Newt Gingrich Full Explosive Interview with Martha Raddatz (10/16/2016) via YouTube
Archive for October 16, 2016
US prepped for massive cyber assault on Russia
October 16, 2016US prepped for massive cyber assault on Russia
The Obama administration is threatening to launch a vast cyber war against Russia in response to the country’s alleged interference with the presidential election.Vice President Joe Biden told NBC News Friday that “we’re sending a message” to Russian President Vladimir Putin and that the wide-ranging “clandestine” cyber operation will take place.
“We’re sending a message,” Biden said during an interview with “Meet the Press” that will air on Sunday. “We have the capacity to do it. It will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact,”
The vice president belittled Russia’s alleged interference in the US election but stressed their efforts, however futile, would be responded in kind.
“Their capacity to fundamentally alter the election is not what people think,” Biden said.
“And I tell you what, to the extent that they do we will be proportional in what we do.”
It was not clear whether the American public would be alerted when or if an attack actually took place. When asked about whether the public would even be aware an attack took place Biden simply said “Hope not.”
Intelligence officials told NBC News that CIA has already begun “opening cyber doors, selecting targets and making other preparations for an operation.”
James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who served as the supreme allied commander at NATO, told NBC that the CIA should “embarrass” the Kremlin by exposing financial dealings of Putin and his cronies.
“It’s well known that there’s great deal of offshore money moved outside of Russia from oligarchs,” Stavridis said. “It would be very embarrassing if that was revealed, and that would be a proportional response to what we’ve seen” in the recent hacks into US political figures and committees.
The US publicly blamed Russia last week for the recent cyberattacks against Democratic Party organizations.
“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process,” the Office of Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security said in a joint statement last Friday. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
The talk of an impending cyber war between the two countries takes place while the powers struggle to collaborate in the war against ISIS and inside Syria.
The ultimate decision on whether to launch to cyber attack would rest with President Obama, officials said. Sources told NBC News that there are diverging view within the administration about how to proceed.
“I think unless we stand up to this kind of cyber attack from Russia, we’ll only see more and more of it in the future,” Admiral Stavridis said.
Man the Vote: It’s the Least You Can Do for Your Country
October 16, 2016Man the Vote: It’s the Least You Can Do for Your Country, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, October 16, 2016
Earlier this week Nate Silver reported that if only men voted Trump’s already won. That is, to say women are voting in greater percentages for Clinton and men for Trump. Here’s his astonishing chart:
“If men were the only voters, conversely, we’d have to subtract 10 points from Clinton’s current margin in every state — which would yield an awfully red map. Trump would win everything that could plausibly be called a swing state, with Clinton hanging on only to the West Coast, parts of the Northeast, Illinois and New Mexico. That would yield 350 electoral votes for Trump to 188 for Clinton:”
This may well explain the Clinton effort to schlep before the cameras every woman who is willing to accuse Trump of making advances toward them no matter how flimsy, tardy and improbable the charge.
Hillary who asserted on her website HillaryClinton.com that women who claimed to have survived sexual assault “have the right to be believed” scrubbed that as Trump reminded voters of her husband’s depredations against women.
Christina Jeffrey notes in correspondence how the term “sexual assault” has been stretched beyond rational meaning when it suits the left to do so:
Our side has done a good job of pointing out what real sexual assault looks like, so just for fun, I think I’ll take up what the PC crowd wants to fight. Fighting rape and real sexual assault in the inner cities and by predatory older males against middle and high school students is difficult and the statistics tend to stigmatize African-American males. So the P.C. crowd goes after the kind of “sexual assault” that is often quite benign and part of semi-modern/traditional courtship rituals.
Political Correctness has invaded every aspect of our lives; but the area where it is now being felt most intensely is in the sexual realm. While pushing “Kiddie Porn” to K-4 students as “health education,” and making statements in the press like this one: “girls have to get used to seeing male genitalia” as a defense for transgendered locker rooms” (paraphrased, but not inaccurately), the PC education crowd insists that college women are constantly at risk of “sexual assault.” If you properly define “sexual assault” as rape or intent to rape, college campuses are actually among the safest places for women of college age. If that were not true, no one would pay $50,000 or more to let their precious daughters attend college. And those of us who teach on these campuses, and are close to our students, would be aware that our women students were being constantly “assaulted.”
When it suits them to do so they are perfectly willing to claim that a hug or kiss is a “sexual assault” in the absence of a notarized statement of consent.
My Facebook friend Lynn Chu apparently concurs with this analysis,” The invention of this term, and its misuse, was a deliberate propaganda effort to blur harmless romance including clumsiness or episodes gone awry often while both parties at colleges are drunk, with actual rape for which a prosecution and conviction would lie. The courts know how to do this, and universities and colleges do not. ”
Now they are trying to use such an expansion to cover dubious claims, often contested by other witnesses, about Trump.
We’ve seen such sexual propaganda before in the Duke and University of Virginia “rape” cases.
The young women whom these charges are designed to influence are astonishingly ill-informed as this tape of some of them who are for repealing women’s suffrage under the misguided belief that it means “suffering” or something reveals:
That some Republican politicians have backed off supporting Trump because of these allegations — again underscoring my contempt for the white-togaed ninnies who also rankle Katie Hopkins at the Daily Mail:
Fearful for their own political future, deserting Republican politicians have spoken of not being able to look their daughter in the eye and still back Trump, despite having made him the party’s nominee.
Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, said ‘women should be championed or revered, not objectified’.
For the record, I never want to be either of those two things. I am not a charitable cause. Being championed makes me sound incapable. And I certainly don’t want to be revered — that’s one step away from being embalmed in holy oil.
John McCain has jumped ship, too. Trying to swim away from the candidate nominated by his party, who has been entirely consistent in his campaign in saying things more sensitive souls find hard to hear.
Predictably the founder of Everyday Sexism was wheeled out from her feminist lair to reinforce Trump as a monster, applauded wildly by young women who need a trigger warning before they read Watership Down.”
She concludes the charges are “no worse than the Hillary-voting, smug rape-culture rappers who like to hang out at the Obama White House while peddling vile lyrics to kids that would make Trump blush.”
Michelle Obama claims that the offending Trump locker room boasts to Billy Bush which NBC sat on until now “shocked her to her core”. Perplexingly, she has also said she considers the half dressed, obscene singer and dancer Beyoncé a “role model” for her daughters.
Nor have I forgotten the warm welcome women carrying giant dildos with the motto “cocks not glocks” received at the White House.
Michelle’s husband’s display of his erect manhood before a planeload of women reporters none of who to my knowledge reported the incident and who now are getting all Victorian further suggests sexual vulgarity is not unknown to the Obama family.
Back in 2008, at least a portion of the below video of Obama flaunting himself did appear on CNN’s website.
However, no media coverage made any reference to lewdness. There was just reference to the unremarkable news that Obama was… wearing jeans.
CNN captioned the clip with only what follows, which Michelle Malkin and Allahpundit took note of at the time:
“Obama in jeans: Sen. Barack Obama surprises the press corps by wearing jeans.”
It appears that the portion of the video that would have created a firestorm had been circumsized by CNN editors.”
I haven’t forgotten either when the left talked about Paula Jones as “trailer trash” when she successfully charged Hillary’s husband with real sexual misconduct or when Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin were called “c*nt” without press or Democratic rebuke. Everything, it seems, is relative. Women of the left are to be treated with care. Those in opposition are disrespected every possible way.
As tawdry as all this is, it has to be answered so if you are offended, I apologize, but there’s no sheltering behind good taste when mud is being slung by people whose record for sleaze and aggression is boundless.
I’m in full agreement with Dr. Hurd:
Hypocrisy is a painful thing to watch. It’s beyond laughable to watch the biased media culture and all the Hillary-supporting politicians go Puritanical when it comes to sex. The morally righteous never had this problem with Bill Clinton, and they don’t have a problem with Hillary’s mind-numbing evasiveness when it comes to partnering with one of the highest profile sexual predators of all time.
Hypocrisy is a symptom. People are hypocrites only when they’re evading something big. What the Clintonistas try to hide is they care about only one thing: Power. They don’t care about respect for women, because to respect women you first have to respect individuality. Their entire lives have been based on the acquisition of political power and the millions of dollars they receive when that power is peddled and sold on the government market. They care nothing for the preservation of individual rights. They care only about rewarding their donors and advancing their socialist causes.
As for career politicians like John McCain and Paul Ryan, why should anyone care what they think? They are nothing more than managers for the collapsing imperial state. Their squandering of America’s Constitution and fiscal future for the sake of their own power trips makes Trump’s sleazy comments seem like nothing in comparison.
[snip]
If you want to make the case for NOT voting for Donald Trump, you have to get real. This tape is the least plausible reason you can find. And if you’re not voting for Donald Trump, be prepared to defend why you did your part to let an actual criminal and lawbreaker — Hillary Clinton — become president.
The issue is more than hypocrisy; it is allowing such stupid distractions to keep us from focusing on the real threats to our lives. Wretchard T Cat (Richard Fernandez) is on target:
The most astonishing thing is that nobody’s hiding anything any more. The Russians are openly stealing information; Wikileaks is blatantly distributing it. America’s enemies are opening fire, banners flying at American warships. The Obama administration is frankly buying the silence or quiescence of enemies with public money. At the same time he’s got so many secret wars going on you can lose count. The Clintons have got a cash drop set up in the middle of Main Street.
The press is openly rooting for Hillary. Heck the UN wants her to win and isn’t shy about saying so. ISIS is taking video, video of atrocities. It’s like they don’t care. It’s like nobody cares. All pretense, all decorum are gone.
The only people who care are the GOP leaders who are shocked, shocked that candidates are using bad language. But they’re like Temperance League biddies in saloon with a fight going on.
The whole spectacle is taking place in plain view and the most miraculous thing is that everyone pretends not to notice and keep drinking even while they dodge flying chairs and spittoons.
The show must go on. Whatever happens the show must go on.
David Gelernter argues we’ve become emasculated by the left in an article which I urge you all to read in its entirety, Here’s the money shot for his argument that Hillary must be stopped:
Trump voters have noticed that, not just over Mr. Obama’s term but in recent decades, their own opinions have grown increasingly irrelevant. It’s something you feel, like encroaching numbness. Since when has the American public endorsed affirmative action? Yet it’s a major factor in the lives of every student and many workers. Since when did we decide that men and women are interchangeable in hand-to-hand combat on the front lines? Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth.
Did we invite the federal bureaucracy to take charge of school bathrooms? I guess I missed that meeting. The schools are corrupt and the universities rotten to the core, and everyone has known it since the 1980s. But the Democrats are owned by the teachers unions, and Republicans have made only small-scale corrections to a system that needs to be ripped out and carefully disposed of, like poison ivy.
The Emasculated Voter to whom no one pays any attention is the story of modern democracy. Instead of putting voters in charge, we tell them they’re in charge, and it’s just as good. That’s the Establishment’s great discovery in the Lois Lerner Age.
Enter Mr. Trump. People say he became a star because he just happened to mention an issue that just happened to catch on. But immigration is the central issue of our time. Trump voters zeroed in because they saw what most intellectuals didn’t. What is our nation and what will it be? Will America go on being America or turn into something else? That depends on who lives here — especially given our schools, which no longer condescend to teach Americanism.
To reclaim your country and your virility — assuming Nate Silver is right — take all your male friends to the polls. It’s the least you can do for your country.
Donald Trump: “A moment of reckoning.”
October 16, 2016Donald Trump: “A moment of reckoning.” Via YouTube, October 13, 2016
(The full speech is available here. –DM)
The Vatican Submits to Islam (2006-2016)
October 16, 2016The Vatican Submits to Islam (2006-2016), Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, October 16, 2016
“[Pope Benedict XVI] has doubted publicly that it can be accommodated in a pluralistic society… and tempered his support for a programme of inter-religious dialogue run by Franciscan monks at Assisi. He has embraced the view of Italian moderates and conservatives that the guiding principle of inter-religious dialogue must be reciprocità. That is, he finds it naive to permit the building of a Saudi-funded mosque, Europe’s largest, in Rome, while Muslim countries forbid the construction of churches and missions.” — Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times.
In that lecture, Benedict did what in the Islamic world is forbidden: freely discussing faith. He said that God is different from Allah.
Since then, apologies to the Islamic world have become the official Vatican policy. Pope Francis denied that Islam itself is violent and claimed that the potential for violence lies within every religion, including Catholicism. Previously, Pope Francis said there is “a world war” but denied that Islam has any role in it.
“It is clear that Muslims have an ultimate goal: conquering the world…But we find it hard to recognize this reality and to respond by defending the Christian faith (…) I have heard several times an Islamic idea: ‘what we failed to do with the weapons in the past we are doing today with the birth rate and immigration’. The population is changing. If this keeps up, in countries like Italy, the majority will be Muslim (…) And what is the most important achievement? Rome.” — Monsignor Raymond Burke, US Catholic leader.
If 9/11 was the declaration of jihad against the West, 9/12 will be remembered as one of the most dramatic knee-bends of the Western cultural submission to Islam.
On September 12th 2006, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) landed in Bavaria, Germany, where he was born and first taught theology. He was expected to deliver a lecture in front of the academic community at the University of Regensburg. That lesson would go down to history as the most controversial papal speech of the last half-century.
On this, the 10th anniversary of the speech, the Western world and the Islamic world both owe Benedict an apology, but unfortunately, the opposite happened: the Vatican has apologized to the Muslims.
In his lecture, Pope Benedict clarified the internal contradictions of contemporary Islam, but he also offered a terrain of dialogue with Christianity and Western culture. The Pope spoke of the Jewish, Greek and Christian roots of Europe’s faith, explaining why these are different from Islamic monotheism. His talk contained a quote from the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman”.
This keg of dynamite was softened by a quotation from a Koranic sura of Mohammed’s youth, Benedict noted, “when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat”, and which says: “There is no compulsion in religion.”
Pope Benedict’s talk was not a surprise. “It is no secret that the Pope worried about Islam”, Christopher Caldwell noted in the Financial Times.
“He has doubted publicly that it can be accommodated in a pluralistic society. He has demoted one of John Paul II’s leading advisers on the Islamic world and tempered his support for a programme of inter-religious dialogue run by Franciscan monks at Assisi. He has embraced the view of Italian moderates and conservatives that the guiding principle of inter-religious dialogue must be reciprocità. That is, he finds it naive to permit the building of a Saudi-funded mosque, Europe’s largest, in Rome, while Muslim countries forbid the construction of churches and missions”.
In Regensburg, Benedict staged the drama of our time and for the first time in the Catholic Church’s history — a Pope talked about Islam without recycling platitudes. In that lecture, the Pope did what in the Islamic world is forbidden: freely discussing faith. He said that God is different from Allah. We never heard that again.
The quotation of Manuel II Palaeologus bounced around the world, shaking the Muslim umma [community], which reacted violently. Even the international press was unanimous in a chorus of condemnation of the “Pope’s aggression on Islam.”
The reaction to Pope’s speech proved that he was right. From Muslim leaders to the New York Times, everybody demanded the Pope’s apologies and submission. The mainstream media turned him into an incendiary proponent of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” In the Palestinian Authority area, Christian churches were burned and Christians targeted. British Islamists called to “kill” the Pope, but Benedict defied them.
At the same time, in Somalia, an Italian nun was shot. In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was beheaded by al-Qaeda and mutilated after the terrorists demanded that the Catholic Church to apologize for the speech. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood pledged retaliations against the Pope. A Pakistani leader, Shahid Shamsi, accused the Vatican of supporting “the Zionist entity.”Salih Kapusuz, number two in the party of the Turkey’s then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, compared Pope Benedict XVI to Hitler and Mussolini. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that the words of the Pope belong to “the chain of US-Israeli conspiracy,” and accused Benedict of being part of the “Crusader conspiracy.”
Security around Pope Benedict was soon massively increased. Two years later, the Pope had been barred from speaking at Rome’s most important university, La Sapienza. After the Regensburg affair, Benedict would not be the same anymore. Islamists and Western appeasers had been able to close his mouth.
A few days after the lecture, exhausted and frightened, Pope Benedict apologized. I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address … which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims,” the Pope told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer residence. The quote did not “in any way express my personal thoughts. I hope this serves to appease hearts.”
The Pope may have said that to stop further violence. But since then, apologies to the Islamic world have become the official Vatican policy.
“The default positions vis-à-vis militant Islam are now unhappily reminiscent of Vatican diplomacy’s default positions vis-à-vis communism during the last 25 years of the Cold War,” wrote George Weigel, a US leading scholar. The Vatican’s new agenda seeks “to reach political accommodations with Islamic states and foreswear forceful public condemnation of Islamist and jihadist ideology.”
Ten years since the Regensburg lecture, relevant as ever after ISIS’s attacks on European soil, another Pope, Francis I, has tried in many ways to separate Muslims and violence and always avoided mentioning that forbidden word: Islam. As Sandro Magister, one of Italy’s most important journalists on Catholic issues, wrote: “In the face of the offensive of radical Islam, Francis’s idea is that ‘we must soothe the conflict’. And forget Regensburg.”
The entire Vatican’s diplomatic body today carefully avoids the words “Islam” and “Muslims,” and instead embraces a denial that a clash of civilization exists. Returning from World Youth Day in Poland last August, Pope Francis denied that Islam itself is violent and claimed that the potential for violence lies within every religion, including Catholicism. Previously, Pope Francis said there is “a world war,” but denied that Islam has any role in it.
In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI (left) said what no Pope had ever dared to say — that there is a link between violence and Islam. Ten years later, Pope Francis (right) never calls those responsible for anti-Christian violence by name and never mentions the word “Islam.” (Image source: Benedict: Flickr/Catholic Church of England | Francis: Wikimedia Commons/korea.net)
In May, Pope Francis explained that the “idea of conquest” is integral to Islam as a religion, but he quickly added that some might interpret Christianity, the religion of turning the other cheek, in the same way. “Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” the Pope claimed in 2013. A year later, Francis declared that “Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and peaceful coexistence.” He claimed that it is the ills of global economy, and not Islam, that inspire terrorism. And a few days ago, the Pope said that “people who call themselves Christians but do not want refugees at their door are hypocrites.”
Pope Francis’s pontificate has been marked by this moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam, which also obfuscates the crimes of Muslims against their own people, Eastern Christians and the West.
But there are brave cardinals who still speak the truth. One is the US Catholic leader Raymond Burke, who is featured in a recent interview with the Italian media, in which he said:
“It is clear that Muslims have an ultimate goal: conquering the world. Islam, through the sharia, their law, wants to rule the world and allows violence against the infidels, such as Christians. But we find it hard to recognize this reality and to respond by defending the Christian faith (…) I have heard several times an Islamic idea: ‘what we failed to do with the weapons in the past we are doing today with the birth rate and immigration’. The population is changing. If this keeps up, in countries like Italy, the majority will be Muslim (…) Islam realizes itself in the conquest. And what is the most important achievement? Rome.”
Unfortunately, Rome’s first bishop, Pope Francis, seems deaf and blind to these important truths. It took five days for Benedict XVI to apologize for his brave lecture. But he opened a decade-long season of the Vatican’s excuses for Islamic terrorism.
Pope Francis is still awaited for a visit at the church of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, where Father Jacques Hamel was murdered by Islamists this summer. That killing, ten years after the Regensburg lecture, is the most tragic proof that Benedict was right and Francis wrong.
Palestinian Authority kids’ drawings: Israel drinks the blood of “Palestinians”
October 16, 2016Palestinian Authority kids’ drawings: Israel drinks the blood of “Palestinians” Jihad Watch,
“Of course, Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with anyone who is dedicated to its destruction. But while I know you have had differences with the Palestinian Authority, I believe that you do have a true partner in President Abbas…” — Barack Obama, March 21, 2013
“PA kids’ drawings: Israel drinks blood of Palestinians,” by Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch, October 16, 2016:
Fatah has posted several children’s drawings on Facebook. The drawings clearly show the success of PA and Fatah brainwashing children to believe that Israel only seeks to harm them, violence is good and that all of Israel really is “Palestine.”
Labeling the drawings “innocent drawings” that “express the feelings of children of #Palestine,” Fatah posted the drawing above showing Israel, as indicated by a Star of David, eating a Palestinian body wrapped in the Palestinian flag. Blood is seen coming from the body, and a glass of blood is next to the plate.
Another drawing by a Palestinian child showed a crucified woman wearing the colors of the Palestinian flag, with her body in the shape of the PA map of “Palestine” that presents all of Israel as “Palestine” together with the PA areas. The crucifixion also repeats the analogy that Palestinians are Martyr victims like Jesus.
Yet other drawings showed support for violence as legitimate means of Palestinian opposition to Israel. One child drew a Palestinian with a slingshot, another drew a hand with a rifle (see below). These drawings echo the PA and Fatah’s encouragement of the use of violence against Israel and their glorification of terrorists as heroes. Palestinian Media Watch documented that summer camps organized by the PA Ministry of Education and the PLO educated children to see terrorist stabbers as role models.
Other drawings repeated the world view that all of Israel is “Palestine,” showing the PA map of “Palestine” which completely erases the existence of Israel and its legitimacy (see below).
This message is repeated endlessly by the PA and Fatah. Children are told that “it will all return to us” on kids’ TV programs. The PA National Security Forces regularly post photos from all over Israel presenting the places as “Palestine,” and even crossword puzzles portray Israeli cities as “occupied Palestine.”
The PA’s exploitation of Palestinian children’s innocence is precisely what PMW has been highlighting and warning about for years….
The Soviet-Palestinian Lie
October 16, 2016The Soviet-Palestinian Lie
by Judith Bergman
October 16, 2016 at 4:30 am
Source: The Soviet-Palestinian Lie
- “The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania.
- “First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa.
- “[T]he Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.” — Yuri Andropov, former KGB chairman.
- As early as 1965, the USSR had formally proposed in the UN a resolution that would condemn Zionism as colonialism and racism. Although the Soviets did not succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975, Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination” was finally passed.
The recent discovery that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was a KGB spy in Damascus in 1983, was discarded by many in the mainstream media as a “historical curiosity” — except that the news inconveniently came out at the time that President Vladimir Putin was trying to organize new talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, the Palestinian Authority immediately dismissed the news. Fatah official Nabil Shaath denied that Abbas was ever a KGB operative, and called the claim a “smear campaign.”
The discovery, far from being a “historical curiosity,” is an aspect of one of many pieces in the puzzle of the origins of 20th and 21st century Islamic terrorism. Those origins are almost always obfuscated and obscured in ill-concealed attempts at presenting a particular narrative about the causes of contemporary terrorism, while decrying all and any evidence to the contrary as “conspiracy theories.”
There is nothing conspiratorial about the latest revelation. It comes from a document in the Mitrokhin archives at the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Vasily Mitrokhin was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, who was later demoted to KGB archivist. At immense risk to his own life, he spent 12 years diligently copying secret KGB files that would not otherwise have become available to the public (the KGB foreign intelligence archives remain sealed from the public, despite the demise of the Soviet Union). When Mitrokhin defected from the Russia in 1992, he brought the copied files with him to the UK. The declassified parts of the Mitrokhin archives were brought to the public eye in the writings of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, who co-wrote The Mitrokhin Archive (published in two volumes) together with the Soviet defector. Mitrokhin’s archives led, among other things, to the discovery of many KGB spies in the West and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the history of the full extent of the KGB’s influence and disinformation operations is not nearly as well-known as it should be, considering the immense influence that the KGB wielded on international affairs. The KGB conducted hostile operations against NATO as a whole, against democratic dissent within the Soviet bloc, and set in motion subversive events in Latin America and the Middle East, which resonate to this day.
The KGB, furthermore, was an extremely active player in the creation of so-called liberation movements in Latin America and in the Middle East, movements that went on to engage in lethal terrorism — as documented in, among other places, The Mitrokhin Archive, as well as in the books and writings of Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Communist official to defect from the former Soviet bloc.
Pacepa was chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania and a personal advisor to Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu before he defected to the United States in 1978. Pacepa worked with the CIA to bring down communism for more than 10 years; the agency described his cooperation as “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”
In a 2004 interview, FrontPage Magazine, Pacepa said:
The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for “liberation” organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara … the KGB also created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks… In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter — a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman…
In the Wall Street Journal, Pacepa explained how the KGB built up Arafat — or in current parlance, how they constructed a narrative for him:
He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
As the late historian Robert S. Wistrich wrote in A Lethal Obsession, the Six-Day War unleashed a protracted, intensive campaign on the part of the Soviet Union to delegitimize Israel and the movement for Jewish self-determination, known as Zionism. This was done in order to rectify the damage to the Soviet Union’s prestige after Israel defeated its Arab allies:
After 1967, the USSR began to flood the world with a constant flow of anti-Zionist propaganda… Only the Nazis in their twelve years of power had ever succeeded in producing such a sustained flow of fabricated libels as an instrument of their domestic and foreign policy[1].
For this the USSR employed a host of Nazi trigger words to describe the Israeli defeat of the Arab 1967 aggression, several of which are still employed on the Western left today when it comes to Israel, such as “practitioners of genocide”, “racists”, “concentration camps”, and “Herrenvolk.”
Furthermore, the USSR engaged in an international smearing campaign in the Arab world. In 1972, the Soviet Union, launched operation “SIG” (Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments”), with the purpose of portraying the United States as an “arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world”. Some 4,000 agents were sent from the Soviet Bloc into the Islamic world, armed with thousands of copies of the old czarist Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov:
‘the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were “fascist, imperial-Zionist countries” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
As early as 1965, the USSR had formally proposed in the UN a resolution that would condemn Zionism as colonialism and racism. Although the Soviets did not succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975, Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination’ was finally passed. This followed nearly a decade of diligent Soviet propaganda directed at the Third World, depicting Israel as a Trojan Horse for Western imperialism and racism. This campaign was designed to build support for Soviet foreign policy in Africa and the Middle East.[2] Another tactic was constantly to draw visual and verbal comparisons in the Soviet media between Israel and South Africa (this is the origin of the canard of “Israeli apartheid”).
Not only the Third World, but also the Western Left ate all this Soviet propaganda raw. The latter continues to disseminate large parts of it to this day. In fact, slandering someone, whoever they are, as racist, became one of the Left’s primary weapons against those with whom it disagrees.
Part of the Soviet tactics in isolating Israel was making the PLO look “respectable.” According to Pacepa, this task was left to Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, who had achieved the unlikely propaganda feat of portraying the ruthless Romanian police state to the West as a “moderate” Communist country. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, as was ultimately revealed in the 1989 trial against Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, which ended with their executions.
 Yasser Arafat (left) with Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu during a visit in Bucharest in 1974. (Image source: Romanian National History Museum) |
Pacepa wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
In March 1978, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. “You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over,” Ceausescu told him [Arafat]… Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.
… Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his — all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.
In his book, Red Horizons, Pacepa related what Arafat said at a meeting he had with him at PLO headquarters in Beirut around the time that Ceausescu was trying to make the PLO “respectable”:
I am a revolutionary. I have dedicated my whole life to the Palestinian cause and the destruction of Israel. I will not change or compromise. I will not agree with anything that recognizes Israel as a state. Never… But I am always willing to make the West think that I want what Brother Ceausescu wants me to do.[3]
The propaganda neatly paved the way for terrorism, Pacepa explained in National Review.
General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who created Communist Romania’s intelligence structure and then rose to head up all of Soviet Russia’s foreign intelligence, often lectured me: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”
The Soviet general was not joking. In 1969 alone, there were 82 hijackings of planes worldwide. According to Pacepa, most of those hijackings were committed by the PLO or affiliated groups, all supported by the KGB. In 1971, when Pacepa visited Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka (KGB headquarters) office, the general boasted: “Airplane hijacking is my own invention”. Al Qaeda used airplane hijackings on September 11, when they used planes to blow up buildings.
So where does Mahmoud Abbas fit into all this? In 1982, Mahmoud Abbas studied in Moscow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. (In 1983 he went on to become a KGB spy). There he wrote his thesis, published in Arabic as The Other Side: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement. In it, he denied the existence of gas chambers in the concentration camps, and questioned the number of Holocaust victims by calling the six million Jews who had been killed “a fantastic lie,” while simultaneously blaming the Holocaust on the Jews themselves. His thesis supervisor was Yevgeny Primakov, who later went on to become foreign minister of Russia. Even after he had finished his thesis, Abbas maintained close ties with the Soviet leadership, the military and members of security services. In January 1989, he was appointed co-chairman of the Palestinian-Soviet (and then Russian-Palestinian) Working Committee on the Middle East.
When the current leader of the Palestinian Arabs used to be an acolyte of the KGB — whose machinations have claimed the lives of thousands of people in the Middle East alone — this cannot be discarded as a “historical curiosity,” even if contemporary opinion-makers would prefer to ignore it by viewing it as such.
Although Pacepa and Mitrokhin sounded their warnings many years ago, few people bothered to listen to them. They should.
Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.
[1] Robert S. Wistrich, ‘A Lethal Obsession’ (2010) p 139.
[2] Robert S. Wistrich, ‘A Lethal Obsession’ (2010), p 148.
[3] Ion Mihai Pacepa, ‘Red Horizons’ (1990) p 92-93.
Iranian ships in Gulf of Aden: How far might Yemen escalation go? Op-Edge
October 16, 2016Iranian ships in Gulf of Aden: How far might Yemen escalation go?
Published time: 14 Oct, 2016 16:02 Edited time: 15 Oct, 2016 11:20
Source: Iranian ships in Gulf of Aden: How far might Yemen escalation go? — RT Op-Edge
The U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Mason © Blake Midnight / Reuters
With Iranian warships in the Gulf of Aden, political analyst and expert on American studies, Sayed Mohammad Marandi says the Iranians feel their presence is to facilitate trade and shipping while the American presence serves to create further chaos.
Iran has established a military presence off the coast of Yemen hours after Washington carried out its first direct strikes against Houthi forces. Two Iranian warships were sent to the Gulf of Aden reportedly to protect trade vessels from piracy.
The White House insists its strike was a defensive measure against a reported attempt by the Houthis to target a US navy vessel in the Red Sea.
Read more
RT: Now there are Iranian warships in the Gulf of Aden. How far might this escalation over Yemen go?
Sayed Mohammad Marandi: I don’t think this is all that important. The Iranians have a permanent presence in that part of the world because of the problems with shipping thanks to the American policies over the past few decades. There is a lot of instability in the Red Sea. And the Iranian ships are there basically to prevent pirates from boarding Iranian ships. They’ve been doing this for a number of years now. The Iranians have also protected the ships of other countries as well. The problem really is the US presence. Iranians are confident the Americans are lying about missile attacks on American vessels. They say this is a fabricated story that the US could enter the fray on behalf of Saudi Arabia to boost Saudi morale.
Because after all the Saudis after bombing weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals despite the fact that the Western media is completely silent about it and Western leaders like Boris Johnson don’t seem to care about the Yemenis who are being massacred in the country. But despite all that the Saudis are losing the war. They have lost the war. And the Yemeni resistance, the Houthis and Ansar Allah and the Yemeni army they have succeeded in defeating Saudi-backed forces and Saudi forces on the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The Iranians feel that their presence is one to help facilitate trade and shipping while the American presence as in the past few decades is only serving to create further chaos.
Middle East affairs commentator Ali Rizk says the Americans and Saudis are guilty of double standards: “Some US figures who favor intervention are now saying: “Look, the Houthis are attacking the US navy vessels therefore we have to get more deeply involved. That is in a very contrast to Syria. I think it shows the clear double standards and that shows also very clearly that the US and Saudi Arabia in particular have no interest in democracy or anything else. What is going on is part of the geopolitical game.”
RT: Isn’t it a danger here that now both sides will see each other as a threat?I
MM: The Iranians believe that the Americans have already lost the war in Yemen. Their support for Saudi Arabia has failed. And the Americans are just as responsible for the atrocities in Yemen as is the Saudi regime. The American president has blood on his hands just like the Saudi King, Crown Prince and the Deputy Crown Prince. The Iranians feel the Americans are not really in a position to escalate further. What they want to do is put pressure on Ansar Allah so that the Saudis could negotiate from a stronger position. And also I think in order to increase pressure on the US after the Saudi regime deliberately targeted the funeral killing 150 people and injuring hundreds more. A lot of people in the West have been increasingly protesting in the media and otherwise against America’s support for the Wahhabi regime.
Read more
This latest fabricated accusation by the US that Ansar Allah fired missiles despite the denials by Ansar Allah and the Yemeni army. This was basically to draw attention away from the killings in the funeral to ease pressure so that the US could continue supporting the Wahhabi regime in Saudi Arabia.
RT: Do you expect Washington to in any way review its co-operation with Saudi Arabia which it suggested it might do after Saturday’s carnage at the funeral in Sana’a?
MM: No, they are being completely dishonest. The Americans from the very beginning when the Saudis were using cluster bombs, they continued to give them weapons, when they bombed hospitals, they continued to support them, when they bombed weddings…The Americans have no problem with what the Saudis are doing on Yemen. It is uncomfortable so they every now and then, they complain about it…
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Clinton: “Israel can’t harm Iran”
October 16, 2016Clinton: ” Israel isn’t capable of causing substantial damage to Iranian nuclear program” Wikileaks reveals Clinton’s speech from 2013 regarding the Iranian nuclear issue: “Israel estimates that even if it will only cause a small set back to the program, an attack might be the best option. But it lacks the ability to cause serious damage.”
Oct 16, 2016, 12:49PM
Ophir Raz
Source: Clinton: “Israel can’t harm Iran” – World News | JerusalemOnline
Reuters
On a speech the Democratic Presidency candidate held in front of the finance company Goldman Sacks in 2013, Hillary Clinton spoke of Israel’s military abilities to face the Iranian nuclear program. “Israel isn’t capable of inflicting substantial damage on the nuclear program” said Clinton during a speech that has been leaked by WikiLeaks.
“The Israelis have investigated the subject closely for several years and are estimating that even if they will just be able to hinder the Iranian nuclear program for a number of years, it will be worth it and they will be able to withhold any retaliation” said Clinton.
“America’s policy regarding the Iranian nuclear program is to absolutely prevent their capability to achieve nuclear armament” said Clinton and added that if Iran will achieve a nuclear weapon, a nuclear arms race will ensue, and that must be prevented at all costs, “bombing Iran’s nuclear power plants is an option.”
Iranian Nuclear Facility Reuters
The speech is part of the documents leaked out through the hacking to Clinton’s campaign manager e-mail account, in which there were thousands of mails between the two. The Democratic Party have yet to confirm the authenticity of the document, but also haven’t denied any of them.
Missiles fired at US warships in Red Sea, no casualties
October 16, 2016Source: Missiles fired at US warships in Red Sea, no casualties | The Times of Israel
Third attack in a week from territory held by Iran-backed Houthi rebels draws US closer to ongoing civil war in Yemen
October 16, 2016, 4:42 am
The USS Mason in the Atlantic on January 14, 2011. (US Navy/Anna Wade)
WASHINGTON – Multiple missiles were fired Saturday at three US warships in the Red Sea, though none was hit and there were no casualties, the US military said, amid rising tensions with Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
A US defense official said the altercation took place starting around 1930 GMT. It was unclear how many of the surface-to-surface missiles were fired at the USS Mason, USS Nitze and USS Ponce.
The USS Mason destroyer, which was sailing in international waters off Yemen’s coast earlier this week, used unspecified countermeasures against the incoming missiles, the official said.
“We are aware of the reports and we are assessing the situation. All of our ships and crews are safe and unharmed,” another US defense official said.
If confirmed, the attempted missile strikes would be the most serious escalation yet of America’s involvement in a deadly civil war that has killed more than 6,800 people, wounded more than 35,000 and displaced at least three million since a Saudi-led coalition launched military operations last year.
Officials have stressed that Washington wants to avoid getting embroiled in yet another war in an already volatile region where America is to varying degrees waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
On Thursday, the US Navy launched five Tomahawk cruise missiles at three mobile radar sites in Houthi-controlled territory on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, after the Iran-backed rebels blasted rockets at the USS Mason twice in four days.
The military insists these moves are taken out of self-defense. The Houthis have denied conducting the attacks.
Though the United States is providing logistical support to a Saudi-led coalition battling the rebels, Thursday’s launches marked the first time Washington has taken direct action against the Houthis.
But the US strikes earlier this week did not take out Houthi missiles and, though the radar destruction makes it harder to aim the weapons, officials have warned rebels could still use spotter boats or online ship-tracking websites to find new targets.
The rockets fired at the USS Mason on Sunday and again Wednesday were believed to be the first time since 1987 that a US warship has been targeted by an incoming missile.
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