BY Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D.

I have to confess a certain liking for Russian President Vladimir Putin. No, it’s not over his actions in Ukraine, nor his authoritarian tendencies domestically. It is due to the fact that he sometimes articulates the hypocrisy of foreign countries and leaders in a pithy and take-no-prisoners fashion. He has lately been brave enough to compare and contrast what the Russian military has been accused of in Ukraine with what Israel has been doing to Gaza. He has done so by asking a series of questions that together demonstrate the hypocrisy of Washington and of some Europeans over what constitutes war crimes or crimes against humanity. The questions were “First, are there any sanctions against Israel for the murder and destruction of innocent Palestinian women and children? Second, are there any sanctions against the United States for killing and destroying lives of innocent women and children in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam, and even stealing their diamonds and gold? And third, were there any sanctions against the US and France over the killing of Muammar Gaddafi and the destruction of Libya?”

Russia, of course, has been on the receiving end of sanctions and boycotts and even official theft of the money that it had in US and European banks. It has also had to deal as well with military support provided by NATO to the Volodymyr Zelensky regime in Ukraine. Last month the US Senate unanimously passed a ridiculous nonbinding resolution declaring Russia to be a “state sponsor of terrorism,” which, if endorsed by the White House, would inevitably lead to still more sanctions and increasing aid to Zelensky and his corrupt cronies in an openly declared attempt to weaken Russia and bring down Putin. It would also mean that a future functional diplomatic relationship between Moscow and Washington would become impossible. Implicit in Putin’s questions is the clear accusation that there is a double standard on what constitutes national security. The West supports military resistance by Ukraine against Russia but does not support the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves when attacked by Israel, as took place on August 5th, an unprovoked attack that killed inter alia 17 Palestinian children.

The Russian Foreign Ministry followed-up with a statement first posted on its Egyptian Embassy social media accounts. The statement included a screenshot of a tweet Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid posted April 3rd on the claimed killing of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, attributed by Lapid and the western media to Russian forces. Lapid declared “It is impossible to remain indifferent in the face of the horrific images from the city of Bucha near Kiev, from after the Russian army left. Intentionally harming a civilian population is a war crime and I strongly condemn it.” The Russian post observed how one might “Compare Yair Lapid’s lies about [Ukraine] in April and attempts to place blame and responsibility on [Russia] for the deaths of people in Bucha brutally murdered by the Nazis with his calls in August for bombing and strikes on [Palestinian] land in the Gaza Strip. Isn’t that a double standard, complete disregard and contempt for the lives of Palestinians?”

The point about a double standard is particularly relevant as Ukraine, which claims to be enduring a brutal Russian assault replete with war crimes, has openly endorsed Israel’s bombing and shooting of the unarmed Palestinians. Two weeks ago, Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk expressed his full support for Tel Aviv, saying “As a Ukrainian whose country is under a very brutal attack by its neighbor, I feel great sympathy towards the Israeli public. Attacks on women and children are reprehensible. Terrorism and malicious attacks against civilians are the daily reality of Israelis and Ukrainians and this appalling threat must be stopped immediately.”

Korniychuk’s odd, and manifestly false, comment takes reality and turns it upside down. But nevertheless, to be sure, Israel’s recent bloody assault on Gaza did not earn it much favor from a global audience that has become tired of the Jewish state’s belligerency and self-serving flood of disinformation. A number of human rights organizations and even some churches responded by declaring Israel to be an “apartheid state.” Some critics of the Israelis have also been pleased to observe that ordinary voters in the US Democratic Party in particular have moved away from knee-jerk support of Israel and have accepted that it is racist and undemocratic. Even a considerable number young Jews, many of whom have protested against the Israeli automatic resort to gunfire and bombs in suppressing the Palestinians, have broken with their parents over the issue of what constitutes the legitimate “right” of Israel to “defend itself.”

Israel is far from defeated, however, and it has struck back in the time-honored fashion, using the Jewish diaspora and its vast wealth to buy up or leverage the media, to corrupt politicians at all levels, and to propagate a narrative that always depicts Jews sympathetically as perpetual victims. That narrative relies on the so-called holocaust and the slogan “never again” to generate the moral authority and outrage that makes the entire otherwise unsustainable imposture work.

What might be plausibly described as an International Jewish Conspiracy directed from the Israeli government’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and from the think tanks, banks and investment houses on Wall Street and K Street is working hard to make it illegal to criticize Israel and is enjoying considerable success. Israel’s recent and continuing slaughter of Gazans and West Bank villagers has not induced the thoroughly controlled governments and media outlets that the Jewish state dominates that there is anything seriously wrong going on between the Israelis and Palestinians, only business as usual.

Israel appears to be winning its war against the Palestinians (and let’s not forget the Iranians) where it matters most, among the power brokers in both the US and elsewhere. Witness for example the reaction of the US government to the killing of the Gazans. President Joe Biden declared that Israel has a “right to defend itself,” the standard line also parroted by Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. Thirty-four congressmen meanwhile signed on to a letter calling on the United Nations to disband a UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Israel following recent controversial remarks by one of the commission’s members. The COI was set up to investigate possible Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied territories and Gaza.

The signatories particularly objected to what the always vigilant Anti-Defamation League has described as anti-Semitic statements by COI member Miloon Kothari, an Indian human rights expert and investigator. In a podcast Kothari observed that Israel routinely “practiced apartheid and settler colonialism against the Palestinians,” before rejecting criticism of his commission as the work of the Jewish lobby that controls the media, saying “We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs,” adding that “a lot of money is being thrown at trying to discredit the commission’s work.”

Jewish power particularly in the anglophone world was also on display recently in Canada. The painfully politically correct Justin Trudeau regime has succumbed to the example set by Germany and several other European states in enshrining the official Jewish organizations’ perpetual victim narrative in the Canadian Criminal Code, s. 319. Henceforth

(2.1) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust

• (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
• (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

So, from now on in Canada, if you question the claimed facts surrounding the approved so-called holocaust narrative you can be sent to prison for two years. So much for free speech or the right to challenge disinformation.

Finally, in Britain, the two contenders for the position of Prime Minister replacing the disgraced Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, were boasting of their pro-Israel credentials over the very weekend when Israel was killing more than fifty Palestinians, including 17 children, while wounding scores more. Truss and Sunak played the Israel/Jewish card big time, with Truss asserting that “The UK should stand side by side with Israel, now and well into the future. As Prime Minister, I would be at the forefront of this mission.” Truss has also hinted that she would follow the Zionist stooge Donald Trump’s lead in moving the British Embassy to Jerusalem and she has supported a Free Trade Agreement between the UK and Israel, which would primarily benefit the Israelis. She has also declared that any criticism of Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism, a popular line that is also being extensively promoted in the United States.

The two dominant parties in the UK’s parliamentary system are the Conservatives (Tories) and Labour. Both parties have organized “Friends of Israel” groups that have as members a majority of parliamentarians, including more than four out of every five Tories, who currently form the government. Recently, the Labour Party ousted leader Jeremy Corbyn because he dared to express sympathy for the Palestinians and replaced him with Keir Starmer, who is as close to Israel and the powerful British Jewish community as, well… choose your metaphor. For what it’s worth, Truss, Sunak and Starmer all support a hard line against Russia in Ukraine and also advocate putting extreme pressure on Iran, Israel’s declared regional enemy. They also all support using the British veto in the United Nations to protect the Jewish state against critics.

In 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon angrily admonished his colleague Shimon Peres, who was arguing that Israel should heed US calls for a cease fire, saying “I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” It now appears that the US, Canada, and Great Britain, joined by other anglophone states like Australia and New Zealand, are riding on the same horse when it comes to sacrificing actual national interests to pander to a foreign nation which can rightly be regarded as both a habitual war criminal and manifestly racist. The British and Canadian politicians on both sides of the aisle have now become like their American counterparts in allowing themselves to be corrupted by money and media influence, making an uncritical and near total commitment to Israel the defining issue in any political campaign for high office.

Modern Jewish power as a global phenomenon is a cancer that was in a certain sense made in America and has spread worldwide. But, fortunately, the smearing of critics as anti-Semites is beginning to wear thin. As Chris Hedges observed in March 2019 “The Israel Lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting against those who defend Palestinian rights…is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. Twenty-four state governments’ passage of Israel Lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact.”

It should also be a fact that Americans are beginning to rally against their government being manipulated by the unregistered insidious agents of a foreign government, but that will have to wait presumably. For the moment, Israel and its fifth column have key elements in both government and in the public space in their iron grip. It might require something like a revolution to loosen that.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

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THE HYPOCRISY IS EXPLAINED AT https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

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Since 24 February 2022, our media have been promoting hate propaganda against Vladimir Putin and Russia. Since then, state radio, television and the press have been drumming up hatred against Putin and Russia, demanding punitive measures, sanctions, arms deliveries and that our politicians should queue up for photo opportunities with Zelensky, as other NATO officials do.
  The fact that this new propaganda hero had disinvited the German president from this procession because of his “former understanding for Russia” was not criticised as impertinent by the German media, but even commented on with understanding.
  Those of our politicians who had previously organised cheap energy supplies from Russia for us (Schröder, Schwesig), have now been persecuted by the Atlantic-controlled propaganda as friends of Putin and Russia, i.e., as cronies of hateful people and peoples. Yet they only dutifully tried to pursue German interests and did not go along with the new trend of exchanging cheap Russian for expensive American energy in Germany, i.e., of sacrificing our previous cheap energy basis of prosperity to our own detriment because of commanded hatred against Russia.
  Artists were dismissed just because they were Russian (music director in Munich) or were no longer allowed to perform (Anna Netrebko).
  The hatred aroused by the media against Putin and Russia has now gone so far that even our excellently integrated Russian Germans are once again defamed, marginalised and insulted.
  On the orders of the USA, Russian assets are now being expropriated by all NATO states, even private assets of Russian citizens. Corrupt Zelensky broadcasts his intention to use these assets to “rebuild Ukraine”. 
  The media combine all reports on Russia with vilifications filled with hate: they no longer speak of war, but of “Putin’s criminal war of aggression”, no longer of Russia, but of “bellicose Russia” and no longer of armies, but of the “criminal Russian army” on the one hand and of the “heroic Ukrainian army” on the other. Something negative is always added so as to fill the population with hatred.
  On the other hand, the comedian Zelensky, who is omnipresent in politics and the world’s media, and his impudent ambassador in Germany have been hailed as stars, and their increasing demands for money and weapons presented as self-evident, while the German chancellor’s cautious hesitation has been presented as irresponsible.
  In this, history has not, as Zelensky claims, laid upon us “a special debt and therefore an obligation” to participate in the war on the side of Ukraine. On the contrary, history should have taught us to exercise special caution before any participation in war, as did Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Mr. Scholz’s attitude of caution is the most responsible attitude of our current political leadership, namely not to let Germany get dragged into another war.
  In a conference of the Mittelstandsinstitut Niedersachsen on the Ukraine war, two almost irreconcilable opinions prevailed: 

This discussion afterwards brought into focus the question whether a government should be allowed to pay German money for foreign wars in foreign interests at all or whether this is a misappropriation of public funds, for which German citizens and payers are being asked to make sacrifices and are being deprived of more important state tasks such as the rehabilitation of our ramshackle infrastructure.
  Despite a heated discussion at the beginning, it was at least possible to reach agreement on the following points:

Why do our media spread hate instead of contributing to peace and promoting negotiations? Why do they support hate politicians instead of moderation politicians? What power directs these media functionaries to their hate campaign? But also, why do we put up with this? Why do voices of peace and efforts for reconciliation not have their say?
  It is not in Germany’s interest if the war lasts longer, even less so if it “will last a long time”, as according to the USA’s ideas. Economically, Germany is already the biggest Western loser in the Ukraine war. The warmongers have imposed economic sanctions that are hurting us now and will hurt us more than Russia in the long run.  •

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THE ONLY WAY TO PEACE IS TO BREAK UP "UKRAINE" INTO TWO DISTINCT REGIONS: THE GALICIANS TO THE WEST AND THE RUSSIANS TO THE EAST...

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BY Patrick Lawrence

I am following British politics during these, Boris Johnson’s final days as prime minister, with interest. It seems that the front-runner to replace the aging boarding-school boy is Liz Truss, who currently serves as foreign secretary. The thought that Truss will be Britain’s next leader interests me a very great deal more than the political jockeying she leads by a wide margin over Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Prime Minister Truss: We had better get ready for it.

To keep things in perspective, and setting aside all questions of political tilt, I sometimes conjure the names of some of Truss’s predecessors when the thought of her residing at 10 Downing comes to mind: Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Churchill, Clement Atlee—Margaret Thatcher, indeed. This is not a question of approving or otherwise the things these prime ministers did. It is to remind myself that, once upon a time, British PMs had some working understanding of the world. They had purpose, intentions, things they wanted to get done because they considered those things in need of doing. A few of them had principles.  

Liz Truss has none of this. In the matter of principles, forget about it. To the extent she can be said to have a purpose, Truss’s purpose as she seeks to be Britain’s next prime minister is to be Britain’s next prime minister.

A little at a time since she came into the public eye, Truss seems to me emblematic of the grave crisis of leadership in the Western post-democracies. Britain will be in very serious trouble if Truss wins the Tories’ vote on September 5. So will the rest of us, given she will represent a new low in our collective elevation of incompetence to high office.

Liz Truss is the foreign secretary who, barking a few months ago at Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, turned out not to know parts of Russia from parts of Ukraine. Liz Truss is the Tory political candidate whose economic platform, as Britons face their worst crisis at least since the 1980s and possibly since 1945 when this is over, begins and ends with a plan to lower taxes.

Lowering taxes and standing fast against Russians are what Thatcher did, you see, and Liz Truss wants to be another Thatcher in the same way Conservative British PMs, including Thatcher, have never gotten over their Churchill complex.

To the extent there is a Liz Truss, Liz Truss is demonstrably a Dummkopf. But it is better to accept that there is no Liz Truss. There is someone who derives her identity by posing atop a NATO tank as Thatcher once did, there is someone who stood fast against Britain’s exit from the European Union and is now overly vigorous in favor of it. But behind the poseur and the shape-shifter there is, by all one can make out, no Liz Truss.

Truss’s plan to lower taxes to appeal to the Conservative constituency that will elect her to succeed Johnson is economic suicide by the reckoning of a large chorus of economists, who think it will worsen an inflation rate that hit 10.1 percent last  week. Predictions of poverty and deprivation—of food, of heat—are dire. “The whole campaign has been conducted in this bubble of unreality,” one of these economists, Tim Bale, who professes at Queen Mary University, London, said in a newspaper interview this week.

I don’t doubt Professor Bale for a second. But let us not miss: The bubble of unreality in which Truss operates is but one case of the bubble into which those purporting to lead the Western post-democracies have marched all of us.

It is interesting to put President Biden in the long line of American presidents in the same way I imagine Truss on the list of British prime ministers. Biden succeeding FDR or Kennedy or LBJ or even Nixon: You get a picture of a long, more or less uninterrupted decline. And you see the same impulse to reenact, to call upon the past for validation. Biden as the second coming of FDR or LBJ: It is ridiculous. Biden has no more purpose to him than Truss, unless we give him the edge as he seeks to stave off America’s loss of its postwar primacy.

I noticed some years ago a peculiar feature of public life in modern America. I named it our culture of representation. Public figures tend to reference the great or supposedly great of the past so as to have some reflected greatness shine upon them.

Among my examples of this phenomenon was Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign in Cuba, June 1898. These were the first moments of overseas combat for American soldiers during what we call the American century. With the buzz of bullets all around him, TR insisted on wearing a cumbersome, useless saber into battle because that is what great soldiers had worn from the American Revolution through the Civil War.

Roosevelt was humorous about this foolishness later in life. “I never wore it again in action,” he wrote in The Rough Riders, “as it kept getting between my legs as I was tearing through the jungle.”

That is our culture of representation in miniature. Since TR’s day it has grown like kudzu over the public life of all the Western post-democracies. Liz Truss is a dedicated practitioner. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, thinks he is de Gaulle come back to life. An interesting thing about Biden is that he tries it—the FDR and LBJ bit—but it is too politically risky even to mimic them. By our standards they are radicals, I am not the first to point out.

It is a fine thing, a sign of wisdom, to learn from the past. But imitation is another matter. For one thing, we are bound to find that the imitators are masking their vacuity—their lack of purpose or intent—behind some previous figure’s purpose and intent. For another, leaders who imitate the past in this way are never going to address the problems confronting their societies effectively. They are going to force their citizens into bubbles of unreality, as Professor Bale nicely put it.

There is another, larger reason for our confinement in bubbles, apart from our leaders’ preoccupation with obscuring their empty opportunism. We live in an historic moment. It does not matter your political stripe, the reality of the West’s loss of primacy after half a millennium—taking my date from da Gama’s arrival in Calicut in 1498—is something we will have to acknowledge if we are to get anywhere in the 21st century.

Those purporting to lead us now prove incapable of acting in response to this moment. They were not trained, as none of us was prepared, to reply to a passage of this magnitude and consequence. All they can do is repeat, to imitate, to charge on with sabers: I want to be another Margaret Thatcher, I want to be another FDR, America is back, and so on.

To turn this point upside down, look at the leaders of prominent non–Western nations. Whatever you may think of Vladimir Putin, whatever you may think of Xi Jinping, whatever you think of Nicolás Maduro or Danny Ortega or Andrés Manuel López Obrador or Miguel Díaz–Canel or any of the new “pink tide” leaders in Latin America, set it aside and consider: These leaders are not wanting in purpose or intent. They do not create or act in bubbles of unreality. They are not given to imitating the past. They have things to do.

President Putin gave another of his remarkable speeches on these matters, delivered at a security conference in Moscow, on August 16. Diego Ramos published a sound analysis of it in ScheerPost on Wednesday. It bears quite directly on the matters I raise. 

I suppose I am circling the thought that the West is exhausted and the non–West is by comparison full of vigor. Perhaps Putin would agree with me: The emergence of the non–West as an energetic pole of power marks an inevitable turn of history’s wheel. The West’s decline does not. It is a choice a frivolous generation of leaders makes for us. And it is not going to end well without a profound change of consciousness, we had better realize.

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THE ULTIMATE OFFENSIVE BY US/UK/NATO AND THEIR DUMB VASSAL OF EUROPE (FRANCE AND GERMANY IN PARTICULAR) IS TO DESTROY RUSSIA (AND CHINA)... UKRAINE IS ONLY A STEPPING STONE FOR THE EMPIRE TO ACHIEVE THIS GOAL. 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW........ (one cannot trust a country like the USA AND the UK while they try to destroy Julian Assange).... ONE CANNOT TRUST THE US EMPIRE. IT IS DEVIOUS AND DECEITFUL. 

DUMB PEOPLE LIKE LIZ TRUSS IN CHARGE OF LEADING ONE OF THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD ARE DANGEROUS, BECAUSE THEY DON'T THINK... AND THEY DON'T KNOW....

SEE: 

"The Age of Deceit"

First published on this site 12 August 2006.

Liz Truss feels “ready” to launch Trident nuclear weapons, the frontrunner for Conservative leadership declared at Tuesday’s hustings in Birmingham, confirming that making such a decision was an “important duty of the prime minister.” 

The foreign secretary did not elaborate on which country the UK might be persuaded to use nuclear weapons against. She has delivered plenty of hawkish rhetoric along the campaign trail, primarily targeting Russia, and is an avid booster of the Ukrainian cause.

Truss also pledged to raise military spending by 3% of GDP by the end of the decade.

Both candidates have blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the dismal state of the British economy, plagued by high inflation, high gas prices and an increasingly unaffordable cost of living, widely seen as resulting from unilateral restrictions imposed by London and its allies.

Truss and Sunak have also taken issue with Putin's planned attendance at the upcoming G20 summit in Indonesia, though Sunak wants to see him barred entirely and Truss said she would prefer to personally confront him at the event.

As of Tuesday, Truss is 26 points ahead her rival and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, according to Politico. Whoever wins will replace Boris Johnson as the British prime minister.

While Sunak was among the first to quit his post in Johnson’s cabinet, Truss was among the handful of high-ranking officials who refused to do so despite the mounting scandals, citing loyalty as her reason.

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SEE ALSO:

https://www.rt.com/russia/561376-ukraine-russia-conflict-us/

THE ONLY PROBLEM HERE IS THAT THE UK (UNDER TRUSS) WOULD PLAY THE MORE DANGEROUS GAME AND NOT CARE MUCH (BECAUSE TRUSS IS STUPID)... WE NEED TO REMAIN ALERT....

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