[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 06 January 2018 07:43.
What it’s like to argue with a bracket and why ‘American founding fathers constitutionalism’ is too complicated and flawed a premise to defend White nationalism.
When asked why she wanted to exclude certain people from White Nations…
Tara experiences what it’s like to argue with a virulent bracket and why defending White America (let alone White Nations generally, of course) on the basis of the U.S. Constitution, founding fathers, exceptionalism, etc., is not the best angle.
If you mean to defend White Nationalism, defend White Nationalism, not American Nationalism of the Founding fathers, their constitution and not I.Q., as Tara does. The intentions of the founding fathers, what their text say, matters of I.Q. and the accomplishments (or lack of certain kinds of misdeeds) of White Nations can provide rebuts to fallacious counter arguments, but are not effective as a premisary thesis for defending White Nationalism.
MR’s platform takes rather a premise of deep systemic, pervasive ecology and biodiversity ... to be deliberately coordinated among human and pervasive ecology; and to be distinguished from Hitler’s ‘ecology’ which was more like Darwinism and absent the sufficient human and humane aspect of praxis.
Perhaps we should let Tara find out the hard way - she has been warned (as Mancinblack noted). There are reasons to be critical of her: she has associated with some pretty bracketed individuals, such as the guy promoting the Jewish alternative payment set up (I’ll find the link a little later); in addition to going along with the fundamentally right wing and Jewish aligned platform that is the Alternative Right.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 05 January 2018 07:06.
According to Wolff book: Trump was shocked by presidential victory. He had run with anticipation of a loss to Hillary based on her “fake” media support which he could parlay into a “real” media empire by contrast; Bannon warned presidential victory would spotlight Trump’s Russian money laundering; Melania cried in stress over “botched plan gone right” which actually landed the presidency for Donald.
NewsWeek, “Trump Was Horrified When He Won the White House and Melania Cried, Book Claims”, 3 Jan 2018:
No one on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team thought Trump would actually become president—and they didn’t really want him to either, according to excerpts from Michael Wolff’s book published Wednesday in New York magazine.
Now-President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and first lady Melania Trump were all reportedly left dumbfounded and afraid on the night of the election in 2016, the book claims. Shortly after 8 on election night, it became clear that Trump had a real shot of becoming president. Wolff wrote that Don Jr. said his father “looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.” Steve Bannon, who helped run the Trump campaign and helped Trump’s team through the transition, said he saw Trump morph from “a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump.”
A week before the election, Trump was sure he would lose the presidency. But still, according to Wolff’s book, he told Ailes that it was “bigger than I ever dreamed of. I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”
Then he actually won.
Wolff’s claims match various reporting on Trump’s election: He certainly wanted the fame that goes along with running a successful campaign, but critics theorized that he wasn’t quite as happy claiming the job of president. In February, The New York Times reported that Trump misses his access to “fans and supporters — an important source of feedback and validation.” The Associated Press wrote that Trump didn’t even want to live in the White House.
But Wolff’s new book claims Trump and his campaign never planned to win and never wanted to accept the job that comes along with a victory. So once he did take office, the West Wing was in disarray, with Bannon, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner all operating in a free-form environment. Bannon, especially, saw his role as creating the “soul” of the White House, according to Wolff. And Trump’s own behavior was credited as not befitting the White House.
“Nothing contributed to the chaos and dysfunction of the White House as much as Trump’s own behavior,” Wolff wrote. “The big deal of being president was just not apparent to him. Most victorious candidates, arriving in the White House from ordinary political life, could not help but be reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this wasn’t that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was actually more commodious and to his taste than the White House.”
Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is to be published by Henry Holt & Co. on January 9.
The Hill, “Bannon warned Russia probe would focus on money laundering: report”, 3 January 2018:
Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon warned that the special counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia would focus on money laundering, according to a book to be published next week.
The revelation is included in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” a new book by Michael Wolff. The Guardian, which has viewed a copy, published several stories on Wednesday about the book, which includes interviews with Bannon and President Trump.
Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was charged with money laundering in an October indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, as was his associate Richard Gates.
In Wolff’s book, Bannon identifies Weissmann, an attorney on Mueller’s team, as a “money-laundering guy.”
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon said in the book. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner. … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”
“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon said, referring to the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
The former White House chief strategist also spoke about the 2016 meeting between Trump Jr. and a group of Russians, describing it as “treasonous.”
And Bannon in “Fire and Fury” mentioned connections between Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and loans taken out from the German Deutsche Bank that have come under scrutiny in relation to the investigation.
In December, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records tied to Kushner’s family’s real estate business, Kushner Companies.
“It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit,” Bannon said of the probe. “The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”
Business Insider, “I know why Steve Bannon let Michael Wolff into the White House”, 4 Jan 2018:
- Michael Wolff’s new book, “The Fire and the Fury,” is rocking the Trump White House, and it hasn’t even been released yet.
- It has the president turning on former adviser Steve Bannon. This is in part because Bannon helped Wolff gain incredible access to the White House.
- Why? Add this to the long list of ego-driven media mistakes made by the administration - a costly one at that.
- What Bannon didn’t count on was that Wolff isn’t a soldier in his army.
I feel like I write this all the time, but the White House is in chaos.
The Trump administration is being thrown by the forthcoming publication of Michael Wolff’s book “The Fire and The Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
The excerpts, until now jealously guarded at select media outlets like New York Magazine and NBC for weeks, tell of a shockingly incompetent president and the in-over-their-heads aides who openly disrespect him. It is chaos, and someone let Wolff take a front seat and watch it all.
That person, by all accounts, was former White House adviser Stever Bannon. While Trump may have known that the biographer of his idol, Rupert Murdoch, was on site, it was Bannon who ensured Wolff had access.
Why? Consider it one part self-aggrandizement, another part a desire for acceptance, and wholly and completely a continuation of Bannon’s desperate search for ideological allies.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 01 January 2018 06:43.
Middle East Monitor, “Palestinians discuss development of gas field with Shell”
In February of 2017, The Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) announced that it has been discussing the development of Gaza Marine Gas Field with Shell, Anadolu has reported.
Gaza Marine is about 30km off the coast of the Gaza Strip in the eastern Mediterranean; it is estimated to contain about 28 million cubic metres of gas.
British Gas bought the concession from the Palestinian Authority in 1999 but the development of the project has been on hold due to Israeli obstacles. Preventing the development of the project is part of the internationally-backed Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Shell bought the British Gas stake in Gaza Marine recently, and it is now the main developer of the field.
The Director of the PIF, Mohamed Mustafa, told Anadolu that the current discussions with Shell concentrate on accelerating the development of the project. He noted that there had been a study to connect a pipeline from the field to the sole electricity plant in Gaza. “The most important thing, though, is that we get Israel’s permission for this pipeline because it crosses its land,” he explained.
According to Offshore-technology.com, Shell holds a 90 per cent interest in the field. The stake will reduce to 60 per cent if the PIF and Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) decide to exercise their options. PIF and CCC would subsequently hold 30 per cent and 10 per cent interests respectively.
The PIF is a sovereign Palestinian fund with capital of $800 million.
Significant reserves of natural gas were found offshore from the Gaza Strip. As of early 2015, Gaza’s natural gas was still underwater and the same for almost all of the Levantine gas.[1]
History
The Palestinians signed a memorandum of intent on November 8, 1999 with British Gas and a company linked to the Palestinian Authority, the Consolidated Contractors Company, giving them rights to explore the area.[2][3] The discovered natural gas reserve was calculated to have 35 BCM, larger than Israel’s Yam Tethys maritime gas field.[3] It was found in two small gas fields dubbed Gaza Marine 1 and Gaza Marine 2.
In 1999, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak set aside exploration of Gaza’s offshore resources for a future Palestinian state, with no prior consultation with Israel stipulated.[2] According to Michael Schwartz, Barak deployed the Israeli navy in Gaza’s coastal waters to impede the implementation of the terms of the modest contract between the Palestinian Authority and British Gas (BG) to develop Gaza’s Mediterranean gas resources.[1] Israel demanded that the Gaza gas be piped to facilities on its territory, and at a price below the prevailing market level[4] and that Israel also control all the (relatively modest) revenues destined for the Palestinians — to prevent the money from being used to “fund terror.” In Schwartz’s view, with this Israeli action the Oslo Accords were officially doomed, because by declaring Palestinian control over gas revenues unacceptable, the Israeli government committed itself to not accepting even the most limited kind of Palestinian budgetary autonomy, let alone full sovereignty. In Schwartz’s view, since no Palestinian government or organization would agree to this, a future filled with armed conflict was assured.[1]
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 30 December 2017 00:46.
New Observer, “Egyptian ‘Migrant’ Terror Attack in Pennsylvania”, 25 Dec 2017:
An Egyptian legal immigrant who entered the US on a “chain migrant” visa carried out the triple terrorist attack on police in the Pennsylvanian state capital Harrisburg this week—an attack largely deliberately ignored the by controlled media.
According to a statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security, “the suspect involved in a terror attack in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and another suspect arrested on terror-related money laundering charges were both beneficiaries of extended family chain migration.”
The invader, named as Ahmed Amin El-Mofty, was a naturalized U.S. citizen who was admitted to the United States from Egypt on a family-based immigrant visa.
El-Mofty was killed on Friday December 22 in a shootout after opening fire and targeting police at multiple locations in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The Egyptian invader started his attack at the 100 block of State Street, when Ahmed El-Mofty started firing gunshots. He then got into a vehicle and headed off towards the State Capitol Building, rounded a corner and shot several times at a Capitol Police car near Third and Walnut streets.
One shot came “very close” to hitting the officer driving, but he was able to escape without injury, according to Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico.
About 30 minutes later, El-Mofty fired several shots at a Pennsylvania State Police trooper. The officer suffered minor injuries and was chased by the shooter more than a mile to Allison Hill near the intersection of 17th and Mulberry streets. By then more officers had converged on scene and killed El-Mofty in the resulting shootout.
“The long chain of migration that led to the suspect’s admission into the United States was initiated years ago by a distant relative of the suspect. One of the most recent links in that chain was an extended family member admitted into the United States from Egypt on an F24 visa,” the DHS statement said.
“Separately, Zoobia Shahnaz, who has been charged with laundering bitcoins to support ISIS, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who came to the United States from Pakistan on an F43 visa.
“The F43 visa is available to the children of F41 visa holders who were sponsored by other family members that obtained citizenship.”
India Today reports on the forced conversion to Islam of Rakhine Hindus in the Bangladesh refugee camps and the discovery of Hindu mass graves in Rakhine by the Myanmar security services. This report dates from September and has gone unnoticed in the West. I found it as the latest entry on the Facebook account of Shwe Eain Si, so the girl obviously hasn’t given up the fight. Good for her.
Mike Isaacs: So, yeah, so the point is that ultimately, the issue is not a matter of ethnicity or nationality, the issue is that we have a social system, an economic system that perpetuates this kind of continued defamation of anyone who isn’t of the ruling class. Millennial Woes: Ah, well, or you could say that it’s to do with rich Jews, ah.. Mike Isaacs:...n-no ... It’s rich, it’s rich like uh rich goyim too. Millennial Woes: Goyim!?! Mike Isaacs: Uh, yeah, uh, yeah that is the word I used. It is an easy way to say ‘non-Jew.’ Uhm, that was your Christmas present I guess, I don’t know…
And of course what Isaacson is saying is true - the problem is rich goyim as well - and in their case, they deserve that title when they are complicit with selling out their ethnic genetic interests.
The problem is that neither side is allowing for a White Left, its steady ethno nationalist perspective - which would provide not only a steady perspective on the antagonism of the YKW, but a steady perspective on susceptibilities to elite betrayal.
That aside for the moment, he’s conducted a ‘Millenniyule’ of sixty some odd intelligent and informative conversations with people concerned for ethnonationalism in one way or another - unfortunately, with the Alt-Right brand, but we’ll be advancing our more sound platform in days to come…
We’ll be addressing these matters, but lets first give credit where credit is due - this was one of the better moments:
MW(42:00): That’s interesting. Why is that you are against Israel?
Mike Isaacs: That’ primarily because I’m an anarchist, so I’m against all states.
MW: I imagine the Jews in Israel wouldn’t like you very much.
Mike Isaacs: Well there are anti-Zionist Jews who grew up there; and that’s their country right now; and also I don’t like ethnostates, in particular.
I think the Palestinian people deserve the right to happiness, a fulfilling life, freedom without persecution.
MW: Yeah, you know, it’s too bad for the Palestinians really, I have no position on this one way or the other. It’s not my problem, really.
Mike Isaacs: That’s so easy to say…like at the end of the day, that fact that Palestinians are in captivity means just like your goverment is in alliance with the Israelis to keep them that way so, if they can like..
MW: Oh, well I’d rather we didn’t ...
Mike Isaacs: You help the system to make money. This is how the system operates. They expect us to turn a blind eye to other people’s problems.
MW: Hold on a minute. You and I are in agreement here. I don’t want us to be sending any money to Israel. With their high I.Q. they should be able to deal with this themselves, make money and all the rest of it… so I don’t think there is a need for us to be sending aid money to them. You know, I agree with you, so I don’t like being implicated, or my people being implicated in these things.
Mike Isaacs: It’s not about implicating your people. This is what I’m trying to get the point across with.. it’s that your people are actively harmed. ..because your people are ultimately in a position, and when I say your people, I mean working class people…
MW: I’m not working class, but anyway, go on…
Mike Isaacs: Ok, but anyway, the common people, of Britain, they are ultimately at the mercy of the people who rule them .. the politicians who are in the pockets of big financiers…and big executives.. uhm, and those people continually profit from the bondage of the Palestinian people. The British weapons industry makes money by virtue of this foreign aid going to Israel then coming back in the form of weapons purchase. The Unites States is even more so…The United States is a huge funder not only of Israel but also of Egypt… MW: I must say, I am delighted that we’ve found something that we can agree on, Mike, this is really nice…I totally share your views on this… Mike Isaacs: So, yeah, so the point is that ultimately, the issue is not a matter of ethnicity or nationality, the issue is that we have a social system, an economic system that perpetuates this kind of continued defamation of anyone who isn’t of the ruling class.
MW: Ah, well, or you could say that it’s to do with rich Jews, ah.. Mike Isaacs...n-no…It’s rich, it’s rich like uh rich goyim too. MW: Goyim!?! Mike Isaacs: uh, yeah, uh, yeah that is the word I used. It is an easy way to say ‘non-Jew.’
...Uhm, that was your Christmas present I guess, I don’t know…
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 23 December 2017 06:02.
DM, “Hundreds protest in Sweden after police told women to ‘stay inside or walk in pairs’ after series of violent gang rapes of teenage girls”, 20 Dec 2017:
- Three gang rapes in less than a month have taken place in Malmo, Sweden
- This weekend, a 17-year-old girl was brutally gang raped in a playground
- After the most recent rape, police advised that women should not go out alone
- Hundreds took to the streets to protest the violence and police action
Fighting back: Protesters demanded that the government take action against rapists and that police do more to protect women in Sweden
Hundreds took to the streets of Malmo in southern Sweden to protest after three teenage girls were brutally gang raped - and police told women to stay indoors.
The most recent incident involved a 17-year-old girl who was raped by an unknown number of assailants in a children’s playground in the early hours of Saturday.
Anger: A protester holds up a placard during the demonstration in central Malmo yesterday (photo TT News Agency/ AP)
The following day, Malmo police issued a warning to local women not to go outside alone at night, and to walk in pairs or use taxis.
Anger: Hundreds marched through Malmo in southern Sweden on Tuesday to protest against the police response to three violent gang rapes of teenage girls
The first rape took place on November 4, and saw a young woman raped by several assailants after a party in Segevång, north Malmo.
Just over a week later, a woman was attacked and raped by a number of men at a bus stop in Södervärn, central Malmo.
Saturday’s rape took place just a few streets away in Sofielund, and saw the 17-year-old attacked by a group of men in a playground.
‘This is a horrible, particularly severe crime with exceedingly brutal violence,’ Andy Roberts, head of area police in North Malmo told Helsinborg’s Dagblad.
He would not give the newspaper details of the violence the victim was subjected to, but added: ‘There are limits, even for me, as an old experienced police officer.’
Wave: Three young women have been gang raped in Malmo in less than three weeks by ‘young men unknown to them’
A local newspaper reports that the victims in all three cases were teenagers.
Police say that while there is no obvious connection between the rapes, it cannot be ruled out as investigations are still ongoing.
All three incidents took place between midnight and 3am and assailants were all young men unknown to the victims, Sydsvenskan reports.
Yesterday’s protest, filmed by a participant, saw demonstrators demand police protection, tougher punishment and that the government step in and push through proposed legislation on consent.
Bearing placards with messages such as ‘no rapists on our streets’ and ‘Stefan Lofven, take your responsibility’, directed at the country’s Prime Minister, hundreds of protesters gathered in Malmo on Tuesday evening.
‘I never thought I would be scared to walk around in my hometown,’ one of the speakers Sara Wettergren said according to Kvallsposten.
Upset: A local newspaper reports that the victims in all three cases were teenagers
Referring to the famous gang rape of a young student in Delhi in 2012, she added; ‘In India the perpetrators were convicted. In Sweden they walk free.’
In the wake of the #MeToo debate and the recent gang rapes, the issue of sexual violence against women is going to be a key issue ahead of next year’s general election in Sweden.
The protesters in Malmo outlined a series of demands on the Swedish government: tougher punishment for rapes, a Minster of Justice with competence in sexual violence issues and a National Police Commissioner ‘who cares about women’.
The demonstrators were also protesting police advice that women stay indoors, which was issued on Sunday. ‘It’s about common sense. We are not warning people not to be outside, but to think twice and maybe not walk alone late at night and instead go with others or take a taxi,’ said Anders Nilsson of Malmo police who is leading the preliminary investigation.
After a national backlash, Malmo police retracted their statement come Monday, with Mr Nilsson saying he had been ‘clumsy’ choosing his words.
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…
Anger: A protester holds up a placard during the demonstration in central Malmo yesterday (photo TT News Agency/ AP)
