[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.
Hundreds of jobs at BAE Systems are threatened by a lack of orders. Unfortunately, the Typhoon multi-role aircraft is not suitable for use on our new aircraft carriers which require planes capable of short take-off and vertical landing. Instead of developing our own aircraft we have ordered fourteen F35B’s from Lockheed Martin at a cost of £2.5 billion. We will eventually buy 48 planes, the cost of which will escalate as the pound falls against the dollar. We must also consider the cost of putting British aerospace engineers on the dole.
Our former Defence Minister, Michael Fallon, suggested that we support America by sending our new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to North Korea before she is properly commissioned and without aircraft. Perhaps he wants to ram the first North Korean ship that we encounter?
The government has wasted billions of pounds on two aircraft carriers with no means of launching or landing aircraft. Nuclear ships use steam to power ‘cat and trap’ equipment, but our new ships are diesels which generate no steam. We, therefore, have to use STOVL aircraft which are not readily available.
When we get our expensive American planes we will be capable of fighting all over the world but what we really need are more destroyers and frigates to defend the homeland. We are a European country with no empire to defend.
Michael Heseltine resigned from the Cabinet over the Westland helicopter affair in 1986. Margaret Thatcher wanted to sell the company to America but he insisted on keeping it in Britain. Today, Westland is part of Leonardo, an Italian company employing 3,300 workers in the UK
Airbus is a French company which employs 15,000 workers in the UK. They have just signed an order for thirty-six A320 superjumbos with the Emirates.
Bombardier is a Canadian company that employs 25,000 workers making trains and aircraft in the UK and Northern Ireland.
The industry is led by BAE, a British company which employs 82,5000 workers making ships, tanks, missiles and aircraft. These companies employ British workers and pay their taxes. They are a vital part of our economy.
The Far Right
The first fascist movement in Britain was the British Fascists, founded by Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman in 1923. They were fiercely anti-communist and pro-monarchist. Arnold Leese, a former BF councillor for Stamford, called them “Tories with knobs on.” In 1929 he founded a rival movement called the Imperial Fascist League which was openly anti-Semitic. According to folklore, when Ron Hargrave applied to join the IFL Arnold Leese first measured his head with a tape measure and told him to report back in a week’s time. When he returned Leese said, “A lot of people here don’t like the look of you but I have decided to let you in.”
Ron Hargrave guarding the platform for JT in 1960.
In 1932 Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascist which quickly became a mass movement but in 1940 it was banned and over a thousand Blackshirts were rounded up and thrown into prison under Defence Regulation 18B. After the war, he founded Union Movement to fight for ‘Europe a Nation’. He died in 1980 and UM was wound up in the nineties. Union Movement was never far-right but because it opposed Commonwealth immigration it was branded as such by the media.
The National Front was founded in 1967 to stop immigration, start repatriation, and get Britain out of the Common Market. It peaked in 1979 and its successor movement the BNP peaked in 2010. Both movements were eclipsed by UKIP which is now in steep decline.
The term ‘far-right’ includes everything from traditional conservatives to neo-Nazis. They command about ten to fifteen percent of the vote in most of Europe. Britain’s first-past-the-post system keeps them out of Parliament but in Germany, the AFD has won 94 seats in the Bundestag, in Austria the Freedom Party is part of the coalition government, and in the United States, Donald Trump, a billionaire Zionist warmonger, has promised to build a wall on the Mexican border and make America great again.
There is a crying need for a sensible patriotic movement to fight for Britain in Europe. Ukip and the remnants of the NF and the BNP are stuck in the past and incapable of change. Most of their members have got one foot in the grave and it’s only a matter of time before a new party emerges to cater for the younger generation.
Readers who are suffering from mental health problems, including paranoia, should ask their doctor for help. Conspiracy theory can be cured by talking therapy. If you think that “they are out to get you”, do not despair. The first step is to admit that you have a problem.
What is Nationalism?
We are familiar with Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism but less so with English nationalism. My generation was brought up on imperialism which embraced the four nations of the British Isles and even included Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Canadians. We were all subjects of the British Empire.
I was proud to salute the Union Jack in the school playground on Empire Day but the Second World War had already destroyed the British Empire. One of the first men to realise it was Oswald Mosley who proclaimed ‘Europe a Nation’ in his book ‘The Alternative’ in 1947. Those of us who share his vision of a united continent with a progressive government are European Socialists.
Nationalism is a mixed blessing. At its best, it’s a love of country, but at its worst, it’s a fear and hatred of foreigners. Celebrating sporting achievements and holidays is a harmless expression of patriotism but beating up immigrants is entirely negative.
Some people believe in a ‘Confederation of Europe’, in which fiercely independent nation-states would co-exist with each other. But history tells a different story. The German Nazis murdered the Austrian leader Englebert Dollfuss, and the Italian Fascists invaded Greece, which was a fascist state under General Metaxas. Nationalist states do not live happily with their neighbours; they invariably attack them.
Little states tend to swagger and act tough, but great empires are self-confident. In the Roman Empire every citizen was protected by the declaration: “Civis Romanus Sum”- I am a Roman Citizen. In 1850 Lord Palmerston stated in Parliament that every citizen of the British Empire should enjoy the same protection. Britain is going through a painful divorce from the European Union but we will still be Europeans, and when the current outbreak of tribalism has subsided, it will only be necessary to say “I am a European”.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 27 January 2018 06:08.
Way to go Alt-Right. You’re wise to them, don’t get played by them or anything.
Trump: It’s great to be with Prime Minister Netanyahu, we’ve developed a great relationship, both as countries it has never been stronger and also as personal friends.
The big move is the fact that we will be moving our embassy to Jerusalem, way ahead of schedule by years.
Netanyahu: We also support you on your stalwart position on the Iran nuclear deal, you said it’s a disastrous deal. You said its fatal flaws are now fixed. You should walk away from it and I want you to know that if you decide to do that we will back you all the way.
We also appreciate the fact that you confront Iran’s aggression with us and with other parties in the region as never before.
I’ve never seen the holistic alliance between the Unites States, Israel and your other allies in the region as strong, as unified as it is under your leadership.
The last one is that you stood up for Israel in the UN, in a remarkable way, rock solid support. This is a place, it’s a house of slander against Israel and against The Unites States, and by word and by deed you’ve told them enough is enough ..as you finish your first year in office, I want to say that I look forward to continuing our remarkable, tremendous friendship in the years ahead and I want to express the appreciation of the people of Israel to you - thank you Mr. President.
Trump: Israel has always supported The United States.
There were many deals that came close [with the Palestinians] but we could never get past Jerusalem.
We took Jerusalem off the table so we don’t have to talk about it [with the Palestinians] anymore.
While many of us may applaud the commendable outpouring of American public outage over President Trump’s supremacist “shithole” comment, we should not forget that those same Americans have maintained almost seven decades of unconscionable silence over far worse supramacist comments by Israeli leaders who take pride in statements that characterise and dehumanise Palestinians as never having existed; as having to be killed unless they were resigned to live as slaves; as being beasts walking on two legs; as being like crocodiles who when given more meat, wanted even more; as a people whose physical homes should be obliterated to prevent more snakes being raised in them; and as deserving to be bombed back to the Middle ages.
Furthermore, those currently outraged Americans have not only remained silent over rampant supramacism in Apartheid Israel but they have gone a stage further by wholeheartedly supporting and financing Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people: and they have done all this despite the U.S. Department of State’s alleged respect for democracy and human rights.
“Democracy and respect for human rights have long been central components of U.S. foreign policy. Supporting democracy not only promotes such fundamental American values as religious freedom and worker rights, but also helps create a more secure, stable, and prosperous global arena in which the United States can advance its national interests. In addition, democracy is the one national interest that helps to secure all the others. Democratically governed nations are more likely to secure the peace, deter aggression, expand open markets, promote economic development, protect American citizens, combat international terrorism and crime, uphold human and worker rights, avoid humanitarian crises and refugee flows, improve the global environment, and protect human health.”
“The protection of fundamental human rights was a foundation stone in the establishment of the United States over 200 years ago. Since then, a central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been the promotion of respect for human rights, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States understands that the existence of human rights helps secure the peace, deter aggression, promote the rule of law, combat crime and corruption, strengthen democracies, and prevent humanitarian crises.”
Ultimately, irrespective of how many American lawmakers, TV anchors, and pundits condemn the supremacist comments of their incumbent and ignorant President, the inescapable fact remains that not only did 62,980,160 Americans vote for him, but also the reality that most Americans are nothing but lamentable cowards and hypocrites when it comes to criticising Israel’s blatant and barbaric disregard for the human rights of the indigenous Palestinians. Thanks to their unconditional support for Israel, the American people have lost their moral compass, abandoned the true principles of democracy, and shattered the American Dream.
There are couple of important matters to note in regard to this article. One being that “rights” should not only regard individuals as being in need of protection; but also group rights as the designation of species potentially under threat as a pattern from patterns of aggressors; or even inadvertent destruction from other groups and individuals.
With regard to Trump’s “shit hole country” remarks, it is interesting to note in the context of this article that El Salvador, one of the countries that he referred to as a shit-hole, has apparently taken a large number of Palestinian refugees - there are approximately 100,000 Salvadorans with Palestinian ancestry; and with that, it is a country more wise than many to the hypocrisy of Israel. This may in part explain why it is not highly regarded by Trump and his ZOG. Why, in fact, in terms of deportation schedule, it is ranked even less urgent a matter than Haiti - the Haitians of which slaughtered entire French peoples, men, women and children the moment they disembarked from ship upon arrival in Haiti; despite their having come there upon fervent assurances that there would be no violence against them and pleas for help to rebuild the country after the Mulatto supremacist revolution had already slaughtered the prior French colonists and troops; and where after the Mulatto supremacists were, in turn, slaughtered by the blacks proper. These blacks are forbears of present day Haiti. Some of us wouldn’t mind having, and could have done a great deal better with, the kind of aid money that has been sunk into that s*** hole.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 13 January 2018 02:10.
The New Observer, “The German government is currently preparing nearly one third of a million “family visas” for the immediate families of non-White invaders given “asylum” in that country—and this is just the start of the program of ‘family reunification,” 10 Jan 2018:
According to a report in the Bild newspaper, the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin is currently preparing at least 300,000 visas for “family members of refugees” living in Germany with subsidiary protection.
This is however only the start of the program, as currently, family reunification for refugees with “limited subsidiary protection” is suspended until mid-March 2018.
“Limited subsidiary protection” is only “temporary” asylum—in theory—whereas full subsidiary protection is for those who have been granted permanent asylum status.
There are currently far more invaders with “limited subsidiary protection” than those with full subsidiary protection, and if the rules are changed to allow the former group to bring their families as well, the number of “family visas” will swell into the millions.
The move to temporarily halt family reunification for those with “limited subsidiary protection” was made by Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party following the strong showing of the anti-invasion Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, as an attempt to dampen support for that group.
However, the Merkel government is in talks with its previous long-term coalition partner, the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD) to form a new government—and the topic of family reunification rights for those invaders with “limited subsidiary protection” is a major topic of discussions between the two parties.
The SPD has set it as a basic demand that those with temporary protection be given the right to “family reunification” and it seems likely that Merkel will give way on this demand in order to remain in power.
It has previously been well-established that those granted “limited subsidiary protection” always end up staying permanently anyway, as once they have been in Germany for five years, they qualify for permanent residence.
Especially during the period in which Netanyahu has dominated its politics (1996-the present), Israel has become increasingly and blatantly ethnonationalist—the very antithesis of what are supposed to be contemporary “Western values” according to the position supported by the Jewish lobby in the West. This more overtly ethnonationalist tendency is driven by demographic shifts within Israel, as well as concerns about terrorism and territorial consolidation. But it also happened because America enjoyed for much of that period a relatively unchallenged hegemony (following the collapse of the Soviet Union), allowing Israel to take liberties it couldn’t take in the 1970s and 80s, and which it will find difficult to take in the more Russian-dominated Middle East that is now emerging.
This means, however, that there is now a blatantly exposed moral contradiction at the heart of Israeli position, as it is increasingly recognised that the “Western democratic values” that Jewish organisations promote in the West (“open borders” and anti-nationalism) would in fact destroy Israel, if implemented there. This is something that the Left and the BDS movement clearly understand, and accordingly they attempt to hold Israel to the same values that the Jewish lobby promotes in the West.
Surprisingly, the main weakness of Israel has turned out to be its enormous donative and media might, which has allowed it to put itself in this ultimately untenable position through short-termist moral manipulations.
Israel has had enormous “moral power”—i.e. the ability to distort moral arguments in its favour—but moral power, let us be clear, is not the same as morality. Moral power is the ability to twist morality, and is therefore in a sense its exact opposite. Without broad-based strength, this is a major problem and indeed ultimately a weakness. Israel can constantly propagandise, bribe, and trick others, but in so doing it ultimately ends up tricking itself. More importantly, its reliance on such perverse “moral power” means that it avoids grounding itself in a true, sustainable morality that is suitable for its situation.
That situation, to be precise, is a situation of conquest, either in its own name or as part of a greater entity, namely the global West—or it is nothing (emphasis added). With that as the foundational premise, there are two possible true moralities for the state of Israel to adopt:
Complete Juche-style self-reliance, justified by constant vigilance and strength. Essentially this would see Israel morphing into a Yiddish version of North Korea or 18th-century Prussia, and relying on its nuclear arsenal and a culture of extreme militarism, to be the unloved catalyst of ever-increasing Islamic unity. End result, a perpetual regional Cold War, in which Israel would face increasing diplomatic isolation and where one major misstep could see its end, possibly in a nuclear war.
Israel as a true outpost of the the West, and thus supported by an undeceived West. But this would have to be a stronger, more expansionary, and anti-Islamic West, cleansed of the Leftist ideologies that the Jews have overwhelmingly supported in the past, and where Israel and the Jews fully supported Westerm ethno- and racio-centrism that echoed that of Israel itself. In such a West, Jews would no longer be seen as traitors, endeavouring to undermine the greater civilisation of which they were a part, but as defending that which defended them. This arrangement could only be achieved through what are essentially Alt-Right ideas of race realism, civilisational hierarchy, and (((culturism))) (brackets added).
There are many choices open to Israel. Choosing to avoid a true moral basis to the state of Israel means continued reliance on trickery and subterfuge, but this ultimately weakens the state of Israel and dooms it to a zombie existence of being a false and soulless state.
But the more moral choices are also hard. The first of the two mentioned above clearly has heavy social costs and would require a constant state of tension and alarm that the Jewish people seem temperamentally unsuited for. There would be extreme brittleness in all that. Indeed the present Israeli state is developing partly along these lines, and is showing some of these dangerous stresses and strains.
The second moral choice is perhaps the best one, the most natural, and also the easiest, although that too has deep costs. This is mainly because it would require World Jewry to start behaving in quite different ways from those that have defined it. But if the effort were made honestly and sincerely, this would have the best chance of reconciling Israel with the West, and thus securing the future of Israel, as part of a more assertive and ethnocentric Western civilisation, holding Islam in check.
However, most of the trends now underway are clearly working against this, creating the conditions of growing Israeli isolation, long-term weakness, and ultimate destruction.
In short, only the Alt-Right can save Israel. One wonders how that undeniable truth sits with the most perspicacious among the Jews.
It’s called Jewing the Whites by first guilt tripping and advocating coalitions of non-or anti Whites against Whites, calling liberalism of their would-be White Left union/national boundaries “the left” and prohibiting Whites from doing the same thing as the anti White coalitions (organizing/unionizing) as that would be “racist” for Whites, if Whites did it. Further, the YKW misrepresent Leftism in a Cartesian way, as if it is not accountable to reality, “just mere constructs”, appeal to White penchant for objectivism (rational blindness to, or denial of, self interest and accountability), as if compassion is only for people beyond their borders/group boundaries (golden rule/ Christianity) - i.e., that is the Problem - “leftist culture of critique” that does not recognize or allow for a White left, its unionized boundaries, the being of White peoplehood. Reaction - right wing, objectivism, Cartesianism, scientism, idealism, religion and most of all, Christianity; search for pure warrant and avoidance of tainted and incomplete warrant in social accountability. Solution - “The Alt Right” ...Whites join and merge with Jews in Zionist supremacist imperialism: “The Left” is the enemy now, all those people who see this reality of the 7 niches that Jewish interests control and what the right wing sell outs have done by selling out to them.
By contrast, we are almost certainly going to need our own left nationalist coalitions, particularly left ethno national coalitions with Asians against the YKW, their right wing cohorts, including Alt Right, Muslims and blacks.
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…
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 Friday, 08 December 2017 07:37.
A whistleblower has told House Democrats that eleven minutes into Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn [shown inset] was texting a former business associate to say, “we’re going to rip-up those (Russian) sanctions and a lot of people are going to make a lot of money.” Flynn specified that their private nuclear proposal which Flynn had lobbied for would have his support in the White House.
WASHINGTON (AP) — As Donald Trump delivered his presidential inaugural address last January, his national security adviser Michael Flynn told a former business associate in text messages that a private plan to build nuclear reactors in the Mideast was “good to go” and that U.S. sanctions hobbling the plan would soon be “ripped up,” a whistleblower told congressional investigators.
The witness did not specify which sanctions Flynn was referring to in his texts. But the nuclear project that Flynn and his business associate had worked on together was stymied by U.S. financial sanctions on Russia.
The witness’s account, made public Wednesday by the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, raises new concerns about the extent to which Flynn may have blurred his private and public interests during his brief stint inside the White House.
Trump fired Flynn in February, saying he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, pleaded guilty in federal court last week to one count of making false statements to the FBI and is now a cooperating witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian intermediaries during the 2016 election.
Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Wednesday the whistleblower’s allegations raise concerns that Flynn improperly aided the nuclear project after joining the White House as one of Trump’s top national security officials. The project has yet to get off the ground.
Cummings detailed the whistleblower’s allegations in a letter to committee chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and urged Gowdy to authorize subpoenas to Flynn and his business associates to learn more about his efforts.
In a reply late Wednesday, Gowdy said he had shared Cummings’ letter with Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman and ranking Democrat heading the House intelligence committee inquiry into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Gowdy spurned Cummings’ request for subpoenas, echoing his replies to previous Cummings subpoena requests.
“If you have evidence of a crime, you should provide it to the Special Counsel immediately,” Gowdy wrote.
Flynn had been a paid consultant for the venture before he joined the Trump campaign last year. The plan, backed by a group of investors, nuclear power adherents and former U.S. military officers, was to construct dozens of nuclear reactors across the Mideast with aid from Russian and other international private interests.
House Democrats noted that a federal ethics law requires White House officials to refrain for a year from dealing with any outside interests they had previously worked with on private business.
“Our committee has credible allegations that President Trump’s national security adviser sought to manipulate the course of international nuclear policy for the financial gain of his former business partners,” Cummings said.
The whistleblower told House Democrats that while Trump spoke in January, Flynn texted from the Capitol steps to Alex Copson, the managing director of ACU Strategic Partners and the nuclear project’s main promoter. The whistleblower, whose identity was not revealed in Cummings’ letter, said that during a conversation, Copson described his messages with Flynn and briefly flashed one of the texts, which appeared to have been sent 10 minutes after Trump was sworn in as president.
“Mike has been putting everything in place for us,” Copson said, according to the whistleblower. Copson added that “this is going to make a lot of very wealthy people.” The whistleblower also said that Copson intimated that Flynn would ensure that U.S. financial sanctions hobbling the nuclear project were going to be “ripped up,” allowing investment money to start flowing into the project.
Attorneys for Flynn and Copson did not immediately return email and phone requests for comment. White House lawyer Ty Cobb declined to comment on the allegation.
In Flynn’s plea agreement last week, prosecutors said he lied to FBI agents about his discussions on sanctions against Russia with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition.
Copson had promoted a succession of nuclear projects designed to include Russian participation dating back to the 1990s. In an earlier note to the committee, Copson said his firm had provided Flynn with a $25,000 check — left uncashed — and paid for Flynn’s June 2015 trip to the Mideast as a security consultant for the project.
Flynn’s financial disclosure did not cite those payments, but he did report that until December 2016, he worked as an adviser to two other companies that partnered with Copson’s firm. That consortium, X-Co Dynamics Inc. and Iron Bridge Group, initially worked with ACU but later pushed a separate nuclear proposal for the Mideast.
___
Associated Press writers Chad Day and Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
NewsWeek, “Flynn’s Secret Text Messages Show Trump Colluded With Russia, Experts Say”, 6 Dec 2017:
Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, told a former business partner that economic sanctions against Russia would be “ripped up” as soon as Donald Trump took office, according to an anonymous whistleblower.
The revelation is the latest evidence suggesting the Trump campaign may have agreed to help Russia in exchange for Russia’s help getting Trump elected president, experts say.
Special counsel Robert Mueller had already secured Flynn’s cooperation in his investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, and Wednesday’s revelation publicly provides new evidence that will embolden Trump critics, experts say.
“It won’t come as a surprise to the special counsel, but it reveals to the public that there was something in the nature of an exchange or quid pro quo,” Lisa Griffin, a law professor at Duke University, told Newsweek.
“There are at least four potential avenues of criminality that the special counsel and others are exploring, and this provides more circumstantial evidence,” Griffin continued. “This might be relevant to the possibility of a bribery case, or assistance with the campaign that was done in exchange for what the Russians want most: the easing of sanctions.”
Whistleblower: Flynn was doing private Russia-related business on his phone during Trump’s inauguration speech https://lnkd.in/d2STwWp
7:52 PM - Dec 6, 2017
Flynn pleaded guilty last week to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador at the time, including speaking with him about U.S. sanctions against Russia. Flynn is known to have maintained close business ties with people in Russia and Turkey.
According to the whistleblower, Flynn also wanted U.S. sanctions against Russia lifted in order to complete an international energy project he was working on. The whistleblower said Flynn texted his former business associate on the day of Trump’s inauguration to say that the project was “good to go.”
The information was given to Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who published an open letter on Wednesday to the committee’s chairman, Trey Gowdy, explaining the revelations.
“General Michael Flynn—within minutes of Donald Trump being sworn in as president—was communicating directly with his former business colleagues about their plans to work with Russia to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East,” the letter reads.
“Our committee has credible allegations that President Trump’s national security advisor sought to manipulate the course of international nuclear policy for the
financial gain of his former business partners,” Cummings continued. “These grave allegations compel a full, credible and bipartisan congressional investigation.”
The revelation is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date that the Trump administration wanted to cancel U.S. sanctions against Russia, and it sheds light on why Flynn originally lied about his conversation with the Russian ambassador, a former Watergate prosecutor says.
Way to go Alt-Right. You’re wise to them, don’t get played by them or anything.
Note the war drums 
