Majorityrights News > Category: Law & Order

Military personnel wearing protective suits remove a police car and other vehicles from a public car park as they continue investigations into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal on March 11, 2018 in Salisbury, England.

Independent, “Russian spy attack: Hundreds in Salisbury could be poisoned for years to come with ‘no cure’, says nerve agent developer.

“Even a very small dose - once your exposed that’s it. No cure.”

Vil Mirzayanov, a chemical weapons scientists who developed the Novichok nerve agent has warned that hundreds of people could be at risk for years following the attack in Salisbury.

Vil Mirzayanov, who fled to the US two decades ago, claimed Sergei Skripal and his daughter would not recover from the poisoning.

“There is no cure,” he told Sky News from his home in New Jersey. “There are antidotes but…they will be invalid for whole life.”

Dr Mirzayanov said Novichok was so powerful that extremely small doses could remain a danger to public health for years, listing possible symptoms including headaches and loss of coordination.

Vil Mirzayonov speaking from his home in New Jersey.

“It’s very bad because even the very small doses, very small, still they are very effective and then there will be consequences for years probably,” he added.

The former Soviet Union scientist said public health advice, including washing clothes and sealing belongings was “not enough” and confirmed that hundreds of people could be at risk.

Asked whether he felt guilty for his part in developing Novichok, he added: “I participated in this criminal enterprise, because of that I’m probably the most fiery enemy of these chemical weapons.

“It’s a weapon of mass murder.”

CNBC, “Nerve agent attack on Russian ex-spy looks like ‘state-sponsored attempted murder,’ British official says” 12 Mar 2018:

The nerve agent attack on the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter looks like “state-sponsored attempted murder,” according to the chairman of the U.K.‘s Foreign Affairs Committee. Prime Minister Theresa May could announce on Monday that Downing Street believes that Moscow was behind the poisoning, according to British media.

Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, are hospitalized in critical condition.

The nerve agent attack on the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter looks like “state-sponsored attempted murder,” according to the chairman of the U.K.‘s Foreign Affairs Committee.

Tom Tugendhat told BBC Radio 4 on Monday that he expected Russia to be blamed for the March 4 attack on the ex-spy and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England.

He said it was a “bit early to be absolutely certain of that” but added that the Russian government was “certainly behaving aggressively towards people in the U.K.”

“We’re expecting the prime minister to make an announcement soon and, frankly, I would be surprised if she did not point the finger at the Kremlin,” Tugendhat told the BBC.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May will chair National Security Council meeting, which includes senior ministers and intelligence chiefs, on Monday. She is expected to make a statement at 1630 London time and could announce that Downing Street believes that Moscow was behind the poisoning, according to British media.

The government could also announce any retaliatory measures, such as expelling Russian diplomats or more sanctions on Russian individuals and entities. Last week, U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called Russia a “malign and disruptive force.”

The nerve agent used has not been named but can usually only be produced in specialist government laboratories.  Skripal’s links to Russia’s security services, and subsequent work as a double agent for the UK, put Moscow firmly in the spotlight for being behind the attack, though Russia has denied any involvement.

Ahead of any possible comments from the British government, the Kremlin’s government spokesman said he had not heard of any allegations from U.K. lawmakers directed at Russia, Reuters reported. He also said that Skripal worked for British intelligence and the attack happened in Britain meaning “it was not a matter for the Russian government.”

Monday’s National Security Council meeting comes as specialist counter-terrorism police continue to search for the source of the nerve agent that was used to attack Skripal and his daughter. They were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury, a small town in the rural county of Wiltshire in England. Both are in a critical condition in hospital. A policeman who attended to the pair was also hospitalized, although his condition is now stable.

Traces of the nerve agent used were found at a pub and restaurant where the Skripals had been on the day they were taken ill.

Hundreds of people who were also in those locations on March 4 and 5 have been told to wash their clothes and any personal items, in case they had come into contact with the nerve agent.

BMan: We know he isn’t on “our” side because if he isn’t outright jewish, he serves them. Putin is the foil in the Kabuki. One side says he never stops his evil attacks on American values, while the other side worships him as if he is George Washington. Syria is just the latest act. Ukraine was first when the “other side” was represented by a Mulatto.

“You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, Boys”

Ayrian Skynet, 8 March 2018:

For most of a century, the partisans of the Soviet Union would make great bales of propaganda hay out of the treatment of blacks in the USA and other capitalist countries. Communism, contrarily, favored the black man’s liberation from his white colonialist oppressors – or so the story went. Many blacks around the world would find themselves seduced by various Marxist philosophies. W.E.B. DuBois, while wary of perceived racism within the Communist Party USA, looked to Russia as “the most promising modern country”1. Paul Robeson, too, professed “warm feelings of friendship for the peoples of that land”2. The Soviet Union provided military aid to multiple African nationalist movements during the Cold War, seeming to bolster its image as the ideological alternative to American racism – but had prejudice really been eradicated from the heart of the New Soviet Man of the Bright, Shining Socialist Future? Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Carter, averred, “The worst racists in the world are the Russians.”3 Soviet support of black nationalists fighting the Apartheid government of South Africa, for example, would seem to support the sincerity of the Communist Party’s public abhorrence for racism – but how did the Russians react when Africans were actually in their midst?

In 1959, at the urging of DuBois, Khrushchev established the Soviet Union’s Africa Institute to promote academic fellowship, and during the 1960s the number of Africans studying in the U.S.S.R. would swell. “As these institutional initiatives were being finalized African students began to trickle into the U.S.S.R.,” writes Maxim Matusevich:

As of January 1, 1959, there were only seven students from sub-Saharan Africa officially enrolled in Soviet institutions of higher learning. However, between 1960 and 61 the number of African students in the USSR increased almost ten-fold, from 72 to over 500, eventually reaching some 5,000 by the end of the decade. […]

Despite the prevailing climate of complacency and the general timidity of their Soviet peers, Africans protested vociferously against poor living conditions, racist incidents, restrictions on travel within the U.S.S.R., restrictions on dating Russian girls, and restrictions on forming national and ethnic student associations. As early as March 1960, African students in Moscow petitioned the Soviet government to curb the expressions of crude racism by Soviet citizens. On another occasion, two African students refused to be part of a long established Soviet practice – an annual dispatch of thousands of Soviet students to work in the countryside during the harvest. The objectors from Chad and Morocco argued (unconvincingly and probably mockingly) that in their cultures men under 25 years old were not allowed to work in the fields but rather had a special obligation “to engage in leisure activities.”  At about the same time four African students […] were expelled from Moscow State University for defying an administrative ban on the Black African Students’ Union. Their expulsion and subsequent departure from the country received wide coverage in the Western press. The students publicly accused university officials of suppressing the union as well as of imposing severe restrictions on the circulation of “books and jazz records.” […]

        Darned if the Russian in the lower right corner doesn’t look like a young Putin.

The death of a Ghanaian student in Moscow, in December 1963, which his friends suspected to have been a homicide, occasioned an exceptionally angry reaction among African students in the U.S.S.R. They staged a protest march on the Kremlin [and appear to have set fire to at least one car in the process, judging by Associated Press archival footage] demanding a Bill of Rights for African students in the country […] More trouble brewed in 1964 and 1965, with African students in the U.S.S.R. frequently reporting racist attacks, fights with Soviet youngsters, and even feeling compelled to carry knives for protection. Komsomol officials at Moscow State University (MGU) grudgingly acknowledged several instances of scandalous behavior exhibited by Soviet students but also argued that Africans and other foreigners at MGU had a limited understanding of the selfless and romantic nature of Soviet young men, many of whom preferred the hardship of toil in remote Siberia to the pleasures of Moscow high life. One wonders if it was the “romantic nature of Soviet young men” that fueled the passions of one youthful geography major who threatened to “lynch” an African student married to his Russian fellow student. Or was it a disagreement over their respective work ethics that led another MGU freshman to call upon his African roommate to “pack up his stuff and go back to Mali”?

In May 1965, the Soviet authorities tacitly linked the African student community in the country with the idea of political subversion when they expelled a black American diplomat, Norris Garnett, for “conducting anti-Soviet work among students from African countries.” Garnett’s departure from the scene hardly had the desired long-term effect. Just a few years later, 800 African students went on a week-long strike, this time – in Kiev, in protest against the expulsion of a 23-year-old Czechoslovakian woman for marrying a Nigerian fellow-student. That same year a Nigerian student sleeping in his dorm room in the city of Lvov (L’viv) was attacked by “a drunken Russian with a chisel.” The attacker was reportedly incensed by the Nigerian’s successes with Russian and Ukrainian girls. The incident quickly turned into a major fight involving other Nigerian students who had come to the rescue of their compatriot, and as a result three of them were expelled “for attacking and beating up a Soviet citizen.” Discrimination or alleged discrimination aside, the students’ resentment, it was noted, stemmed from “the sole fact of their living in a communist country.” Once in the Soviet Union, Africans, “even self-proclaimed leftists,” had to reconcile “the obvious discrepancies between what is said and what actually exists.” And what “actually existed” in the Moscow of 1960s and 70s were “the crowded living conditions, lack of privacy, monotonous diet, inadequate sanitary facilities, and the overall drabness of life.” A former African student at Moscow State University, writing about his experiences there, maintained that of all foreign students in the Soviet Union, Africans were most upset by Russia’s depressed style of living […]

There was “no splash of color to relieve Moscow’s damp gray”4, and the Russian cultural diet of the time was famously lacking in the urban flava to which blacks are known to be partial. Kidding aside, Soviets’ blacks appear to have quickly fallen into a pattern of obnoxious behavior that will be immediately familiar to American readers: lazing, complaining, chasing white girls, getting into fights – constituting a demographic liability and a constant threat to public order – all while blaming crazed, irrationally hateful whites for their problems.

               
This story, which appeared in The Milwaukee Sentinel on Feb 19 1963, indicates that anti-black sentiment in the communist bloc was not limited to Russia.

“What I learned in six months in the Soviet Union is what some Africans will never learn,” Kenyan bellyacher Nicholas Nyangira moaned in an article syndicated by the Associated Press in 1965. “They are taken to Russia’s showplaces and never experience the race hatred that I experienced at the University of Baku.” Nyangira claims, furthermore, to have always gone in fear for his life. “We were referred to scathingly as ‘the blacks’,” he continues, his tears positively seeping through the newsprint. “Many local people had never seen an African before and because we were black they hated us.”

Several Kenya students got beaten up. Usually it would begin with abuse, then lead to violence. It was advisable to walk in pairs because if there was trouble you could expect no help from police. I don’t remember a week that went by without an African student being robbed or attacked.5

DinduNuffin? Check. Racist police? Check. Chimpout? Check. Sympathetic US press coverage? Check. Tracking the entitled black through the ages, can any of the preceding – or any of the following – possibly come as any surprise? Matusevich picks up with Russian attitudes toward Africans at the close of the Soviet era:

Glasnost lifted the floodgates to prejudice and crude racism and let loose the virtual anti-black hysteria. And many Africans blamed Gorbachev’s “revolution” for not feeling safe in the streets and public places of the Soviet cities. A Nigerian journalism student at Kazan University wrote to a Moscow newspaper: “One day I decided to have my lunch in nearby café. As soon as I opened the door, I was met with jeers and cat-calls by young girls sitting around a table, laughing and cracking unfriendly jokes about me…” The enterprising Nigerians soon learned to play curious mind games to save their skin during the growing number of unfriendly encounters. One of them, for example, when approached by a group of hoodlums, pretended to be an American black. The trick worked as the toughs abandoned their original belligerent intentions and “immediately simulated keen interest and began to ask questions about Steve Wonder, Michael Jackson, etc.” The ploy, however, was not 100% fail proof and between May and August of 1990 at least four Nigerian students were severely beaten up and one allegedly killed in Moscow on grounds raging from “being a monkey” to dating Russian girls. Considering the growing public paranoia about HIV-AIDS, for any African to approach a Russian girl was increasingly becoming a risky proposition. […]

         
        USSR April 6 1990: the Deep State calls in its premier spook for a briefing.

“As a result of a deliberate racist campaign, we are now being called SPID (SPID is a Russian abbreviation for AIDS) on the streets by Soviet youngsters.” Soviet street folklore, with its characteristic sexual undertone, tied together the much professed (and mocked) “love” of the Soviet officialdom for the developing world and the appearance of the disease in Russia. A popular joke provided “alternative” transliterations for the original Russian SPID (AIDS) wherein the term was variously interpreted either as Sotsialnoe Posledstvie Internatsionalnoj Druzby (Social Consequence of International Friendship) or Spetsialny Podarok Inostrannyh Druzej (Special Gift from Foreign Friends). Africans residing in the Soviet Union were far from amused though; the joke encapsulated growing popular dissatisfaction with the regime, which “wasted precious resources” on people who (in the words of one populist politician) “have just descended from the palm tree.”

[…]

While the Soviet-style paternalism, that permeated the pre-perestroika publications on Africa, was being gradually toned down, so was the concern for the continent. Africans residing in Russia on the eve of the Soviet collapse noted on many occasions that coverage of Africa was reduced to simplistic and highly stereotypical catalogues of its bane and woes. In the media, the very word “Africa” was often supplanted by cherny kontinent (black continent), the place of danger and wasted opportunities, and a proverbial black hole devouring scant Soviet resources. The stage was being set for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Africa as it was for the debilitating wave of racism and xenophobia soon to sweep across the post-Soviet spaces.6

But, seriously, Russia – why import blacks in the first place? Everybody knows the Russians invented breakdancing:

Not sure that these dancers doing an early form of break-dancing, viz., “the labor wave”, are exactly Russian and can therefore be attributed as the inventors; however, it is Soviet era and they are wearing Russian style hats.

Endnotes:

Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, p. 52.

Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988, p. 38.

Mitchell, Nancy. Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016, p. 243.

Matusevich, Maxim. “Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual”. Anthropology of East Europe Review (Fall 2009), pp. 21-24.

Nyangira, Nicholas. “Student: Russians Hate Negroes”. Sumter Daily Item (April 16, 1965), p. 3.

Matusevich, Maxim. “Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual”. Anthropology of East Europe Review (Fall 2009), pp. 30-31.

Comments:

icareviews, March 8, 2018:

I’ve read that Russia hosts a lot of North Korean guest workers, as well.

I’ve also heard before that Russian nationalists anti-immigration activists hate Putin. Who is the alternative in Russia for voters of populist-nativist inclination? The Communist Party? One sometimes hears of stirring “red-brown” tendencies in Russian politics – commies allying with hardline nationalists – and I think that was a particular fear of the internationalists during Yeltsin’s early years in office – but they just don’t seem to have any opposition parties with sufficient support to dislodge the Putin machine. For decades now, their most famous nationalist politician has been a Jewish clown named Vladimir Zhirinovsky. His whole shtick seems to be to make nationalism into an Archie Bunker type side show.

bob saffron, March 8, 2018:
Artemov maintains Lebed’s death was more than just misadventure.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/04/24/russians-in-russia-the-state-within-the-state/

bob saffron, March 8, 2018:

Putin I view positively only in comparison to the giddy imperialism of Washington. Taken with the obligatory grain of salt that comes with partial sources:
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/11/death-russian-171123102640298.html

In West Virginia, teachers ended their historic strike after state officials agreed to raise the pay of all state workers 5%.

“Who made history? We made history! Who made history? We made history!”...a group of West Virginia teachers chanted.

The strike began on February 22nd and shut-down every public school in the state. It was the longest teachers strike in West Virginia history.

Majorityrights readers should observe that this is a group of White people, albeit implicit, unionized against the state/ goverment. The implications of the model demonstrate possibilities for “White community” organizing against state and other elite position oppression of group interest.

Apologies again for the anti-White source. Note that I will use them when I see news sources that are both pro-White and are not duped into being “anti-left”, against its concepts such as unionization to fight oppressive government policies and other elite position exploitation; when I see them, I will use those other sources. Until then, we have to make use of feedback from sources like Democracy Now, picking out the bits and pieces that we need - note that you can scarcely see a non-White teacher in this story, and that West Virginia is one of the Whitest states in America.

Giorgia Meloni’s “Brothers Of Italy”, Matteo Salvini’s “Lega” (dropping the “Nord” to be more comprehensive of all Italy) and Raffaele Fitto, “Us with Italy”, join with Berlisconi’s backing.

Express, “Italian election: ‘Immigration out of control!’ Lega backs Berlusconi in crucial vote”, 2 March 2018:

The 81-year-old Silvio Berlusconi is the founder of liberal Forza Italia (Go Italy) party and the leader of a coalition composed of Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers Of Italy parties.

The former prime minister has fought through sex scandals, corruption allegations and a tax fraud conviction to stage a political comeback.

The latest projections show his coalition is leading with 36 per cent of the vote, bringing Mr Berlusconi closer to win his seventh electoral campaign.

The Italian election will be held on March 4.

Attilo Fontana, a key member of Italy’s Lega, has joined forces with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to call for an immigration clampdown days before citizens go to the polls, it emerged on BBC Newsnight.

He stated: “People here are worried about the current immigration situation. It’s currently not under control and it’s creating social tension.”

In an attempt to sway voters on election day, Mr Fontana emphasised that immigration is “not under control” as he issued promises to get rid of immigrants.

A month ago, Pamela Mastropietro‘s dismembered body was found in a suitcase left on the side of a road by her Nigerian murderer; nevertheless, what the YKW/liberal media displayed indignation over was not that, but the response of Italian nationalists. The YKW/liberal media care about the feelings of those invading, e.g., another Nigerian, Cecile Kyenge - an interloper into Italian political office, who has no business what-so-ever being there; but they’ve empowered her to levy charges of “racism” against the Italian public and politicians - causing one to be fined €50,000; with that, to lose his house for having made a common sense remark that Africans are not Italians.

“It’s clearly unthinkable we could send hundreds of thousands back home instantly.

He stated: “If they come back, we’re waiting for them.

“We check hundreds of people every day and we’ve got plenty of ways of keeping them under surveillance.

“We have new technology and CCTV cameras which allows us to monitor entrances and exits in the city.”

Meanwhile, former Italian integration minister and current member of the ruling Democratic Party (PD), Cecile Kyenge, declared that she is a “victim” of the campaign by both Berlusconi and Fontana.

Kyenge declared herself a ‘victim’ of the campaign by both Berlusconi and Fontana.

She accused both of them for “investing in racism” as she cried out for a change in rhetoric ahead of the vote.

Ms Kyenge told BBC Newsnight: “I’m a victim of the campaign from this political party, they are working and investing in fewer people and I think that today, our country must take measures and sanctions to all political leaders and political parties who are investing in racism.”

Related story: “President of Jewish Community of Rome: the White race doesn’t exist, to say it does is ‘ignorant.”

READ MORE...

Donald Trump is flanked by Dianne Feinstein, right , who literally strikes the hand-clasping pose of “the happy merchant.”

1:21Trump Backs Broad Gun Reforms: In a meeting with lawmakers, President Trump expressed support for a “comprehensive” gun bill that would include stronger background checks and temporarily take guns away from high-risk individuals.Published OnFeb. 28, 2018CreditImage by Tom Brenner/The New York Times.

In a remarkable televised meeting in the Cabinet Room, the president appeared to stun giddy Democrats and stone-faced Republicans by calling for comprehensive gun control that would expand background checks, keep guns from the mentally ill, secure schools and restrict gun sales from some young adults.

ZOG’s forces will have a huge advantage over bolt-action weaponry.

Trump: “I told N.R.A. leaders its time to stop this nonsense” ... “I like taking the guns early ... Take the guns first, go through due process second.”

And if the second amendment can be compromised twice in this way, on the basis of spurious mental diagnosis and age restrictions, then they can violate it again, until eventually, functionally, you don’t have it at all ....“we define an assault weapons as”...

New York Times, “Trump Stuns Lawmakers With Seeming Embrace of Gun Control”, 28 Feb 2018:

In a meeting with lawmakers, President Trump expressed support for a “comprehensive” gun bill that would include stronger background checks and temporarily take guns away from high-risk individuals.Published OnFeb. 28, 2018CreditImage by Tom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump stunned Republicans on live television Wednesday by embracing gun control and urging a group of lawmakers at the White House to resurrect gun safety legislation that has been opposed for years by the powerful National Rifle Association and the vast majority of his party.

In a remarkable meeting in the Roosevelt Room, the president veered wildly from the N.R.A. playbook in front of giddy Democrats and stone-faced Republicans. He called for comprehensive gun control legislation that would expand background checks to weapons purchased at gun shows and on the internet, keep guns from mentally ill people, secure schools and restrict gun sales from some young adults. He even suggested a conversation on an assault weapons ban.

At one point, Mr. Trump suggested that law enforcement authorities should have the power to seize guns from mentally ill or other dangerous people without first going to court. “I like taking the guns early,” he said, adding, “Take the guns first, go through due process second.”

The declarations prompted a frantic series of calls from N.R.A. lobbyists to their allies on Capitol Hill and a statement from the group calling the ideas Mr. Trump expressed “bad policy.” Republican lawmakers issued statements or told reporters that they remained opposed to gun control measures.

“We’re not ditching any Constitutional protections simply because the last person the president talked to today doesn’t like them,” said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska.

Democrats, too, said they were skeptical that Mr. Trump would follow through.

“The White House can now launch a lobbying campaign to get universal background checks passed, as the president promised in this meeting, or they can sit and do nothing,” said Sen. Murphy, (D) of Connecticut.

At the core of Mr. Trump’s suggestion was the revival of a bipartisan bill drafted in 2013 by Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Despite a concerted push by President Barack Obama and the personal appeals of Sandy Hook parents, the bill fell to a largely Republican filibuster.

The president’s embrace did not immediately yield converts. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said after the meeting that he was unmoved, repeating the Republican dogma that recent shootings were not “conducted by someone who bought a gun at a gun show or parking lot.” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican who sat next to Mr. Trump looking alternately bemused and flustered, emerged from the meeting and declared, “I thought it was fascinating television and it was surreal to actually be there.”

With AR-15s, Mass Shooters Attack With the Rifle Firepower Typically Used by Infantry Troops:

When a gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, he was carrying an AR-15-style rifle that allowed him to fire upon people in much the same way that many American soldiers and Marines would fire their M16 and M4 rifles in combat.

But Mr. Trump suggested that the dynamics in Washington had changed after the school shooting in Florida that claimed 17 lives, in part because of his own leadership in the White House, a sentiment that the Democrats in the room readily appeared to embrace as they saw the president supporting their ideas.

“It would be so beautiful to have one bill that everyone could support,” Mr. Trump said as Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a longtime advocate of gun control, sat smiling to his left. “It’s time that a president stepped up.”

Democrats tried to turn sometimes muddled presidential musings into firm policy: “You saw the president clearly saying not once, not twice, not three times, but like 10 times, that he wanted to see a strong universal background check bill,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “He didn’t mince words about it. So I do not understand how then he could back away from that.”

Just what the performance means, and whether Mr. Trump will aggressively push for new gun restrictions, remain uncertain given his history of taking erratic positions on policy issues, especially ones that have long polarized Washington and the country.

The gun-control performance on Wednesday was reminiscent of a similar televised discussion with lawmakers about immigration last year during which the president appeared to back bipartisan legislation to help young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children — only to reverse himself and push a hard-line approach that helped scuttle consensus in the Senate.

Mr. Trump’s comments during the hourlong meeting were at odds with his history as a candidate and president who has repeatedly declared his love for the Second Amendment and the N.R.A., which gave his campaign $30 million. At the group’s annual conference last year, Mr. Trump declared, “To the N.R.A., I can proudly say I will never, ever let you down.”

But at the meeting, the president repeatedly rejected the N.R.A.’s top legislative priority, a bill known as concealed carry reciprocity, that would allow a person with permission to carry a concealed weapon in one state to automatically do so in every state. To the dismay of Republicans, he dismissed the measure as having no chance at passage in the Congress. Republican leaders in the House had paired that N.R.A. priority with a modest measure to improve data reporting to the existing instant background check system.

“You’ll never get it,” Mr. Trump told Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican whip who was gravely injured in a mass shooting last year but still opposes gun restrictions. “You’ll never get it passed. We want to get something done.”

Mr. Trump also flatly insisted that legislation should raise the minimum age for buying rifles to 21 from 18 — an idea the N.R.A. and many Republicans fiercely oppose. When Mr. Toomey pushed back on an increase in the minimum age for rifles, the president accused him of fearing the N.R.A. — a remarkable slap since the association withdrew its support for Mr. Toomey over his background check bill.

“If there’s a Republican who’s demonstrated he’s not afraid of the N.R.A., that would be me,” Mr. Toomey said after the meeting.

The president appeared eager to challenge the impression that he is bought and paid for by the gun rights group. While calling the N.R.A. membership “well-meaning,” he also said he told the group’s leaders at a lunch on Sunday that “it’s time. We’re going to stop this nonsense. It’s time.”

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What stands logistically in the way is that the Kurds seek a homeland, and that would entail a piece of Syria, which Assad does not want to relinquish. However, the Kurds do seem prepared to negotiate with Assad for the right, somehow, to live alongside the Syrians, within what Assad would like to maintain or re-claim as greater Syria - parts of which Assad was forced to abandon in 2012. We should encourage their reconciliation and alliance; and for other ethnonations to ally with them despite the shit-hole nations of Turkey and Israel in opposition.

The Guardian,  23 Feb 2018: “Why are world leaders backing this brutal attack against Kurdish Afrin?”

Islamist militants – with Turkish army support – are wreaking havoc with a pocket of peace and sanity in the Syrian war.

‘Afrin’s population doubled during the conflict, as hundreds of thousands of mostly Arab refugees had come to shelter with its original, overwhelmingly Kurdish, population.’

Three years ago the world watched a ragtag band of men and women fighters in the Syrian town of Kobane, most armed only with Kalashnikovs, hold off a vast army of Islamist militants with tanks, artillery and overwhelming logistical superiority. The defenders insisted they were acting in the name of revolutionary feminist democracy. The Islamist fighters vowed to exterminate them for that very reason. When Kobane’s defenders won, it was widely hailed as the closest one can come, in the contemporary world, to a clear confrontation of good against evil.

Today, exactly same thing is happening again. Except this time, world powers are firmly on the side of the aggressors. In a bizarre twist, those aggressors seem to have convinced key world leaders and public opinion-makers that Kobane’s citizens are “terrorists” because they embrace a radical version of ecology, democracy and women’s rights.

Turkey’s attack on Syrian Kurds could overturn the entire region.

The region in question is Afrin, defended by the same YPG and YPJ (People’s Protection and Women’s Protection Units) who defended Kobane, and who afterwards were the only forces in Syria willing to take the battle to the heartland of Islamic State, losing thousands of combatants in the battle for its capital, Raqqa.

An isolated pocket of peace and sanity in the Syrian civil war, famous only for the beauty of its mountains and olive groves, Afrin’s population had almost doubled during the conflict as hundreds of thousands of mostly Arab refugees had come to shelter with its original, overwhelmingly Kurdish population.

At the same time its inhabitants had taken advantage of their peace and stability to develop the democratic principles embraced throughout the majority Kurdish regions of north Syria, known as Rojava. Local decisions were devolved to neighbourhood assemblies in which everyone could participate; other parts of Rojava insisted on strict gender parity, with every office having co-chairs, male and female, in Afrin, two-thirds of public offices are held by women.

Turkey’s attack on Syrian Kurds could overturn the entire region.

Today, this democratic experiment is the object of an entirely unprovoked attack by Islamist militias including Isis and al-Qaida veterans, and members of Turkish death squads such as the notorious Grey Wolves, backed by the Turkish army’s tanks, F16 fighters, and helicopter gunships. Like Isis before them, the new force seems determined to violate all standards of behaviour, launching napalm attacks on villagers, attacking dams – even, like Isis, blowing up irreplaceable archaeological monuments. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, has announced, “We aim to give Afrin back to its rightful owners”, in a thinly veiled warning to ethnically cleanse the region of its Kurdish inhabitants. And only today it emerged that a convoy heading to Afrin carrying food and medicine was shelled by Turkish forces.

Remarkably, the YPG and YPJ have so far held off the invaders. But they have done so without so much as the moral support of a single major world power. Even the US, the presence of whose forces prevents Turkey from invading those territories in the east, where the YPG and YPJ are still engaged in combat with Isis, has refused to lift a finger to defend Afrin. The British foreign secretary Boris Johnson has gone so far as to insist that “Turkey has the right to want to keep its borders secure” – by which logic he would have no objection if France were to seize control of Dover.

The result is bizarre. Western leaders who regularly excoriate Middle Eastern regimes for their lack of democratic and women’s rights – even, as George W Bush famously did with the Taliban, using it as justification for military invasion – appear to have decided that going too far in the other direction is justifiable grounds for attack.

To understand how this happened, one must go back to the 1990s, when Turkey was engaged in a civil war with the military arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, then a Marxist-Leninist organisation calling for a separate Kurdish state. Whether the PKK was ever a terrorist organisation, in the sense of bombing marketplaces and the like, is very much a matter of contention, but there is no doubt that the guerrilla war was a bloody business, and terrible things happened on both sides. About the turn of the millennium, the PKK abandoned the demand for a separate state. It called a unilateral ceasefire, pressing for peace talks to negotiate both regional autonomy for Kurds and a broader democratisation of Turkish society.

This transformation affected the Kurdish freedom movement across the Middle East. Those inspired by the movement’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, began calling for a radical decentralisation of power and opposition to ethnic nationalism of all sorts.

Turkey starts ground incursion into Kurdish-controlled Afrin in Syria - Read more

The Turkish government responded with an intense lobbying campaign to have the PKK designated a “terrorist organisation” (which it had not been before). By 2001 it had succeeded, and the PKK was placed on the EU, US, and UN “terror list”.

Never has such a decision so wreaked havoc with the prospect of peace. It allowed the Turkish government to arrest thousands of activists, journalists, elected Kurdish officials – even the leadership of the country’s second largest opposition party – all on claims of “terrorist” sympathies, and with barely a word of protest from Europe or America. Turkey now has more journalists in prison than any other country.

The designation has created a situation of Orwellian madness, allowing the Turkish government to pour millions into western PR firms to smear anyone who calls for greater civil rights as “terrorists”. Now, in the final absurdity, it has allowed world governments to sit idly by while Turkey launches an unprovoked assault on one of the few remaining peaceful corners of Syria – even though the only actual connection its people have to the PKK is an enthusiasm for the philosophy of its imprisoned leader Öcalan. It cannot be denied – as Turkish propagandists endlessly point out – that portraits of Öcalan, and his books, are common there. But ironically what that philosophy consists of is simply an embrace of direct democracy, ecology, and a radical version of women’s empowerment.

The religious extremists who surround the current Turkish government know perfectly well that Rojava doesn’t threaten them militarily. It threatens them by providing an alternative vision of what life in the region could be like. Above all, they feel it is critical to send the message to women across the Middle East that if they rise up for their rights, let alone rise up in arms, the likely result is that they will be maimed and killed, and none of the major powers will raise an objection. There is a word for such a strategy. It’s called “terrorism” – a calculated effort to cause terror. The question is, why is the rest of the world cooperating?

• David Graeber is professor of anthropology at the LSE and author of Debt: The First 5000 years; he was involved in the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street

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