[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 05 January 2018 07:06.
According to Wolff book: Trump was shocked by presidential victory. He had run with anticipation of a loss to Hillary based on her “fake” media support which he could parlay into a “real” media empire by contrast; Bannon warned presidential victory would spotlight Trump’s Russian money laundering; Melania cried in stress over “botched plan gone right” which actually landed the presidency for Donald.
NewsWeek, “Trump Was Horrified When He Won the White House and Melania Cried, Book Claims”, 3 Jan 2018:
No one on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team thought Trump would actually become president—and they didn’t really want him to either, according to excerpts from Michael Wolff’s book published Wednesday in New York magazine.
Now-President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and first lady Melania Trump were all reportedly left dumbfounded and afraid on the night of the election in 2016, the book claims. Shortly after 8 on election night, it became clear that Trump had a real shot of becoming president. Wolff wrote that Don Jr. said his father “looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.” Steve Bannon, who helped run the Trump campaign and helped Trump’s team through the transition, said he saw Trump morph from “a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump.”
A week before the election, Trump was sure he would lose the presidency. But still, according to Wolff’s book, he told Ailes that it was “bigger than I ever dreamed of. I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”
Then he actually won.
Wolff’s claims match various reporting on Trump’s election: He certainly wanted the fame that goes along with running a successful campaign, but critics theorized that he wasn’t quite as happy claiming the job of president. In February, The New York Times reported that Trump misses his access to “fans and supporters — an important source of feedback and validation.” The Associated Press wrote that Trump didn’t even want to live in the White House.
But Wolff’s new book claims Trump and his campaign never planned to win and never wanted to accept the job that comes along with a victory. So once he did take office, the West Wing was in disarray, with Bannon, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner all operating in a free-form environment. Bannon, especially, saw his role as creating the “soul” of the White House, according to Wolff. And Trump’s own behavior was credited as not befitting the White House.
“Nothing contributed to the chaos and dysfunction of the White House as much as Trump’s own behavior,” Wolff wrote. “The big deal of being president was just not apparent to him. Most victorious candidates, arriving in the White House from ordinary political life, could not help but be reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this wasn’t that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was actually more commodious and to his taste than the White House.”
Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is to be published by Henry Holt & Co. on January 9.
The Hill, “Bannon warned Russia probe would focus on money laundering: report”, 3 January 2018:
Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon warned that the special counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia would focus on money laundering, according to a book to be published next week.
The revelation is included in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” a new book by Michael Wolff. The Guardian, which has viewed a copy, published several stories on Wednesday about the book, which includes interviews with Bannon and President Trump.
Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was charged with money laundering in an October indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, as was his associate Richard Gates.
In Wolff’s book, Bannon identifies Weissmann, an attorney on Mueller’s team, as a “money-laundering guy.”
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon said in the book. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner. … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”
“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon said, referring to the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
The former White House chief strategist also spoke about the 2016 meeting between Trump Jr. and a group of Russians, describing it as “treasonous.”
And Bannon in “Fire and Fury” mentioned connections between Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and loans taken out from the German Deutsche Bank that have come under scrutiny in relation to the investigation.
In December, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records tied to Kushner’s family’s real estate business, Kushner Companies.
“It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit,” Bannon said of the probe. “The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”
Business Insider, “I know why Steve Bannon let Michael Wolff into the White House”, 4 Jan 2018:
- Michael Wolff’s new book, “The Fire and the Fury,” is rocking the Trump White House, and it hasn’t even been released yet.
- It has the president turning on former adviser Steve Bannon. This is in part because Bannon helped Wolff gain incredible access to the White House.
- Why? Add this to the long list of ego-driven media mistakes made by the administration - a costly one at that.
- What Bannon didn’t count on was that Wolff isn’t a soldier in his army.
I feel like I write this all the time, but the White House is in chaos.
The Trump administration is being thrown by the forthcoming publication of Michael Wolff’s book “The Fire and The Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
The excerpts, until now jealously guarded at select media outlets like New York Magazine and NBC for weeks, tell of a shockingly incompetent president and the in-over-their-heads aides who openly disrespect him. It is chaos, and someone let Wolff take a front seat and watch it all.
That person, by all accounts, was former White House adviser Stever Bannon. While Trump may have known that the biographer of his idol, Rupert Murdoch, was on site, it was Bannon who ensured Wolff had access.
Why? Consider it one part self-aggrandizement, another part a desire for acceptance, and wholly and completely a continuation of Bannon’s desperate search for ideological allies.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 04 January 2018 14:31.
JTA, “Neo-Nazi who co-runs Daily Stormer has Jewish relatives on both sides of family”, 3 Jan 2018:
Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer
(JTA) — The mother of a neo-Nazi who co-runs the white supremacist website Daily Stormer and said Jewish children “deserve to die” has Jewish relatives on both sides of his family.
Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer’s mother, Alyse, confirmed to Newsweek magazine in an article published Wednesday that her son comes from a “large, mixed race family” with Native American heritage, and that he has Jewish lineage “on both sides of his family.” His Jewish heritage was first reported by Gawker in 2012 when he volunteered the information to a reporter, but this is the first time a family member has confirmed his background.
Auernheimer, who runs the technical side of the Daily Stormer, with its more well-known editor Andrew Anglin, is believed to be in Ukraine, where he has lived since serving jail time in the United States on a computer hacking charge. He has been estranged from his mother for over a decade, she told Newsweek.
“Weev” Auernheimer works for both Daily Stormer and TRS.
Auernheimer, 32, on the podcast Radical Agenda last month said Jews were to blame for the Daily Stormer website losing its dot-com status, causing it to jump from domain to domain in recent months.
“If you don’t let us dissent peacefully, then our only option is to murder you. To kill your children. To kill your whole families,” he said in an interview. “There is only one thing absent free speech that we can do to express our dissent and that’s to slaughter you like dogs, and you’re gonna have it coming and your children will deserve to die.”
While normal WN have been intent on denying a supremacist message in favor of a separatist message, Weev sent this missive everywhere from China to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Podcast host Christopher Cantwell, who is under house arrest in Virginia on two felony charges for allegedly using tear gas and pepper spray at the Charlottesville rally in August, tried to walk back the statements, saying that killing Jews “is certainly an undesirable option I’ll state for the FBI agents and prosecutors who are listening to this show.”
Auernheimer also said that the retaliation against the Jews should focus on the “top” Jews, “the most Jewish Jews.”
Related, Weev added in that show that he just wants Jews to convert to Christianity. He has in mind a special new denomination of Christianity which would conform to “natural order.”
The Paleoconservative deal…
Mancinblack remarked, “Oy vey Maria. Weev should go poke a polar bear with a crucifix. I’d pay good money for the film rights.”
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 20 December 2017 06:02.
A backlog of articles detailing the connection between Chabad-Lubavitch, Putin, the Russian Federation and Trump.
Politico, “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin”, 9 April 2017:
Where Trump’s real estate world meets a top religious ally of the Kremlin.
Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island’s Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The center is an unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing: Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through it.
Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.
Their respective ambitions led the two men—along with Trump’s future son-in-law, Jared Kushner—to build a set of close, overlapping relationships in a small world that intersects on Chabad, an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of.
Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”
A few years later, Trump would seek out Russian projects and capital by joining forces with a partnership called Bayrock-Sapir, led by Soviet emigres Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater and Tamir Sapir—who maintain close ties to Chabad. The company’s ventures would lead to multiple lawsuits alleging fraud and a criminal investigation of a condo project in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, the links between Trump and Chabad kept piling up. In 2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter and Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. A few months after the ceremony, Leviev met Trump to discuss potential deals in Moscow and then hosted a bris for the new couple’s first son at the holiest site in Chabad Judaism. Trump attended the bris along with Kushner, who would go on to buy a $300 million building from Leviev and marry Ivanka Trump, who would form a close relationship with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova would host the power couple in Russia in 2014 and reportedly attend Trump’s inauguration as their guest.
With the help of this trans-Atlantic diaspora and some globetrotting real estate moguls, Trump Tower and Moscow’s Red Square can feel at times like part of the same tight-knit neighborhood. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office having proclaimed his desire to reorient the global order around improved U.S. relations with Putin’s government—and as the FBI probes the possibility of improper coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin—that small world has suddenly taken on outsize importance.
Trump’s kind of Jews
Founded in Lithuania in 1775, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement today has adherents numbering in the five, or perhaps six, figures. What the movement lacks in numbers it makes up for in enthusiasm, as it is known for practicing a particularly joyous form of Judaism.
Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, recalled having this trait impressed upon him during one family wedding at which the two tables occupied by his first cousins, Chabad rabbis, put the rest of the celebrants to shame. “They were dancing up a storm, these guys. I thought they were black. Instead they’re just black-hat,” Klein said, referring to their traditional Hasidic garb.
Despite its small size, Chabad has grown to become the most sprawling Jewish institution in the world, with a presence in over 1,000 far-flung cities, including locales like Kathmandu and Hanoi with few full-time Jewish residents. The movement is known for these outposts, called Chabad houses, which function as community centers and are open to all Jews. “Take any forsaken city in the world, you have a McDonald’s and a Chabad house,” explained Ronn Torossian, a Jewish public relations executive in New York.
Chabad adherents differ from other Hasidic Jews on numerous small points of custom, including the tendency of Chabad men to wear fedoras instead of fur hats. Many adherents believe that the movement’s last living leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, is the messiah, and some believe he is still alive. Chabad followers are also, according to Klein, “remarkable” fundraisers.
As the closest thing the Jewish world has to evangelism—much of its work is dedicated to making Jews around the world more involved in Judaism—Chabad serves many more Jews who are not full-on adherents.
According to Schmuley Boteach, a prominent rabbi in New Jersey and a longtime friend of Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, Chabad offers Jews a third way of relating to their religious identity. “You have three choices as a Jew,” he explained. “You can assimilate and not be very affiliated. You can be religious and Orthodox, or there’s sort of a third possibility that Chabad offers for people who don’t want to go the full Orthodox route but do want to stay on the traditional spectrum.”
This third way may explain the affinity Trump has found with a number of Chabad enthusiasts—Jews who shun liberal reform Judaism in favor of traditionalism but are not strictly devout.
“It’s not a surprise that Trump-minded people are involved with Chabad,” said Torossian. “Chabad is a place that tough, strong Jews feel comfortable. Chabad is a nonjudgmental place where people that are not traditional and not by-the-book feel comfortable.”
He summarized the Chabad attitude, which is less strict than the Orthodox one, as, “If you can’t keep all of the commandments, keep as many as you can.”
Torossian, who coincidentally said he is Sater’s friend and PR rep, also explained that this balance is particularly appealing to Jews from the former Soviet Union, who appreciate its combination of traditional trappings with a lenient attitude toward observance. “All Russian Jews go to Chabad,” he said. “Russian Jews are not comfortable in a reform synagogue.”
Putin’s kind of Jews
The Russian state’s embrace of Chabad happened, like many things in Putin’s Russia, as the result of a factional power struggle.
In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.
At the time, Russia already had a chief rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to the title.
The Putin-Chabad alliance has reaped benefits for both sides. Under Putin, anti-Semitism has been officially discouraged, a break from centuries of discrimination and pogroms, and the government has come to embrace a state-sanctioned version of Jewish identity as a welcome part of the nation.
As Putin has consolidated his control of Russia, Lazar has come to be known derisively as “Putin’s rabbi.” He has escorted the Russian leader to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and attended the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, Putin’s pet project, on the Jewish Sabbath. Putin returned that favor by arranging for Lazar to enter the stadium without submitting to security checks that would have broken the rules for observing Shabbat.
In 2013, a $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow under the auspices of Chabad and with funding from Abramovich. Putin donated a month of his salary to the project, while the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, pitched in by offering relevant documents from its archives.
In 2014, Lazar was the only Jewish leader present at Putin’s triumphal announcement of the annexation of Crimea.
But the rabbi has paid a price for his loyalty to Putin. Since the annexation, his continued support for the Russian autocrat has caused a rift with Chabad leaders in Ukraine. And for years, the Russian government has defied an American court order to turn over a trove of Chabad texts called the “Schneerson Library” to the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Shortly after the opening of the tolerance museum, Putin ordered the collection transferred there instead. The move made Lazar the custodian of a prized collection that his Brooklyn comrades believe is rightfully theirs.
If Lazar has any qualms about his role in all the intra-Chabad drama, he hasn’t let on publicly. “Challenging the government is not the Jewish way,” the rabbi said in 2015.
Trump, Bayrock, Sapir
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, as Trump looked for business and investors in the former Soviet Union during the first years of this century, he struck up an enduring relationship with a firm called Bayrock-Sapir.
Bayrock was co-led by Felix Sater, a convicted mob associate.
Sater and another Bayrock employee, Daniel Ridloff, who like Sater later went on to work directly for the Trump Organization, belong to the Port Washington Chabad house. Sater told POLITICO Magazine that in addition to serving on the board of the Port Washington Chabad house, he sits on the boards of numerous Chabad entities in the U.S. and abroad, though none in Russia.
The extent of Sater’s ties to Trump is a matter of some dispute. Working out of Trump Tower, Sater partnered with the celebrity developer on numerous Trump-branded developments and scouted deals for him in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Sater escorted Trump’s children Ivanka and Don Jr. around Moscow to scour the city for potential projects, and he worked especially closely with Ivanka on the development of Trump SoHo, a hotel and condominium building in Manhattan whose construction was announced on “The Apprentice” in 2006.
In 2007, Sater’s stock fraud conviction became public. The revelation did not deter Trump, who brought him on as “a senior advisor to the Trump Organization” in 2010. In 2011, a number of purchasers of Trump SoHo units sued Trump and his partners for fraud and the New York attorney general’s office opened a criminal inquiry into the building’s marketing. But the purchasers settled and agreed not to cooperate with the criminal investigation, which was subsequently scuttled, according to the New York Times. Two former executives are suing Bayrock alleging tax evasion, money laundering, racketeering, bribery, extortion and fraud.
Under oath, Sater has described a close relationship with the Trumps, while Trump has testified under oath that he barely knew Sater and would not be able to pick his face out in a crowd. Several people who worked closely with Sater during this period and who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation from both men, scoffed at Trump’s testimony, describing frequent meetings and near-constant phone calls between the two. One person recalled numerous occasions on which Trump and Sater dined together, including at the now-defunct Kiss & Fly in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
“Trump called Felix like every other day to his office. So the fact that he’s saying he doesn’t know him, that’s a lot of crap,” said a former Sater colleague. “They were definitely in contact always. They spoke on the phone all the time.”
In 2014, the Port Washington Chabad house named Sater its “man of the year.” At the ceremony honoring Sater, the chabad’s founder, Shalom Paltiel, recounted how Sater would spill his guts to him about his adventures working as a government cooperator on sensitive matters of national security.
“I only recently told Felix I really didn’t believe most of it. I thought perhaps he watched too many James Bond movies, read one too many Tom Clancy novels,” said Paltiel at the ceremony. “Anyone who knows Felix knows he can tell a good story. I simply did not put too much credence to them.”
But Paltiel went on to recount receiving special clearance years later to accompany Sater to a ceremony at the federal building in Manhattan. There, said Paltiel, officials from every American intelligence agency applauded Sater’s secret work and divulged “stuff that was more fantastic, and more unbelievable, than anything he had been telling me.” A video of the event honoring Sater has been removed from the Port Washington Chabad house’s website but is still available on YouTube.
When I contacted Paltiel for this article, he hung up the phone as soon as I introduced myself. I wanted to ask him about some of the connections I’d come across in the course of my reporting. In addition to his relationship with Sater, Paltiel is also close to “Putin’s rabbi” Lazar, calling Lazar “my dear friend and mentor” in a short note about running into him at Schneerson’s gravesite in Queens.
According to Boteach, this is unsurprising, because Chabad is the sort of community where everybody knows everybody else. “In the world of Chabad, we all went to Yeshiva together, we were all ordained together,” Boteach explained. “I knew Berel Lazar from yeshiva.”
The Port Washington Chabad house has another Bayrock tie. Among its top 13 benefactors, its “Chai Circle,” as listed on its website, is Sater’s partner, Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif.
Arif, a former Soviet bureaucrat turned wealthy real estate developer, owns a mansion in Port Washington, an upscale suburb, but he makes a curious patron for the town’s Chabad. A Kazakh-born citizen of Turkey with a Muslim name, Arif is not Jewish, according to people who have worked with him. In 2010, he was arrested in a raid on a yacht in Turkey that once belonged to the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, and charged with running an international underage prostitution ring. Arif was later cleared of the charges.
Before the scandal on Ataturk’s yacht, Arif partnered closely with Trump, Ivanka Trump and Sater in the development of Trump SoHo along with the Sapir family, a New York real estate dynasty and the other half of Bayrock-Sapir.
Its patriarch, the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.
Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.
Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.
Trump attended the bris. A month earlier, in May 2008, he and Leviev had met to discuss possible real estate projects in Moscow, according to a contemporaneous Russian news report. An undated photograph on a Pinterest account called LLD Diamond USA, the name of a firm registered to Leviev, shows Trump and Leviev shaking hands and smiling. (The photograph was first pointed out by Pacific Standard.)
That same year, Sapir, an active Chabad donor in his own right, joined Leviev in Berlin to tour Chabad institutions in the city.
Jared, Ivanka, Roman, Dasha
Also present at the Sapir-Rosen bris was Kushner, who along with his now-wife Ivanka Trump has forged his own set of ties to Putin’s Chabad allies. Kushner’s family, which is Modern Orthodox, has long been highly engaged in philanthropy across the Jewish world, including to Chabad entities, and during his undergraduate years at Harvard, Kushner was active in the university’s Chabad house. Three days before the presidential election, the couple visited Schneerson’s grave and prayed for Trump. In January, the couple purchased a home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood and settled on the city’s nearby Chabad synagogue, known as TheSHUL of the Nation’s Capital, as their house of worship.
In May 2015, a month before Trump officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Leviev for $295 million.
Kushner and Ivanka Trump are also close with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Abramovich, an industrialist worth more than $7 billion and the owner of the British soccer club Chelsea FC, is the former governor of the Russian province of Chukotka, where he is still revered as a hero. He owes his fortune to his triumphant emergence from Russia’s post-Soviet “aluminum wars,” in which more than 100 people are estimated to have died in fighting over control of aluminum refineries. Abramovich admitted in 2008 that he amassed his assets by paying billions of dollars in bribes. In 2011, his former business partner, the late Boris Berezovsky—an oligarch who had fallen out with Putin and gone on to live in exile at the Trump International on Central Park West—accused him of threats, blackmail and intimidation in a lawsuit in the United Kingdom, which Abramovich won.
Abramovich was reportedly the first person to recommend to Yeltsin that he choose Putin as his successor. In their 2004 biography of Abramovich, the British journalists Chris Hutchins and Dominic Midgely write, “When Putin needed a shadowy force to act against his enemies behind the scenes, it was Abramovich whom he could rely on to prove a willing co-conspirator.” The biographers compare the two men’s relationship to that between a father and a son and report that Abramovich personally interviewed candidates for Putin’s first cabinet. He has reportedly gifted Putin a $30 million yacht, though Putin denies it.
Abramovich’s vast business holdings and his personal life overlap with Trump’s world in multiple ways.
According to a 2012 report from researchers at Cornell University, Evraz, a firm partly owned by Abramovich, has contracts to provide 40 percent of the steel for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project whose completion was approved by Trump in March after years of delay. And in 2006, Abramovich purchased a large stake in the Russian oil giant Rosneft, a company now being scrutinized for its possible role in alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. Both Trump and the Kremlin have dismissed as “fake news” a dossier that alleges that a recent sale of Rosneft shares was part of a scheme to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Meanwhile, his wife, Zhukova, has long traveled in the same social circles as Kushner and Ivanka Trump: She is a friend and business partner of Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng, one of Ivanka’s closest friends, and a friend of Karlie Kloss, the longtime girlfriend of Kushner’s brother, Josh.
Over the years, Zhukova has grown close to Jared and Ivanka themselves. In February 2014, a month before Putin illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Ivanka Trump posted a photo to Instagram of herself with Zhukova, Wendi Deng, a bottle of wine, and the caption, “Thank you [Zhukova] for an unforgettable four days in Russia!” Deng was recently rumored to be dating Putin, though she denied it. Other photos from the trip show Kushner was also present in Russia at the time.
Last summer, Kushner and Ivanka Trump shared a box at the U.S. Open with Zhukova and Deng. In January, Zhukova reportedly attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka Trump’s guest.
On March 14, The Daily Mail spotted Josh Kushner dining with Zhukova in New York. According to the outlet, Josh Kushner “hid his face as he exited the eatery with Dasha.”
A week later, at the same time Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were vacationing in Aspen with her two brothers and their families, Abramovich’s plane flew from Moscow to Denver, according to a flight tracking service. Abramovich owns two properties in the Aspen area.
A spokesman for Abramovich declined to comment on the record about the Colorado overlap. The White House referred queries about the couples to a personal spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump. The spokeswoman, Risa Heller, initially indicated she would provide answers to questions about the Colorado overlap and recent contacts between the couples, but did not do so.
President Trump has reportedly sought security clearances for Kushner and Ivanka, who have taken on growing roles in his White House. For anyone else, a close personal relationship with the family of a top Putin confidant would present significant hurdles to obtaining security clearances, former high-ranking intelligence officials said, but political pressure to grant clearances to the president’s children would be likely to override any security concerns.
“Yes, such connections to Russia should matter for a clearance,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA Moscow station chief. “Question is, will they?”
“I don’t think the Trump family camp will have any trouble with security clearances, as long as there’s no polygraph involved,” said Milt Bearden, former chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division. “It’s absolutely crazy, but not going to be an issue.”
***
With Washington abuzz about the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump world’s relationship with Putin’s Kremlin, their overlapping networks remain the object of much scrutiny and fascination.
In March, the New York Times reported that Lazar had met last summer with the Trump administration’s special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt, then a lawyer for the Trump Organization. The men characterized the meeting as a normal part of Greenblatt’s campaign outreach to Jewish leaders and said it included general discussion of Russian society and anti-Semitism. The meeting was brokered by New York PR rep Joshua Nass, and Lazar has said he did not discuss that meeting with the Russian government.
In late January, Sater met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to discuss a proposed Ukraine peace deal that would end U.S. sanctions on Russia, which Cohen then delivered to Trump’s then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House, according to the Times. Cohen has given varying accounts of the episode.
According to one Jewish Republican who said he sees Cohen “all the time” there, Cohen himself is a regular presence at the Midtown Chabad on Fifth Avenue, a dozen blocks south of Trump Tower and a half-dozen blocks south of his current office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Cohen disputed this, saying, “I’ve never been to a Chabad and I’ve never been to one in New York City either.” Cohen then said he last stepped foot in a Chabad over 15 years ago to attend a bris. He said the last Chabad-related event he attended was on March 16 at a hotel in Newark when he spoke at a dinner honoring Trump’s secretary of veterans affairs, David Shulkin. The dinner was hosted by the Rabbinical College of America, a Chabad organization.
To those unfamiliar with Russian politics, Trump’s world and Hasidic Judaism, all these Chabad links can appear confounding. Others simply greet them with a shrug.
“The interconnectedness of the Jewish world through Chabad is not surprising insofar as it’s one of the main Jewish players,” said Boteach. “I would assume that the world of New York real estate isn’t that huge either.”
Zionist Report, “COMMENTARY: Trump and Putin – Agents of Chabad-Lubavitch”, 28 Mar 2017:
Americans have given up on America a long time ago, and pretty soon they will get a real taste of their atrocious mistake. When countries don’t have what it takes to assume their responsibility, the result, without a doubt, is their own destruction.
“Trump and Putin: Agents of Chabad-Lubavitch”
The following is a section I wrote on November 7, 2016; it was part of an update titled Why the globalists will announce Trump as the winner of the election. I’m reposting it on this page because it contains information that is vital to your understanding of what’s really going in the world right now. So here goes…
“Where once were men but now are sheep
- a fiction and far cry,
From planet Earth’s proud animal
- who would be you and I
Alas, our forebears drank the cup of poisoned alibi
And made excuses far and wide,
And made God in the sky.
This boogaloo’s now round the world
- bad trips for everyone.
No more the man of paradise
Or the Celt of Albion
They queue like burning moths to spread
- the all time viscous lie
You Christians destroyed our tribe
- I’ll fight you till I die….”
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 16 December 2017 07:01.
Mateusz Morawiecki. third from left, at the Warsaw Zoo holding a document honoring rescuers of Jews, Sept., 2017. (Courtesy of From the Depths)
JTA, “New Polish prime minister refers to rescue of ‘Jewish brothers’ in his inaugural address”, 12 Dec 2017:
(JTA) — In his first speech as Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki said that non-Jewish Poles who saved their “Jewish brothers” during the Holocaust represent the “essence of what it means to be Polish.”
Morawiecki, a former banker who in September spoke about his Jewish roots – two of his aunts are Jewish — in a speech about rescuers of Jews in Warsaw, presented his inaugural address Tuesday to the parliament.
The remark about Jews was unusual because of the reference as brethren and the de facto head of state including the subject in an inaugural address.
Morawiecki, who was the finance minister before his promotion in a surprising reshuffle in the government of the right-wing ruling Law and Justice Party, spoke mostly about the economy and foreign relations.
But in speaking about the national identity, he said: “The deep community dimension is inscribed in our tradition: Assistance to people in flight, Żegota saving our Jewish brothers and Solidarity. This is real proof of what Polishness is and what the community is.”
Żegota is the name of a Polish resistance group that helped Jews during the Holocaust. Solidarity was an anti-communist movement, in which Morawiecki’s father was active during Poland’s subjugation to the Soviet Union.
Morawiecki, 49, succeeds Beata Szydło, also of the right-wing party, who has served in the post since 2015.
Morawiecki, who was not even a member of Law and Justice two years ago, joined the government as minister for economic development in 2015 before adding the post of finance minister last year.
His Jewish roots were known in Poland. Morawiecki spoke about it in some detail earlier this year at a ceremony at the Warsaw Zoo honoring a former zoo director and his wife, Jan and Antonina Żabiński, who saved hundreds of Jews there, and other rescuers.
Polish non-Jews killed at least 1,500 Jews in a series of pogroms during and directly after the Holocaust, according to the Polish chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 11 December 2017 05:01.
The Hill, “Russia recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital”, 6 April 2017:
Russia on Thursday publicly recognized West Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel.
The announcement was made in a statement by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that addressed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In the statement, Moscow reaffirmed “support for the two-state solution” while acknowledging that East Jerusalem should be the capital of the future Palestinian state.
“We reaffirm our commitment to the UN-approved principles for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, which include the status of East Jerusalem as the capital of the future Palestinian state,” the ministry said.
“At the same time, we must state that in this context we view West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
Moscow’s announcement comes as the new U.S. administration is considering moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby recognizing the city as Israel’s capital.
Israel declared Jerusalem its capital in 1950, but Russia is the first nation to recognize it as such, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Long-standing U.S. policy has called for the status of Jerusalem to be resolved by the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Russia is currently not planning on moving its embassy to the city.
In the statement, Russia maintained that a two-state solution is the best policy for the achieving peace in the region and pledged to focus on ensuring access to Jerusalem “for all believers.”
“Moscow reaffirms its support for the two-state solution as an optimal option that meets the national interests of the Palestinian and Israeli people, both of whom have friendly relations with Russia, and the interests of all other countries in the region and the international community as a whole,” the ministry said.
“Russia will continue to provide assistance to the achievement of Israeli-Palestinian agreements. We will focus on ensuring free access to Jerusalem’s holy places for all believers.”
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 10 December 2017 07:53.
“Do you like white women? Because have a lot of them at Baylor, and they love football players.” - Kendell Briles, Baylor College football recruiter, addressing black football prospects.
Washington Post, “Baylor moves to dismiss lawsuit alleging 52 rapes by 31 football players”, 29 March 2017:
Baylor moved Tuesday to dismiss a federal lawsuit filed in January filed by a former student who claimed to have been gang-raped by a pair of football players in 2013. In addition, her complaint alleged 52 “acts of rape” committed by the school’s football players between 2011 and 2014.
Those numbers were far higher than the eye-opening figures cited by school regents from the report of an outside law firm, which found that 17 women had reported 19 incidents of sexual or domestic assault by Baylor football players since 2011. However, in its court filing Tuesday, Baylor said it “does not agree with or concede the accuracy of Plaintiff’s 146-paragraph complaint and its immaterial and inflammatory assertions.”
“Baylor moves to dismiss Plaintiff’s assault, failure to investigate, and negligence claims because they are barred by the two-year statute of limitations,” stated the document, filed with a U.S. District Court that includes Baylor’s home of Waco, Tex., in its jurisdiction. The move to dismiss also claimed that the allegations of the woman, referred to as Elizabeth Doe, “do not rise to the level of ‘deliberate indifference.’ ”
Doe alleged in her complaint that on April 18, 2013 — an annual date known as “Diadeloso” (“Day of the Bear”) at Baylor and marked by a lack of classes and an encouragement of social interaction — she was raped by two freshman football players, Tre’Von Armstead and Shamycheal Chatman, and that Baylor ignored the situation. She also claimed that her position as a member of the school’s female recruiting team, called the Baylor Bruins, contributed to the incident.
“Baylor’s recruiting policies and practices, along with the Baylor Bruin football hostess program, directly contributed to the creation of a culture of sexual violence that permeated Baylor and from which Ms. Doe would soon suffer,” the lawsuit stated.
The lawsuit also contended that Kendal Briles, a former assistant football coach and son of former head coach Art Briles, told a recruit, “Do you like white women? Because we have a lot of them at Baylor, and they love football players.”
“While broadly and needlessly impugning the integrity of the many female students who honorably participated in the Bruins organization, Plaintiff does not allege that she herself was ever asked by any Baylor official, directly or indirectly, to participate in the ‘good time’ recruiting policy that she claims to have existed,” Baylor said Tuesday, “nor does she claim that her alleged assault occurred in conjunction with any recruiting activity.”
More broadly, the lawsuit claimed that “Baylor football players were responsible for … the most widespread culture of sexual violence and abuse of women ever reported in a collegiate athletic program,” adding, “Baylor football under Briles had run wild, in more ways than one, and Baylor was doing nothing to stop it.”
“Although Baylor appreciates the sensitivity and seriousness of the issue of sexual assault — a fact demonstrated by its voluntary release of the Pepper Hamilton investigation findings in May 2016 — Plaintiff’s inflammatory and immaterial allegations must be disregarded when evaluating whether Plaintiff has stated a claim,” the university said in Tuesday’s filing.
Former Baylor football player Tre’Von Armstead arrested on sexual assault charges.
Armstead and Chatman were arrested last week and indicted in connection with the 2013 incident. Another former Baylor football player, Sam Ukwuachu, had a sexual-assault conviction overturned last week by a Texas appeals court, with the case remanded for retrial. Two other ex-Bears, Tevin Elliott and Shawn Oakman, have been convicted of and indicted on rape charges, respectively, in an ongoing scandal that has cost the jobs of Briles and other senior Baylor officials and spawned numerous lawsuits.
On Friday, lawyers for 10 women (in addition to Doe) who are suing Baylor for its alleged indifference to their rapes by football players filed notice to subpoena materials from Pepper Hamilton’s investigation into the school. “It’s long past time for the truth of how senior administrators discouraged and retaliated against the young women for reporting sexual assault,” Jim Dunnam, one of the lawyers, said Monday (via the Waco Tribune-Herald).
“We’ll never have transparency until they stop saying this was just a football problem,” he added. “Every time they say it is just a football problem is further victimization of the over 100 young women who were wronged that had nothing to do with football.”
Baylor’s Kim Mulkey: “Knock Parents Concerned About Sexual Assault Scandal ‘Right In The Face.”
DeadSpin, “Baylor’s Kim Mulkey: Knock Parents Concerned About Sexual Assault Scandal ‘Right In The Face”, 25 Feb 2017:
Today was senior day for the Baylor women’s basketball team, and rather than spending her time at the mic focused solely on her soon-departing players, head coach Kim Mulkey took a different route.
The storied coach decided to share a few choice words for parents voicing concern over sending their daughters to a place currently being sued for allowing and enabling football players to commit an alleged 52 sexual assaults in four years. Or rather, she shared some instructions for the fans—who cheered her both during and after her speech—telling them that if a parent tells them they won’t let their daughter attend Baylor, they should “knock them right in the face.”
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 09 December 2017 06:07.
The New Observer, “Netanyahu: Race-mixing to Destroy Liberal Jews”, 3 Dec 2017:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly predicted that racial mixing between liberal Jews and non-Jews will wipe out Reform Judaism in America by 2070—and that as a result, the Jewish ethnostate must prepare itself for survival without being supported by the US.
The comments, first reported by the Hebrew-language Makor Rishon daily newspaper in Israel, have highlighted two important facts: firstly, that Netanyahu is acutely aware of the threat to racial identity posed by racial mixing of any sort; and secondly, that the liberal Jews in America are behind the support that country provides to Israel.
In the original report, Netanyahu said that Reform Judaism—which, according to Pew Center estimates, represented 35 percent of American Jews—“would disappear within two generations due to assimilation.”
The publication of the report in Makor Rishon caused an uproar amongst Jews in America, and Netanyahu’s office issued an oblique denial in a tersely-worded statement which said that the report was “inaccurate and do not reflect the Prime Minister’s views.” It was significant that the statement did not specifically deny using those words, a tactic often employed by politicians as a way of publicly backtracking from comments.
Makor Rishon’s diplomatic correspondent, Ariel Kahana, however, confirmed that Netanyahu repeated the assessment several times in private talks, and that Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, has been heard making similar projections.
According to Kahana’s reports, Netanyahu spoke of the scenario of the demise of Reform Judaism as a threat to Israel, saying the Jewish state needs to prepare for a day when it would no longer enjoy the base of support provided today by the Jewish community in the United States.
As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency pointed out, Netanyahu has been criticized by leaders of Reform Judaism “in the United States and beyond” over his government’s refusal to implement a compromise that enlarges the space devoted to allowing Jewesses to pray at the Western Wall, as well as its support for a bill that would give the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate formal control over conversions—which would further cement Israel’s ban on marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
The JTA makes no reference to the real reason for the split between “left” and “right” wing Jews, namely on how best to present Israel to the outside world.
The JTA also ignored the other elephant in the room—the fact that the Jewish lobby in America and European countries still all support Israel and its racial policies—while vehemently attacking any white people who dare to say that they seek to emulate Israel’s plans to protect itself from being overrun by racial aliens.
Netanyahu’s assessment that liberal Jews in America will disappear due to racial mixing is based on reportedly high intermarriage rates with non-Jews amongst that community.
This is however unlikely to affect the power of the Jewish lobby, because the Conservative and Orthodox branches of American Jewry—together the majority of Jews in the US—still maintain their Jews-only marriage policies, and will not disappear.
In fact, it is precisely the Orthodox Jews who wield such strong influence over the Donald Trump administration, which is proof in itself that the disappearance of Reform Jews will not dramatically affect the power of the Jewish lobby in America.
As the Israeli Haaretz newspaper reported in April 2017, the “New Jewish Elite of the Trump Age” are the “ultra-Orthodox and pro-Israel Hawks.”
Haaretz reported that “among many moves aimed at reversing his predecessor’s policies, President Trump recently decided not to make public the White House visitors logs.
“Had they been open, the lists would reveal the profound change 100 days of a Trump administration had brought about to the Jewish community’s power structure.
“The atmosphere has changed, at least for us. There’s a sense of familiarity and greater receptivity and that makes a better atmosphere,” said Abba Cohen, vice president for federal affairs at Agudath Israel of America, a group representing the ultra-Orthodox stream.”
The real threat to Jewish power in America will only come when—and if—America tips majority nonwhite, because the Jewish Lobby’s power is directly linked to the presence of a majority white electorate—as controlling the electoral choices of a majority nonwhite population will prove much harder to do.
I’ve published this full article by The New Observer in order to allow the article to build up to this last - crucial - paragraph:
“The real threat to Jewish power in America will only come when—and if—America tips majority nonwhite, because the Jewish Lobby’s power is directly linked to the presence of a majority white electorate—as controlling the electoral choices of a majority nonwhite population will prove much harder to do.”
It makes a point, inadvertently in all likelihood, and it is a chief point that Kumiko has become vigilant about - that non-Whites who are aware of the JQ, its power and destruction to ethno-nationalism, are being compelled where they are observant, to oppose White advocacy in general (just as the Jews would have it via controlled reaction to cultural Marxism) because it (right-wing reaction) has become engrafted with Jewry and their agenda. The Alt-Right is no relief from this fact; quite the opposite, it is the ultimate in crypsis as it basically has a quid pro quo relation with Jewry’s right wing position upon its full ascendancy (approximately following the 2008 American housing bust).
And so, while David Duke, KM, TRS, Mark Collett et al. will continue to make excuses for (((Trump’s administration))); some Alt Right tents will bolster their JQ cred by apologetics for Nazi Germany; but generally they will wield the anti-social stigma that Jewry will encourage among Whites; while other tents among their big tent will be in their circuit ready to express their “compassionate side” by running apologetics with and for Lauren Southern, John K. Press, Mike Enoch and Faith Goldy…. in their broader sphere will be Stephan Molyneux, Breitbart, Fox etc.
That is to say, the Alt Right and its perspective against “the left” has been and remains a Jewish trick at the most fundamental, epistemic level of (against) praxis; a trick which non-White and White ethnonationalists alike cannot afford to ignore. For it is the anti-social right, bereft of social accountability in propensity for naturalistic fallacy and unhinged idealism that has precipitated wars catastrophic for everybody except for the ultimate benefit of YKW.
“Do you like white women? Because have a lot of them at Baylor, and they love football players.” - Kendell Briles, Baylor College football recruiter, addressing black football prospects.
Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer
“Weev” Auernheimer works for both Daily Stormer and TRS.
While normal WN have been intent on denying a supremacist message in favor of a separatist message, Weev sent this missive everywhere from China to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
The Spirit Lives, by 
Former Baylor football player Tre’Von Armstead arrested on sexual assault charges.
Baylor’s Kim Mulkey: “Knock Parents Concerned About Sexual Assault Scandal ‘Right In The Face.”
