Tag Archives: Ukraine

The West’s duplicitous stance and hypocrisy draw condemnation in the world

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By Viktor Mikhin

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Many politicians around the world strongly condemn not only Israel’s inhumane policy in the Gaza Strip, when peaceful Palestinians are being slaughtered, but also the hypocrisy, duplicity, pharisaism and arrogance of the West. In one case, the current worthless rulers of Europe condemn the defence of their citizens in Donbass by Russia, which is complying with all international rules of engagement. On the other, when Israel started to destroy civilians in the Gaza Strip (which according to international laws is considered a policy of genocide), the West welcomes and applauds, defending its protégé in the Middle East in every possible way.

For example, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called the West’s position on Gaza, which differs from its position on Ukraine, “the height of hypocrisy.” “What happened in Gaza, has caused the West and the Europeans to lose all their reputation, all their accumulated credits (of trust). They have squandered all their political capital in the eyes of humanity, especially in the eyes of our generations,” Turkish daily Hürriyet quoted Hakan Fidan as saying. According to him, it will not be easy for the West to regain the lost trust. “It will not be easy for them to regain it. Unlike their stance on Ukraine and Russia, their stance on Gaza is the height of hypocrisy. They cannot talk about principles, virtue and morality. They ignore them completely. I see that all this is preparing the ground for a huge geostrategic rupture,” the minister said.

A huge swath of the Global South sees and criticises the double standards that guide the West’s actions in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, as the New York Times (NYT) reluctantly reported through gritted teeth. The publication notes that for the past 20 months, US authorities have actively criticised Moscow for its special military operation in Ukraine, but now that the IDF has carried out a bloodbath in Gaza, full American support for Israel risks creating new and complex obstacles in Washington’s efforts to win over world public opinion.

The war in the Middle East, the piece says, is driving a wedge between the West and leading nations of the Global South such as Brazil and Indonesia. In addition, the West’s unconscionable double standard in defence of Israelis has been sharply criticised by leaders of the Arab world.   The fact that the West treats Ukraine as a special case because it is in Europe, against the backdrop of Middle East escalation, has only increased discontent in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There, the impression is that the West is more concerned about refugees from Ukraine than about those affected by the conflicts in Arab countries. The publication has to admit that the West has failed to convince countries such as India and Turkey to support sanctions against Russia. Given the bloody events in the Gaza Strip, “Western efforts to widen the front against Russia are unlikely to be successful in the near future“.

Earlier, American businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who was seeking the nomination as the country’s presidential candidate from the Republican Party (he ended his campaign and supported Donald Trump’s candidacy in the presidential election), said that the United States should seek an early settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, which would provide for the transition of Russian-speaking regions into Russia. And he is not alone in the US, where questions are increasingly being asked as to why it is the Americans who should bear the brunt of the financial burden and supply vast quantities of weapons to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.

Irish MEP Mick Wallace has rightly stated that the Ukrainian conflict is still going on because of the unwillingness of the United States to end it. He expressed the same opinion with regard to the situation in the Gaza Strip. The world media also noted that the International Criminal Court, at the behest of the United States, has ignored many years of genocide in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore the ICC is “unfair in its choice of topics to explore” and has turned into “an unscrupulous legal body of the West.”

Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya has accused the United States of its position preventing the Security Council from adopting resolutions aimed at stopping the violence in the Gaza Strip, RIA Novosti reported. “It is regrettable that under these circumstances the UN Security Council has so far failed to adopt a single resolution demanding a halt to the violence because of the position of one delegation, the United States, which is blocking all efforts and initiatives to stop the bloodshed,” the diplomat said. He noted that this gave Israel carte blanche to further destroy the Palestinians.

The huge difference in the West’s attitude to the Palestinian-Israeli and Ukrainian conflicts points to hypocritical double standards, one of the goals of which is to interpret international law exactly as it suits the US. In this case, the fate of the Palestinian population is much less interesting to the hardened Western officials in terms of “domestic political points.” How many times have Western delegations requested UN Security Council meetings on Ukraine? The answer is at least twice a month, while how many times the said delegations have requested Security Council meetings on the Middle East issue – zero. Apparently, in this case comments are unnecessary, the conclusion is already on the surface. The West’s double standards “in all their glory” were also observed in the situation with the migration crisis in the EU. While Ukrainian refugees have been given all sorts of benefits, refugees from Africa and the Middle East are being “kept in camps in inhumane conditions”.

The State Department has after all decided to explain the difference in its approaches to the situation in Gaza and Ukraine in the way that yesterday’s hegemon considers, rather than in accordance with the generally accepted laws of international law. Thus, the deputy head of the State Department’s press service, Vedant Patel, responded to a journalist’s question about the difference in the approaches of the US authorities to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The official said that Washington sees no grounds to accuse Israel of genocide of Palestinians, and “one should be very careful when making such statements.” At the same time, when Patel was asked why US President Joe Biden “very quickly” called the events in Ukraine “genocide” in 2022, the State Department official could not give more specific explanations. He only noted that “such definitions must be made with a careful consideration of the law and the facts”, without specifying which facts he had in mind. He simply did not have a reasonable answer, and in the current circumstances he did not dare to say that this was Washington’s wish and favourable.

Incidentally, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier that international law must be respected in all conflicts. This is a correct observation, but according to the Secretary General’s personal interpretation, the conflicts in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine have differences. And he personally believes that Israel, which destroys peaceful Palestinians, strictly observes international law, while Russia, which fights against the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev only on the battlefields, violates this law. Apparently, in Stoltenberg’s “enlightened” opinion, Russia will respect international law only when it, like Israel, destroys the peaceful population of our brother nation. A strange opinion worthy of a schizophrenic from a psychiatric hospital. On this occasion, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the statement by the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, about the “senselessness of humanitarian aid supplies to the Gaza Strip” if hostilities continue there an apologetic of transhumanism. She asked her colleague whether he also considered it pointless to provide medical assistance and love “someone who will die tomorrow”. There was, of course, no reply.

The accusations against the Russian side on the subject of “indiscriminate strikes” against Ukrainian cities can best be assessed by comparing “two realities” – the situation in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip. In this regard, we can recommend that opponents go to the Internet and familiarise themselves with Ukrainian news or watch local TV channels. On Ukrainian websites one can easily find a large number of reports on club and restaurant life in such cities as Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk and others. Ukrainian state institutions and other municipal buildings are functioning normally almost everywhere, transport continues to operate, schools and hospitals are open. This situation can be observed almost two years after Russia launched a special operation aimed at protecting the population of Donbas from the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. All of this shows, as has been repeatedly confirmed by independent observers, that the Russian Armed Forces are conducting exclusively precision strikes against military facilities and infrastructure related to military capabilities. This policy is in sharp contrast to the crimes against humanity committed by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which is deliberately firing Western-made missiles at civilians in Donbas. And there are numerous facts and evidence to this effect, which at the very least would make for a new Nuremberg process.

The current leaders of the West should look at what their lackey Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip, which for three months now has sought to raze the territory and destroy the Palestinians living there. Not only have hospitals and schools been burned to the ground, but entire towns have been destroyed, and the death toll, including a large number of children, is appalling. And all this is happening before the eyes of the world in the 21st century, to the hooting and applause of the Biden administration and the current rulers of Europe, who have finally lost shame, conscience and simple human compassion. “Comparing these two realities, ask yourself a question: how many times have you condemned the methodical annihilation of peaceful Palestinians?” – noted Russia’s UN representative Nebenzya, when asked by Western representatives whether they had ever supported calls for a ceasefire in the Middle East conflict, whether they had condemned Israel’s anti-human crimes. The answer would be only negative. Not only has the West done nothing to stop Israel’s current massacre of Palestinian civilians, it has encouraged them even more by supplying the latest lethal weapons, financially pumping in huge sums of money and defending them on the international stage. Suffice it to say that the US representative at the UN has twice vetoed Security Council resolutions to stop the deadly slaughter in the Gaza Strip, unleashing the Israeli military for even more atrocious crimes, rightly assessed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In the current circumstances, when the former hegemon has lost its power and authority, it has to resort more and more to hypocrisy and double standards to somehow camouflage its bankrupt policy. But no matter how hard the West, led by the U.S., tries, they will no longer be able to fundamentally influence events in the world. And the events in Ukraine, where Russia is successfully conducting a special military operation to protect the Russian population, and the bloody events in the Gaza Strip are the best evidence of this.

Global Economic War Is Coming And The Threat To The US Dollar Is Real

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In a recent statement posted to social media, Tucker Carlson explained succinctly his many reasons for traveling to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. His decision, mired in an avalanche of outrage from leftist media talking heads and a multitude of western politicians, was inspired by Carlson’s concern that Americans have been misdirected by corporate propaganda leaving the public completely uneducated on the war in Ukraine and what tensions with the East might lead to.

I agree. In fact, I don’t think the majority of Americans have a clue what the real consequences of a global war with Russia and its allies would look like. Even if the conflict never resulted in shots fired and stayed confined to the realm of economic warfare, the US and most of Europe would be devastated by the effects.

Carlson specifically mentioned dangers to the status of the US dollar, and I suspect this comment probably mystified a great number of people. Most of the population cannot fathom the idea of a US dollar implosion set in motion by a foreign dump of the greenback as the world reserve currency. They really do believe the dollar is invincible.

The most delusional people are, unfortunately, those within mainstream economic circles. They just can’t seem to grasp that the west is in the midst of financial collapse already, and war would accelerate the effects to levels not seen since the Great Depression.

I have been warning about this outcome for many years. I think I have made my position clear in the past; I suspect the conflict between east and west has been carefully engineered over the course of a decade or more, and Russia is not innocent in this affair.

Russia has consistently collaborated with globalist institutions including the International Monetary Fund in the effort to create a new “global reserve currency system.” In other words, the interests of Russia and the globalists do indeed intersect in a number of ways and the war in Ukraine has not necessarily changed that.  Time Magazine even complained last year about the IMF issuing positive reports about Russia’s economy – They thought the organization was going to repeat the false NATO narrative that Russia was in the midst of fiscal implosion.  Instead, the IMF essentially praised Russia’s resiliency in the face of sanctions.

As I noted in 2014 in my article ‘False East/West Paradigm Hides Rise Of Global Currency’ in reference to the burgeoning war with Ukraine.

“I would remind pro-Putin cheerleaders that Putin and the Kremlin first pushed for the IMF to take control of the Ukrainian economy, and the IMF is now demanding that Ukraine fight Russia in exchange for financial support. This might seem like irony to more foolhardy observers; but to those who are aware of the false East/West paradigm, it is all the part of a greater plan for consolidation of power.”

I also argued that:

“I have warned for quite some time that the development of East/West tensions would be used as a cover for a collapse of the dollar system. I have warned that among the American media this collapse would be blamed on an Eastern dump of foreign exchange reserves and treasuries, resulting in a global domino-effect ending U.S. world reserve status.”

From the moment Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed (many argue that this was done with the help of western intel agencies) the agenda for WWIII was set in motion. Both sides seemed to create the circumstances by which a conflagration was unavoidable.

Russia, strangely, supported the intervention of the IMF to secure Ukraine’s economy. The IMF then asserted that Ukraine would have to fight Russia to keep control of the Donbas or risk losing the financial aid that was keeping the country alive. Is this irony, or is there something else going on here?

NATO started arming Ukraine, and Ukraine used those arms to slaughter civilians in the Donbas. The eastern population wanted to join with Russia, and Ukraine had no intention of allowing this (IMF funding was on the line). In the meantime, the government began openly discussing the official inclusion of Ukraine into NATO. Russia then invaded, taking the Donbas. Now the entire region is a powder keg and both sides are ready to light the fuse.

But let’s look at this situation as if there was no globalist involvement in facilitating the crisis, just for a moment as an exercise in critical thinking…

If I had to pick a side that is “more right” in their position, it would have to be Russia, but not for the reasons many leftists might imagine when conservatives defend Russia.  The bottom line is that the left blindly follows establishment dictates while the rest of us are at least willing to look at the situation from both sides (which is the same thing Tucker Carlson is doing, and he’s being accused of treason for it).

Imagine if China was working to create a military alliance with Mexico with the potential for the Chinese military to stage long range weapons and soldiers on the American southern border? Imagine the chaos that this would cause in the US (maybe they would finally secure the border)? That’s what Russia was facing with Ukraine. Hell, America almost initiated global nuclear war when the Soviets staged missiles in Cuba in 1962. Military operations so close to the borders of major national powers are not a joke.

This was exact rationale for the war on Ukraine cited by Putin in his discussion with Tucker Carlson, and it makes sense.  Again, if we look at the events without the prospect of globalist interference.  But what if we start to consider who benefits the most from this war?

I certainly don’t trust Putin, but that doesn’t negate the Orwellian behavior of European and American political leaders. There is something going on here beyond the typical mechanisms of geopolitical brinkmanship. The conflict has wide ranging consequences and only serves the goals of a select group of elites.  I suspect elements of both Russia and NATO governments are either knowingly or unwittingly serving these interests.

It is undeniable. It is a verifiable reality – Many of our political leaders and elitist institutions are corrupt beyond comprehension. They are seeking an authoritarian reformation, a “great economic reset” and they are triggering multiple conflicts around the world. We saw the mask come off during covid. These people are not merely misguided; they are monsters, and they are hungry. It’s not beyond them to conjure a worldwide calamity and sacrifice the west like a goat on the altar to get the total centralization they desire.

The East/West paradigm plays into this plan perfectly. The BRICS nations are poised to drop the dollar as world reserve; some have already done so in bilateral trade. Make no mistake, if the conflict in Ukraine (and other parts of the world like Syria or Iran) continues to escalate nations like China will move to dump their dollar holdings just as Russia did. As the largest importer/exporter in the world, many countries would follow China’s lead and shift into a basket of currencies instead of the dollar for international trade.

What does this mean?

The dollar, which has been hyperinflated through more than a decade of Federal Reserve QE money printing, has continued to remain stable only because it is the world reserve and the petro-currency. Foreign banks hold trillions in US currency in overseas coffers for this very reason. With the loss of reserve status, an endless river of dollars will then flood back into the US as foreign investors diversify away from the Fed note. Result? Massive inflationary collapse.

This is what’s at stake. This is what Tucker Carlson was referring to, and far too many in America just don’t get it. Globalists benefit because this is what they have been working towards for decades – The deconstruction of US society and the economy so that the “old world order” can be replaced with their “new world order” of Central Bank Digital Currencies.  An IMF one-world currency basket and a host of other highly unpleasant socialist changes would swiftly follow.

The BRICS might be working with the IMF because they see the dethroning of the dollar as an opportunity to gain greater influence over international trade.  Or, maybe they are controlled opposition and they are scrambling for a seat at the NWO table.  In the end, the fall of the dollar would be a watershed moment for the formation of a global currency system.

And the best part for globalists is, they will be seen as the “heroes” when it’s all over. They spent the better part of the last century setting up America for economic failure through their devaluation of the dollar and the creation of a national debt trap. The system was going to break anyway, but now they can divert all blame to war and the “arrogance of nation states” and then come to the rescue with their dystopian digital money.

An east/west conflict opens the door to the Great Reset.  It is, in a lot of ways, the core of the Reset.  Everything in the new world order agenda relies on it.  Right now, the only thing holding back the tide is the public’s general refusal to fight. No one is interested in going overseas to die in a meaningless battle for Ukraine (Zelensky is truly delusional if he thinks Americans will shed blood in his trenches – Even a draft would be an utter failure). No one is interested in starting WWIII, whether it be nuclear or just economic.

I think the establishment’s outrage over Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin is based on their fear that western audiences are already skeptical of the motives behind the conflict and an unfiltered discussion on the war might galvanize this feeling.  The notion of war is becoming harder and harder for the establishment to sell.

This, however, does not negate the ability of NATO or Russia in expanding the crisis beyond Ukraine into other regions or into financial subterfuge (again, keep your eyes on Syria and Iran). Ultimately, they want us to choose sides, but only from the list of sides they approve. Liberty minded groups in the west need to choose our OWN side and fight for our own interests. It can’t be about NATO vs Russia, it has to be about free people vs the globalists. This is the only way these disaster events will ever end.

The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded by the American Taxpayer

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The madmen are in power.”— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.

At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.

What is going on?

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

Global Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.

This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

Global Surveillance

Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

“The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

Global War Profiteering

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Global Policing

Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.

Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State. It’s too busy selling us to the highest bidder.

How Sad It It Is to Watch America’s Abandonment of Morality and Degeneration into Evil.

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

To be an American today is to collect a basket full of sadness.  We have been at war forever for the profits of the military/security complex, for the hegemonic ideology of the neoconservatives, for Cold War hysteria, and for Israel.  Huge sums of money have been wasted for no benefit to the American people.  Just yesterday I was listening to a deputy sheriff tell me how frustrating it was that he cannot reach the criminal American elite and bring them home to their crimes, but has, instead, to focus on the minor crimes of their lower class victims.  

I asked him why it is the lower class that most waves the flag, and he said that patriotism is all that they have that gives them meaning.  I responded that this means that they cannot escape their victimhood, and he said “that is what is sad about it.”

Parents have not come home from Washington’s wars to their spouses, children, family, and friends.  They died for the military/security complex’s profits, for Israel, or for some dumbshit ideology.  They did not die for America, but for their deaths to have meaning, their families have to insist that they did.  With the American people trapped in this way, Washington can pile up the deaths, thanking the dead not for defending the military/security complex’s profits, but for “defending America.” In this way Washington can continue its endless wars. Dying for America is a way the lower class can find meaning in their lives. 

Now that Russia has shown that there is to be no American victory in Ukraine, Washington has renewed its war adventures in the Middle East, aligning solidly with Israel’s massacre of the Palestinians and against the Arab and Muslim countries that oppose what is an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Palestinian women, children, hospitals, schools, social infrastructure are being blown to tiny pieces with the American bombs and missiles that Biden is handing to Israel’s Nazi leader, Netanyahu, who is under indictment both in Israel and now in effect by the International Court of Justice.  But this means nothing to Washington, which sees itself as the exceptional, indispensable country unaccountable to any law, domestic or international.

The alleged “moral democracies,” the US, UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland, thumbed their noses at the International Court of Justice’s verdict against Israel by suspending their funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the major source of aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.  

What does this tell us about the morality of the Western World.  It tells us that it is worse than in Sodom and Gomorrah. 

How can we be Proud Americans when the suspension of funding by Washington will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, over half of whom are children, who rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza? The population faces starvation and an outbreak of disease under Israel’s bombardment and blockade of aid.

This is the way that Zionist Israel, together with its Biden Regime Democrat ally, intends to accomplish its genocidal elimination of the Palestinian people. 

Israel has blockaded all water, food, electricity, and medical supplies to Gaza for the last 120 days. As a result, a half million Palestinians face starvation. 

The massive and ongoing bombing of Gaza, courtesy of the continuous shipment of US munitions to Israel, has killed and wounded at least 90,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children. More than 1000 children have had to undergo amputations without anesthesia. There is no medicine, no blood for transfusions, no clean water to wash wounds. And no food. Only more bombs falling from the sky each day, thanks to America.

Chris Hedges reports that the West’s alleged humanitarian and medical institutions refuse to denounce Israel’s decimation of human life in Gaza.  We are faced with the stark fact that even Western medical and humanitarian institutions are in the pocket of Israeli Zionists.  Morality cannot be found on the scene.

How is it that a tiny county, the existence of which depends entirely on American support, can force the world to accept genocide at the risk of the war widening into Nuclear Armageddon?

“Not Wanting” A Wider Middle East War, the U.S. Has Started One

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Dissident Voice

You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness.  In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo.  The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.

To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded.  Yet, while the International Court of Justice considers the South African charge of genocide against Israel that is supported by overwhelming evidence, the U.S. and its allies have instigated a wider war throughout the Middle East while claiming they do not want such a war.  These settler colonial states want genocide and a much wider war because they have been set back on their heels by those they have mocked, provoked, and attacked – notably the Palestinians, Syrians, and Russians, among others.

While the criminalization of international law does not bode well for the ICJ’s upcoming ruling or its ability to stop Israeli’s genocide in Gaza, Michel Chossudovsky, of Global Research, as is his wont, has offered a superb analysis and suggestion for those who oppose such crimes: that Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter – “The fact that a person [e.g. Israeli, U.S. soldiers, pilots] acted pursuant to order of his [her] Government or of a superior does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” – should be used to supplement the South African charges and appeal directly to the moral consciences of those asked to carry out acts of genocide. He writes:

Let us call upon Israeli and American soldiers and pilots “to abandon the battlefield”, as an act of refusal to participate in a criminal undertaking against the People of Gaza.  

South Africa’s legal procedure at the ICJ should be endorsed Worldwide. While it cannot be relied upon to put a rapid end to the genocide, it provides support and legitimacy to the “Disobey Unlawful Orders, Abandon the Battlefield”  campaign under Nuremberg Charter Principle IV.

While such an approach will not stop the continuing slaughter, it would remind the world that each person who participates in and supports it bears a heavy burden of guilt for their actions; that they are morally and legally culpable.  This appeal to the human heart and conscience, no matter what its practical effect, will at least add to the condemnation of a genocide happening in real time and full view of the world, even though no one will ever be prosecuted for such crimes since any real just use of international law has long disappeared.  Yet there is a edifying history of such conscientious objection to immoral war making, and though each person makes the decision in solitary witness, individual choices can inspire others and the solitary become solidary, as Albert Camus reminded us at the end of his short story, “The Artist at Work.”

With each passing day, it becomes more and more evident that Israel/U.S.A. and their allies do want a wider war.  Iran is their special focus, with Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen targets on the way.  Anyone who supports the genocide in Gaza, explicitly or through silence, bears responsibility for the conflagration to come.  There are no excuses.

And the facts show that it is axiomatic that waging war has been the modus operandi of the U.S./Israeli alliance for a long time.  Just as in early 2003 when the Bush administration said they were looking for a peaceful solution to their fake charges against Sadam Hussein with his alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” the Biden administration is lying, as the Bush administration lied about September 11, 2001 to launch its ongoing war on terror, starting in Afghanistan.  Without an expanded war, President Biden – aka the Democrats, since he will most probably not be the candidate – and his psychopathic partner Benjamin Netanyahu, will not survive.  It is bi-partisan war-mongering, of course, internationally and intramurally, since both U.S. political parties are controlled by the Israel Lobby and billionaire class that owns Congress and the “defense” industry that thrives on never-ending war to such an extent that even the notable independent candidate for the presidency, Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is running as an anti-war candidate, fully supports Israel which is tantamount to supporting Biden’s expanding war policy.

Biden and Netanyahu, who are always claiming after the fact that they were surprised by events or were fed bad advice by their underlings, are dumb scorpions. They are stupid but deadly.  And many people in the West, while perhaps decent people in their personal lives, are living in a fantasy world of “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” in MLK, Jr.’s words, as the growing threat of a world war increases and insouciance reigns.

Neither the Israeli nor American government can allow themselves to be humiliated, U.S./NATO by the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis by the Palestinians.  Like cornered criminals with lethal weapons, they will kill as many as they can on their way down, taking their revenge on the weakest first.

Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned.  They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the moneyed elites whom allegedly they oppose while pocketing their cash and ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence or the perfidy of their enemies is the retort to all those “nut cases” who conjure up conspiracy theories or plain facts to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent.  And they can’t understand why those they have long abused reach a point when they will no longer impetrate for mercy but will fight fiercely for their freedom.

All signs point to a major war on the horizon.  Both the U.S.A. and Israel have been shown to be rogue states with no desire to negotiate a peaceful world.  Believing in high-tech weapons and massive firepower, neither has learned the hard lesson that anti-colonial wars have historically been won by those with far less weapons but with a passionate desire to throw off the chains of their oppressors.  Vietnam is the text-book case, and there are many others.  Failure to learn is the name of their game.

The Zionist project for a Greater Israel is doomed to fail, but as it does, desperate men like Biden and Netanyahu are intent on launching desperate acts of war.  Exactly when and how this expanded war will blaze across the headlines is the question.  It has started, but I think it prudent to expect a black swan event sometime this year when all hell will break loose.  The genocide in Gaza is the first step, and the U.S./Israel, “not wanting” a wider war, have already started one.

(For an excellent history lesson on the Zionist oppression of Palestinians and the current genocide, listen to Max Blumenthal’s and Miko Peled’s impassioned talk – “Where is the War in Gaza Going? – delivered from the heart of darkness, Washington D.C.  Two Jewish men who know the difference between Zionism and Judaism and whose consciences are aflame with justice for the oppressed Palestinians.)

When the Truth Lies Dead and Buried – Resurrect Logic

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

If you read Western mainstream propaganda these days, you’ll find the truth hidden so deep no archaeologist could unearth it. A case in point is a buried lead in a story from the New York Post suggesting Russia has secret plans to hit NATO hard in the coming months.

According to the Post’s Chris Nesi, leaked secret documents released by German newspaper BILD tell of Europe preparing for Vladimir Putin to expand his military operation in Ukraine and to attack NATO ally countries next year. If readers take the headline and a keen graphic illustrating Putin’s alleged diabolical plan, you’d be in the right stocking up those bomb shelters in Wisconsin and Luxembourg.

Fortunately, Nesi’s story is entirely misleading. It suggests BILD got hold of Russian secret plans, conveniently categorised as a “plot” to sound more sinister, when in fact, German generals made plans to etch out WW3 like some chessboard game. The New York Post super sleuth waited until the article’s end to tell readers the truth about these “plans.” Here’s the passage.

“While the plans obtained by BILD are a potential scenario prepared by generals in the German army, European allies take Russia’s threat seriously and are preparing accordingly.”

The biggest problem with these misleading stories is the downstream effect of main outlets, and their tabloid cousins, spreading the lies to the broader public. Iona Cleave of The Sun titled her version “COUNTDOWN TO CONFLICT Putin’s ‘step-by-step plan to bring West to brink of WW3’ revealed in leaked intel doc…including date of ‘Day X’ in 2025.” In this case, the lead of the story is not just buried. It’s cremated and scattered into the digital air before publication by the tabloid. Still, grocery shoppers in London and Edinburgh catch the stunning revelations about “X-Day” while waiting in the checkout line. The Putin bad man campaign continues, and the everyday citizen wonders what their government will do to protect them.

Then the narrative arrives for curious business people via Banking News: “Britain sends 20,000 troops to mammoth NATO exercise against ‘Putin threat’.” Mail Online takes things further by quoting the former head of NATO forces in Europe, retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, assuring readers the “plot” is actual. So, the German Ministry of Defence’s so-called step-by-step doomsday guide is deftly transformed into a bored staff officer scenario-building game in leather armchairs somewhere beneath the Brandenburg Gate into a bonafide Putin strategy to take over Europe.

The media is not the only conduit for Russophobia these days. Leaders of state like Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the UK, say the Russians will not stop at Ukraine’s borders. American President Joe Biden has warned my people that if Putin wins a victory over Ukraine, Russia will attack a NATO country. And the minions of continual conflict for the Liberal Order are out in force in academia, business, and on the NGO and think tank circuit. One fine example is retired Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who’s gone on the media/propaganda circuit to sell more gas masks and military headgear via companies he’s affiliated with, told The Telegraph, “Putin may be about to launch an apocalyptic assault.” For those unfamiliar, Colonel Hamish Stephen de Bretton-Gordon commanded NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion between 2005 and 2007. He was in all the right places about the time America was introduced to the post-9/11 idea of a “war on terror.” He later led a company profiting from his and other analysts’ apocalyptic prophecies. When regime change schemes came to Syria, it was the good colonel who “informed” the House of Commons and the waiting BBC audience of Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his people. Bretton-Gordon and many others trained by the spooks and the Anglo-American military-industrial complex play a continuous melody of crisis and fear.

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” ― Adolf Hitler

Logic, the holy of holies these days, seems as lost as the Ark of the Covenant. Who could fail to notice, for instance, Russia taking up a defensive stance to save her soldiers’ lives and those of countless civilians in Ukraine cities like Kyiv, Karkhov, and Dnipro? With nearly half a million troops held in reserve and with Ukraine’s forces decimated, why haven’t the Russians already pushed through the weak spots on the way to the Dnieper River? And what about the billions and billions in arms and cash Western states have now lost to an impossible cause?

Looking at the latest tally of destroyed Ukraine equipment since the start of the operation tells the real story. So far, the Russians have knocked out almost 600 Ukrainian warplanes, 265 helicopters, almost 11,000 UAVs, 450 SAM systems, 14,645 tanks and armoured vehicles, 1,202 rocket launching systems, 7,750 artillery pieces, and 17,507 special military vehicles. Unbiased experts put the number of Ukraine dead at between 400 and 500 thousand combatants. And the number of wounded surely exceeds a million by now.

And finally, let’s remember that the elitist-controlled Western media, the politicians, and the so-called experts have been telling us Russia was finished for years now. Sanctions, the blown-up pipeline, and the weapons and money dump to Zelensky were supposed to weaken Russia. This is not the truth. Russia is more vital now than ever since the 1980s, militarily and economically. This points to another point of lost logic. Why would Russia want to take over states protected by NATO? Europe is a consumer continent. It’s where a billion people need feeding, not a breadbasket for good Russian families. There is nothing in Europe that Russia needs. It is Europe, on the other hand, that desperately needs Russia and the other BRICS countries. So, who are the most likely aggressors in all this?

Never believe their slogans, especially not NATO/good, Russia/bad.

Biden’s Foreign Policy; the Biden Doctrine

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By Peter Van Buren

Source: WeMeantWell.com

Joe Biden ordered airstrikes on Iraq, against Iranian-backed militants, in retaliation for recent attacks by those militants that severely injured three American soldiers. Joe didn’t consult with Congress or anyone else before ordering the strikes, and no declaration of war exists of course. Yet no one believes the militias, following their spanking, will disappear or stop harming Americans.

That sums up the Biden Foreign Policy, call it a doctrine if you’d like: a series of geopolitically unsuccessful, inconsequential, mostly reactive unilateral actions, with no end game. Underlying it all is the sense that no one is particularly frightened, respectful or wary of American power anymore. Let’s see how this worked on a global scale over the last three bloody years.

The disastrous evacuation of Kabul in August 2021 should have warned all of us we were dealing with foreign policy amateurs. The rush for the last planes was an expected unexpected event. Yet the Biden administration did not quietly start the evacuation in February with high-value personnel, nor did it negotiate ahead of time for third country landing rights. Mistakes made as long ago as Vietnam evacuating locals who worked with us were clear, yet Biden did not kick start processing SIV visas for translators and others until literally the last flights were scheduled out. The entire evacuation appeared as an unplanned free fall, just “land some planes and see if that works.” No endgame really, simply a unilateral decision to cap the evacuation off at a certain point in time and declare it over no matter who was or was not saved.

Ukraine is some yellowed vision of cold war. The Biden plan was based on a Wonka-like act of imagination, that U.S. arms wielded by amateur fighters backed up by intelligence, space-based targeting, and special forces infiltrated on the ground would hastily defeat a determined opponent (See Afghanistan, failure of the same strategy, 2001-2003.) When the miracle cure strategy failed, there was no Plan B except to continue to pour arms in to a war that had no clear end game, that was not winnable, only sustainable. Meanwhile, Biden restrictions on domestic mining mean the United States is the largest purchaser of Russian enriched uranium. If the Russians are scared of American power they hide that well.

The results have not been better elsewhere. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine preceeded what one pundit described as “the 2023 brazen Chinese spy balloon’s uncontested trajectory over the United States, the recent Hamas invasion of Israel, the serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria, and the terrorist Houthis’ veritable absorption of the Red Sea. America’s enemies had become opportunistic, not deterred.” Biden took the bait at each open-ended opportunity, and now Joe is dangerously close to letting Gaza and Yemen spiral into a global conflict.

And so another “coalition” fight, this time in Ukraine with NATO, ended up a U.S. primary struggle. It is NATO mostly walking away from the meat of the Ukraine struggle, and the baby NATO coalition elsewhere of France, Italy, and others that was supposed to control the Red Sea breaking down. It is a thin gruel of happy talk about caring for civilians backed up by unlimited arms to Israel, handled so poorly diplomatically that the U.S. has inherited pariah status globally. The modern version of American power was demonstrated when Egypt snubbed Joe Biden’s visit over the mess in Gaza. The question of Palestine, always simmering, is now another major issue to divide Red and Blue and further polarize society. In addition to receiving $6 billion in frozen oil funds from Biden as a ransom for five American hostages, Iran controls the playbook, attacking with impunity via its proxies across Iraq, Syria, and southern Lebanon; Iran’s partners carried out more than 100 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea.  They decide if and when the 1:1 conflict with Israel goes regional, and the U.S. will be again forced to react. The Houthis, also Iran-backed, have dragged the U.S. into a broad promise to keep the Red Sea open to shipping, as the world rolls its eyes as Pax Americana once again looks like a punchline. Can anyone say we are still indispensable?

Another Biden foreign policy disaster has come home, literally, in the immigration crisis. For reasons too vague to enunciate, the Biden administration did away with any semblance of immigration law and flung open the southern border to anyone interested in wandering in. Already more than eight million illegal entrants have come across, with another quarter-million entering each month. As in Ukraine and elsewhere, there is no endgame. When will the border close? How much will caring for the millions cost (New York City has processed more than 160,000 migrants; some 70,000 remain in the city’s care. In Denver, caring for the new migrants has consumed 10 percent of the city’s budget)? The United States has now exceeded, both in real numbers and in percentages, all past numbers of non-native born American residents. What impact on our greater society will such an influx have, especially given how it is targeted at a handful of cities? Will the Russians ever surrender? What about the immigrants?

Three years ago, there was no war in Ukraine and certainly no U.S. military involvement in the Crimea and Donbas. Israel and Hamas existed in their tinder-like stasis condition, no brutal massacre of 1,600 Jews (30 of whom were Americans) and no invasion of Gaza. Campus protestors limited their protestations that they were not anti-Semitic in their hatred of Israel. Iran and the U.S. cooperated on fighting ISIS in Iraq, uneasy partners for certain but not shooting cousins as now. The Houthi struggle was confined within Yemen’s borders. On the positive side, efforts were being made to watch diplomacy bloom with North Korea, which instead is now test firing missiles aplomb once again. Biden has made no progress on China either to limit their opportunistic stance or reduce their hold over America economically. Biden has largely ignored most of Africa and South America as well as the world’s most populous democracy (and nuclear power) India. It is impossible to call it progress and all too easy to call it sadly the Biden Doctrine.

The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse

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Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous. 

Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator. 

“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one.  We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you.  The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”

The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”

While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. 

As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.” 

He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza. 

Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.

And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank. 

When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.

Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.  

Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military. 

While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.

In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”

Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:

At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.

He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018. 

An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:

A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”

[….]

A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”

Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.

[….]

McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.

Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.

In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”

McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority —  an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu. 

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.  

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7. 

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.