S. Carolina wouldn’t have dared.
 
I am not going to stick my neck out and suggest that Mossad or the CIA was behind those attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf (though Israel has the assets to carry out such an attack and has a history of false flags). I will only say that Iran had no motive whatsoever unless they are really stupid or crazy, though maybe they are. But it is a mark against the US that Pompeo and Bolton so quickly accused Iran of perpetrating those attacks before an investigation could be performed, when it was abundantly clear that Israel was the one itching for war “one way or another” in its own words! Who had the motive? Cui bono? Yet, the known war mongers (including known Iranophobe John Bolton) in Trump’s cabinet quickly pointed the finger at Iran in an attempt to trap Trump into attacking Iran, a move that would greatly endanger his chances of re-election in 2020.
 
Now that the senator has indirectly pointed his dainty finger and accused the president of being weak, it will be interesting to see what happens next.
 
As Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif said after the attacks and the swift US accusations: “suspicious doesn’t begin to describe what happened.”
 
So now I have a question for the US public:
 
Did you learn a lesson from the phony narrative of the WMDs in Iraq that no one has been able to find? Or are you about to fall into another trap that could lead to a war three times as costly as that one?

 
Vince Dhimos answered a question at Quora.
 
https://www.quora.com/Why-has-Russia-been-for-decades-a-traditional-enemy-of-Israel-What-did-the-Israelis-ever-do-to-them#
 
Why has Russia been, for decades, a traditional enemy of Israel? What did the Israelis ever do to them?
 
BEGIN QUORA ANSWER
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
This question is more of a statement and it is erroneous. Russia has never been a traditional enemy of Israel ever. Now if the querier had said Russia was a traditional enemy of the Jews, that may have been a bit closer to the truth, but also not very accurate. While the word pogrom is Russian in origin, several other countries waged pogroms against their Jews, including Poland, Ukraine, and Greece, the Soviet Union was the country that sent more of its people to Israel than any other. 20% of Israelis were born in Russia and many more are descended from them. Not only that, Putin frequently meets with Netanyahu and is so friendly with him that the Russian people are annoyed because of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians and its attacks on Syria, as can be seen by reading the forums of Russian-language news sites.
 
And as for traditional enemies of the Jews, no nation under the sun has come anywhere near to Germany in terms of persecuting Jews. The Holocaust and concentration camps like Auschwitz were not located in Russia, of course, and Russia bitterly opposed Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. Soviet propaganda and literature established Russia as the anti-Nazi that treated its Jews with kindness. Auschwitz was in Poland, run by German Nazis, and who was it that liberated these Jewish prisoners? Yes, it was the Russians. So how are they traditional enemies of the Jews? Only in someone’s imagination, and the one mainly responsible is named below.
 
I think the question should have read “why has Russia been traditionally blamed as an enemy of the Jews?
 
This myth of Russia as an enemy of the Jews was first popularized by Charles Scofield, the author of the commentaries in the Scofield Bible. Scofield’s footnote at the bottom of the first page of Ezekiel 38 (p. 883) started a pernicious myth among English-speaking Christians, particularly Americans, who have a tendency to read the Bible through the prism of Bible “scholars,” and for decades, Scofield was their favourite. Some of them actually believed his notes were inspired by the Almighty. Although Protestants have long criticised the Catholics for insisting that only the priests were qualified to read and understand the Bible, Protestants quickly adopted the same kind of man-centred principles in their doctrines, holding mostly doctrines that some Bible “scholar” or other had invented. In 1909, on said p. 883, Scofield added a note to Ezekiel’s description of the battle of Armageddon, that he could not have written if he had lived through WW II by that time. Quote:
 
“That the primary reference is to the northern (European), headed up by Russia, all agree. ..... “Gog” is the prince, “Magog” is his land.”
 
This gave rise to the belief – which lasted in US Christian circles until far into the 20th Century and beyond, including the present day  – that Gog and Magog – the villains who were to invade Israel in the future – were a man and a place, respectively, in Russia, making Russia an anti-Semitic villain. But Assyrian court records discovered decades after Scofield published his commentaries show that Gog and Magog were places in what is now Turkey. Thus, standard Christian views were forged not by God but by a fallible man and they stuck.
 
Scofield continues (remember, it was 1909 and the Holocaust in the Third Reich had not yet happened):
 
“Russia and the northern powers have been the latest persecutors of dispersed Israel.”
 
Note that Scofield does not say which of the northern powers he is referring to. Certainly, if he had had even the slightest inkling which ones they were, he would have mentioned them. In mentioning only Russia, he was infecting most of Protestantism with a pernicious fear and distrust of Russia that she in no way deserved.
 
Thus in one footnote, Scofield, through the fruits of his vivid imagination, has set the tone for US-led foreign policy for over a century to come, effectively endorsing a fear and distrust of Russia that extended into Western, particularly American, foreign policy. It is still very much in place.
 
This one man’s notes on Israel and its supposed future enemies has contributed greatly to the phenomenon we call Russophobia, which, BTW, got its start in his homeland, England, where it held sway by the middle of the 19th Century and was no doubt the primary impediment to relations between Europe and Russia. In fact, it seems likely that Scofield’s view of Russia was shaped not by his reading of the scriptures but by good old fashioned English Russophobia that predated his commentaries.
 
To get a snapshot of what Russia’s current views are on Judaism and the Jews, here is my translation of part of an article from the Kremlin site:
 
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/26985
 
“The President of Russia [Putin] declared the need to erect a barrier to xenophobia and religious extremism in society.
 
“Russia is a unique country,” said the head of state, where for centuries Christianity, Judaism and Muslim cultures not only coexisted but were in harmony. According to the President, this fusion is the basis of the strength of the multinational Russian people.”
 
Contrast this with America, where, after many years of human relations based on race and religion-based foreign policy, little if anything has been learned. A president has forged and enforced an immigration policy denying travel to America to people because they are Muslims (but ironically, this is only enforced against Shiites, not the more dangerous Sunnis) and US planes have bombed and killed thousands of Muslims for reasons that no one has ever been able to adequately articulate, except that they were mostly Shiites and the US is partial to Sunnis (due to its alliance with Saudi). As for the Jews and Israel, there are no attempts to actually help Israel, for example. US policies simply give Israel what it thinks it wants, always by military means, thereby actually putting the people of Israel in grave danger. Pulling out of the Iran deal did nothing but infuriate the Iranians and Hezbollah and nothing to promote understanding. US tolerance for the abuse of Palestinians indulges Israel’s prejudices but does not help it learn how to deal with others in a civilized way. In the final analysis, these war-centred policies not only do not help Israel, they actually expose it to the gravest of dangers and therefore, ultimately are in fact anti-Semitic – the opposite of what they purport to be. The latest rumour that the US is preparing a strike on the Tehran nuclear power plant does not help bring peace to Israel, quite the opposite. If this happens, there is a good chance that Iran will strike Tel Aviv, and it may use enough missiles to swarm the Iron Dome air defences in such a way that many missiles will get through and actually destroy a large part of Tel Aviv. They may also strike a US aircraft carrier, but that may not be as much a concern to Trump as his obsession to give Israel what it demands (since I finished writing this, Trump has already called off a promised strike on Iran. Perhaps things are turning around). Everyone knows that if the Iran deal had been kept intact, none of this would be happening. It is a perverse kind of racism (Iranophobia) that threatens Israel and can easily get thousands of them killed. But in the final analysis, it is a matter of doing what they want, not giving them what they need, and though this policy seems, on the surface, like a love of Israel, it is merely an over-indulgence of the religious beliefs of the American “Christian” Zionists and of the Israelis, with little thought given to possible consequences. We are now left to wonder if Israel will go ahead and attack Iran on its own.
 
Russia too deals with Israel and never harshly, but at the same time, refuses to go along with the abuse of Palestinians and sets limits as to what Israel may bomb in Syria.
 
 
In my opinion, the only hope for peace in the Middle East is the possibility that the US will step aside and Russia will serve as an arbiter.
 
END OF QUORA ANSWER
 
Relevant:
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/popular-us-religious-cult-defiles-the-holy-land
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/military-affairs/israel-just-admitted-it-wants-to-drag-the-us-into-war-with-iran
​

In the following, you will find our translation of another analysis by Ivan Danilov, who always shows uncommon insight into the machinations of American Establishment figures, including politicians and intellectuals. Here Danilov examines two editorials from Bloomberg, which are both aimed at preparing the US for a confrontation with both Russia and China simultaneously, or in other words, something that could only turn into an apocalyptic scenario. Though Danilov doesn’t mention by name the Thucydides trap described by Allison Graham, he writes:
 
“...the fact is that the feeling of “American decline” and the death of American hegemony, which no longer even needs resuscitation, but rather the miracle of resurrection from the dead, is both a conclusion and an emotion that can be found throughout the American “press for thinking people.”
 
In his book “Destined for War” Published May 2017, a scant 2 years ago, author Graham Allison reminds us that Thucydides had once written:
 
“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
 
The Belferd Centre of the Harvard Kennedy School writes of this theme:
 
“China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one.”
 
Danilov recognizes that the Thucydides trap has just doubled in size and in danger to world peace, as we are reminded by two Neocon writers published by Bloomberg, who think the US must prepare for war with both China and Russia at the same time, by building up its armed forces even further, as if spending over twice the amount on armaments as China, the world’s biggest defence spender, were not already an extravaganza that threatens to bankrupt the US and rather than strengthen it, in fact, further weakens an already decrepit economy built solely on debt and Ponzi schemes like the petrodollar agreement with Saudi or the attempt to make America great by the Rube Goldberg scheme of fracking and strong-arming Europe into buying extravagantly priced American LNG instead of the much cheaper pipeline-delivered Russian natural gas. Only the fools who run the US fail to realize that you can’t keep holding a gun to your trading partners’ heads and expect them to keep swallowing this insult without fighting back against the dollar that is used more as a weapon than it is as a currency.
 
Nor is there a clean analogy between the empire building and war making of the US and the ancient empires. The wars of Rome and Greece were focused on confronting real enemies and conquering new lands for their empires. But the US makes war for reasons that are not nearly as clear as this. Geopolitical analysts spend their lives trying to decode the motives of US war makers and go to their graves without fully grasping these motives.
 
Academicians have long sought the true motivation of America’s wars, but their theories do not reveal anything resembling a clear-cut striving to build riches and conquer territory or to benefit their own people in any way for that matter. Of course, the false pretexts are superficially moral-sounding and many ordinary people still fall for the narrative of the US as the saviour of mankind. But people with a modicum of insight who have lived through, for example, the WMD and Gulf of Tonkin lies, know there is something sinister going on behind the scenes and they have drawn their own conclusions, some of which make sense.
 
We have shown at New Silk Strategies that there are two factors in these wars that are provable and not just conspiracy theories because they are supported by facts from the msm, though the facts almost never support the conclusions of editorialists and academic analysts, and these factors are Saudi and Israel. Bloomberg supplied the details of the petrodollar agreement concluded between President Nixon and King Faisal in 1973, whereby the US agreed to use its military to protect the Saudi dictators (please don’t call them royals and don’t call Saudi Arabia a kingdom as long as US media and pols call democratically elected leaders like Bashar al Assad dictators and call Syria a “regime.” But if Syria is a regime and Assad is a dictator, then the Saudis are a double dictatorship and deserve no respect at all, only condemnation, for having supported the Taliban, ISIS and Al-Qaeda for many years and having brought permanent chaos to the Middle East. We have exposed the Saudi role in US wars here, here, here and here. As for the Israeli role, we have described it here and here, and it is described in greater detail elsewhere, for example, by Consortium News. We need only look at a brief excerpt, regarding the debate in Congress over entering the Iraq war:
 
“AIPAC Marching Orders
 
The more serious problem with focusing on the Logan Act, however, is that what Cotton and his Republican colleagues were doing was not negotiating with a foreign government but trying to influence the outcome of negotiations in the interest of a foreign government.” [which was done under the influence of AIPAC].
 
And this heavy hand on US foreign policy got started over 50 years ago.
 
Jewish Press lovingly calls LBJ the first “Jewish president” and the venerable Washington Report on Middle East Affairs writes:
 
“It was 33 years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. While a traumatized nation grieved for its youngest president, he was succeeded by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was to become the most pro-Israel president up to that time. A sea change was about to take place in America’s relations with Israel.” And incredibly, LBJ was so blindly pro-Israel that he totally accepted the slaughter of American seaman of the USS Liberty and ever covered for Israel's ignominious role therein.
 
As we see, the Israeli involvement in US wars is an open secret and proving it is not the problem. The problem is to avoid being slandered as an anti-Semite if you dare to utter or print publicly what every historian knows. Fortunately, that is not as big a problem as it may seem because the best evidence that we have of the truth about this fact is the Jewish sources themselves, just as the best sources on Israel are Israeli experts, such as historian Ilan Pappe, author of “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” and Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, and there is an increasing number of American Jewish groups that are horrified by the treatment of the Palestinians and no longer identify with Israel. Further, polls show that Evangelical young people are considerably less inclined to go along with “Christian” Zionism than their parents, so the support for Israel that made wars in the Middle East popular among US Christians is dwindling and eventually we can expect the religious support for senseless wars to slowly ebb away. It is noteworthy that Trump had to resort to retirement-age Neocons, notably John Bolton, to fill his cabinet, an indication that Zionism is slowly fading in the US.
 
I have discovered that, in my debates with even the most dyed-in-the-wool Israel defenders and Zionists on Quora, I can placate most of them and end the discussion on a friendly note by doing the following:
 
1—Quote from Israeli or Jewish sources to prove my point
 
2—Tell them that in my honest opinion, the bulk of the blame for the damage done by US wars waged on behalf of Israel and by the IDF’s brutality toward Palestine and the missile attacks by the IAF on Syrian targets must be borne not by Jews, nor by Israel, nor even by Zionists, but by American “Christian” Zionists and their total misinterpretation of both the Old and New Testaments. It is obvious that none of these people had ever heard anyone say this and were disarmed by the obviously non anti-Semitic thrust of my arguments.
 
I then take this opportunity to explain how these “Christians” misinterpret the scriptures, using a limited number of examples. I tell them that their main basis for their belief that God wants them to support Israel and its warlike policies is the prophecy in Ezekiel 37 about the dry bones re-assembling and forming the nation of Israel that was dispersed. Then I mention that, according to verse 24 of that chapter, this resurrected Israel was to have David as its king and to be “obedient to God’s decrees,” whereas a WIN/Gallup poll shows that a full 65% of today’s Israelis have no religion at all and could not possibly be obeying the decrees of the Old Testament God! I tell them that another teaching of “Christian” Zionism comes from a prophecy in II Thessalonians 2:3-4 that the anti-Christ will sit in “the temple of God,” and that therefore, Christians must supposedly support the building of a third temple in Jerusalem so that the anti-Christ may sit there as predicted. However, neither God nor Jesus ever commanded believers, either Jewish or Christian, to help God fulfil His prophecies, and even so, would it not be blasphemy for people calling themselves “Christians” to support the building of a temple so that the anti-Christ would have a place to sit as he persecuted Christians and wreaked chaos on earth?
 
Thus the most devastating wars of recent time have been promoted and started by Christians who thought they were helping God and supporting Israel but were only deceiving themselves and blundering into delicate foreign policy areas that require years of intense study to understand and of which they are totally ignorant. However, as thorough as our investigation of the causes of recent wars has been, none of this research applies directly to earlier wars such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
 
Nonetheless, there is a certain commonality between the wars since, say, the signing of the petrodollar agreement between Nixon and King Faisal in the 70s and some of the earlier geopolitical meddling and wars prior to that, and one of the most prominent features is the US support for jihadism in that earlier period. There is little evidence that Israel or Saudi, for example, supported the Vietnam war, although there are small clues. For example, Mondoweiss writes:
 
“...in 2002, my brother shocked me when he said, ‘I demonstrated against the Vietnam War, but my Jewish newspaper said this war could be good for Israel.’ “
 
As for Afghanistan, the CFR writes:
 
“Beginning in the late 1980s, Saudi Arabia—along with the United States, Pakistan, and others  – began supporting the Afghan resistance movement against the Soviet occupation.” In fact, interventionist Zbigniew Brzezinski manage to twist Jimmy Carter’s normally pacifist arm into supporting CIA meddling in Afghanistan to weaken the Soviets’ hold on the country.
 
The US’ early involvement in Afghanistan, beginning with the CIA’s support of the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation, is emblematic of how, despite any good intentions there may have been in Washington, the US is consistently on the side of chaos, confrontation and war while the Russians have sought peace, though at times through brief military involvement. Thus Russia lent its support to a non-sectarian secular Afghan government, while the US has never supported a secular government in any conflict in a Muslim country, invariably taking the side of the religious fanatics, supporting radical jihadists with values diametrically opposed to those of the supposedly “Christian” US. It is obvious to any thinking person today that supporting radical Muslims is playing with fire. Osama bin Laden benefitted, whether directly or indirectly, from the US meddling in Afghanistan, which kicked off a long series of US-initiated wars and regime change interventions in various parts of the world, and the leitmotif was always chaos and instability. It never seems to have occurred to the US interventionists that the genie they were letting out of the bottle might never be contained again.
 
Russia, even in Soviet days, always strove to bring stability and to overcome radical Islamic terror through secularization. Yes, this was certainly mostly because the Soviets were militantly atheistic, but the end effect of their actions was to oppose and mitigate radical Islamic terrorism and inhuman treatment of women and minorities. This is, BTW, clearly evident in Syria, where, despite whatever ill effects the Assad family may have had on the Syrians, harmony reigned among religious groups. The first US-backed Syrian Spring uprisings were led by radical Sunni sympathizers of the harsh policies introduced by US-backed “rebels” who wanted strict enforcement of sharia law and of laws that forced women into subservient roles in society. And yet, at home in the US, they supported feminists. Thus there was no rhyme nor reason to their policies, which, with a tad bit of foresight, could have been expected to fail colossally, as they did.
 
Meanwhile, Saudi has been deeply involved in supporting terror groups through private donations while officially supporting the US.
 
The NYT wrote in 2016:
 
“The dual tracks allow Saudi officials plausibly to deny official support for the Taliban, even as they have turned a blind eye to private funding of the Taliban and other hard-line Sunni groups.”
 
“The result is that the Saudis — through private or covert channels — have tacitly supported the Taliban in ways that make the kingdom an indispensable power broker.”
 
Westerners who point out the errors of their countries, especially the US, as I often do, are often accused of being unpatriotic. But it’s like this.
 
If you had a son with a serious case of diabetes, would you allow him to eat sweets all day long? The unthinking “Christian” Zionists believe they are “helping to defend” Israel when they send them tons of lethal weapons every year and reflexively spring to the defence of dangerous Israeli policies that only serve to anger countries like Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. There are politicians like John Bolton in the US who would attack Iran at the drop of a hat claiming this would help Israel, when in fact it could easily lead to the nation’s destruction.
 
I personally see only one path to reconciliation or at least peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Muslim nations not aligned with the US. The US has disqualified itself as an arbiter in the Israel-Arab confrontation because it only sees the arguments of one side in the debate and has no interest in the Arab side at all, only disdain. Which is why it ignores the fact that Muslims consider Jerusalem a holy site as well and the fact that Syrians consider the Golan Heights theirs since it was theirs until it was occupied illegally by Israel. So the US will never be an even-handed arbiter and the Arabs are fully aware of that.
 
The Arab Youth Poll shows that, unlike a few years ago, this group now deems Russia the most trustworthy and the US the least trustworthy of all non-Muslim nations. There are good reasons for this, but the main one is that Russia has shown itself to be even-handed and friendly toward all nations, even those that deem it an enemy, like the US. I believe that if Russia is chosen as the arbiter in the Middle East conflict, it will eventually pacify Iran on one hand and Israel and the US on the other, and will bring a degree of peace to the Middle East that has never been seen before. All the US has to do is step aside.
 
It will never do so voluntarily but events with a life of their own, centred about the US dollar, are inevitably shutting down the hegemon.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
USA: we must prepare for war with China and Russia at the same time
 
June 14, 2019
 
Ivan Danilov
 
An information campaign has begun in the United States to prepare for a new war: the Pentagon is being asked to prepare for war on two fronts - with Russia and with China at the same time.
 
The Bloomberg Business Information Agency has published two comprehensive articles designed to frighten the American reader and the decision makers in Washington. One of these frightening texts was written by a geopolitical specialist, an expert at several very influential NGOs (Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Foreign Policy Research Institute), Johns Hopkins University Professor Hall Brands, and the second was released from the pen of the former US and NATO Commander for Europe, James Stavridis, a retired admiral, and now an expert at the financial company Carlyle Group. Both venerable specialists are trying to present to the audience two very unpleasant theses. The first thesis, which the professor and the admiral promote in tandem with each other, is that the United States and its European allies are definitely not ready for the "Russian-Chinese alliance" that threatens the United States and the America-centric world by the very fact of its existence. The second point is that the United States must begin preparations for a clash with two great powers at the same time, with Professor Brands emphasizing that otherwise there is a chance that Washington will be exposed to a combination such that either Beijing or Moscow will get involved in a war with the United States and tie down all American forces, and the second partner in the Russian-Chinese coalition will simply finish off a defenceless America.
 
This media event could be attributed to the negative attitude of two separate (albeit highly influential) Washington experts who found like-minded pessimists in the team of billionaire Michael Bloomberg (the owner of the Bloomberg agency). But the fact is that the feeling of “American decline” and the death of American hegemony, which no longer even needs resuscitation, but rather the miracle of resurrection from the dead, is both a conclusion and an emotion that can be found in the entire American “press for thinking people.”
 
From the point of view of American propaganda aimed at consumers of cultural and information fast food, everything is ok: Hollywood continues to make films about how bomb democracy is winning everyone over, creators of popular computer games (including those among the Russian youth) teach children to believe in the "White helmets” and deem Russian military pilots as murderers of innocent Syrians, while Russian (including business) publications write articles about how they want Russia to “be like in Ukraine. "
 
However, if you go up a level and read, for example, the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, you can get acquainted with another view on reality:
 
“Looking back, it can be said that the fall seems inevitable. Today, it seems, it’s not the present reality of the eternal conflict within the United States and abroad that needs to be explained, but Washington’s feverish dreams of the end of the last century about the eternal virtuous hegemony of the United States should be explained. However, those who survived know that nothing was predetermined and that history could have turned out differently. Therefore, we decided to carry out a posthumous autopsy of the American leadership of recent decades - those years when the US elites squandered an inheritance and good the name bequeathed to them."
 
If you look at the slightly panicky text of Admiral Stavridis, it is easy to see that he is appealing to the deepest fear of the Washington (and indeed the entire English-speaking) political elite, which was brought up on Halford John Mackinder’s geopolitical theory. “China and Russia want to control World Island,” Admiral Stavridis writes, and from his point of view, this is a big, one might say, existential threat to the United States. The Russian reader is more familiar with another term from Mackinder’s theory, ie, Heartland, which implies the most strategically important part of Eurasia, control over which is considered one of the key factors of world domination. “World Island” is a better bet than the Heartland, for which our Western partners were ready to fight in the last century, because the “World Island” is (very roughly stated) “Heartland” plus all of Europe, plus all of Asia and Africa. Stavridis, listing the points of interaction between Moscow and Beijing, comes to the iron-clad (from his standpoint) conclusion that the ultimate goal of this cooperation is Sino-Russian control over Eurasia and Africa as a whole, which inevitably implies ousting the United States and its allies (if they survive at all) to the "periphery of the world."
 
In response, it is proposed to do everything to bind Europe to the United States and not allow the Sino-Russian alliance to "seduce" European countries. The recipe for opposition from a retired admiral is strikingly diplomatic: "The US and its allies should pay attention to the growing cooperation between Russia and China; focus intelligence gathering on how far this cooperation can go; do everything possible to support a united Europe and strengthen the alliances, partnerships and friendships across the periphery of Asia."
 
Obviously silent on this list of measures is work on sabotaging Russian-Chinese cooperation, but although Admiral Stavridis does not mention this directly, in the very text of the article he deals with propagating typical anti-Chinese theses, starting with statements that Putin "is making the mistake of” collaborating with China and ending with the statement that China “is eyeing Siberia like a dog eyes a steak."
 
It is significant that it has never occurred to any of the American experts concerned with the rapprochement along the Moscow-Beijing line to suggest any options for normalizing relations between Washington and Moscow. Only punitive and coercive measures are discussed, although this applies equally to US-China and US-European relations: only coercive techniques are discussed, and the word "compromise" essentially does not exist in the lexicon of recommended solutions.
 
Professor Brands does not mince words and does not rely on diplomacy, but writes with almost military directness about what to do: “America must work out the right combination of capabilities and concepts to defeat China or Russia before it significantly expands its armed forces. But after this combination is determined, the US will have to create - at considerable cost - a large force that can reliably prevent the aggressor from achieving its goals in the second theatre (military operations. - Ed.), Even if America is fighting in the first. In the foreseeable future, the US will simultaneously participate in a tense and dangerous rivalry with China and Russia. "
 
No need to entertain illusions. In Washington, Russia is perceived as an enemy, and the strengthening of Russian-Chinese friendship and cooperation is perceived as a direct bid for world domination, and the United States will struggle with this “bid,” including by force and diplomatic means. We need to be prepared for this, and protective measures must be taken in advance, without counting on the possibility that common sense and readiness for compromise will prevail in Washington.

1.
 
https://www.quora.com/How-would-the-global-economy-be-affected-if-global-oil-production-was-reduced/answer/Vince-Dhimos?prompt_topic_bio=1
 
How would the global economy be affected if global oil production was reduced?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Answered 11m ago
 
Whenever crude oil production is reduced for whatever reason, the price of crude, and then of petroleum distillates, such as petrol, goes up.
 
Trump keeps saying he is happy when Saudi helps reduce prices by keeping up a brisk crude oil production rate and hence keeping the price low.
 
But Trump is being coy. He pretends he wants low prices for his voters but the fact is, he wants high prices for his cronies in the oil industry. Why? Because US oil producers are generally drilling in shale and to extract this oil, they must use a very expensive process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. This process drives up production costs, which means the sale price must be higher to make extraction profitable. And recall that Trump is betting on hydrocarbons to help make America great, so this scheme just has to work or Trump will be in trouble.
 
So if OPEC or Russia decided to extract more than usual, then prices would go down and the US producers would not be happy, and Trump would be in a sour mood. He might even threaten to attack Iran. Again.
 
So he is trying desperately to persuade oil producing countries to keep prices up while pretending he wants lower prices for this voters. All politicians play these kinds of games so it’s not just Trump.
 
So back to to the question of how all this affects the global economy. As we have seen, it is complicated:
 
Reduced production means higher oil prices. Oil producing countries would be affected positively with regard to their profits, but all countries would pay more for their petrol. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
 
So the leaders of the oil producing countries would all have to pretend they were upset that their people – the ones they are pretending to work for – have to pay too much for petrol at the pump but would be warmly thanked by their cronies in the industry – the ones they are really working for.
 
 
2.
 
Why are EU citizens not allowed to seek asylum within EU countries if they have real problems? What is the conspiracy behind this law?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Answered Mon
 
The EU is supported by a narrative that is far from representative of the true situation. The narrative is that the EU is unified and that all member states have laws protecting the rights of its citizens. But there are problems. For example, if anyone in Germany makes a statement, even a true one, that reflects badly on Israel or is perceived as offensive to a Jew (or other ethnic or religious group), that person can be punished for Volksverhetzung, “incitement of the people.” Fr. Frederick Toben, a British historian who wrote a book denying aspects of the Holocaust, was actually arrested in the UK under this German law and was nearly extradited to Germany where he would have been tried and sentenced to jail. (Let me state here that I am no follower of Toben. I have visited Auschwitz and was shocked at what I saw.)
 
You can read about this law here (pay attention to the reader comments):
 
Why Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany
 
This law exists only — or primarily — in Germany and often leads to the unjust jailing of an innocent researcher who had no intention of offending anyone but who found evidence that the accepted number of 6 million may be exaggerated. (Indeed, controversy still rages over this question).
But if this accused researcher lived in another EU state that does not have this law, he would not be allowed to seek asylum in his own country. The reason is simple: the EU narrative is that all EU countries have harmonized their national laws with EU law in such a way as to produce uniform justice throughout the union and no injustice exists in the legal systems of any EU member states. If one EU country could afford asylum to a person in another EU country who was threatened with jail time for doing something that is perfectly legal in that other country, then this would expose the narrative as untrue. Therefore, the EU has banned such offering of asylum.
 
That is just one of several such examples.
 
3.
 
Is Iran just too big for the US military to occupy (were it so inclined to try)?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Answered Sun
 
Israeli geopolitical analyst Yakov Kedmi recently stated (Кедми: Для США начать войну в Иране — это значит отдать Тайвань Китаю) that the United States cannot defeat Iran from a purely military point of view due to the vastness of its territory and the inability of the Americans to land there due to the incredible complexity of logistics that the Pentagon is well aware of.
 
I would add to this that Iran has warned of its ability to take out US aircraft carriers with its guided missiles and torpedoes fired from subs. The following article iran has subs and torpedoes discusses Iranian naval assets:
 
The subs have sonar-evading technology and can launch missiles from under water, as well as fire torpedoes and drop marine mines, the TV said. Iran began manufacturing Ghadir subs in 2005. The first was unveiled in 2007 and by 2012, five such submarines were incorporated into Iran's navy.
 
Trump knows that if he presides over the loss of a multimillion dollar carrier, his chances of winning in 2020 are diminished. I doubt he will try it, although the Israelis have admitted they want the US to fight alongside them, as I showed at Quora:
 
https://www.quora.com/Is-Syria-still-a-threat-to-lsrael/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
In case you have forgotten, Netanyahu was one of the ringleaders in dragging the US into the war on Iran. Here you can see him pleading his case before the US Congress:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_PDpwL8kuY
 
Israel has never gone to war against terror but is always willing to shed American blood for its wars.
 
4. 
 
https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-view-the-Sino-US-trade-war/answer/Vince-Dhimos?prompt_topic_bio=1
 
How do you view the Sino-US trade war?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Answered Mon
 
It is a disaster and will not end well.
 
Deutsche Bank reported that so far, Trump’s trade war has cost the stock market $5 trillion.
 
The war has put most American soybean farmers out of business, and the Chinese are now seeking or have found new sources in South America, so this is permanent damage to the US economy.
 
The trade war has prompted the Chinese to resort to counter tariffs on gas, and this is a very big item and very costly because special LNG terminals for export to China have been built in the US southern states and now they will probably never be used, or at least not to anywhere near full capacity. A recent article in a Russian site reports that the Russian company Power of Siberia is about to finish laying a pipeline to China and that will be used to buy the amounts of gas that China will no longer buy from the US, and the cost will be less. Of course, this fits in nicely with the Sino-Russian war on the US dollar because none of the settlements in this trade deal will be made in dollars. International trade settlements made in non-dollar currencies tend to reduce the value of the USD. This is a win-win for Russia and China and a major loss to the US.
 
The war on Huawei is especially critical because it is expected to affect US tech companies. For example, there are warnings that whole networks built by Huawei will have to be torn down at a high cost to the US and China both. So far, tech stocks have lost at least $1 trillion.
 
Prior to the war on China, Trump and Congress banned imports from the Russian aluminium company Rusal. The problem was that this company made primary Al products, ie, mostly ingots, which were sold at reasonable prices to US secondary producers which processed them into sheets, tubes, forgings, etc. The US manufacturers warned Congress and Trump not to do ban Rusal products because it would threaten their livelihood. But the US government does not seek to solve real world problems. It only seeks votes and support for its ideology (which currently is focused almost solely on opposing other countries, not on solving internal economic problems — a very dangerous way to run a government). So the government simply ignored these distress calls from US manufacturers and blundered ahead with the ban. A few months later, the US companies sent their balance sheets to Congress showing that they were going bankrupt as a result of the ban. At that point, someone in Congress with a few brain cells left decided the ban had to be lifted. After wreaking havoc with US industry for months, the ban was finally lifted, but the losses left their mark. It is remarkable that, after all these disasters, Trump has never stopped or slowed down his trade wars. He seems incapable of learning lessons.
 
Even before the trade wars started, almost every prominent economist was warning that these tariffs would not benefit the US. Their warnings are coming true.
 
 
5.
 
https://es.quora.com/Qu%C3%A9-dijo-Guaid%C3%B3-Se-est%C3%A1-negociando-la-salida-de-Maduro-o-no-en-Oslo/answer/Vince-Dhimos?prompt_topic_bio=1
 
What did Guaidó say? Is he negotiating the ouster of Maduro or not, in Oslo?
 
¿Qué dijo Guaidó? ¿Se está negociando la salida de Maduro o no, en Oslo?
 
Vince Dhimos, jefe de redacción en www.NewSilkStrategies.com (2015-presente)
 
Se ha respondido hace 4 minutos
 
Translation of my response:
 
According to Article 233 of the constitution of Venezuela, the president of the National Assembly does not have the right to assume the presidency. The person entitle to assume the presidency in the absolute absence of the president is the vice president of the Republic. That would be Delcy Rodriguez. Here is a copy of the relevant parts of the constitution.
 
"When there is an absolute absence of the President of the Republic during the first four years of the constitutional term, a new universal and direct election shall be held within the following thirty consecutive days. While the new President is elected and takes office, the Executive Vice President or Executive Vice President shall be responsible for the Presidency of the Republic. "
 
"If the absolute absence occurs during the last two years of the constitutional term, the Executive Vice President or Executive Vice President shall assume the Presidency of the Republic until the completion thereof."
 
As we see from the above, Guaidó has no right to negotiate with Maduro because he has no constitutional power whatsoever.
 
Besides, the president of the US has no jurisdiction in Venezuela and has no right to interpret the Venezuelan constitution.
 
Therefore, Trump and the heads of other allied nations have no right to declare that Guaidó is the interim president and they have no right to declare that Maduro is a dictator. Only the people of Venezuela have this right, and they have not declared unanimously that Maduro is a dictator. In fact, no referendum has been held in this issue.

This analysis will never be published in an outlet recognized by the Establishment. We promise.
 
In the following is our translation of a commentary from RIA FAN on the chaos that awaits the Middle East merely because elections are coming up, since Trump needs a military engagement to make him look good. Commentary and notes [in brackets] are by Vince Dhimos. This game is not specific to Trump. Almost every president has used war to gain an edge in an upcoming election or to help weather a scandal. Each one uses this dirty little ploy generally by sometime in the second or third year of his first term. The best and only way the American people could show their power – yes, they have some – would be to refuse to go along with this game and not vote for any president playing it. If the people refused to vote for a president starting a war or a foreign coup, even a small one, in the third year of his first term or during a presidential scandal, that would throw a spanner in the Establishment’s machinations. Guaidó was recognized by Trump as “president” of Venezuela in Trump’s third year of office, the Arab Spring started in the third year of Obama’s first term, and Clinton started the Kosovo war in the midst of the Lewinski scandal. US wars never reflect a military threat to the US, only a political reality in the US, most notably a perceived threat to a president’s career. But the people continue to be led by the nose, showing beyond a doubt that there is absolutely no significant people power – otherwise known as democracy – in America. Not only the Establishment but also the grassroots is owned lock stock and barrel by a small coterie of powerful men who know how to impose their will on everyone to the detriment of America and its economy – by piling on still more unpayable debt.
 
My list of agents other than the people who rule America and meddle in public affairs includes the White House, which acts as a foreign agent, contrary to the people’s interests, in support of Israel lobby AIPAC, which heads the list. Also on the list are the msm and gullible Americans who believe the propaganda spread by the corporate media, as well as the very large group of “Christian” Zionists who believe God wants them to support all policies of the secular, apartheid state of Israel, policies that include massacring unarmed protesters and illegally seizing Palestinian territory and blowing up the homes of Palestinian families. Somehow they think that encouarging Israel to commit crimes and make and provoke powerful enemies is "blessing" Israel.
 
This is never a surprise to a wide-awake observer. But if the American voter public were even half awake, or cared, they would know good and well that it is a sleazy ruse to secure their vote. And if they were aware and had a stitch of moral conscience, they would not vote for a shyster willing to kill innocent civilians from the air just to get votes. And that would be a sign that the public is waking up and growing up at last. But after Dubbya’s immoral and cynical trick of making “enemies” out of nations that are harmless to the US and using the false-flag of non-existent WMDs to invade them and slaught their civilians from the air, all to garner a few extra votes, the nation either didn’t wake up or it didn’t give a rip. The unvarnished truth is that presidents are nothing more than paid assassins in suits. But the real culprits are the voters who watch this charade every presidential first term and never tire of observing the procession of murderers marching through the White House, and who cheerfully shell out a percentage of their income for the pleasure of knowing that their country is the biggest and baddest and no one dares to “mess with us.” They are fully aware that somewhere beyond the blood-stained curtain of the theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue are the lives of whole families tragically snuffed out, homes blown to bits, limbs blown away, minds scarred forever, but the man in the White House is their son of a bitch and ultimately, they’re still ok with it all because the Holy Land is safer now. None of those babies will come back to life and grow up to threaten the Republicans, the Democrats or the Likud.
 
To get an idea of the games played in Washington is, let’s look at a quote from our translation below:
 
“Pro-American forces and armed groups are aggravating the situation in areas of Syria, in particular, in Deir ez-Zor, where Kurdish formations operate.”
 
You know, a thorough analysis of the news is not a matter of even just reading massive amounts of information and mulling what you’ve read. There is more to it than even that. The first time I read that the US was deploying Kurds to Deir ez-Zor, I recalled that the US under Obama had killed 80 or so Syrian troops there “by accident” and that I had done some extra reading on that province and discovered that it was the oil-richest region in Syria. We later learned that, under Trump, an unspecified number of Russian mercenaries were gunned down by heroic American pilots in the province, and later some Syrian troops were shot and killed there “by accident.” So now it was logical to check and see why the Kurds just happened to be there (because if you’re an analyst worth your salt, there’s no such thing as “just happened”). Remember that the excuse the US gave for allying with the Kurds was to give them a homeland. So of course, an alert analyst wants to know if Deir ez-Zor is part of the Kurdish homeland. Right? So I googled up a map of Kurdistan and sure enough, Deir ez-Zor is not part of traditional Kurdistan, the Kurdish home, which is north of there, but the US is expanding its territory to include the most oil rich region, which it intends to steal from Syria. Newer maps, unfortunately, show the Kurdish-controlled region extending far to the south of Kurdistan into Deir ez-Zor. So this is just one of myriad frauds perpetrated by the Pentagon, which is not in the least interested in giving the Kurds a homeland but only in grabbing an oil-rich region to rob the already beaten down Syrians of what is left of their resources.
 
Now the Russians probably could, if they wished, chase the US out of the Deir ez-Zor province and at some point they might. It all depends on whether they decide that the Trump administration is better than whoever might replace him. They probably don’t know that yet. We shall see.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
Syria and the Middle East facing chaos because of election games in the US
 
The actions of Kurdish militants in the east of Syria are provoking the development of a fuel crisis in Syria. According to experts, a new military-political staging under the control of the United States is currently unfolding on the eastern bank of the Euphrates.
 
Despite the country's criticism and President Donald Trump’s displeasure, the Pentagon intends to send 1,500 American soldiers to the Middle East to “contain” Iran. American politicians have reacted to the new "Iranian" initiative with distrust. For example, the senator from Virginia, Dick Black, frankly ridiculed plans for the military.
 
“Every time we send another batch of troops to the Middle East, it ends badly. This has never led to anything good, but only destabilizes the situation even more. We send troops to protect our other troops from attack. Let's get them out completely, and then no one can attack them. We don’t have to worry about it at all,” said Black, caustically commenting on the militarism of the Pentagon, which is convinced that any problem can be solved with sufficient firepower.
 
However, the dissatisfaction of lawmakers is unlikely to stop the Napoleonic plans of the Pentagon and Trump. From unofficial sources it is known that the US President notified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about an "imminent attack on Iran." [I was unable to find such a report. Russian analysts tend to play up the possibility of a US attack on Iran] It is unlikely that the United States will use Syria as a springboard for an offensive against Iran, since a sufficient number of US bases are located in countries with a [US-] loyal government in the Middle East [Actually, Turkey and Qatar, where the likeliest US bases for such an attack are located, have moved closer to Tehran and are now more supportive of Iran than other reliable allies like Saudi]. The territory of Syria, or rather the northeast of the country, is needed as a raw materials appendage. Concentrated here are the main oil companies that fell into the hands of Americans and pro-American forces. Continuing the occupation of this region will allow the United States to fully control the movement of most of the hydrocarbons produced in Syria, which will be an additional push in the fuel collapse.
 
At the moment it is very difficult to reliably interpret Trump's true plans. Earlier, Washington declared that the occupation of the north-eastern regions of Syria would open the way for the Kurds to create an autonomous state, which would initially enjoy the support of the White House and be focused on American values. Under former US President Barack Obama, this topic was very popular, but Trump made the Kurds understand that he was not even considering this option. The Kurds are in limbo - Washington categorically forbids them to make contact with Damascus, but does not offer any future except as part of the coalition of the "Syrian Democratic Forces" (SDF) - Arab and Kurdish armed groups that exist exclusively to ensure American interests in the east of Syria.
 
What is happening in the American establishment now looks more like the beginning of a chess game before the upcoming elections. “A small victorious war” in all cases brings political dividends and the goodwill of voters, but it can be a significant risk - and in the future, as the example of Iraq shows, can change the world and the balance of forces in it forever.
 
Trump has spoken many times about the withdrawal of American troops from Syria, but “they are still there,” recalled Boris Dolgov, a senior fellow at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in a conversation with the Federal News Agency. Orientalist suggested that at the moment the Americans intend to maintain all their positions in the Middle East indefinitely.
 
“It is worth noting that Trump’s initial statements about the withdrawal of American troops were repeatedly revised — according to the latest statement by Donald Trump and the Pentagon leadership, the US military will be withdrawn from Syria “for a specific situation and in accordance with the interests of the United States”- no dates, nor are the terms determined,” the expert emphasized. “So far, there is no withdrawal of American troops from Syria, but there is formation by the Americans of new armed groups of ‘moderate opposition,’ ostensibly to fight ISIS.”
 
The FAN interlocutor noted that at the present time the Americans are trying to consolidate more tightly in eastern Syria, where the oil-producing regions are located.
 
“Pro-American forces and armed groups are aggravating the situation in areas of Syria, in particular, in Deir ez-Zor, where Kurdish formations operate. The Kurds began negotiations with Damascus, but the Americans sent controlled forces there,” said Dolgov.
 
The military, which the Pentagon plans to send to the Middle East, is likely to proceed to US bases in Iraq and Jordan. At the moment, the exact plans of the United States are difficult to guess, but if Trump really decides to strike Iran (using the tankers damaged in the Persian Gulf, for example, as an excuse), 1,500 troops will not help him there - the time will come for extensive forces and assets. The question is, how far is Trump willing to go in order to achieve re-election in 2020?
 
“In 2020, there is a presidential election in the USA, and Trump intends to participate – it is already 99% obvious that he will try to run for a second term. Prior to the election, Trump has taken credit for all the successes of the American military in the Middle East, and he took credit for all the successes in the destruction of ISIS.”
 
“In addition, Trump’s active support to Israel - first the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and then recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory - also fits within the framework of the election campaign, since the Israeli lobby in the States is strong enough and it will support Trump in this policy, in exchange for Trump’s support for Israel’s strikes against Syria and Iranian forces. The fact that he continues the policy of allegedly “restraining” Russia also, according to the logic of Trump's supporters, fits into the general logic and helps him in the eyes of his supporters,” said the orientalist.
 
END TRANSLATION

Below is our translation of an analysis from RIA Novosti with commentary and notes [in brackets] by Vince Dhimos.


QUOTE:

“In this context, two seemingly unrelated stories paradoxically fit together: sanctions against the European clearinghouse created to continue buying oil from Iran, and future sanctions against Gazprom’s European partners participating in the Nord Stream-2 project. In the Iranian case, the US is trying to control which oil EU countries can buy, and in the case of sanctions against Nord Stream 2, Washington will seek to establish control over what gas the European Union can buy.”
 
Remember I had said in my remarks on Trump's war on Huwei that the US is acting just like a colonial master toward its colonial subjects:
 
“I recalled learning during my stay in Taiwan that that country had once been occupied by Japan and that it once served its colonial masters as a source of agricultural products but that the Japanese had made sure, by discouraging higher education, that the Taiwanese colony would not be allowed to develop industry. These examples from Israel and Japan embody the very essence of Neo-Colonialism.
 
“There is an analogy here [in the context of the war on Huawei] with China and its colonial relationship with the US, which was quite happy to have China manufacture low-tech products with cheap labour and later even allowed the country to assemble high-tech instruments and information technology as long as the US masters were in charge of the technology and the Chinese refrained from learning the tricks of the trade. And herein lies the ulterior motive behind the trade wars.”
 
Danilov says the US attitude toward Europe is the same:
 
QUOTE:
 
“...the administration of Donald Trump is not just trying to deprive the European Union of at least some chance of its own energy and financial policy. At the same time, it is seeking to de-industrialize Europe, as well as opening its market for American food products, which, firstly, do not meet European environmental requirements, and secondly, will bring European farmers to mass bankruptcy with their artificial low prices.”
 
According to a European Commission report,
 
“The EU exported over €10.8 billion worth of goods to Iran in 2017. EU exports to Iran are mainly machinery and transport equipment (€5.5 billion, 50.9%), chemicals (€1.9 billion, 18.1%), and manufactured goods (€0.9 billion, 8.9%).”
 
Yes, when Trump exited the trade deal and tried to force Europe to do likewise, he was in fact tending to de-industrialize Europe by depriving them of an important buyer of industrial products. Further, Danilov’s comment about Trump forcing US food imports on Europe are in reference to the latest trade talks between Trump and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, where the latter insisted that US food exports did not meet European standards.
 
And the following could be a sign of things to come:
 
“Even if Trump loses in 2020, (German officials. - Ed.) say that the trust that has buoyed transatlantic friendship for seven decades, may be lost forever. Germany has already started to create new alliances that will protect its interests in a world where the US won’t do this. And some of them don’t like Washington. "In the future, we must take our destiny into our own hands to a much greater degree if we want to be strong," Merkel said at a political rally on Friday in Munich."

 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
The United States threatens Europe with sanctions. Europe is preparing for the last battle
 
May 31, 2019
 
Ivan Danilov
 
Below is our translation of an analysis of Ivan Danilov from RIA Novosti with commentary and notes [in brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
The administration of Donald Trump openly threatens to impose sanctions on the European Union for interfering with US foreign policy. On the one hand, one can admire how tough official Washington is to defend its foreign policy interests. On the other hand, there are reasonable doubts that such a policy will be beneficial to the United States in the long term.
 
Relations between Washington and Brussels are far from ideal, and if it comes to real sanctions, then they may well pass the point of no return. Potential anti-European sanctions, which, judging by the statements of officials of the US Treasury Department, include a “disconnect from the American financial system,” may well lead to undesirable diplomatic consequences for the United States. Sooner or later, countries that are under various US sanctions will simply have to cooperate with each other in order to withstand American pressure. The Trump administration works on the principle of "look at successful predecessors and do the opposite." The "divide and conquer" principle is proven by historical experience (from ancient Romans to Machiavelli, Bacon and Napoleon), but the US sanctions policy is now based on the "unite all against us" scheme, which horrifies those mastodons of American diplomacy who still remember how masterfully the United States pitted its opponents among each other in the twentieth century.
 
Such a view may seem biased due to the fact that the shattering of the once “united West” is very beneficial to Russia, but analysts of influential American media are arriving at similar conclusions, looking at the situation not with delight, but with deep spiritual pain. Bloomberg Business Information Agency informs readers:
 
“Even if Trump loses in 2020, (German officials. - Ed.) say that the trust that has buoyed transatlantic friendship for seven decades, may be lost forever. Germany has already started to create new alliances that will protect its interests in a world where the US won’t do this. And some of them don’t like Washington. "In the future, we must take our destiny into our own hands to a much greater degree if we want to be strong," Merkel said at a political rally on Friday in Munich. "
 
It is in this political context that the consequences of the US Treasury’s intentions to impose sanctions against a special structure that the European Union is trying to launch to circumvent the US sanctions against Iran should be considered.
 
The Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Sigal Mandelker sent a letter threatening the leadership of INSTEX, a European clearinghouse created jointly by Germany, France and the UK. As noted by The Washington Post, “the idea of ​​creating INSTEX is that a company supported by three major US allies can tie the hands of the American administration, since any step towards sanctions against INSTEX or companies trading through it will create a conflict between Washington and (the group) Berlin - London - Paris." The Europeans have not played the bet, and the Washington Post has a logical explanation: “The experiment (ie, the mechanism for circumventing the Iran sanctions. Author’s note) Is being watched closely. If expanded, it could jeopardize the global dominance of the US dollar, which is the [currency] most frequently used for international transactions and allows the United States to have some control over the global economy. <...> If INSTEX or other alternatives are successful, international trading systems that bypass the US currency can limit the ability of future US (presidential -.. ed.) administrations to use sanctions as a foreign policy tool.”
 
The leaders of the European Union are squarely confronted by the question: what level of conflict with the US are they ready to go to pursue their own foreign and energy policy? In this context, two seemingly unrelated stories paradoxically fit together: sanctions against the European clearinghouse created to continue buying oil from Iran, and future sanctions against Gazprom’s European partners participating in the Nord Stream 2 project. In the Iranian case, the US is trying to control which oil EU countries can buy, and in the case of sanctions against Nord Stream 2, Washington will seek to establish control over what gas the European Union can buy.
 
Indirectly, both of these attempts to throw an energy noose around the neck of the European Union are connected with another key question (as relates to the future of the USA as a world hegemon): is the euro a regional European currency or is it a full-fledged competitor of the dollar in world trade?
 
It is worth noting that if the problem were confined to the sphere of energy and currency regulation, the chances of forcing Europe to preserve and deepen its status as an American colony would be much greater. However, the administration of Donald Trump is not just trying to deprive the European Union of at least some chance of its own energy and financial policy. At the same time, it is seeking to de-industrialize Europe, as well as opening its market for American food products, which, firstly, do not meet European environmental requirements, and secondly, will bring European farmers to mass bankruptcy with their artificial low prices. In this context, the threat of Trump himself to impose sanctions on German auto makers, as well as punish the European Union as a whole for state support of the Airbus concern, that is, the main competitor of the American company Boeing, which is now experiencing far from the best times [Danilov is referring to the 2 disastrous crashes of Boeing 737s that have grounded these aircraft indefinitely due to charges of negligence] - these are just pin-points of large American operations to transform the European Union into a kind of analogue of Ukraine. That is, to make it a territory that is rapidly losing any signs of belonging to a developed and high-tech world.
 
The leaders of the European Union, even if they are only interested in political self-preservation, and not a place in history, have only one rational way out of the situation: to move closer to those who are under similar pressure from Washington. Fortunately for Berlin and Paris, almost all potential geopolitical partners and possible situational allies are in a similar situation. Moreover, those geopolitical players who have not yet been thrown under Trump’s bus, such as Japan and India, have every chance of finding themselves in his crosshairs soon [India has, for example, weighed the possibility of buying the S-400 air defence system from Russia, against the warnings of Washington]. Judging by the fact that Angela Merkel cancelled her departure from politics, and her government continues to defend Germany’s right to cooperate with Gazprom (on Nord Stream - 2) and Huawei (on building 5G networks in Europe), at least the main central EU forces are preparing to fight the final battle against American geopolitical ambitions. And in this case, any success of Berlin will be very good for Moscow.
 
END TRANSLATION