[TabletMag] My mother was a top Middle East analyst for the CIA. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. To find out why, I asked her former colleagues. I’m still reeling from their answers.
When I spoke to my mother’s former colleagues, I consistently encountered a tendency to attribute every event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the conflict itself. It’s not that Palestinian textbooks have, since the 1990s, contained material that is “openly antisemitic and encourages violence, jihad and martyrdom,” or that “peace itself is not taught as preferable or even possible.” Nor is it, as a 2019 review discovered, the “complete removal of all pre-existing content discussing peace agreements, summits, negotiations, and proposals supporting a two-state solution, acknowledgment of historical Jewish presence in the land of Israel and labeling the name ‘Israel’ on a map” from those textbooks. To retired intelligence officers with long and distinguished careers, these facts are incidental. If children were actually set on fire on Oct. 7, that was a guerrilla tactic, not the result of a culture of murderous hatred. Some expressed these views with dispassion and others, with a disturbing degree of passion, but they all expressed them.
#1
But why would these crazy ideas take hold in America? Because Marxism has slowly but surely crept inward from the far left in this country, most recently in the form of the social justice movement, and Marxism is an elaborate form of Jew-hatred.
#4
CIA changed from being operationally driven to being driven by the analysts. Spies who cultivated terrorist assets no longer set the tone. The baton had passed to the wonks in Langley.
Returned to the above in a second reading.
"Cultivating" or recruiting foreign sources 'be hard' and very time consuming. Recruiting domestic political assets is much easier and safer.
Why serve the master when you can become the master. He did not graduate from St. Andrews, you did. The phenomena did not originate here, it was imported from perfidious Albion.
My take was that it was Dad who was Jewish, not Mom, so quite possibly she did not know about Limoieza, nor think much about Nazi laws, considering the latter to be a special case not to be repeated.
#6
Marxism is not an elaborate form of antisemitism. Marx, a plurality of the Bolshevik leadership, a significant number of American communists and communist spies in in 30's, 40's and 50's were jews. It's an anti religious ideology but not antisemitic
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/28/2024 6:45 Comments ||
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#11
QFT: Every intelligence officer I spoke with performed this sleight of hand. Yes, antisemitism exists, and is serious—but only as a right-wing problem, and as a Western phenomenon. The Hamas-loving kids on American college campuses? Overblown, irrelevant. The Palestinian children being given military training by terrorists? Not the issue.
#Experts
#12
#6 You say: "Marx, a plurality of the Bolshevik leadership..., in in 30's, 40's and 50's were jews. It's an anti religious ideology but not antisemitic." I think Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, scores of Russian Jewish doctors, and the large number of Jews who accompanied Lenin from exile on his train to Russia during WWI would disagree with you.
#13
Behind the Headlines: How Stalin’s Plan to Annihilate USSR Jews Was Thwarted
January 8, 1974
For centuries Jews throughout the world have been celebrating Purim as the day when the Jewish population in ancient Persia miraculously escaped a general massacre prepared for them by Haman, the grand vizier of the Persian King Ahasuerus. Purim became a day of merriment in Jewish history. The day of March 5–when Stalin died in 1953 from a stroke–should similarly be marked by Jews as a miraculous day to remember. His sudden death came as a great miracle for the 3,000,000 Jews in the Soviet Union. It thwarted his plans, scheduled to be started the next day, to annihilate the Jews in Russia through mass-pogroms and deportation of all surviving Jews to slave labor camps in remote Arctic regions to die there a slow and tortuous death. The signal to this brutal plan was to be given March 6 at the opening of the notorious “Doctors’ Trial” at which six prominent Jewish and three non-Jewish physicians were accused by Stalin falsely of having plotted to poison him and other Soviet leaders in the Kremlin. The trial was cancelled immediately upon Stalin’s death, the physicians were released and rehabilitated. Soviet Jews–who lived in mortal fear during weeks of intensified anti-Jewish propaganda in the Soviet press preparing the climate Stalin wanted for the trial–breathed freely.
[ZMan] The term "deep state" has been overused and abused to the point where it is meaningless, but the concept behind it remains useful. Conceptually, it simply means the permanent state, the individuals and institutions that lie behind the facade of our democratic processes and institutions. Politicians come and go but there is a permanent managerial elite that runs the important institutions. The C.I.A., for example, does not change after a presidential election brings in a new president.
That is what makes this long piece in the New York Times about the C.I.A. operating in Ukraine an interesting bit for regime-ology. There is not a single punctuation mark in that piece that was not vetted by the C.I.A. Senior people in the agency wanted that piece in the "newspaper of record" so they made sure the senior people at the paper put reliable stenographers on the job. It is why it reads like a marketing piece extolling the accomplishments and capabilities of the agency.
The part that is getting the most attention is that the agency has been operating secret bases in Ukraine since the U.S. led coup in 2014. The newly installed spy chief of Ukraine was in contact with British and American spy agencies on day one, which is a strange thing to make public. On the one hand, the agency wants the world to know that they have been trying to undermine Russia from bases in Ukraine for a decade, but at the same time they were invited into to do the work.
One way to read this is as a signal to Russian intelligence that when the war is over there will be no hard feelings. It is just the old game. While the agency did the task assigned to it by the political side of Washington, the agency bears no ill-will to the Russians with regards to Ukraine. In the article there are several examples of how the agency supposedly told the Ukrainians that they were not so conduct assassinations or terrorist operations inside of Russia.
That sounds like something out of a John le Carré novel, but like the rest of permanent Washington, the C.I.A. is still stuck in the Cold War. This is not the first time that stories planted by the agency have made the point that the Ukrainians have been operating outside the parameters set by the C.I.A., so it is fair to assume that this is a point that is important to the agency for some reason. It could have to do with internal politics between factions in Washington.
-- SNIP --
Meanwhile, the public face of the Kagan cult that controls the State Department is making the rounds, threatening to kill Valdimir Putin. Victoria Nuland is doing what these people always do and that is double down on failure. As far as Nuland is concerned, the deteriorating situation in Ukraine is proof that the West must pour even more resources into the Ukraine project. If it means nuclear war with Russia, that is just the price that must be paid to finish the job in Ukraine.
What all of this suggests is that the people operating behind the curtain are deeply worried about project Ukraine. Things may be worse than what the general public can see through social media and local reports. That New York Times piece extolling the glories of the C.I.A. is a glimpse of the jockeying that is going on behind the scenes to see who takes the blame for the failure. More precisely, to see who gets to blame which politicians for the failure of Project Ukraine.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/28/2024 09:27 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[37 views]
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#1
It is why it reads like a marketing piece extolling the accomplishments and capabilities of the agency.
Getting hundreds of thousands of people killed might be seen as good marketing by some.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/28/2024 12:52 Comments ||
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#2
The newly installed spy chief of Ukraine was in contact with British and American spy agencies on day one, which is a strange thing to make public.
I'm guessing they were in contact well before day one.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/28/2024 12:53 Comments ||
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[RedStar] February 28 marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Hero of Russia Colonel Viktor Ivanovich Polosukhin, commander of the 32nd Saratov Red Banner Rifle Division.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Petr Akopov
[REGNUM] Alena Boyko-Polyakevich, who recently kicked out a SVO soldier from her Lyubertsy cafe, was fined (RR)45,000 under the article on discrediting the Russian army. Not for expelling a fighter who, in her words, “acted like a schmuck,” but for the way she wrote about it on social networks - “I’ve already kicked out homeless people, now unfortunate fighters are on my list,” and others reasoning that those being mobilized had to “resist and not allow themselves to be taken away like calves to war.” The fact that Alena got away with a fine is not surprising - this is not the first such case. But the fact that on the same social networks she called Russia a “fascist state” is surprising. After all, if you live in a fascist country, you should be afraid of reprisals and severe punishment for disagreeing with the authorities - or try to “break out of hell.” Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens did just that in 2022 - but the young lady was not going anywhere, preferring to talk about the fascist state, being at its epicenter.
Snipped a comment this morning from our very own Frank in ref to "My Mother's Secret" posting by TW (Attribution corrected).
[NEO] I found it to be an oddly disjointed article. It took me a little while to understand — and the author never made it 100% clear — who in the author’s family was Jewish and what religion the other parent was. It seems to have been her father and not her mother who was Jewish, but the author never says whether her mother was Christian, or atheist, or what (other than a CIA analyst).
Much of the latter part of the article is a discussion of the current Middle East situation, but it says nothing particularly unique. On the CIA, however, the author seems to have been strangely naive, and seems to still be naive about John Brennan, whom she seems to trust. But I see no reason that anyone would trust Brennan (do a search on this blog for "Brennan" and you’ll see why I say that).
Why would the author be surprised at the anti-Israel bent of anyone connected with our foreign policy or intelligence community these days? The State Department, the CIA, all of it? When this stance started I don’t know (I think it got worse during the Obama administration but I think the trend predated that). The only person I personally knew who went into the diplomatic corps was definitely a leftist, and I knew him in the 70s when he was in grad school shortly before he entered that profession.
Pithy, followed by many additional pithy comments. Don't miss them. IMHO, much truth here, little if any fiction. Hat tip to both Skid and TW.
Yes, indeed, Frank G. I was just about to share the link when I noticed you’d beat me to it, proving I was on the right track. :-)
And then Besoeker saw that it needed a separate post to make t searchable and expand the discussion, nailing it home. I’m sitting here basking in the glow of reflected cleverness.
#5
My apologies Frank. Wrong attribution. I'll go in and fix it right now.... a bit late however. Again, my apologies and of course thanks for posting the comment.
[PJ] In an interview with Russian-American computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Tucker Carlson declared that the 2020 presidential election was "100% stolen" and explained why.
"You said to some degree the election was rigged," Fridman began. "Was it stolen?"
"It was 100% stolen," Carlson replied. "Are you joking?"
"Like, it was rigged to that large—"
"They completely change the way people vote right before the election on the basis of COVID—which had nothing to do with—"
"So, in that way, it was rigged?" Fridman asked.
Carlson replied:
One hundred percent. And then you censor the information people are allowed to get. Anyone who complains about COVID, which was like — by the way, it might have hurt Trump. But I mean, it's like whatever... I mean, you could play it many different ways. You can't have censorship in a democracy by definition; here's how it works. The people rule, they vote for representatives to carry their agenda to the capital city and get it enacted; that's how they're in charge. And every few years they get to reassess the performance of those people in an election. In order to do that, they need access, unfettered access to information. And no one, particularly not people who are already in power, is allowed to tell them what information they can have. They have to have all the information that they want. Whether the people in charge want it or don't want it or think it's true or think it's false doesn't matter.
Related: How Much Did Mail-in Voting Affect the 2020 Presidential Election?
He added:
And the second you don't have that you don't have a democracy. It's not a free election period. And that's very clear in other countries, I guess. But it's not clear here. So... but I would say it's this election that — it took me a while to come to this — but it's this election that's the referendum on democracy. Biden is senile. He's literally senile. He can't talk. He can't walk. The whole world knows that. Leave our borders. People are, you know, everybody in the world knows it. He can't... A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there's fraud. Period. Like, who would vote for a senile man? He literally can't talk.
Carlson continued, "And nobody I've ever met thinks he's running the U.S. government because he's not. And so I think the world is looking on at this coming election and saying — and a lot of the world hates Trump, okay, it's not an endorsement of Trump — but it's true; if Joe Biden gets reelected, democracy is a freaking joke."
[ZERO] The fact that Google's Gemini AI is a complete woke mess comes as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention.
Between Google's internal culture, and the fact that large language models (LLMs) are largely a reflection of their creators, Gemini is was the predictable digital poster-child for racist, anti-white, anti-conservative, historical revisionist culture - as opposed to the neutral purveyors of information they claim to be.
Mask-off, as they say.
In fact, we couldn't sum it up better than Mario Juric, director of the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle.
In a lengthy post on X, Juric says that despite known "many good individuals working there," he's "done with @Google."
#1
Gemini is was the predictable digital poster-child for racist, anti-white, anti-conservative, historical revisionist culture - as opposed to the neutral purveyors of information they claim to be.
The Ivey Leagues and the State schools are no less "predictable." Our education system is not about cultivating information, it's about re-shaping the culture.
They already arrive intelligent, they must simply be pointed in the right direction.
#2
There are far too many people who simply do not appreciate the emperor's new clothes.
Beatings will continue until morale improves!
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/28/2024 10:33 Comments ||
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#3
Chat AI is a new grift. My experience with Gemini is that the bot is extremely limited. Even more so when you have a liberal homosexual feeding it answers.
#4
I find ChatGPT to be a lot like Wikipedia. If the subject matter doesn't present an opening for woke idiocy, it's pretty straightforward.
It's difficult to work Critical Race Theory into a question about fluorane chemistry.
But it's early days...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/28/2024 12:46 Comments ||
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#5
AI might be much more sophisticated than the software we've seen or used in the past but even so, it is just the latest buzzword for software that is no better than the programmers and designers who created it. In one very important way it is just like any other software that has ever been created: Garbage in, garbage out.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/28/2024 13:06 Comments ||
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[JPost] Extremists are threatening to set the mentally vulnerable alight and normalize political violence in America.
The American radical left’s glorification of the self-immolation of US airman Aaron Bushnell in front of Israel’s Washington, DC embassy on Sunday is another step toward widespread acts of political violence in America.
Bushnell approached the embassy in his uniform, doused himself in a flammable liquid, and before setting himself alight and mortally wounding himself, gave a speech.
“I am an active duty member of the US Air Force,” said Bushnell. “And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
In any other situation, Bushnell’s suicide would result in so-called compassionate humanitarians raising awareness about mental health and suicide prevention. Instead, his action was treated as legitimate and he was called a martyr who died in an act of “resistance.”
“Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice!” said independent presidential candidate Cornel West. “I pray for his precious loved ones! Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time!”
NOT THE FIRST TO SET THEMSELF ON FIRE IN PROTEST OF ISRAEL
The US is suffering from a mental health crisis, with nearly 20% of American adults experiencing mental illness in 2019 according to Mental Health America. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the American suicide rate in 2021 was 14.04 per 100,000 individuals. Having suicide ideologically sanctioned if done in protest risks the lives of those in vulnerable mental conditions or have also worked themselves into a state of hysteria over a war an ocean away.
Yet it is not only irresponsible to promote suicide because of those that my commit it, but also because an act of suicidal political protest is another step toward more political violence.
A first pass reading of the rules for SGLI seems to indicate that his beneficiaries will, indeed, be paid.
The catch is that if he did this as part of a larger wrongdoing, they may be able to stop a check. I am hoping that AFOSI is auditing everything this kid ever did while in uniform for such a thing.
Trouble is, he was a member of A Protected Class (TM). If there was any kind of evidence trail, it was probably binned every time it popped its head up.
#7
^Aaron Bushnell claimed to have 'top secret' information of US troops fighting in Hamas tunnels, a friend claimed
Despite his youth and low rank, he claimed to have insider intelligence that the US military was 'killing large numbers of Palestinians'
#8
Having suicide ideologically sanctioned if done in protest risks the lives of those in vulnerable mental conditions or have also worked themselves into a state of hysteria over a war an ocean away.
Like, trannyfestos? Pepper spraying a pregnant woman? Attempted assassination of a comedian on-stage?
[Tablet] Four-and-half months after Hamas commandos overran the police station in the center of Sderot, all that remains is a dusty lot of twisted rebar. Although the city’s police killed over two dozen terrorists before the IDF arrived late in the morning of Oct. 7, it took over a dozen tank shells to bring down the hijacked station, where outnumbered officers had fought Hamas’ Nukhba forces to a bloody impasse. An Israeli tank had never fired on an Israeli building on Israeli territory in combat before.
A freshly painted mural next to the former site of the demolished station memorializes this unprecedented breach in the national reality of the Jewish state: A tank is shown bombarding the building against eerily colorful skies. The numinous image of an open Torah scroll hovers above the scene, recalling the desecrated happiness of the holiday on which the fighting took place. On the day I visited, earlier this month, an American family was on a guided tour, feet away from a group of several dozen uniformed policemen who were also on some kind of organized visit to their force’s newest national shrine. On Feb. 11, the Times of Israel reported that rubble from the station, which was bulldozed the morning of Oct. 8, had been dumped in a nature preserve north of the city.
Is the Sderot battle something to be canonized or buried? It isn’t surprising that the answers, as expressed in the present, are so bizarrely incoherent. One of the major features of the war that began on Oct. 7 is its persisting lack of clarity. Israel might be on the verge of defeating Hamas in Gaza—or it could be weeks away from the steep strategic setback of American recognition of a Palestinian state. While the demobilization of reservists and a newly announced government timeline for the repopulation of the Gaza border region has partly relieved the feeling of an active emergency, an even worse crisis looms in the form of a potential war with Hezbollah, a threat that has so far prevented 60,000 displaced Israelis from returning to their homes in the north.
Months after Hamas’ destruction of a 30-year-old illusion of a settled national existence and the discrediting of most of those responsible for theorizing and implementing it, there is societywide consensus on the need to defeat Hamas and a fog over nearly everything else. There are relatively few senior Israelis left who have proved themselves qualified to see through the morass. Of those few remaining former generals, government ministers, and agency heads still worth listening to, almost none held as senior a position in the security apparatus as Maj. Gen. (Res.) Gershon Hacohen.
[IsraelTimes] Ramallah’s new prime minister is likely to be another loyalist to the PA president, who appears to be trying to preempt US pressure for structural changes to revitalize the body.
The resignation of the Palestinian Authority’s government on Monday — formally accepted by PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday — was meant to mark a major step toward the revitalization of the administrative body, a move demanded by the US and the international community if it is to have a role ruling post-war Gaza.
But some Palestinians are less than optimistic that the plan to replace PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh and others with a group of technocrats will be enough to salvage the ailing authority.
“It’s mostly a superficial change, not a significant one,” said veteran Ramallah-based journalist Mohammed Daraghmeh, a correspondent for the Saudi-owned Asharq TV news channel.
“This move was expected. Abbas was under international and local pressure to have a new government to get ready for the ‘day after’, so he had his cabinet resign to appease the international community,” Daraghmeh said.
Shtayyeh is to remain as a caretaker prime minister until a new technocratic government is formed, likely under the leadership of Mohammad Mustafa, the current head of the government’s investment fund and a former deputy prime minister and economy minister.
But as before, the overall authority will still reside with Abbas.
Seeking more radical reforms within the PA, Washington has reportedly been pushing for a genuine transfer of power from the president to the prime minister, while letting Abbas retain a ceremonial role. The octogenarian leader, in office since 2005, however, seems to have turned a deaf ear to calls to loosen his grip.
“The change is purely cosmetic, but Abbas is not able to understand that nobody will buy his cosmetics,” quipped Samer Sinijlawi, a Palestinian political activist from East Jerusalem and head of the Jerusalem Development Fund, which specializes in Palestinian humanitarian affairs.
Outside Ramallah’s halls of power, some influential Palestinian political figures have been seeking to formulate a vision for a reformed PA, chief among them Mohammad Dahlan. The former PA security head in Gaza, ousted from the Strip by Hamas in 2007 and exiled by Abbas to the UAE in 2011, has repeatedly called for fresh leadership.
The PA’s move to announce a new government was ostensibly designed to neuter calls by Abbas’s critics for him to empower an independent government, with a mission and a timetable for carrying it out.
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.
[Tablet] Four-and-half months after Hamas commandos overran the police station in the center of Sderot, all that remains is a dusty lot of twisted rebar. Although the city’s police killed over two dozen terrorists before the IDF arrived late in the morning of Oct. 7, it took over a dozen tank shells to bring down the hijacked station, where outnumbered officers had fought Hamas’ Nukhba forces to a bloody impasse. An Israeli tank had never fired on an Israeli building on Israeli territory in combat before.
