Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Oleg Shevchenko
[REGNUM] Exactly 55 years ago, on November 17, 1969, negotiations between the USSR and the USA began in Helsinki to limit nuclear arsenals. Representatives of all the world's media that had any presence in the information resources market rushed to the capital of Finland. An event of incredible significance! The USSR and the USA decide to come to an agreement, Armageddon is postponed! For the average person, this event happened suddenly, but in the world of big politics and big military strategy, there is no place for the word "suddenly". And the main issues were not decided in front of cameras in Helsinki, but "behind the curtain".
More precisely, in a series of closed bilateral meetings between the veterans of the diplomacy of that time: US presidential aide Henry Kissinger and Soviet ambassador to the US Anatoly Dobrynin. And it all took its final form only in November 1974 in Vladivostok during a meeting between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and US President Gerald Ford.
AGENT X REPORTS
It all began in the distant, victorious year for our country - May 18, 1945. From the USSR Embassy in Great Britain came a cipher using the most powerful encryption capabilities, it had the stamp "Super Lightning". That is, the information contained in it was not only extremely secret, but it was required to be reported to the leadership as soon as possible.
They were obtained by an agent with the code letter "X", whose identity is still one of the main secrets of our intelligence services. He reported that three days ago the Joint Planning Headquarters of the British War Cabinet began developing a scenario for war against the USSR - the Unthinkable plan.
The scenario – the authenticity of which the British government denied until 1998 – included plans for an offensive by 47 Anglo-American divisions in East Germany and Poland. The British also intended to use 12 undisbanded Wehrmacht divisions that the Allies were “keeping in reserve” in Schleswig-Holstein and southern Denmark.
Even then, the West's plans did not assume that the war would be "conventional" (without the use of weapons of mass destruction). Let us recall that the first atomic bomb was tested at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico in July 1945, and a month later, the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became victims of the new weapon.
In 2014, London's The Daily Mail published FBI archive data, which showed that in 1947, Churchill convinced the Harry Truman administration of the need to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.
"DESIRABLE LOSSES OF RUSSIANS" - UP TO 100 MILLION PEOPLE
But the Americans themselves were developing various options for attacking the Soviet Union. Here are just a few of them.
In September 1945, American Major General Loris Norstad developed a map of targets for American nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union. The general planned to drop from 123 to 466 nuclear warheads on peaceful cities: Moscow, Baku, Novosibirsk, Gorky, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Kuibyshev, Kazan, Saratov, Molotov (Perm), Magnitogorsk.
On December 14, 1945, the Peancer plan was born. It designated 20 major cities and industrial centers of the USSR for atomic bombing, on which it was supposed to drop 196 atomic bombs. This plan was followed by a number of others with no less menacing names: "Hot Day", "Incinerating Heat", "Shake", etc.
In 1946, Dwight Eisenhower, then the US Army Chief of Staff, developed the Totality plan, which called for dropping 20-30 atomic bombs on two dozen Soviet cities.
On December 19, 1949, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff officially approved the basic plan for waging nuclear war, Dropshot.
According to this plan, it was necessary to drop 300 nuclear bombs on the USSR in such a way that 85 percent of the industrial potential of the Soviet Union would be destroyed in one blow. At the same time, the “desirable losses” of USSR citizens were estimated at 60-100 million people.
Against this warlike background, the Americans begin diplomatic pressure. In a very brazen manner, reveling in its own monopoly on nuclear weapons, Washington proposed the " Baruch Plan " - named after its developer, Roosevelt's advisor, financier Bernard Baruch.
According to the plan, actual control over the nuclear industry and nuclear arsenals that other countries might acquire would be transferred to the United States through the creation of a supposedly international special commission in which the West would occupy a dominant position.
PEACE PROPOSALS PLUS "KUZKINA MOTHER"
In response, on June 19, 1946, Moscow put forward a draft international convention on the complete and unconditional prohibition of the production and use of atomic weapons to the UN Atomic Commission.
The project was based on the recognition of the principle of equality and equal security for all signatory states. As expected, the Americans began to block Moscow's proposal and put pressure on various countries in every possible way to accept their plan. But the Soviet Union soon had a weighty argument.
In 1949, the USSR tests its first atomic bomb. It becomes obvious to Washington that nuclear blackmail can no longer be used: Moscow has something to respond to the plans of NATO generals.
And although the ratio of nuclear bombs was in favor of the Americans (1950 - 299 for the USA versus five for the USSR; 1955 - 2422 versus 200), no one in Washington wanted to have a nuclear explosion in New York or Los Angeles.
This was the moment when it would have been possible to come to peace talks. But the US relied on its scientific and technological advantage and began a new round of atomic blackmail. It was called "Bombing Breakaway".
The goal was to dominate the speed and scale of air delivery of bombs against the USSR and destroy its nuclear potential at their bases with a surprise preemptive strike. By 1960, over 18,000 nuclear warheads and over two thousand carrier aircraft had been accumulated. The USSR could counter them with only 1,600 atomic bombs.
Soviet successes in near-Earth space, from the launch of Sputnik to the flight of Yuri Gagarin, convinced the Americans that the military component of our missile program was up to par. As early as 1959, Pentagon chief Neil McElroy announced that the Soviets were capable of creating large forces of intercontinental ballistic missiles in a short time, while the United States was critically lagging behind in this regard.
With this statement, the United States launched a new round of nuclear confrontation in the sphere of missile technologies, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. After it, it became clear to many: the USSR would not give in to blackmail, and its scientific and technical base was not much inferior to the American one. The situation was becoming a stalemate.
This was stated in 1957 by then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in his book War or Peace?: “The ability of the United States to drop atomic bombs on Russia is largely neutralized by the ability of the latter to drop atomic bombs on the United States and Western Europe.”
Even the creation of a super-powerful thermonuclear bomb by the US in the mid-1950s did not improve their situation, because the USSR responded with a hydrogen bomb – a weapon of geostrategic scale. In those same years, the US Secretary of Aviation Thomas Finletter claimed: “ The security of our country is affected, which was not the case with the advent of the atomic bomb… In a short time, the Russians will have enough hydrogen bombs to be able to destroy the United States with a small part of them.”
THE MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM LOOKS LIKE WET CARDBOARD
The next stage of the US asymmetric response was to be missile charges with multiple warheads and the first Sentinel missile defense systems, which had been developed since the late 1960s. But at the same time, American military-technical analysts were sounding the alarm.
The presence of a heavy missile system with a nuclear charge in the USSR, the ever-increasing stock of our hydrogen bombs and the improvement in the quality of their delivery indicated that the American missile defense looked, as they say, like wet cardboard under a hail of boulders.
The American elite finally lost their nerve when it became known that the USSR had created its own missile defense systems - the A-35 and its successor, the A-135, which turned out to be much more effective than their American counterpart. The Soviet system was capable of intercepting most American missiles, and those that would miss would not be able to deliver a critical blow to the Soviet Union. A symmetrical blow from Soviet nuclear forces would wipe the United States off the face of the earth.
The nuclear arms race entered the parity phase, and Washington reasonably decided that it was time to reach an agreement.
"KISS" IN ACTION
On July 2, 1968, the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Soviet leadership led by Brezhnev indicated interest in nuclear arms control negotiations. In January 1969, when "Tricky Dick" Republican Richard Nixon replaced Democrat Johnson in Washington, Moscow formally agreed to begin negotiations.
The new White House team suddenly took a break – and fell silent. And then the Americans began to link the course of the nuclear weapons talks with… the situation in the Middle East and Vietnam. They say that Moscow should make concessions on these two issues.
A quiet dance of the two powers, resembling the soft steps of a cat, began. Allies were involved, spy networks were used, the press was monitored, and accidentally dropped phrases of diplomats were recorded - everything was subjected to careful filtering and analysis. Never in the history of the world had there been an analogy to an agreement on limiting nuclear weapons, this super-powerful trump card in a global war that never began.
It was necessary to build a structure of communication, formulas for concessions, a technique for probing the motives of opponents from scratch, without ready-made templates. The era of nuclear diplomacy was coming, for which no university in the world had prepared.
And as always, secret diplomacy started working before open diplomacy, and here the main role was played by another "sly one" - a diplomat with a serious intelligence background, Henry Kissinger. He had two nicknames - "Sly Fox" and "Kiss" - an abbreviation of his last name and at the same time "kiss" (Kiss). Apparently, thanks to his innate softness, charm and delicacy of communication, behind which hid a tough and skillful negotiator.
He was opposed by the recent Deputy Secretary General of the UN, and since 1962 the USSR Ambassador to the USA, who confirmed his highest qualifications during the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis – Anatoly Dobrynin.
On October 20, after a series of tense diplomatic clashes, the USSR forced the American government to announce its agreement to begin discussions on the issue of formal limitation of strategic arms (SALT).
The Soviet delegation was headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semenov, a diplomat with 30 years of experience, which included working at the embassy in Berlin just before the war, "resolving" the Berlin crisis of 1948-49, and participating in the formation of the GDR. The Western press respectfully called him "the gray cardinal." The Americans put forward a specialist in the field, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for "atomic" issues Gerard Smith, against our broad-based diplomat.
BREAKTHROUGH AND A NEW DEAD END
So the negotiations took place on two levels: confidentially in Washington “Kissinger-Dobrynin” and officially in Helsinki and Vienna “Smith-Semyonov”.
To call the negotiations difficult is to say nothing. Moscow had counted on talking only with Washington. But the American side published Nixon's message: the US will not decide anything without its allies, whose interests the US has pledged to protect. A sharp turn in the negotiations for which Moscow was not prepared.
Reminiscent of the behavior of Donald Trump's team during the negotiations on the START-3 nuclear agreement in 2020. Then, let us recall, Washington "dragged out" the negotiations, insisting that either China joins the Russian-American treaty (and China clearly did not intend to do this), or START-3 is not extended. As a result, the treaty was "buried".
Half a century earlier, Nixon and Kissinger had the common sense to reach an agreement with Moscow, although the background for the Helsinki meetings was demarches, provocative articles in the press, loud statements and a minimum of firm guarantees. By 1972, the negotiations began to steer towards the final stage. Its first stage was Nixon's visit to Brezhnev and the signing of two documents on May 26: the open-ended ABM Treaty and the five-year Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I).
But many important issues could not be settled. For example, the number of strategic bombers and missiles with multiple warheads (which replaced the old missiles and made it possible to increase the number of warheads without increasing the number of carriers themselves). And the five years of SALT-1 were supposed to pass quickly.
New consultations began, but the next round of negotiations again led the situation to a dead end. A decisive breakthrough was needed, which happened after Watergate and Nixon's resignation.
"Mr. Secretary General, I'm keeping my fingers crossed."
Half a century ago, in November 1974, the new President Gerald Ford met with Brezhnev in Vladivostok. The President and Secretary General agreed on a new treaty, SALT II. The USSR and the USA were obliged to limit the number of strategic nuclear weapons carriers to 2,400 units, and restrictions were imposed on the number of ground-based launchers and on the deployment of nuclear weapons in space.
According to Ford's memoirs, Brezhnev began to talk at length about the United States Congress, "which the Soviets saw as potentially detrimental to their ability to negotiate with American presidents. " Brezhnev asked Ford, "What Congress will you have to deal with in the next two years?" to which the president replied, "Mr. General Secretary... I can only say that I am keeping my fingers crossed."
Brezhnev signed SALT-2 in 1979, already with the next US President Jimmy Carter, but the conversation with Ford turned out to be prophetic: the Senate, citing the “Soviet invasion” of Afghanistan, flatly refused to ratify the treaty.
And the famous peacemaker Carter was playing a hidden game, which, incidentally, was also known in Moscow. Recently, in October 2024, the FSB declassified our intelligence data: in 1980, Carter signed secret presidential directive No. 59, which outlined a "new nuclear doctrine" that envisaged the possibility of the United States starting a full-scale nuclear war against the Soviet Union."
But both the “dove” Carter and the “hawk” Ronald Reagan who replaced him were pragmatists, and Washington, mindful of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, formally observed SALT II, which was never ratified.
SYSTEM COLLAPSE AND HYPERSONIC OVERTAKING
Washington did not enjoy the position of the sole wielder of the nuclear club for long - 75 years ago the USSR ended this monopoly, and 55 years ago it forced the US to comply with rather strict rules of the game for the first time. Since Russia was lucky enough not to lose the nuclear triad after the collapse of the USSR, America has been polite in the post-Soviet era. Examples of this are the treaties on strategic offensive weapons: START-1 (1991-2009), START-2 (1993-2002) and the START-3 agreement signed in 2010.
But already under George W. Bush, the United States began dismantling the system of checks and balances created in the last three decades of the 20th century. In 2002, the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty, in 2019, under Trump, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) collapsed, and in 2023, already under Joe Biden, the New START Treaty was de jure terminated.
Today's Russia has eliminated all risks associated with the US attempt to feel safe in the face of a retaliatory nuclear strike. Russia's current nuclear triad, its missile defense systems, and hypersonic carriers have cooled many hot heads in Washington.
But in essence, we are once again in a situation of legal instability and turmoil of the mid-1960s. Only with the development of "hypersound" it is not we who are in a catch-up situation, but our opponents in the West. The spiral of nuclear diplomacy has completed its next turn and is heading into the future.
#3
..included plans for an offensive by 47 Anglo-American divisions
The US was quickly shifting divisions from Europe to the Pacific after May. When that concluded in August, the US demobilized as quickly as possible. Where were they going to get those divisions?
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Gevorg Mirzayan
[REGNUM] The political crisis in Abkhazia has entered a wait-and-see phase. Opposition groups have occupied government buildings and are demanding the resignation of the country's president, Aslan Bzhania. The president himself, who is currently in his ancestral village, claims that he is ready to announce early elections (and participate in them), but only after the protesters go home. Local security forces have withdrawn; they do not intend to disperse anyone.
The reason for the protests was the investment agreement with Russia, which was signed at the end of October and was being ratified in parliament. It regulated Russian investments (large ones, from 2 billion rubles) in tourism, agriculture, manufacturing, supporting infrastructure and the fuel and energy complex through the creation of a special register of investors.
"The purpose of this agreement was only one - to protect Russian investments that could come to Abkhazia. Moreover, protection was not through intra-Abkhaz legislation, but through an international agreement, since it was believed that this was more reliable," Nikolai Silaev, a leading research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at MGIMO, explains to Regnum.
That is, to put it simply, the agreement would oblige the Abkhazian authorities to provide Russian investors with the most favorable treatment (land, quotas for foreign workers, tax breaks, etc.), and also to compensate Russian companies for expenses in the event that Sukhum violates its obligations.
Western media present the protests as some kind of anti-Russian demarche of the population. As a desire to free themselves from "Moscow oppression." Euronews describes the situation as a confrontation between the "Russian-backed president" and society. CNN calls the Abkhaz authorities "hostages of Moscow."
The situation was predictably commented on by the "West's watchdog" on Georgia, a career employee of the French Foreign Ministry and part-time Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili.
"And in occupied Abkhazia there is an attempt to implement the Russian law, and there civil society has spoken out against it. I want to express solidarity with them," she said, hinting at the activities of the current Georgian government to limit Western influence on the country.
However, in reality, there is no “anti-Russian” protest in Abkhazia. Not to mention the “Maidan”. There is a combination of two factors. Firstly, the immaturity of the Abkhaz political system, in which changing power “across the street” has become commonplace. This happened both in 2014 and in 2020. Secondly, the population’s discontent is not so much with the investment agreement itself, but with its possible consequences for the republic’s way of life.
"The population does not think in terms of protest against Russian money, but in terms of infringement of sovereignty. They do not like the fact that Russian investors will have any guarantees in principle. The protesters proceed from the fact that Abkhazia belongs to the Abkhazians, and a Russian investor can infringe on the full economic power of the titular people," says Nikolai Silaev.
This is the political culture that has developed in Abkhazia. A combination of fear of losing control over one's land (which is an extremely interesting piece for investors in tourism and agriculture) and becoming a minority in one's own country.
Abkhazians already make up slightly more than half of the country's population, and if, as protesters fear, apartments are built in the republic for visitors, the share of the "state-forming people" will shrink even more. That's why people took to the streets.
It would seem that they ultimately won - the authorities were forced to withdraw the investment agreement from parliament. And it is far from certain that the next head of state (or the same Aslan Bzhania, if he wins the early presidential elections) will again submit it for consideration by legislators. However, in reality, society lost.
Firstly, due to internal fears, it prevents the inflow of investments into the republic. Investments that will allow the restoration of local industry, the resort sector and the creation of jobs: in a number of regions of the republic, unemployment reaches 80-90%.
Secondly, the current protests are scaring off those investors who were ready to come in without an agreement. “It turns out that you can sign and even ratify a dozen agreements, but this does not guarantee that a crowd of three hundred people will not come to some facility with Russian investments and destroy it, as they destroyed government buildings,” says Nikolai Silaev.
Thirdly, by refusing to ratify the investment document, the Abkhaz side failed to fulfill its obligations to Russia. This means that it is unlikely that Russian financing of the republic, which was recently frozen due to the same failure to fulfill, will be unblocked.
"They don't give money not because someone suddenly woke up and got up on the wrong side of the bed. But because there was an agreement on assistance in implementing the program of socio-economic development of Abkhazia. One of the points there was the harmonization of legislation. There is no harmonization - that's why there is no money," explains Nikolai Silaev.
Finally, fourthly - and here the situation in Abkhazia is somewhat similar to Georgia - without Russian money and Russian investors (even those building apartments) the republic will lose its sovereignty. After all, there are countries that are capable of developing it and at the same time have the tools to undermine this independence. Without any agreements.
In the case of Abkhazia, we are talking about Turkey. "Despite the fact that the Turkish Republic has not officially recognized Abkhazia as an independent state, it is quite actively engaged in maritime trade with it. Moreover, both with Abkhazia itself and through Abkhazia. For Turkish businessmen, Abkhazia is a window that can be used for contacts with Russia," explains Vladimir Avatkov, Doctor of Political Science and Head of the Department of the Near and Post-Soviet East at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to Regnum News Agency.
And Turkey has a tool to bypass Abkhazian restrictions in the form of the so-called "muhajirs" - settlers from the Caucasus who left for the Ottoman Empire in the 19th - early 20th centuries. "A large number of Abkhazians live in Turkey who have ties to their homeland. And how can ethnic Abkhazians receive land in Abkhazia - with all the ensuing difficulties, consequences and opportunities for Turkey," says Vladimir Avatkov.
That is, in essence, Ankara has legal opportunities to take over both Abkhazian land and Abkhazian real estate, providing itself with another "chair", a point of support and income extraction. After which they will be able to dictate their will to the locals - as Turkey does in the Middle East, and even in neighboring Georgia (it is enough to look at the consequences of Turkish economic expansion in Adjara).
And if this happens, local residents may very well regret having scared off Russian investors who treat them with much more respect.
[IsraelTimes] Victims, Israeli officials, some Dutch leaders blamed local Arab and Muslim gangs; others in Holland refer to ‘youths on scooters’ and ‘taxi drivers,’ highlight Israeli hooliganism
As the controversy over references to the religion and ethnicity of the scores of mostly young people who attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans in Amsterdam on November 7 rocks the nation and even threatened to bring down the ruling coalition on Friday, two political debates on the subject were held in the past few days — one in the capital and one in the seat of parliament.
The first debate, dominated by left-wing parties, was held in the Amsterdam city council on Tuesday. The other took place the following day in the Second Chamber, the main body of the Dutch national parliament in The Hague.
In Amsterdam’s city hall (dubbed the Stopera, since it doubles as an opera house), with the help of center-left, far-left, and Islamist parties, Mayor Femke Halsema easily survived a no-confidence vote requested by right-wing opposition party JA21.
At that debate, the religious and ethnic backgrounds of the youths who attacked Israeli fans in the streets of the Dutch capital were mentioned only by a handful of center-right and right-leaning council members. There were frequent references, however, to genocide in Gaza and Islamophobia as causes for the unrest in the capital — though no Muslims were targeted in Amsterdam before, during, or after the attacks.
Israeli officials said 10 people were injured in the November 7 violence carried out by local Arab and Muslim gangs against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, after a soccer match in the city. Hundreds more Israelis huddled in their hotels for hours, fearing they could be attacked. Many said that Dutch security forces were nowhere to be found, as the Israeli tourists were ambushed by gangs of masked assailants who shouted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans while they hunted, beat and harassed them.
One councilwoman, Nilad Ahmadi of the far-left and staunchly anti-Zionist party Vonk (meaning “Spark”), blamed Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency for the violence.
Overall, even though some council members warned against open antisemitism and were apprehensive about the fate of Dutch Jews, the blame was squarely shifted toward purported Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans. This fits the narrative of the country’s major newspapers and television stations in the last few days, as well as remarks by Amsterdam police chief Peter Holla.
Similarly, a preliminary police timeline extensively referred to the “provocations” of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters — most notably the removal of a Palestinian flag from the façade of a house in Amsterdam’s city center and the chanting of racist slogans including “Fuck the Arabs” on the way to the game versus local club Ajax.
Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel and subsequent conflict in Gaza, desecrating Israeli flags at protests has become a common occurrence in the Dutch capital.
Flags for me but not for thee, O Cancer Joooos.
The emphasis on provocations, hate speech, and violence on the Israeli side is in stark contrast with initial reports by the mayor and local law enforcement. These clearly laid the blame on those who were labeled “youths on scooters” and “taxi drivers” who carried out “hit-and-run” attacks on individuals or small groups of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters.
These terms are widely seen as euphemisms that avoid mentioning the ethnic or religious background of the perpetrators of the violence, or the scale and organization of what many in the Dutch-Jewish community have dubbed a “pogrom.”
“I don’t think their mode of transportation or job description is the defining aspect of these groups,” Kevin Kreuger, a council member for JA21, told The Times of Israel. “There was clearly an Islamic motive behind the attacks.”
Kreuger lamented the unwillingness to name the attackers by their background and motive, which he described as “Jew-hatred driven by Islam.”
“Everybody saw the videos, heard the attackers speak Arabic. It’s like they are a group we need to feel sorry for and protect,” Kreuger said.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE HAGUE
The debate in the Dutch parliament concentrated on rising antisemitism within the country’s sizeable Muslim minority and the radical left, as progressive parties blamed “extreme right-wing provocations” for the violence rocking the capital.
Dilan Yesilgoz, leader of the center-right liberal party, brings a unique perspective to the events in Amsterdam. She served as justice and security minister under former prime minister Mark Rutte, fought antisemitism as an MP, and started her political career on the Amsterdam city council.
Yesilgoz was born in Ankara and is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. Like Kreuger, she noticed a tendency among left-leaning parties to avoid mentioning the ethnic or religious background of the attackers of November 7.
“It’s bad enough that Jewish institutions like schools and synagogues need to be protected, but now youths are demanding to see citizens’ papers to check if they are Israeli or Jewish. If they are, they get beaten up,” Yesilgoz told The Times of Israel.
“This is an absolute low point for Amsterdam and an example of bad integration of migrants into Dutch society. The attackers were probably of Moroccan background, and police are investigating this,” she claimed.
Yesilgoz said such tiptoeing around identity has been a frustrating experience throughout her career.
“I can speak freely about antisemitism among the extreme left and right, but as soon as I mention Islam as a motive, everybody freezes up and starts talking about exclusion and Islamophobia,” said Yesilgoz. “But how can you fight the problem if you’re not allowed to talk about it?”
Moroccan-born Nora Achahbar quit on Friday as junior finance minister after prominent ministers accused Dutch youths of Moroccan descent of attacking the Israeli fans, local media NOS cited sources in the cabinet session as saying. “Achahbar reportedly indicated then that she, as a minister, had objections to certain language used by her colleagues,” NOS stated.
The new center-right Dutch government has, however, announced that it wants to treat violent antisemitic assaults as terrorism, which under Dutch law makes it possible to strip the perpetrators of their Dutch citizenship as long as they own a passport from a different country. This can have an impact on the country’s many Moroccan immigrants and even their children and grandchildren.
WHEELS OF JUSTICE BEGIN TO TURN
On Tuesday night, the images of five youths who “committed the most serious violence” during the attacks were shown on Dutch television for the first time — albeit with their faces blurred to give them a chance to come forward on their own. Two were subsequently taken into custody; unblurred pictures of the other three were then made public by the police.
Dutch police said Sunday they were probing 45 people for violent crimes in relation to the attacks, with nine of them already identified and arrested.
It became clear very soon after the attacks that their instigation was to a large extent premeditated, as messages in several WhatsApp groups associated with the attackers instigated violence, even describing a “Jew hunt.”
Even before November 7, street gangs of largely third-generation Moroccan immigrants were notoriously quick to commit acts of violence against police, members of the LGBTQ community, and occasionally what is known in the Netherlands as “visible Jews” (Dutch links). Because there are few ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Netherlands, verbal and physical violence is often directed at rabbis, who can be recognized as Jewish by their mode of dress.
Unlike the Islamist perpetrators of terror from earlier in the century — most infamously Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Islam-critic Theo van Gogh — these current street gangs are generally not politically educated or especially religious (Dutch link). Preliminary reports do not indicate any foreign hand in the violence, and it is not expected that investigations will find a sophisticated level of organization or financing for the attacks.
However, the ongoing war in Gaza has likely only increased antisemitism that, according to several research projects (Dutch link) over the last few decades, is much more common in Muslim families than in other Dutch religious and ethnic groups.
Many Moroccan households receive their news on the Israel-Hamas conflict through satellite television stations in North Africa and the Middle East. Teachers in the Netherlands’s bigger cities often find it difficult to speak neutrally about the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to their Muslim students, who in some areas of Amsterdam form a majority in their classrooms.
Although the city was home to the famous young Holocaust diarist Anne Frank before she perished at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, history teachers frequently find themselves unable to teach lessons on the Holocaust because of racist and sometimes aggressive reactions by their students.
LOCAL JEWS NEXT?
David Beesemer, chairman of Maccabi Netherlands and Europe, says Dutch Jews are “gravely concerned” that they will be targeted next.
“Now that there are no Israelis to hunt in Amsterdam, what will stop this horde from marching into Buitenveldert?” he asked, referring to an affluent Amsterdam suburb with a large number of Jews.
Beesemer was one of the community leaders who overnight on November 7-8 organized “rescue missions” to evacuate stranded Israelis from the city center and take them to safe houses and the airport, where they were repatriated by planes that were especially sent from Israel.
“Every day we are contacted by scared members of the community who feel like they are living a nightmare,” said Beesemer. “Community leaders are trying to keep a brave face, but the pressure on Dutch Jews is enormous. The day after the ‘hunt,’ hateful protests continued, as did the Gestapo-like ID-checks and assaults.”
Even as late as Wednesday last week, Dutch police detained 281 anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters rallying in central Amsterdam in defiance of a ban imposed after violence against Israeli soccer fans. Dozens of demonstrators, some with Palestinian flags, chanted “Amsterdam is saying no to genocide” and “Free Palestine.”
“It’s a disgrace that the city of Anne Frank has become world news because of violent antisemitism and the city council’s priority seems to be to blame Israelis or the government in The Hague,” said Yesilgoz, leader of the center-right liberal party. “Damn it, I’m a citizen of Amsterdam. Show me you can and want to guarantee my safety. Show us at least that you care.”
#1
If you refuse the acknowledge your attacker, your blanket party is totally voluntary.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
11/18/2024 7:25 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Srebrenica massacre comes home when a UN Protection Force contingent of 370 lightly armed Dutch soldiers failed to deter the town's capture and subsequent massacre.
[AmericanThinker] There have been thousands of words written about the 2024 presidential election, but I think Jeffrey Tucker’s article at Brownstone best summarized the sea change in votes cast, and Victor Davis Hanson best describes the cabinet nominees so far of greatest significance, people selected in part to avenge their treatment by the prior lawless administration.
Tucker argues that what we are seeing is an actual, not purported, transfer of power. A transfer from a permanent government to a new one actually responsive to actual voters against pollster predictions:
What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop. There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future. After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that. The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement. The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
#3
There is a question about whether the coalition can have permanence. I think it can, if the proposed changes and improvements actually take place. Vance and Gabbard are smart enough to steer this for another 8 years beyond Trump’s second term. The enemy of this enterprise remains corrupt and stupid people, the DC denizens. The swamp needs to be drained not swallowed.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
11/18/2024 7:38 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Grom the Reflective all AOC really has to do to see why the Democrats lost the election is look in the mirror.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/18/2024 11:20 Comments ||
Top||
#5
In SEC v. Jarkesy (2024), SCOTUS restricted the use of "administrative law judges" by agencies. The same agency that wrote the rules shouldn't be able to prosecute citizens in “courts” that it controls.
These agency administrative courts have allowed the proliferation of regulations outside of Congress for a too long a time. It's resulted in the leviathan of regulations that strangle business today.
[Independent Sentinel] It’s a Sunday meme post celebrating victory over the Loons.
The media is trying to make eating McDonald’s into a scandal and is now spreading the false rumor that Robert Kennedy plans to ban corn syrup in Pepsi.
[IsraelTimes] The terror group is said to be led by five top officials representing its various components, but experts say that its war strategy and red lines in talks are unlikely to shift
This month, Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... announced the suspension of its mediation role between Israel and Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... concerning a potential Gazoo ceasefire and hostage release. At the same time, Doha refrained from confirming whether it would close Hamas’s office in the country, despite requests from the Biden administration to do so.
Qatar has hosted Hamas officials in Doha since 2012, when the terror group moved its headquarters out of Damascus amid the Syrian civil war; Washington had urged Qatar to serve as a conduit to the terror group, much as the Gulf state had done by hosting a Taliban ...mindless ferocity in a turban... embassy.
Even if the group were expelled from Qatar, it’s not clear who the order would apply to, with Hamas’s leadership structure made suddenly opaque by the killings of its last two chiefs Ismail Haniyeh ...became Prime Minister of Gaza after the legislative elections of 2006 which Hamas won. President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Haniyeh from office on 14 June 2007 at the height of the Fatah-Hamas festivities, but Haniyeh did not acknowledge the decree and continues as the PM of Gazoo while Abbas maintains a separate PM in the West Bank... and Yahya Sinwar in recent months.
Following the losses, the terror group has reportedly opted against appointing an immediate successor. Instead, a five-member committee based in Doha is said to have taken over leadership responsibilities.
According to Hamas sources speaking to AFP, the committee was set up in August following the liquidation of Haniyeh in Tehran. While Sinwar was named head of the group, the fact that he was in hiding in Gaza made communication difficult, necessitating an alternative. When Israeli forces killed Sinwar on October 16, the quinquevirate stepped in.
The collective leadership structure could be a defensive strategy for Hamas, nominating five heads rather than a single chief who would immediately be in Israel’s crosshairs.
But the group also appears to want to present Paleostinians with an "inclusive" leadership committee, one that spans Gaza and the West Bank and includes both political and religious figures, as it navigates a period of profound crisis for its future.
"This appears to be mostly a symbolic decision to indicate that all components of Hamas are represented," said Hamas expert Guy Aviad, a former official in the IDF’s History Department, which maintains the military’s official annals.
"Joint leadership is not necessarily aimed at preventing assassinations. If Israel wanted to eliminate a number of leaders, it could do so," Aviad told The Times of Israel, adding that Israel is unlikely to conduct liquidations within Qatar or The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor... The current governance structure will be in place until the terror group holds elections for a new leader, which are scheduled for March next year, according to AFP.
There is also speculation that Hamas may have already secretly appointed a new leader but is concealing his identity, a tactic used in 2004 after the assassinations of leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi within months of each other. A Hamas source told the BBC in October that the movement is likely to keep the identity of its new leader secret for security reasons.
PARTY OF FIVE
According to Hamas sources who spoke to AFP, the committee is composed of five politburo members:
Khalil al-Hayya: Previously Sinwar’s deputy, he currently acts as the liaison between Hamas in Gaza and abroad. He relocated to Qatar from Gaza shortly before the October 7 attack and is seen as a probable candidate to lead the organization in the future, chiefly because of his proximity to the Iranian regime.
Khaled Mashaal: Head of the foreign politburo abroad, he is the most well-known and experienced Hamas official alive, having led the politburo for 22 years between 1996 and 2017. Despite his credentials, he is not touted as a potential future leader — Yahya Sinwar himself reportedly rejected his candidacy. Mashaal has strained relations with Tehran, dating back to when he turned against Syrian President Bashar Assad, a close Iran ally, during the Syrian civil war. After Hamas was booted from Syria, Mashaal became persona non grata in Tehran as well, while most of the group’s politburo increasingly gravitated toward the Iranian regime. In early October, he met with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Doha, where he currently resides, indicating a possible rapprochement.
Zaher Jabarin: In charge of Hamas in the West Bank since January, he lives in Istanbul and supervises the terror group’s finance department. Jabarin is believed to be behind attempts to revive Hamas’s strategy of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians in recent months. Israeli security officials indicated that an attempted suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in August had been overseen by Hamas in Turkey, suggesting Jabarin’s direct involvement in the plot.
Muhammad Ismail Darwish: Darwish heads Hamas’s Shura Council, a religious advisory body composed of about 50 clerics. Darwish was an unknown figure until reports in the Arab media in August claimed that he would succeed Haniyeh as the head of the terror group, though Sinwar got the nod in the end. Very little is known about him other than he lives in Qatar.
An unnamed fifth official: The identity of the fifth committee member is unknown, but it can be presumed that the group would appoint at least one member who is still inside the Gaza Strip. Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, told The Times of Israel that an anonymous source close to Hamas named the figure as Nizar Awadullah, a politburo member who was a runner up to Sinwar in internal elections in 2021. Awadullah is thought to still be living in the Strip.
Notably absent from the list is Yahya Sinwar’s brother Muhammad, considered to be the de facto commander-in-chief of military operations in Gaza, where he is believed to be. (Israel says it killed titular armed wing head Mohammed Deif.)
According to experts, Muhammad Sinwar is not a political figure, making him an unlikely choice for the leadership council. Nonetheless, he still wields sizable influence within Hamas thanks to his control of Hamas’s forces in Gaza and of the Israeli hostages.
STAYING THE COURSE
The ability of the leadership quintet to influence actions within Gaza remains uncertain due to ongoing communications difficulties between the Strip and the rest of the world. The IDF’s monitoring of mobile communications complicates Hamas’s coordination, leading the group to rely on encryption technology or hard-to-come-by satellite phones.
Despite the difficulties in communication, it appears that for the time being the new leadership has not enacted any major shifts in its strategy, whether on the military front or in negotiations for a ceasefire deal.
On the battlefield, experts expect the group to continue fighting a war of attrition against the Israeli military until there is an agreement that meets its conditions: an open-ended halt to hostilities, a full withdrawal of IDF troops from the Gaza Strip, the release of Palestinian detainees in return for hostages, and guarantees that it will not be wiped out after the hostages are freed.
Until those demands are met, the group is expected to keep conducting guerrilla operations with what forces it has left, while hanging onto the hostages both as a bargaining chip and a cudgel, “deepening the wound inside Israeli society” and the fracture between citizens and their political leaders, Aviad said.
“Hamas will not change its principles and will not accept a deal that diverges from its conditions,” he said. “Right now, it is in a win-win situation: if it gets its way in negotiations, all the better. If not, it will keep embittering the lives of Israelis, to hold the hostages captive and spill the blood of soldiers and reservists.”
The only area where the joint leadership might show some flexibility is in the details of a ceasefire deal, Milshtein said.
To advance negotiations, it might agree to a staged IDF pullout, with some troops remaining after some hostages were released, but the leadership committee won’t back off the demand for all IDF troops to leave Gaza by a final stage, the expert said. Under Sinwar, the terror group had already shown some flexibility on the timing of the IDF withdrawal.
A PARTIAL BREAKUP WITH HAMAS
Experts concur that the expulsion of Hamas leaders from Qatar currently seems unlikely – similar rumors have circulated before.
The Gulf petrostate has temporarily pulled back its involvement on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal, but it benefits greatly from its role mediating between the US and groups Washington finds too odious to engage with directly. Doha is unlikely to risk surrendering that prestigious position, and will probably resume its mediating role on Gaza at some point in the future, Aviad said.
However, things might change under President-elect Donald Trump, whose administration may seek to flex its muscles in the Middle East.
Qatar’s recent suspension of mediation could signal its nervousness about Trump, Milshtein suggested, particularly recalling the country’s isolation during the 2017-2021 boycott by Saudi Arabia and four other Arab states.
It may also be a tactic to put pressure on Hamas and demand more flexibility while the getting is good.
“Doha knows that once Trump becomes president, it will be much tougher for them to mediate between the parties,” Milshtein said, referring to the pro-Israel slant that the Trump administration is expected to follow.
However, it will take “enormous pressure” for Qatar to ultimately expel Hamas, Milshtein said. For instance, the Pentagon could threaten to pull out of Qatar’s al-Udeid air base, the largest US military installation in the Middle East.
International pressure of this type has worked in the past. The Saudi-led boycott is considered to be the catalyst for Qatar’s expulsion of senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in 2017. Al-Arouri was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut at the beginning of the year.
“The Qataris know how to be more flexible and take steps when they are under pressure,” Milshtein said. “But I don’t think right now that pressure is enough.”
[Mccullough] A massive leak of internal e-mails and memos from Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (federal agency and research institute for controlling infectious disease) reveals that the institute's scientists understood that virtually every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic response was NOT guided by science, but by political machinations to spread fear, control the population, and promote the experimental vaccines. On November 2, 2024, Professor Stefan Homburg gave a presentation on the leaked documents in the German Parliament.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have suspected that governments throughout the world were committing the greatest organized fraud in history, but I still found Professor Homburg's presentation to be absolutely breathtaking in the sheer ruthlessness of the lies and manipulation revealed in these leaked documents. Perhaps the most perfidious is a memo from September 28, 2020.
Translation: 28.09.2020: FDA approval [of COVID-19 vaccines] before the US Elections is not desired, also not by European authorities.
In other words, both U.S. and European public health authorities were afraid the COVID-19 vaccines—which had been heralded as the forthcoming saviors of mankind—could help to get Donald Trump elected if they were approved before the election. And so they found it expedient to withhold approval until after the election, even though they claimed the vaccines could save millions of lives.
I strongly encourage everyone to watch the video presentation (in German with English subtitles) and to share it far and wide.
#3
@1 Skid, it's more than a "real possibility". It's been obvious for years. Here's a 2023 Baric paper[0]. Note the that the spike RNA sequence was supplied by SHI Zhengli, who happens to be the the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
From the Author Contributions section at the end: Z.-L.S. provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids. R.S.B. designed experiments and wrote manuscript.
Z.-L.S. is Zheng-Li Shi and R.S.B is Ralph Baric.
When the gain of function work stopped at UNC, Shi continued it at Wuhan, with funding funneled through Peter Dazak[1].
#5
And in case your eyes glazed over reading the abstract, here's the end:
Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
