Would the west bank and Gaza be allowed to vote, the Palestinians would have the majority in Israel.
All posts by Algora Blog
Gaza, An Israeli Invention
“There was no Gaza Strip before 1948. The strip itself is an Israeli invention.”
— Israeli historian, Prof. Ilan Pappe
“I’m sorry your packages are late, but there’s a genocide going on”
EPIC PUSHBACK: “I’m sorry your packages are late, but there’s a genocide going on”
America’s Sacred Clowns
First, Biden officially endorsed Nikki Haley!
She’s a democrat … here is why.
Kamala Harris impression is all too accurate …
“Are they not idiots?” Ukraine Demands Russia Disarms Voluntarily
via RT
As President Vladimir Zelensky pushes forward with his so-called “peace formula,” which has been dismissed by the Kremlin as “absurd,” Ukrainian officials continue to propose additional terms and conditions.
The conflict in Ukraine can only end with a “complete liberation” and “restoration of its 1991 borders,” Kiev’s deputy defense minister Ivan Gavrilyuk told the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel last week. Only then can Moscow and the pro-Kiev “coalition” sign a document to “create preventive mechanisms so that Russia will never think about another war against Ukraine or any country in the future.”
“This document must include Russia’s renunciation of nuclear weapons, because it poses a threat to the world,” Gavrilyuk claimed.
A senior adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, Mikhail Podoliak, voiced a similar idea, claiming that the negotiation should take place only when Moscow “suffers a global defeat,” or at the very least a series of “tactical defeats,” and “internal riots” that would threaten political stability in Russia and force it to “voluntarily give up nuclear weapons.”
“What is a global defeat? The Russian Federation will no longer be able to dominate… will not be able to use its veto right in the UN Security Council,”Podoliak explained. “Then conditions are possible for nuclear weapons, and for the number of carriers of nuclear weapons, including missiles of a certain range, and for cross-border buffer zones, etc.”
During the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelensky once again attempted to promote his so-called ‘peace formula’, which among other things proposes that Russia pay reparations, surrender its officials to face war crimes tribunals, and restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders. It has previously been rejected by the Kremlin as “absurd,” with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov referring to it as a publicity stunt and “a figment of a sick imagination.”
“Are they not idiots?” Putin asked, adding that if Ukraine had simply ignored Johnson, then the violence could be long over by now. “This just proves yet again that they are not independent people.”
‘If Ukraine loses, our enemies will decide the world order’
by Roland Oliphant, SENIOR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT via telegraph
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, a former secretary General of Nato, has seen his fair share of international crises CREDIT: Julian Simmonds
[ . . . ]
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen has seen his fair share of international crises. As Tony Blair’s Secretary of State for Defence and later the Secretary General of Nato between 1999 and 2003, he presided Nato’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the alliance’s enlargement to include former Warsaw Pact members in eastern Europe, and its only ever invocation of Article Five, the North Atlantic Treaty’s self-defence clause, in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks.
Unlike many retired politicians and generals, he is still viewed by serving defence officials and thinkers as a credible elder statesman. Now, he has a warning: we are living through a period of global volatility “unlike anything in history, and we are not rising to the occasion”.
“If they [Ukraine] lose, we lose…because otherwise the world order will be written by the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and the North Koreans. And that will make a very, very uncomfortable world for my grandkids.”
It is not a reassuring prediction. The war in Ukraine is about to enter its third year, the Middle East is aflame, and Western nerves jangle over Xi Jinping’s plans for Chinese “unification” with Taiwan.
Ukrainian servicemen fire a M777 howitzer toward Russian troops at a position near a front line in the Zaporizhzhia region CREDIT: Reuters/Stringer
And by the end of the year, Donald Trump, who is on record telling European officials that “Nato is dead,” may once again be president-elect of the United States.
Some officials are openly warning that Britain may be involved in a peer-to-peer conflict within a decade. Some people say the world has never been so dangerous as it is in 2024. Can Lord Robertson reassure us it isn’t?
“Oh, it’s bad,” he says. “People say it’s an incredibly dangerous time. Well, it is. We have never had such a volatility of events, so many things simultaneously happening in politics of both democracies and autocracies. Is it the most dangerous period? No.”
Lord Robertson left Nato in 2003, but never really retired. At the age of 77 he is a frantically busy peer, commuting weekly between Westminster and his home in Dunblane where he lives with his wife Sandra (he also has three grown-up children).
[ . . . ]
“It’s unlike anything in history this period we’re living through,” he says. “It is almost a battle of alliances. The Global South is taking sides and they don’t seem to recognise that they’ve got a dog in the fight – that if you can change borders by the use of force then anarchy is the eventual outcome. The Western alliance is there, but maybe endangered by Donald Trump coming in. We cannot afford to be taken by surprise again.”
It is the vacuum of leadership that bothers him most. Yes, he concedes, the Westerners, including his own generation of leaders, became complacent in the aftermath of the Cold War.
“Even now, when there is a land war in Europe, when we’ve got Ukraine and some other problems – the Prime Minister was reminding us on Monday of how important it was that [Ukraine] gets the equipment. And he still doesn’t say when we will give them a multi-year commitment.”
Lord Robertson talks to troops from the Ukraine and Poland during a joint training exercise in 1998 CREDIT: Adam Butler/PA
This week, Rishi Sunak won a standing ovation in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, when he announced a new package of aid. It was a strong speech, and greeted with great relief by Ukrainians who sense a creeping fatigue over the war.
But Lord Robertson fears there is still too large a gap between the bravado of Western rhetoric and the hesitancy of their actions for the Kremlin to take them seriously.
“There is a basic principle in politics: it is not what you say, it is what people hear. We forget that all the time. The only thing that will change Vladimir Putin’s mind – and that’s the mind that dictates what is happening there – is you’ve got to say you are there for the duration. One speech on a Monday afternoon is not enough.
“The money we pay for Ukraine at the moment runs out in a few weeks time in March. The Prime Minister goes out there and makes all the right noises and gets an award and announces £2.5 billion for the next year. What they need is for us to say ‘we’re going to give you £2.5 billion every year.’ Because that’s the only thing that will be heard in the Kremlin.”
He sees a similar problem across the Atlantic. Joe Biden has also shown “timidity” in his response to Ukraine. And Donald Trump has even worse messaging problems.
US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hold a press conference at the White House in December CREDIT: AFP via Getty Images
“I was talking to an American congressional delegation this week who were pointing out that, although he was rhetorical about Nato before, he actually increased the American contribution to Nato. The American Congress has now put in place a law that says he cannot withdraw from Nato,” he explains.
“They were saying, ‘Look what Donald Trump did. We are absolutely on the side of the Ukrainians. We just want this deal done’. I said, ‘But that’s not what is appearing in the Kremlin. And that is all they are listening to’.”
[ . . . ]
“I think the next stage for Putin, if he succeeds here, is that you build up another buffer. He will mop up Moldova, Armenia, Kazakhstan – building that buffer in there. There is a timidity both in the White House and in Downing Street and in other capitals in Europe, that they don’t want to escalate.
“You can’t give them long-range weapons because they might use them into territorial Russia and then we will have World War Three. So that fear of escalation is reducing that objective, that Ukraine has got to win,” Lord Robertson explains.
“In my view, again psychologically, we have got to inculcate into the Russian high command the thought that they could escalate and bring about that conflict. Because a conflict with Nato would lead to Russian defeat.”
[ . . . ]
Admiral Rob Bauer, Nato’s current military chief, warned this week that Nato must prepare for all-out war with Russia in the next 20 years. The head of Poland’s national security agency last month gave the alliance’s eastern members just three years to arm themselves.
Defence think tanks are rehearsing a nightmare scenario of Russia launching a surprise attack on the Baltic States, presenting Nato with a fait-accomplis before the alliance can agree on an effective military response.
By exploiting fear of nuclear war, Putin could then seek to persuade European governments to talk rather than fight – avoiding a conventional war (which he would lose), while effectively destroying Nato politically by demonstrating that Article 5 is useless.
Lord Robertson is sceptical. “I don’t think he will cross the Article 5 line. The key thing about nuclear deterrence is you don’t know what we’re going to do. And you can say Trump won’t press the button. But actually you’ve got the French and the British deterrents. And the British deterrent is independent.”
He freely admits he has come a long way from scouting for CND protesters at Holy Loch.
And yet the painting on his office wall is a reminder that there is more continuity than contradiction between the angry young pacifist scouting CND campsites and the peer of the realm putting faith in mutually assured destruction.
It was, after all, a group of former student radicals who resolved to stop Slobodan Milošević’s nascent genocide in Kosovo.
“The French, German, and British foreign and defence ministers around that table were all of that Sixties generation who protested against the Vietnam war,” Lord Robertson recalls. “You had people like Robin Cook, and me, and Joschka Fischer, confronted with something horrible going on, that we can stop.
“We knew what the public didn’t know, about Operation Horseshoe and Milošević expelling an entire population. Are you going to take military action? You have to, when you’re faced with that enormous responsibility.”
In the end, it comes back to the bones beneath the poppies on his office wall.
“We need to look at Ukraine in the same context. Because if they lose – if Putin wins – then we all lose.”
Read the whole article here.
ProPalestinian Rally, Water Cannons and Batons
Pro-Palestine rally in VicenzaOro Fair northern Italy crushed by the police.
Did Lenin Create Ukraine?
by Sergey Markov
Did Lenin (or more exactly the Bolsheviks) create Ukraine? Yes. More precisely, of course, Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks.
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They artificially divided the Russian people, consisting of Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians. They recorded that Ukrainians are not Russians. Although this directly contradicts thousands of years of history. The goal of the Bolsheviks was to artificially reduce the number of Russian people and increase the number of national communities, according to the principle – divide and conquer.
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The Bolsheviks created an artificial Ukrainian language. “Little Russian” regional dialects don’t differ much from the official Russian language recorded in dictionaries. But on the instructions of the Bolsheviks, an artificial official Ukrainian language was created, seeking to use as few Russian words as possible. [Same way as they created the artificial language and the nation of Soviet Moldovans, in total disregard to the evidence that they are unmistakably ethnic Romanians.]
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Huge territories were assigned to Ukraine – part of Donbass and Novorossia and Slobozhanshchina (Kharkov). And later Crimea.
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In the 20s and 30s, the Bolsheviks actively pursued a policy of forced Ukrainization in the territories of Little Russia, Novorossiya, Slobozhanshchina, and Donbass. This policy of Ukrainization in a mild form continued in the 60-70-80s.
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The Bolsheviks persistently called the ancient Russian city Kiev “Kyiv”, Ukrainian.
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In general, the Bolsheviks adopted the Polish concept of Ukraine, abandoning the Russian concept of a united Rus’.
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Therefore, Lenin can be considered the creator of modern Ukraine, an artificial formation that has one goal – the division of a single large Russian people into separate groups.
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Ukrainians are not non-Russian. Ukrainians are Ukrainian Russians, just like there are Siberian Russians, Moscow Russians, Volga Russians, Ural Russians.
Banks, Credit Card and Financial Firms are Searching Your Purchases
Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Faith leaders and religious liberty advocates are up in arms over news that the federal government encouraged banks and other financial institutions to search customers’ private accounts using the search term “religious texts.”
Tony Perkins (C), president of the Family Research Council, speaks during an interfaith roundtable on the Chinese Communist Party’s threat to religious freedom in Washington on July 12, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)
The “religious texts” search term was among those federal officials asked financial institutions to use following the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, a congressional source with direct knowledge confirmed to The Epoch Times on Jan. 18.
Other terms that were asked to use in the searches included “MAGA” and “Trump,” according to the House Judiciary Committee. Federal officials at the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department sought the data from such searches as part of their investigation of the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Religious liberty advocates interviewed by The Epoch Times were unanimous in condemning the searches, which were conducted without judicially authorized search warrants.
“This is beyond alarming,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told The Epoch Times. “If we did a word search in history of the type of activities the Biden administration is engaged in, it would return words like ‘KGB,’ ’totalitarian,‘ ’repressive,’ ‘anti-democratic,’ and ‘grave threat to freedom.’”
Family Research Council is a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group that works on behalf of traditional values, including and especially defense of the family and religious freedom.
“The last place you would anticipate this kind of government intrusion into freedom of speech is America and yet it is rife with this administration and with the ‘deep state,’” Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver told The Epoch Times.
“It is a very serious concern and it should be a serious concern, no matter your political beliefs because if this is permitted, then it just depends on who is in power. This is what despotic governments do to suppress people that they don’t agree with,” he said.
Mr. Staver’s organization, Liberty Counsel, is an Orlando, Florida-based nonprofit religious liberty defense foundation.
‘Mockery of Our Laws’
Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO, and chief counsel for the Plano, Texas-based First Liberty Institute, told The Epoch Times the searches exposed by the House panel represent a threat to religious freedom.
“It’s outrageous and frankly chilling that the federal government may be urging banks to monitor Americans for exercising their religious freedom by simply purchasing a Bible or other religious text,” Mr. Shackelford said.
“Weaponizing the federal government against religious Americans freely exercising their constitutionally protected freedom is outrageous and a danger to all our freedoms. It makes a mockery of our laws. When religious people are attacked and religious freedom is not upheld, all other civil liberties—including economic freedom—soon start crumbling.”
“This news should serve as a wake-up call for every American,“ warned Jeremy Tedesco, senior vice president of corporate engagement for Alliance Defending Freedom. ”The revelation that the government is working with financial institutions to flag everyday American citizens as ’threats’ because they shop at Cabelas, Dick’s Sporting Goods, or buy religious texts is terrifying.
“No one should live in fear that law enforcement or a financial service provider will flag their account based on the exercise of their constitutionally protected rights.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in a Jan. 17 statement that the searches were sought by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Stakeholder Integration and Engagement in the Strategic Operations of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), in conjunction with the FBI.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) accused the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division of politically based prosecutions while questioning U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke during a House hearing about “Oversight of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division” in Washington on Dec. 5, 2023. (Screenshot via NTD)
Mr. Jordan wrote a Jan. 17 letter to Noah Bishoff, the former FinCEN director who is now the anti-money laundering officer for Plaid Inc., a San Francisco digital financial platform developer and marketer.
“According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of ‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views,’” Mr. Jordan wrote.
“In other words, FinCEN used large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”
Officials’ Testimony Sought
Mr. Bishoff was asked to provide testimony to the House Judiciary panel about the searches, as was Peter Sullivan, senior private sector partner for outreach in the Strategic Partner Engagement Section of the FBI.
“Freedom of Religion is a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution,” Mr. Jordan told The Epoch Times. “It should frighten every American that the federal government is watching people based on their purchases. This is as wrong as it gets and we will continue to expose this blatant attack on faith and civil liberties.”
In a Jan. 17 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Mr. Jordan explained that Mr. Sullivan’s testimony “will help to inform the [House Judiciary] Committee and Select Subcommittee [on the Weaponization of the Federal Government] about the FBI’s mass accumulation and use of Americans’ private information without legal process; the FBI’s protocols, if any, to safeguard Americans’ privacy and constitutional rights in the receipt and use of such information; and the FBI’s general engagement with the private sector on law-enforcement matters.”
Congressional leaders also told The Epoch Times the searches warrant further investigation and corrective action.
FBI Director Christopher Wray looks over notes as he arrives for a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 10, 2023. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) also commented.
“The Biden administration is bringing back ‘Operation Chokepoint’ from the Obama-Biden era to weaponize our financial system against their political opponents. House Republicans, under the leadership of Chairman Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee, will not tolerate this un-American abuse of power.” Mr. Emmer said.
He was referring to a Department of Justice investigation in 2013 of firearms dealers, payday lenders, and other businesses thought to be vulnerable to money laundering.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told The Epoch Times that “digging through American citizens’ private financial transactions, based on political phrases, is a clear weaponization of the federal government and those responsible must be held responsible.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called the searches “outrageous” and claimed “the Biden administration is using federal law enforcement to engage in financial surveillance of Americans. … Shockingly, the government is even monitoring people for purchasing religious texts like the Bible. This is an Orwellian invasion of privacy, and it should have never happened in the United States. Biden’s bureaucrats running this horrendous financial surveillance system must be held accountable.”
Similarly, Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) told The Epoch Times: “This is yet another example of the federal government being weaponized against Joe Biden’s political opposition, as well as people of faith. This sort of activity is highly concerning and warrants further investigation. I applaud the House Judiciary Committee for digging into this issue and I look forward to investigators exposing and rooting out this misconduct.”
Tactics of Marxism
Shea Bradley-Farrell is an international development professional and president of the Washington-based Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research, and Education. She told The Epoch Times that the searches are typical of the control measures used by totalitarian regimes to counter dissidents and other groups not approved by the authorities.
“Weaponizing the federal government against private citizens for their political or religious beliefs is straight out of the playbook of Marxism, and was also used to identify, crush, and control the occupied peoples under the communist Soviet Union,” Ms. Bradley-Farrell said.
“As I explain in my book, ‘Last Warning to the West,’ these are totalitarian, police-state tactics used to impose ‘docility, discipline and controllability of subject populations. These are warrantless searches that violate the Fourth Amendment.”
A spokesman for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Biden Has Always Been a Pro-Israel ‘Hardliner’
“There’s a long history. If you ask me where Biden stands, I would say that ultimately, he stands to the right of some members of the cabinet in Israel. He’s a hardliner,” former British diplomat Alastair Crooke told the New Rules Podcast.
Crooke noted that even during the Obama administration, Biden undercut other cabinet members to support Israeli interests.
Watch the full episode of our show on Rumble