Headlines

… Following WWII, the term “fascist” has almost always been used as a pejorative … Even before WWII ended, George Orwell was lamenting how the term “fascist” was overused to the point that it was “meaningless.” He said the most apt synonym for “fascist” was “bully,” but he cautioned against flinging the term with reckless impunity against those with whom one simply disagreed. Not that anyone listened. The current situation in Ukraine has both sides tossing the word “fascist” back and forth at one another like a hot potato.

… Liberals, Zionists, and “responsible” conservatives now occupy a rhetorically Hitlercentric universe, in which Nazism is the measure of all evil and Roosevelt is redeemed by his determination to crush Germany. The stain of guilt for Nazism constantly spreads – to ordinary Germans, allies of Germany, neutrals, isolationists, Swiss bankers, and Pius XII himself … Everyone and everything is measured on a single scale, which might be called the Hitler Continuum. But there is not corresponding Stalin Continuum. Those who aided and defended and celebrated Stalin at the height of his crimes incur no guilt or obloquy. To have dreamed the Communist dream is evidence of idealism, not guilt or even irresponsibility.

As recently as the 1970s, Baghdad was lauded as a model city in the Arab world. But now, after decades of seemingly endless conflict, it is the world’s worst city. That is, at least, according to the latest survey by the Mercer consulting group, which when assessing quality of life across 239 cities, measuring factors including political stability, crime and pollution, placed Baghdad last.

Just in time for the eleventh anniversary of America’s war to liberate Iraq, a leading global business consulting firm comes forward with what could be the most telling measure of our success. According to an annual ranking prepared by Mercer, the human resources consulting subsidiary of Marsh & McClennan, the Iraqi capital of Baghdad is the worst city in the world to live in … The top five cities in the world, according to Mercer, are Vienna, Zurich, Auckland (New Zealand), Munich and Vancouver … The five worst in North America are Mexico City (122), Detroit (70), St. Louis (67), Houston (66), and Miami (65).

Holocaust scholars are charging that several prominent historians have suppressed documents revealing unfriendly remarks about Jews made by presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman … One of Dr. Medoff’s revelations focuses on a 1938 memo in which President Roosevelt … alleged that Jews were dominating the Polish economy and claimed the Jews’ behavior was the cause of antisemitism in Poland … In 1942, Roosevelt remarked to the visiting Soviet foreign minister that the Communist Party USA was dominated by “distinctly unsympathetic Jews” who were making the party look bad. In 1945, Roosevelt joked to Soviet leader Josef Stalin about giving all of America’s Jews to the king of Saudi Arabia as a gift.

… There are even those who insist that American officials were well aware of Hitler’s crimes during World War Two, yet chose purposely not to stop them. Documentation made available only during the past decade, however, amply demonstrates that the volatile accusations of American indifference — even collusion — are unwarranted. That the Roosevelt administration (and, it is also charged, American Jews) did not act with dispatch to effect the rescue of European Jewry, shows essentially that the tales of extermination were not believed. This study will examine what was known of allegations of a German policy of mass murder in Europe, and whether the many wartime reports about such allegations were credible.

European attempts to ban circumcision and ritual slaughter are outright anti-semitism, Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar stated Monday evening. Addressing a conference organized by the Rabbinical Center of Europe, the Chabad hasid blasted efforts to legally proscribe Jewish practices as continuing the work of the Nazis using different methods. Opponents of the rites, which are currently under attack in several countries, “are trying to fight Judaism,” Lazar averred. “I’d even call them, sadly, anti-Semites.”

It is one of the oddities of the Royal Family — shared by the majority of the English upper classes — that for many generations they have circumcised their male sons, invariably using a Mohel, the Jewish word for a circumcision practitioner. It was rarely done on medical grounds, nor on religious ones, but was a matter of class. This has prompted some speculation as to whether the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will chose to follow suit … The NHS [national Health Service] now tries to guide parents away from the practice and the most recent figures suggest just 3.8 per cent of male babies are circumcised in the UK. This is down from a rate of 20 per cent in the 1950s …

… European Man is an endangered species. European Man is dying out. By 2050, Russia, the fourth most populous nation in 1950, will be 15th, behind Egypt, and far behind Congo and Tanzania. The only Western nation in the top 14 will be the USA. But most Americans will then trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America. Since 1914, all the great European empires — British, French, German, Russian, Italian — have vanished. All the great armies and navies have melted away. All are being invaded and repopulated by African, Asian, and Middle Eastern peoples they once ruled. And almost all of the native-born populations of Europe are aging and dying and passing away.

Hours a day the average American spends online with a computer: 2.31. Hours a laptop could be powered from the energy saved by recycling one aluminum can: 5.22 … Percentage of Americans who can’t imagine living without their cell phones: 29 … Average number of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island annually from 1892–1924: 375,000. Average number of immigrants deported annually during President Barack Obama’s first term: 382,500. Estimated number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2012: 11.7 million

… Not only in Ukraine is ethnic nationalism surging … The most startling news on the nationalist front last week came in Venice and the Veneto region, where 89 percent of a large turnout in a non-binding referendum voted to secede from Italy and re-establish the Venetian republic that vanished in 1866 … Across Europe, there is a fear that the ethnic character of their countries and continent are being altered forever against the will of the people … What the children of Europe are rebelling against is what their fathers, paralyzed by political correctness, refused to prevent.

… The ignorance and hubris of the folks that we have elected to high office is astonishing, but it is matched by what one reads in the mainstream media where there is a steady drumbeat to “do something” every time a foreigner looks askance at the insane policies that Washington regularly promotes. If there is one central truth about the US-Russian relationship it is that it is better to have a friendly Russia cooperating on issues like Iran and Syria than it is to have a hostile Russia that will use its considerable resources to obstruct Washington’s initiatives. Unfortunately no one inside the beltway seems to understand that.

The time has come for people in Israel and the Jewish lobby in the United States – which blindly supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians publicly recognize Israel as the Jewish state as a condition for a peace agreement – to internalize U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s conclusion: “I think it’s a mistake for some people to be raising it again and again as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a state and peace.” In his remarks, Kerry was delicately hinting that Netanyahu’s ultimatum is not part of ensuring Israel’s interests, but rather an obstacle intended to block the chance for a peace agreement.

President Obama can’t seem to catch a break from the American people, particularly when it comes to his leadership throughout the Crimean crisis with Russia … Looking more broadly at the president and the United States’ image in the world, more Americans now say the image of the U.S. has grown worse (43 percent) since Mr. Obama became president, rather than better (32 percent) … Other data from the CBS poll rubs salt in the wounds. Americans like the president about as much as they like Russia.

Britons see Russia in a more positive light than the European Union, despite recent tensions with Moscow over Ukraine, according to a poll published on Saturday. Voters in Britain are also equally divided about whether to remain in the 28-member bloc, a subject on which Prime Minister David Cameron has promised a referendum in 2017. The results of the online poll of 20,000 people between 7 and 20 January organised by Conservative party peer Lord Michael Aschcroft were published in Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid The Sun on Sunday.

A remarkably clear look at life in central San Francisco more than a century ago, taken with a camera mounted on the front of a cable car as it moves along Market Street. The clock tower that can be seen at the end of Market Street at the Embarcadero (Spanish for Wharf) is still there. Made with one of the first 35 mm film cameras, this eleven-minute clip was filmed on April 14, 1906, four days before the devastating earthquake and fire that destroyed virtually the entire downtown area.

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) has launched an ad campaign urging the expulsion of all illegal Nazi war criminals from the U.S. once and for all. Hikind, himself the son of Holocaust survivors, was set to release the campaign in newspapers and on Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus shelters beginning next week … In particular, Hikind pointed to the case of Jakiw Palij, a Queens resident who worked as an armed guard at an SS slave labor camp for Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II and helped keep prisoners from escaping, according to court documents. Palij has denied the allegations, but he has been stripped of his U.S. citizenship.

State Assemblyman Dov Hikind was deeply involved in the Jewish Defense League, which the FBI listed as a “violent extremist Jewish organization.” Other officials should be questioning him, not the college / … The press conference was organized by a man who has been suspected by the FBI of involvement in several terrorist bombings and who was a top cadre in an organization currently identified by the FBI as a “violent extremist Jewish organization.” He is Dov Hikind, a Democratic State Asssemblyman who, despite his links to acts of terrorism and violence against racial minorities, has emerged as a political kingmaker in New York State politics.

… The central problem with the Obama foreign policy, guided as it is by a bundle of poorly defined principles, is that it has no coherency … The difference between Washington and Moscow is that the former seeks to maintain global dominance while Russia pretty much operates within its own local zone of influence … So if Washington truly stands for what passes for international law and “American values” where are the sanctions on Israel and its leading politicians and why haven’t American politicians themselves been regularly appearing before the International Criminal Court in the Hague?

Dear President Obama: As you ponder your potential moves regarding President Vladimir V. Putin’s annexation of Crimea (a large majority of its two million people are ethnic Russians), it is important to remember that whatever moral leverage you may have had in the court of world opinion has been sacrificed by the precedents set by previous American presidents who did not do what you say Mr. Putin should do — obey international law … Ignore the belligerent baying pack of neocons who always want more United States wars … Concentrate on America, President Obama, whose long unmet necessities cry out from “sea to shining sea.”

The conflict in Ukraine has prompted several level-headed commentators to point out that, of all governments, the U.S. government is in no position to lecture Russia about respecting other nations’ borders … George Washington spoke of the “rising American empire” and described himself as living in an “infant empire.” … The Indian Wars were among the first steps in empire building. The unspeakable brutality and duplicity — the acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as we say today — were crimes, not merely against individuals, but also against whole societies and nations.

It was almost ten years ago when, before the House International Relations Committee, I objected to the US government funding NGOs to meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine. At the time the “Orange Revolution” had forced a regime change in Ukraine with the help of millions of dollars from Washington … I was worried about millions of dollars that the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its various related organizations spent to meddle in Ukraine’s internal affairs. But it turns out that was only the tip of the iceberg.

A Republican candidate for California governor is comparing President Barack Obama’s gun control policies with those of dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Twin Peaks, posted a Twitter message Tuesday with an image that compared what he said were figures who have supported gun rights with those who have supported gun control. Those he said “stood for gun rights” were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He said Hitler, Stalin, Kim, King George III, Mao Zedong and Obama “stood for gun control.”

… The notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review … “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote … Much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Führer, which extols the virtue of gun control: …

A common belief among defenders of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is that the National Socialist government of Germany under Adolf Hitler did not permit the private ownership of firearms … Unfortunately for those who would like to link Hitler and the National Socialists with gun control, the entire premise for such an effort is false. German firearms legislation under Hitler, far from banning private ownership, actually facilitated the keeping and bearing of arms by German citizens by eliminating or ameliorating restrictive laws which had been enacted by the government preceding his …

… Civic groups are demanding a similar fate for an 1892 bronze statue in New York’s Central Park of medical pioneer James Marion Sims, long revered as the father of modern gynecology, but more recently found to have experimented on female slaves. Changing U.S. attitudes and values involving race, gender, and other issues are prompting demands to tear down decades-old statues of heroes now seen as villains by Americans who say history is not written in stone … Twenty-first century America’s rejection of once common behavior, from slavery to mistreatment of women, children and laborers, has sparked outrage over monuments in parks, statehouses and other public spaces across the country.

Fifteen percent of young people in the United States are neither in school nor working, according to a new study released Monday by The Opportunity Nation coalition. The study looked at youths between the ages of 16 to 24, and estimated almost six million are out of school but also without jobs. Researchers tracked 16 factors — including Internet access, income inequality, and public safety — and found that the most supportive states of young people are Vermont, Minnesota, and North Dakota; at the bottom of the list are Nevada, Mississippi, and New Mexico.

.. Let’s remember that this brutal war was begun by the Western Powers and Saudis, is financed by them, and could be stopped at anytime if Washington and Riyadh give the order … Today, Syria is in ruins. It joins Afghanistan and Iraq who also defied the will of the United States, and paid the price … Israel and its US supporters are determined to crush the Assad regimes as the first step in overthrowing Iran … Ukraine and Crimea temporarily distracted the US. The cautious Obama administration seeks to avoid conflict, but America’s pro-Israel neocons and Republican hawks are pushing hard for war …

President Obama’s policy toward Russia has been wrong-headed and counterproductive, says Jack Matlock, Jr., who served as US ambassador to Moscow, 1987- 1991 … “A pattern of American activity that has been hostile to Russia and has simply disregarded their national interests … The decision to expand NATO the way it was done was one of the most fateful and bad decisions of the late 20th century …. The fact is, Russia now is not going to give up Crimea. The fact also is, if you really look at it dispassionately, Ukraine is better off without Crimea, because Ukraine is divided enough as it is. Their big problem is internal, in putting together disparate people who have been put together in that country.”

… Secretary of State John Kerry says that in the Ukraine crisis, “All options are on the table.” John McCain wants to begin moving Ukraine into NATO, guaranteeing that any Russian move on the Russified east of Ukraine would mean war with the United States … Is America really prepared to fight all of these wars that we are obligated by treaty to fight? The national recoil at attacking Syria, for crossing Obama’s “red line” last summer and using poison gas, suggests that there is a vast gulf between what America is obligated by treaty to do, and what the American people are willing to do in sending their soldier sons into a new war.

A man who made headlines during the 1990s as a controversial Jewish “Holocaust denier” has broken 18 years of silence to speak publicly for the first time about the challenges, achievements and mishaps of that era, and his secretive career since then. David Cole – now 45 years old – was in good form as he addressed a spirited, well-attended IHR meeting … His lively, articulate presentation was packed with colorful anecdotes, humorous asides and eye-opening insights … He adopted a new identity (“David Stein”) and in 1998 began a career as a filmmaker, Republican Party activist and conservative commentator.

For 50 years, Holocaust survivors Ernest Hollander and his brother Alex thought that their older brother, Zoltan, had been executed by the Germans in 1944. And for half a century, Zoltan thought that both his two brothers had been killed by the Germans during the war. But thanks to Ernest Hollander’s appearance in April 1992 with revisionists Mark Weber and David Cole on the Montel Williams Show, the long-lost brothers were reunited in San Francisco several months later. Along with Weber and Cole, Ernest Hollander, 67, appeared with his wife, Anna (a survivor of Auschwitz), and another Jewish Holocaust survivor on the nationally syndicated broadcast.

France’s far-right National Front party dealt a major blow to the ruling Socialists Sunday after several of its candidates took prime position in the first round of local elections … President Francois Hollande suffers record unpopularity against a backdrop of near-zero growth and high unemployment … Although the FN had been expected to do well, the first round results were far better than expected. Far-right candidates came ahead in several key towns and cities that will put them in pole position in the second round on March 30.

The leader of Austria’s Jewish community called on a right-wing politician to drop his campaign for re-election to the European Parliament after he was quoted as likening the European Union to the Third Reich in Nazi Germany. Andreas Moelzer, co-lead candidate for Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) in the May EU election, made headlines when a German paper quoted him as calling the EU a dictatorship that made the Third Reich look “informal and liberal” by comparison. The Third Reich “certainly did not have as many rules and regulations, commandments and bans”, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s magazine quoted him as telling a gathering in Vienna last month.

The former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched a scathing attack on what he calls a US-backed coup in Ukraine, insisting the Crimean people have the right to align their territory with Moscow and characterizing sanctions against Russia as “an act of war” … The libertarian guru’s remarks in an interview with the Guardian are almost diametrically opposed to those of his son, the Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul, who has called for stiff penalties against Russia and declared: “If I were president, I wouldn’t let [Russian president] Vladimir Putin get away with it.”

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Monday issued a scathing critique of the Obama administration, declaring that Israel cannot rely on the US to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, accusing the administration of broadcasting weakness throughout the world, and warning that its perceived weakness was inviting further terrorism against US targets. Speaking at a Tel Aviv University event reported by the Haaretz daily, Ya’alon said Israel could not afford to rely on the Obama administration to lead an action against Iran’s nuclear program, and that Israel could only rely on itself … Ya’alon reportedly stressed several times that the US was radiating weakness in every region worldwide.

There are popular fundamental misconceptions about Iran’s nuclear program: that the Iranian leadership has a fixed goal of acquiring a nuclear weapon, that if left alone Iran would build such a weapon and that this presumed ambition will be thwarted only if the rest of the world imposes enough costs and barriers. These misconceptions infuse much of the U.S. discourse on Iran, as reflected in frequent, erroneous references to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” … If Iran really were bent on building the bomb, it probably would have done so by now, based on a nuclear program that dates to the time of the shah.

Intelligent people are more likely to trust others, while those who score lower on measures of intelligence are less likely to do so, says a new study … The authors say one explanation could be that more intelligent individuals are better at judging character and so they tend to form relationships with people who are less likely to betray them. Another reason could be that smarter individuals are better at weighing up situations, recognising when there is a strong incentive for the other person not to meet their side of the deal … The authors say the research is significant because social trust contributes to the success of important social institutions, such as welfare systems and financial markets.

.. Look Who’s Back (Er ist wieder da) by Timur Vermes. Vermes’s book, in which a resurrected Adolf Hitler wakes up in 2011 Berlin and proceeds to rise to prominence, became a surprise bestseller after its publication in 2012 … This stuff of nightmares may seem an unlikely start for a novel praised by its fans as “hilarious” and “thigh-slappingly funny”. The plot is simple: after being mistaken for a Hitler impersonator by television executives looking for the next stand-up sensation, the Nazi leader makes a comeback thanks to his enduring populist touch. With cantankerous charm, he befriends his Jewish assistant, embraces the zeitgeist with his vegetarianism and hands out dating advice …

Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff said in a prison interview that he does not feel he “betrayed the Jews.” The scheme — believed to be the largest of its kind in U.S. history — affected a disproportionate number of Jewish individuals and organizations. Madoff, 70, is serving a 150-year prison sentence at the medium-security federal prison in Butner, N.C. “Religion had nothing to do with it,” Madoff told Politico in an interview published Thursday. “I don’t feel that I betrayed the Jews, I betrayed people. I betrayed people that put trust in me — certainly the Jewish community. I’ve made more money for Jewish people and charities than I’ve lost.”

An academic study has accused the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of having an anti-Christian bias in its reporting on hate groups in America. / … Professor George Yancy of the University of North Texas says he is not arguing one way or the other about FRC’s inclusion on the list but merely demonstrating SPLC’s outrage is subjective, selective, and never reckons progressive groups guilty of the same things of which it accuses conservative ones … To SPLC, there can be no hate on the left, only on the right.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hatewatch” fails to use objective criteria in determining which organizations should be labeled a “hate group,” George Yancey, professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, finds in a new study, “Watching the Watchers: The Neglect of Academic Analysis of Progressive Groups,” published in the January issue of the journal Academic Questions … The [SPLC “hate”] list is more about mobilizing liberals than providing an objective source for hate groups, Yancy argues.

… Reporters, editorialists, and feature writers are notorious for accepting, without further investigation, reams of data and materials disseminated to them by a cluster of self-appointed overseers of American society, among the most prominent, the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Thanks to the fawning acceptance granted them by the establishment media, these groups, and several more like them, have acquired an almost quasi-governmental status in the public mind. When they spread lies, there are few people who will risk inevitable public denigration and stand up to challenge them.

Heroin abuse in the US has been spreading beyond inner cities, resulting in a sharp rise in addiction and death. Chicago is a hub for cheap, pure and plentiful heroin, much of it supplied by Mexican drug cartels. Chicago’s “L” train green line leads directly to the open-air drug markets on the city’s west side … Nearly half a million Americans are thought to be addicted to heroin. One woman we meet in a county jail – she was locked up for stealing to feed her habit – calls it an “epidemic”. “I don’t think these police officers know how bad it is out there – I really don’t,” she says. Back on Lower Wacker Drive, home to central Chicago’s destitute for nearly a century, five heroin addicts are injecting in an underpass.

The crisis over Crimea is more than a dispute over whether the strategic Black Sea peninsula should be considered Russian or Ukrainian. At its root is a deeper issue: Russia’s simmering anger over its treatment by the West since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union … Russian President Vladimir Putin recounted the post-Cold War history during a speech Tuesday marking Crimea’s annexation, accusing the West of cheating Russia and ignoring its interests in the years that followed the Soviet collapse … At the United Nations. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador, blamed the crisis on “Western powers who simply cannot rid themselves of the imperial colonial habits of attempting to impose their writ on other peoples and countries.”

… The western allies have committed the same error over Ukraine that they did over Czechoslovakia in the mid-1930’s: extending security guarantees they could not possibly fulfill. As of now, it looks like Putin’s gambit over Crimea will work and there is nothing the West can do about it but huff, puff and impose mutually negative economic sanctions … The US neocons who have played a key role in engineering the coup in Kiev and this crisis. They want to see Russia punished for supporting Syria and the Palestinians.

It is interesting to observe the large numbers of people who suddenly think they’re experts on the ongoing crisis in Ukraine — both those on the left who blame it on Obama for intervening too much and those on the right who blame it on Obama for not intervening enough. As someone who has spent his entire academic career analyzing and critiquing the U.S. role in the world, I have some news: While the United States has had significant impact (mostly negative in my view) in a lot of places, we are not omnipotent. There are real limits to American power, whether for good or for ill. Not everything is our responsibility. This is certainly the case with Ukraine.

… A fascinating book, ‘The Chief Culprit’ by Viktor Suvorov (US Naval Institute Press), the pseudonym of a defector from Soviet military intelligence GRU, makes explosive new revelations about Stalin’s role in igniting World War II … I poured through Suvorov’s meticulous military analysis. To me, as a veteran military analyst, his figures appear to confirm that Stalin was just about to attack when Hitler pre-empted him … Had Hitler not attacked first in 1941, Stalin’s thirty-million man army, backed by mammoth industrial production, would have overwhelmed all of Europe in a 1941 surprise blitz. Suvorov’s unstated conclusion: Hitler saved Western Europe from Stalin.

… This prolific writer [von Thadden] concisely and cogently explains why Hitler was compelled, for both political and military reasons, to launch his preemptive strike against the Soviet Union when and how he did. “Stalin’s Trap” is also his final legacy to future generations … Many Soviet documents captured by the Germans during the course of the war, as well as German intelligence reports on the Soviet buildup in 1941, amply justify Hitler’s decision to strike. Presented before an impartial tribunal, this evidence surely would have exonerated the German military and political leadership. Unfortunately, all of these documents were confiscated and kept by the victorious Allies.

In this lecture, Viktor Suvorov shows that Stalin should be considered the “chief culprit” of World War II. In his much-discussed book “Icebreaker,” and in several follow-up works, the Russian historian presents extensive evidence to show that the German attack against the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a preventive strike because Stalin was preparing to launch a massive Soviet assault against Germany and Europe. This lecture by Suvorov was given at the US Naval Academy in Oct. 2009. This video presentation is in four parts. Runtime of this first part: 13 mins.

… A few years ago Shauli read “Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War” … From out of the sea of details, a coherent thesis emerges: Stalin dragged Hitler into war to force Europe into chaos and facilitate a communist revolution on the continent. According to Shauli, there is [additional] evidence to back up this theory, including a speech by Stalin himself as well as a report obtained by the U.S. Consulate in Prague … The document is in his possession, and now the history of World War II may have to be rewritten: It was Stalin’s fault.

… Hitler is presented [by author John Mosier in his new book “Deathride”] as a sane and rational man making sensible and very smart decisions, understanding strategy and global politics far better than his generals. Instead of a surprise attack on the innocent Russians, Mosier has concluded that the war was a pre-emptive strike on a predator poised to invade Germany and Europe … “The most recent evidence confirms what German interrogations of captured Soviet officers revealed in 1941, that Stalin was in fact planning to attack Hitler at the first opportune moment … The recent evidence contradicts a long established Stalinist legend, and certainly explains Hitler’s motivation: his attack on the Soviet Union was a preemptive strike.”

Here is the complete text of Hitler’s historic address of Dec. 11, 1941, in which the German leader recounts the reasons for the outbreak of war in September 1939, explains why he decided to strike against the Soviet Union in June 1941, reviews the dramatic course of the war thus far, and deals at length with US President Roosevelt’s hostile policies toward Germany. Hitler details the US government’s increasingly belligerent actions against Germany and Italy, and concludes by announcing that Germany was now joining Japan in war against the United States.

President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed Crimea as a part of Russia on Tuesday, reversing what he described as a historic injustice … In an emotional address steeped in years of resentment and bitterness at perceived slights from the West, Mr. Putin made it clear that Russia’s patience for post-Cold War accommodation, much diminished of late, had finally been exhausted … His remarks, which lasted 47 minutes, were interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and at the end chants of “Russia, Russia.” Some in the audience wiped tears from their eyes. A theme coursing throughout his remarks was the restoration of Russia after a period of humiliation following the Soviet collapse …

Calling out the United States for its hypocrisy in regards to Russian “interference” in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an address from the Kremlin on Tuesday that U.S. foreign policy is guided, not by international law, but by the “rule of the gun” … “Our Western partners headed by the United States prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun,” Putin said. “They have come to believe in their exceptionalism and their sense of being the chosen ones. That they can decide the destinies of the world, that it is only they who can be right.”

… Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism … Standards were imposed on these nations that did not in any way correspond to their way of life, traditions, or these peoples’ cultures … They have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders.

Brief excerpts, with English subtitles, from the historic March 18 address in the Kremlin by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. In this fervent, perusasive and forcefully delivered speech, Putin asks Russia’s Federal Council to ratify the annexation of Crimea, discusses his nation’s relations with Ukraine, Europe and the US, and sharply criticizes American policies over the past twenty years.

… Overturning regimes deemed uncooperative or hostile has long been a CIA specialty. Its first big success came in 1953 with the subversion of Iran’s democratic-nationalist leader, Mohammed Mossadegh by a combination of propaganda, rented crowds, and bribes … Nearly all Russians believe Putin is on the right track. By contrast, Washington wants to keep Russia weak and treat it as an obsequious, defeated nation, like postwar Germany or Japan. The US won’t accept that Russia has any legitimate spheres of influence, while Washington’s span the globe.

… Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, Gorbachev maintained that “the end of the Cold War is our common victory.” Yet the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser … In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view … The sad fact is that the cycle of dismissive actions by the United States met by overreactions by Russia has so poisoned the relationship that the sort of quiet diplomacy used to end the Cold War was impossible when the crisis in Ukraine burst upon the world’s consciousness.

If you think the U.S. job market is snapping back, you’re probably not a teenager hunting for work. A report released today uses new statistics and analysis to call attention to an employment decline that’s so big it would be considered a national emergency if it affected people older than age 19 … In 2000, he points out, 45 percent of teens (aged 16 to 19) were employed. By 2011, the last year covered by the study, that ratio had plummeted to 26 percent … “For teenagers, it’s worse than the Great Depression. The question is, why don’t we care?”

… Fuller was more than a brilliant thinker. Of inestimable help in publicizing ideas that demanded a revolutionary change in the conventional British military thinking of the time was Fuller’s gift — one might even use the word genius — for vivid, forceful and persuasive writing … Fuller’s renown is not merely as a military prophet and innovator, nor, obviously, is it due to his commitment to a short-lived political movement. He is remembered today primarily as a masterful writer of history, and as a historian who artfully described the underlying forces behind historical events.

Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington’s foreign policy for years. In the Sunday interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the “Jewish domination of the media,” adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.” “There’s a major lobby in the United States,” Stone said, adding that “they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington.”

… In the estimation of this writer, Vladimir Putin is a blood-and-soil, altar-and-throne ethnonationalist who sees himself as Protector of Russia and looks on Russians abroad the way Israelis look upon Jews abroad, as people whose security is his legitimate concern … America and Russia are on a collision course today over a matter – whose flag will fly over what parts of Ukraine – no Cold War president, from Truman to Reagan, would have considered any of our business.

… We are already seeing Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, demonized for years in the mainstream media, compared to Hitler by no less than Hillary Clinton and a supporting chorus of neocons. We are back in the bunkers and it is 1938 in Munich. Again we are being called on to oppose evil, the same clarion call sounded over every overseas crisis for the past twenty years … So here is the simple truth about Ukraine – we have no genuine national interests there and we are needlessly provoking Russia which does have legitimate interests.

… Such intervention-to-promote democracy is an arrogant, reckless, sophomoric, and war-causing method of conducting international relations, and it is a Satan that has spawned two other war-promoting interventionist causes — human rights and women’s rights. The U.S. and the EU commitment to endless intervention for unobtainable abstract ideals that have nothing to do with their legitimate national security concerns are today the greatest motivation for much of the hatred and violence directed by non-Westerners at American and European citizens and interests.

In the Netflix series “House of Cards,” a bunch of corrupt politicians collude behind closed doors, using parliamentary tricks to rule against the interests of a population they disdain. Needless to say, the show has been a resounding hit in Washington D.C., where real-life legislators have been using smoke and mirrors for years while ignoring the public interest. But the real-life version is not entertaining. It’s a threat to the survival of our republic … Congress is, in effect, delegating its legislative powers to unelected bureaucrats. This means more and more of the people’s lives are controlled by a vast, unelected administrative state.

Weber reviews the profound social-demographic changes in America over the past 60 years, and looks at the factors behind the nation’s drastic transformation. America today is a society in denial, he says in this 21-minute talk, and is therefore unable to come to grips with its deep-rooted ills. As a result, this country’s entrenched problems will remain, the harmful trends will continue, and further social disintegration and national decline are inevitable.

Swastika. The word is a potent one. For more than one billion Hindus it means “wellbeing” and good fortune. For others, the cross with arms bent at right angles will forever symbolise Nazism. Yet England is seemingly awash with swastikas … Swastikas had been found in China, Japan, Mongolia, the ancient Mediterranean, among native Americans and, of course, the British Isles … Jump forward a few thousand years and the swastika motif reappears in England in thriving abundance. Not on rocky outcrops now, but on buildings.

Inside the beltway types and the media constantly refer to Israel as an ally, which it is not. Israeli soldiers have never fought beside American troops and to be an ally you need an actual alliance on paper … Sycophants in congress are also fond of calling Israel Washington’s best or closest friend in spite of the fact that it does actual damage to the United States … Nothing relating to Israel is quite like how the US interacts with other countries. Direct grants, forgiveness of loans, charitable exemptions, and Pentagon co-production schemes all contribute to the dollar costs that go to support Israel, measures that are not in place for any other nation.

Since 2012 the United States has been sending Israel $3.1 billion a year (or an average of $8.5 million a day). US tax dollars are subsidizing one of the most powerful foreign militaries. Recently the Israeli paper “Israel Hayom” reported that the US will give Israel $3.4 billion ($9.3 million per day) in defense aid for the fiscal year 2014 … “Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state …”

… Israel is based on the principle that Jews have rights “goyim” don’t have. Hence its abuse of Arab gentiles and its defiance of Western gentiles. Mark Weber, of the Institute for Historical Review, has summed up the situation in one pithy sentence: “The truth is that if we held Israel to the same standards that we apply to Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel Aviv, and we’d be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians … But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified — and there are many — cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasing … Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in “moral collapse.”

Video journalist Mark Dice published a new man-on-the-street interview … in San Diego, Calif., asking people to sign a fake petition allowing Karl Marx on the 2016 presidential ballot, “since Obama’s been working with him” … [Dice] received more than a dozen signatures in 20 minutes by people eager to see the deceased German political philosopher succeed the president during the next election cycle. “Support Karl Marx for president,” Mr. Dice repeatedly said as one person after another signed the fake petition.

Is America fit for self-government? The attitude and behavior of the seemingly typical Americans shown in this eye-opening video suggests that the answer is No. Mark Dice, a media analyst and author, randomly asks people in southern Calfornia to sign a petition to allow Karl Marx, the German-Jewish writer who died in 1883, to succeed Barack Obama as US president. “We just want to gather signatures showing that the American people are behind Obama and Karl Marx,” says Dice as one man signs. “Show support for Obama and his Communist agenda,” he said to another signer. “Sign here to support the Marxist takeover,” Dice says to yet another.

A major French railway company has been forced to begin negotiations with the U.S. State Department about making payments to Holocaust survivors or risk losing out on a billion dollar contract. The state-owned Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF) runs some of the fastest and most efficient lines in the world but has a dark history which saw it transport thousands of Jews to their deaths in German concentration camps.

A major French railway company has come under renewed scrutiny in the US over its ties to the Holocaust, and billions of dollars are at stake … The company formally apologized in 2011, saying it acted under coercion from the Nazis, but Holocaust survivors in the US are demanding reparations, and lawmakers have sprung into action. This month the Maryland state legislature will debate a bill that would block an SNCF subsidiary from winning a lucrative public transit project unless its parent company pays reparations to Holocaust survivors in the US.

… To me it [the movie “12 Years a Slave”] was like watching a cartoon, as one scene jumped into another without continuity, just clips of horrible whites torturing an innocent black man. Yet it won Best Picture in El Lay, and of course it would, wouldn’t it? Slavery makes Hollywood go weak at its knees, as it’s a moneymaker like no other. Brutal white American Southerners plus black victims of American greed equals lotsa moolah at the box office … The trouble with critics nowadays is they get all their knowledge about life under German occupation from Hollywood. I knew it firsthand for three years. Most German officers acted impeccably, as did simple soldiers.

… Unfortunately, clueless and pernicious claims concerning Russia were also made by Secretary of State John Kerry … He easily forgot that the U.S. has been engaging in exactly such policy all the time, both in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. People are obviously turning schizophrenic: they judge some actions by one set of criteria, while they totally forget their own such as American actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

President Obama has decided to get tough with Russia by imposing sanctions and increasing support for Ukraine’s new government. This is a big mistake. This response is based on the same faulty logic that helped precipitate the crisis. Instead of resolving the dispute, it will lead to more trouble … Washington played a key role in precipitating this dangerous situation, and Mr. Putin’s behavior is motivated by the same geopolitical considerations that influence all great powers, including the United States … The West has few options for inflicting pain on Russia, while Moscow has many cards to play against Ukraine and the West.

… If anything, America’s utter disregard for international law gives license to other powerful countries, like Russia, to behave similarly … And of course there is the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which is a model example of the clearest violation of international law … If America flouts international law as a matter of routine, how can it then turn around and condemn Russia for its own illegal military actions? When people see the actions of Russia, or some other government, as the result of alleged “weakness” on the part of the U.S. for failing to more readily bomb whatever country at the drop of a hat, what they are really advocating is for America to rule the world by force.

… As a journalist who vilified Gibson in The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly until my coverage allowed me to get to know him, I want to make the case here that it is time for those Hollywood agencies and studios to end their quiet blacklisting of Mel Gibson … In his second apology on the anti-Semitic statements, Gibson promised to reach out to Jewish leaders. Gibson followed up by meeting with a wide variety of them … Gibson has quietly donated millions to charitable Jewish causes … Similar to what he told Sawyer, Gibson told me that he believed that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

He is widely regarded as one of Europe’s most influential 20th century philosophers whose writings inspired some of the important thinkers of the modern era. But almost four decades after Martin Heidegger’s death, scholars in Germany and France are asking whether the antisemitic tendencies of the author of Being and Time ran deeper than previously thought … This week’s publication of the “black notebooks” (a kind of philosophical diary that Heidegger asked to be held back until the end of his complete work), challenges this view … Heidegger argues that Weltjudentum (“world Judaism”) is one of the main drivers of western modernity, which he viewed critically.

About 1,500 Latvians on Sunday celebrated Legionnaires Day — which their government abolished in 2000 — by paying tribute to World War II veterans who fought alongside Nazi troops. After a church service in the Lutheran Cathedral in Riga, the capital, the marchers went to the Freedom Monument, where they laid roses in the red and white colors of the Latvian flag, closely watched by police and security guards … Many Latvians honor war veterans on Legionnaires Day, but ethnic Russians who account for about one-third of Latvia’s 2.3 million population, see it as glorifying fascism.

Latvia’s environment minister will be fired after he insisted on participating in the annual commemorations of Latvian soldiers who fought in Nazi units during the Second World War … Cilinskis explained his decision to attend the parade by saying that a “nation that does not respect its heroes has no future”, the Baltic News Service reported. Many Latvians consider the Waffen SS veterans as heroes who fought for independence against the Soviet Union …

Why do so many citizens of a small Baltic country defy harsh international criticism to honor the young men who fought with the “Nazi” Waffen SS during World War II? Who were the Latvians who fought in German uniform along with so many other Europeans against the Allies? Why is March 16 the commemoration day of the Latvian Legion? Runtime: 7:13 mins.

The focus of this paper is the oppression and persecution which the rulers of the Soviet Union inflicted on the Baltic nation of Latvia, from its declaration of independence in 1918 to 1987. The Red Army invaded and occupied Latvia three times in seventy years. Its last aggression, in 1944, resulted in continuing, illegal Soviet occupation of Latvia. Each Soviet incursion was accompanied by mass killings and deportations of Latvians, and Soviet authorities sought to destroy Latvian nationhood by the illegal annexation of Latvia to the USSR and through measures aimed at eradicating the Latvians’ historical, cultural, and religious traditions.

… Though he may write of Harry Truman in 1947, it is Barack Obama and contemporary America at which he [John B. Judis] aims [in his new book, Genesis]. “The underlying problem,” he says, “remains the same: whether an American president and the American people can forthrightly address the conflict of Jew and Arab in the Middle East, or whether they must bow to the demands of a powerful pro-Israel lobby.” These are clearly fighting words … Truman and the United States, according to Judis, had the power to enforce an agreement, and just might have done so if it were not for America’s pro-Zionist lobby. This is the crux of his argument, and to make it, he gives us the history of the lobby’s rise to influence …

… An “insider’s account” of the discussions leading up to these [1947-1948] decisions has been published by former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, one of the few living parties to the discussions leading to partition … Clifford’s story once again disproves the assertion that American diplomatic or military personnel ever viewed Israel as a ” strategic asset.” The foreign policy establishment, 43 years ago as today, saw Israel as a geopolitical liability that owes its US support to the extraordinary clout of its apologists within the American Jewish community and the American political system.

The apparent ability of Israel, one of the world’s smallest countries, to shape the Middle East policies of the world’s remaining superpower has been a source of puzzlement, conjecture, and constant frustration on the part of those fighting for justice for the Palestinians and for the peoples of the region, as a whole … In the arena of foreign policy, no lobby has proved more powerful than that of the organized American Jewish community in support of Israel; what is generally referred to as the Israel Lobby and in the halls of Congress, simply as “the lobby.” Its power is all the more impressive when one realizes the lobby represents no more than a third of America’s six million Jews.

Sorry to burst everyone’s branding bubble, but there is a “Jewish lobby.” It happens to be pro-Israel because it’s Jewish — not the other way around. Jews don’t like hearing non-Jews use the term in public, and perhaps they shouldn’t. But as an interest group, Jews as such are ably represented (most of the time) by a close-knit network of advocacy organizations. Most of these are purely or predominantly Jewish, judging by their branding, supporters and staff

In both domestic and foreign policy, the US has one standard for Israel and the organized Jewish community, and another for non-Jewish humanity. The decades-long US campaign against “Nazi war criminals” underscores the hypocrisy of US policy. When President Truman recognized the newly-founded Israeli state in 1948, he rejected the stern warnings of his own advisors and officials. He put narrow, partisan interests ahead of the interests of the US and the world, and betrayed the principles that he and other American leaders claim to support. This was the “original sin” of US Middle East policy.

Opinions vary with respect to the ongoing conflict in Iraq, but we can all agree that the struggle for Europe, 1939-45, was “the Good War.” Or can we? Not if Pat Buchanan is right, and he presents a serious argument in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, one of the finest achievements of his career. His principal thesis is that the war guarantee given to Poland by the British government on March 31, 1939, turned a German-Polish confrontation into a general European war, one that led to the death of millions (including victims of the Holocaust) and to destruction on an unimaginable scale.

… On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry … We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938 … The two books … are Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke … Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief. If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident.

World War II is widely considered one of the most morally unambiguous military conflicts in history — the quintessential “Good War,” as journalist Studs Terkel once described it… At the same time, 60 years of research and reflection have gradually brought to light numerous aspects of this conflict that do not fit a straightforward pattern of black-and- white moral clarity… Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo — entire cities, tens of thousands of noncombatant civilians at a time, incinerated or blasted to bits under a steady torrent of British and American bombs. The large-scale killing of children, women and old people had now become routine facets of Allied warfare.

… Russia and China are great power rivals and antagonists, not the monster regimes of the Cold War that massacred millions. We must deal with them, and they don’t take direction from Uncle Sam. As for Iran, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies say it has no nuclear weapons program … Last fall, Lindsey Graham was shopping around a resolution for a U.S. war on Iran. What became of that brainstorm? After Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans are weary of what all this bellicosity inevitably brings.

… So there is no question in my mind that the United States has a responsibility to act. But what Obama is doing is exactly the opposite from what should be done in my view … I think that what we need to do is to tone down our rhetoric and to think seriously about what our objectives are. I do not see how more autonomy for Crimea would affect negatively fundamental American national interests … I would try to approach Putin, the Ukrainian government, and I would try to negotiate a comprehensive deal … We are speaking very loudly. We are carrying a small stick … We are not clearly defining what is important to us … We are issuing pathetic declarations which nobody is taking seriously.

… The crisis in Ukraine is a product of Russia’s desire to restore control over Crimea and of Ukraine’s deep social and political divisions. But in a manner more reckless than feckless, the Obama administration has made matters worse at each step … An administration that entered office determined to rebuild America’s image has instead further marred it, discouraged allies, and emboldened foes — grand talk and no action … In the end, China’s rise is much more significant than Crimea’s fate, and the United States should avoid reacting to the Ukraine crisis in ways that could severely undermine its ability to manage this paramount priority.

Starting at the end of January, several press items reported on an academic article published in the December edition of the quarterly magazine Endeavour … that Nazi scientists wanted to use mosquitos as insect vector for the delivery of malaria plasmodium protozoans … Geissler, now a retired professor in molecular biology and genetics … basically debunked the myth that the SS was conducting a secret offensive biological warfare programme against Hitler’s explicit orders not to investigate such weapons … There is no evidence of [such] offensive biological warfare research in Germany …

A long-suppressed report written in June 1945 by the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service shows that American military leaders made plans for a massive preemptive poison gas attack to accompany an invasion of Japan. The 30-page document designated “gas attack zones” on detailed maps of Tokyo and other major Japanese cities. Army planners selected 50 urban and industrial targets in Japan, with 25 cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Kobe and Kyoto, listed as “especially suitable for gas attacks.”

During World War II, some of Hollywood’s most accomplished directors left at the height of their careers to join the US armed forces. They weren’t there to fight, but to document the war and broadcast images of the battlefield to the American public back home. Their short films and newsreels were shown across the country during a time when going to the movies was a weekly occurrence for many and was seen as a source of both news and entertainment. In his new book Five Came Back, author Mark Harris tells the stories of five directors – John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler and Frank Capra – and how their films shaped the way the American public experienced the war.

Decades of deceitful motion pictures have done much to produce a misinformed and compliant American public. A notable example of such film deceit is “Mission to Moscow,” a major Hollywood production made with White House backing, that portrays Soviet dictator Stalin and the Soviet Russian regime as benevlolent, peace-loving and trustworthy. Another good example is the “Why We Fight” series of documentary-style films produced by the US War Department, which have been viewed by millions. Made during World War II, these seven films use staged scenes and fake quotations to present a grossly distorted view of history and the world.

In 1981, Jack Glenn, director of the popular 1940’s newsreel series “March of Time” died at age 76. His obituary … let slip an amazing revelation: “As senior director for the popular movie house newsreel, he often created world events with actors and movie sets. One such news feature film, Inside Nazi Germany, made in 1938, included footage of a `concentration camp’ that was filmed on Staten Island with scores of New York City actors…” Millions of Americans watching the “news”-reels in their local theatres were convinced that they were seeing “the real thing.” How many such images of “reality” that we see on a regular basis are actually the creation of movie magicians?

Thirty-eight times in recent years the French authorities have charged the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala with violating anti-hate laws. The government has urged cities and towns to ban his performances, and some have done so, canceling his sold-out shows. Senior officials have condemned him as an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier who is inciting hatred. Yet the campaign against him shows few signs of succeeding … The attempts to silence Mr. M’bala M’bala seem to have fueled support for him among his core audience: a social and racial cross section of French people who feel shortchanged by a ruling elite.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday launched a frontal assault on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. “One movement that’s definitely on the wrong side of the moral divide is the movement to boycott Israel, the so-called BDS,” Netanyahu told the cheering delegates … “Those who wear the BDS label should be treated exactly as we treat any anti-Semite or bigot. They should be exposed and condemned. The boycotters should be boycotted.” This speech is Netanyahu’s highest profile attack on BDS … In recent months, top ministers in Netanyahu’s government have repeatedly declared that BDS is the “greatest threat” Israel faces.

Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea have reached new depths of self parody … From a longer-term perspective, the crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s … And contrary to undertakings given at the time, the US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded Nato up to Russia’s borders, incorporating nine former Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics into what is effectively an anti-Russian military alliance in Europe.

… The Obama Administration’s policy toward Ukraine is hypocritical. The overthrow of the government in Kiev by violent street protests was called a triumph of democracy, but when the elected parliament in autonomous Crimea voted last week to hold a referendum to decide its future, President Obama condemned it as a violation of international law. What about the principle of self-determination, which is also enshrined in international law? I have long thought that a referendum to reorganize Ukraine into a looser confederation of regions might help reduce tensions.

The escalating crisis in Ukraine has set off reckless missile-rattling in this country … We should take a deep breath — and a sober look— before committing treasure and prestige to a still-unsettled new leadership in a country on Russia’s border, one that has had a fragile independent existence for barely two decades. Some history would also serve us well if we’re to understand fast-moving developments. We are reaping the bitter fruit of a deeply flawed post–Cold War settlement that looks more like Versailles than Bretton Woods, a settlement inflamed by the shortsighted American decision to expand NATO eastward and pursue other policies aimed at isolating Russia and ignoring Russian interests.

… And Putin? After 13 years in power, and facing a crisis in Ukraine, he directed his soldiers in the Crimea to take control of the small peninsula where Russia has berthed its Black Sea fleet since Napoleon. To the Wall Street Journal this is a “blitzkrieg.” But as of now, this is a less bloody affair than Andrew Jackson’s acquisition of our Florida peninsula … If there is a Cold War II, or a U.S.-Russia war, historians of tomorrow will as surely point to the Bushes and Clintons who shoved NATO into Moscow’s face, as historians today point to the men of Paris who imposed the Versailles treaty upon a defeated Germany in 1919.

A new poll suggests Americans have very little appetite for any real involvement in the crisis in Ukraine. Only 29 percent of Americans would like for the Obama administration to take a “firm stand” against Russia’s incursion into its neighbor, according to the Pew Research Center poll, while nearly twice as many — 56 percent — prefer the United States not to get too involved in Ukraine. Another 15 percent did not have an opinion. The poll reflects a war-weary American public that is still very reticent to get involved in international conflicts.

… And Skurnik was not the only Jew fighting on the side of the Germans. More than 300 found themselves in league with the Nazis when Finland, who had a mutual enemy in the Soviet Union, joined the war in June 1941. The alliance between Hitler and the race he vowed to annihilate — the only instance of Jews fighting for Germany’s allies — is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Second World War, and yet hardly anyone, including many Finns, know anything about it.

After a visit to the Eastern front in occupied Soviet territory, Hitler flies to Finland for a historic meeting on June 4, 1942, with Finland’s great commander, Marshal Mannerheim, on his 75th birthday, and with Finnish president Ryti. Portion of the weekly German wartime newsreel, “Deutsche Wochenschau” of June 11, 1942. With English subtitles. Runtime: 5:26 mins.

… Next year may be the first since at least 1914 that British soldiers, sailors and air crews will not be engaged in fighting somewhere – the first time Britain is totally at peace with the rest of the world. Since Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in August 1914, not a year has passed without its forces being involved in conflict. It is a statistic that has been largely overlooked, and not one about which the government is likely to boast … No other country, even those with similarly militaristic traditions, has been engaged continuously over such a long span.

… British troops have been in action somewhere in the world every year since 1914. It is an extraordinary and chilling record, unmatched by any other country. Only France, Britain’s historic rival colonial power, and the US, at the head of the first truly global empire, come close … There are in fact only a handful of countries British troops haven’t invaded at some point.

… I have argued unceasingly here that the World War Two myth has made serious discussion of foreign policy very difficult. So few people really understand what happened during that era, but that does not stop them from believing that they do. Thus they say idiotic things, over and over again. Worse, they think these things are clever.

Citing little-known reports and remarks of Polish, British and French officials, and other evidence, Weber traces President Franklin Roosevelt’s secret campaign to provoke war in Europe prior to the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939. By pressing Britain, France and Poland into war against Germany, the US President bears at least some responsibility for World War II. Weber also discusses the role of Jewish power and influence on US foreign policy during those years. Roosevelt’s record of deceit, lies and lawlessness is routinely suppressed by those who control the US media and American cultural life.

Of the approximately half-million titles issued by mainline American publishers in the 1980s, Wartime by Professor Paul Fussell is one of a small selection which a revisionist might profit from reading … It used to be a conviction generations ago that the only certainty upon the outbreak of war was that one side would not win. Modern wars are mainly lost by both sides, though it takes awhile for this to be realized … All times are disorderly. The notion that human affairs move in the direction of something called “normalcy” is a hallucination.

This has been a big week for Bitcoin. On Monday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held the first- ever Congressional hearing on Bitcoin. Later in the day, the currency’s value reached an all-time high of more than $800. That has left a lot of people scratching their heads. What’s Bitcoin? How do you use it? And why would anyone want to? Read on for answers … Why would anyone use a payment network based on an imaginary currency? … Where do bitcoins come from? … Should I buy bitcoins?

France’s Jewish Defense League has published a eulogy of Baruch Goldstein that celebrates a massacre he perpetrated against Palestinian worshipers in Hebron 20 years ago. The group, known locally as Ligue de Defense Juive or LDJ, posted the eulogy on its website ahead of the February 25 anniversary of the massacre during which Goldstein, a US-born physician, shot dead 29 Palestinians while they were praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs … LDJ officials say the group has several hundred members in France. The group adheres to the doctrines of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a radical Jewish-Israeli nationalist who was born in the United States.

…Under these various names, Jewish activists for 15 years have unceasingly sown terror [in France] with total impunity. Provocations that have no other aim than to incite reprisals. As if certain people wanted the [French] Jewish community to feel threatened … The victims of the 50 cases listed by Le Choc du mois, who number in the hundreds, suffered: loss of life, an eye put out, acid throwing, numerous hospitalizations, injuries followed by deep coma, lifetime disabilities, and serious post-traumatic conditions, “the commission of barbaric acts,” severe beatings in the presence of policemen who refused to intervene, and numerous ambush attacks …

The tradition of thought with which George Kennan (1904-2005) is most often identified is that of political realism. That tradition appears to most Americans to be rather foreign, incompatible with new world enlightenment and morality … A prudent foreign policy was one that accepted the realities of power and interest and strove to keep the inevitable conflicts between nations within tolerable limits. Such a policy could be successful only if it took as its guiding principle the national interest … Realism meant something else as well: a rejection of any idea of American “exceptionalism” or messianism, any claim that superior virtue placed upon Americans a redemptive burden on a global scale.

… Kennan was the ultimate realist about the country that he alternately loved and loathed … His diaries. They are rife with ruminations about the horrors of unbridled democracy, vulgarian culture and deracination … During his time as a government official Kennan had often witnessed how the principles of good policy were undermined by the short-term thinking of elected politicians, and he had concluded from the experience that democracies were inherently incapable of devising and pursuing rational strategy.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s tiresome vilification of Iran has taken on the characteristics of a rote obsession that diverges farther and farther from truth, reality, and his own ostensible objective … Falsehoods continue to flow out of Netanyahu’s mouth on this subject. Maybe the technique of getting people to believe something if it is repeated often enough is working, as reflected by some of the same falsehoods coming out of the mouths of members of Congress. He referred, for example, to the need for pressure to get Iranians to “abandon their nuclear weapons program.” … Glaringly absent from the tirade was any of the perspective of a person living in a glass house who should be careful about not throwing stones.

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and the Jewish-Zionist “amen corner” in the US insist that Iran must not be allowed to acquire even the capability of developing a nuclear weapon, and they threaten war to keep that from happening. But diplomats, military leaders, scholars and specialists are warning of the catastrophic consequences of any military strike against Iran. Most Americans have been pursuaded to believe — mistakenly — that Iran already has nuclear weapons, and poses a grave threat to America and the world.

… As everyone here recognizes, the future of the United States is tied to the future of Israel. This is something that every President since Harry Truman has understood … President Obama has remained true to this proud legacy since the first day he took office, and he has made it clear that for him and for this Administration, America’s commitment to Israel is ironclad. As he said as President-elect, before he even took office: “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is nonnegotiable.” And he has never wavered from that position … A strong and secure Israel is vital to America’s strength and America’s security.

The US government’s “Office of Antiboycott Compliance” is charged with administering and enforcing the Antiboycott Laws under the Export Administration Act. Those laws discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, and certain other countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott … What do the Laws Prohibit? Conduct that may be penalized under the TRA and/or prohibited under the EAR includes: Agreements to refuse or actual refusal to do business with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.

Secret files have revealed the astonishing level of ingratitude shown towards the British by Charles de Gaulle for defeating the Nazis and liberating France … Winston Churchill personally apologised for the arrest, but de Gaulle blamed the British. MI5 papers say he became ‘incurably suspicious’ of his British allies. In May 1945, shortly after VE Day, de Gaulle – by then head of the provisional government in Paris – summoned the British ambassador. He told him: ‘We are not in a position at present to open hostilities against you, but you have insulted France and betrayed the West. This cannot be forgotten’.

Here’s a change Obama can make by executive order: redesign the “new” U.S. passport adopted by the State Department in the late Bush years … While the cover is still in basic blue, what unfolds now inside is a whole tie-dyed history of the United States. On nearly all of its 26 multicolored pages, there are quotes from great Americans, usually presidents, or at least their speechwriters, pumping up America … Something about this passport doth seem to protest too much. Page after page, it starts to seem neurotic. A border guard might begin to wonder whether we’re as wonderful and democratic as we insist we are.

A Russian philosophy professor says he is being forced from his job at a prestigious state university after comparing Moscow’s actions in Ukraine with Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. In an opinion article published on the daily Vedomosti’s website on Saturday, Andrei Zubov said Russia was on the verge of war and added: “We must not behave the way Germans once behaved, based on the promises of Goebbels and Hitler.” … Many Russians including Putin view victory in World War II as their country’s proudest moment of the 20th century, and the government bristles at any comparison of the Soviet Union or Russia with Hitler’s Germany.

The Sound of Music is a popular, tuneful and enduring American film. But its portrayal of history, and especially its depiction of the 1938 union of Austria with the German Reich is a gross distortion of reality. In fact, the vast majority of Austrians joyfully welcomed the union (Anschluss) of their homeland with National Socialist Germany, and strongly, even enthusiastically, supported the Hitler government. Runtime: 48:21 mins.

The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to US national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines — particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin — is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm.

Since World War II – and extending well into the Twenty-first Century – the United States has invaded or otherwise intervened in so many countries that it would be challenging to compile a complete list. Just last decade, there were full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, plus American bombing operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Libya … Are Kerry and pretty much everyone else in Official Washington so lacking in self-awareness that they don’t realize that they are condemning actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin that are far less egregious than what they themselves have done?

… Far from being the final episode of the Cold War, the events in Ukraine reflect fundamental geopolitical realities that stretch far back in history, long before World War I and the Russian Revolution. Ukraine was fated by geography and history — perhaps tragically — to be at the epicenter of any tensions between Russia and the West … George Will and President Obama and Victoria Nuland may think they are dealing with a simple moral question of democracy over autocracy and that Yanukovych’s ouster represents a big step forward for the good guys in a kind of mini-Cold War drama. But that’s not what it’s about, and the geopolitical imperatives involved, far greater for Russia than for the West, ultimately will drive events in Ukraine.

A familiar clutch of hawks have taken wing over the rapidly developing crisis in Ukraine, as neo-conservatives and other interventionists claim that President Barack Obama’s preference for diplomacy over military action invited Russian aggression … Israel-centred neo-conservatives, for whom Obama’s “weakness” and “appeasement” in dealing with perceived adversaries have become a mantra over the past five years, have been quick to use the Ukraine crisis to argue for toughening Washington’s position in the Middle East, in particular.

Competing rallies in Russia’s two biggest cities have laid bare divisions among Russians over a possible military intervention in Ukraine … Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that his country had the right to invade neighboring Ukraine. Lawmakers unanimously authorized him to use force. Ordinary Russians, however, appear divided over the prospect of a war with Ukraine. Independent opinions polls conducted before the crisis show that an overwhelming majority of Russians opposed Russian meddling in Ukrainian politics as well as a possible military intervention in the country. But the state-controlled media’s relentless portrayal of Euromaidan protesters as Western-funded extremists appears to be turning the tide.

A rift appeared to be opening up on Monday night between the US and Europe on how to punish Vladimir Putin for his occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, with European capitals resisting Washington’s push towards tough sanctions. With the Americans, supported by parts of eastern Europe and Sweden, pushing for punitive measures against Moscow, European Union foreign ministers divided into hawks and doves, preferring instead to pursue mediation and monitoring of the situation in Ukraine and to resist a strong sanctions package against Russia.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday compared recent actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine to those implemented by Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. Putin’s desire to protect minority Russians in Ukraine is reminiscent of Hitler’s actions to protect ethnic Germans outside Germany, she said … “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” she said. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

A California state appeals court has upheld the conviction of ten students at the University of California, Irvine, who disrupted a 2010 speech by then-Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren. During the speech, the protesters interrupted Oren repeatedly, calling him a “mass murderer” and a “war criminal.” The heckling caused him to pause his speech amid calls for order, and he curtailed his hourlong speech to twelve minutes. In 2011, the students were charged and subsequently convicted of violating a state law prohibiting the disruption or breaking up of a lawful assembly. The appeals court upheld the conviction. The defendants face up to a year in prison.

… Anyone watching the Oscars on Sunday – or reading/watching news Monday morning – knows that 12 Years a Slave earned the Academy Award for Best Picture. But when the star-studded cast and director crowded the stage at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre to accept their trophies, it was evident that film producer and Israeli spy Arnon Milchan – who stood with them – also won big. Though Milchan, an Israeli citizen, admitted in November that he engaged in espionage against the U.S for many years, including helping to smuggle American nuclear bomb parts to Israel, his appearance at the Oscars was pretty much proof not all spies are treated equally.

Walt Disney was one of the great American artists of the 20th century. This needs to be recognised. So here I am, Walt, coming to the rescue, aided by an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris that celebrates Disney’s films as visual art … What Disney actually achieved was not to diffuse an American banality worldwide but, in a world that was becoming ever more banal and forgetful, to preserve the old oral storytelling of the pre-industrial world. Few artists have done as much as Disney to humanise modernity; the magical proof of this is one of his last films.

“My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza,” says British Jewish Zionist MP Gerald Kaufman, in a speech to the House of Commons, Jan. 15, 2009. “The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count … Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism …”

A Jewish member of Britain’s parliament accused Israel of exploiting Holocaust guilt to justify its actions in the Gaza Strip. “The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians,” Sir Gerald Kaufman, a veteran MP of the governing Labour Party and a long-time critic of Israel, said Thursday [Jan. 15, 2009] in parliament.

These kinds of atrocities, and particularly the scale of the repression, did not spring full-blown out of some terrorist provocations by Palestinians. These atrocities grew out of a political philosophy that says whatever advances the interests of Jews is acceptable as policy. This is a racist philosophy. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism.

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said on Monday that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is “the 21st century form of 20th century anti-Semitism.” “It is the same manifestation, except [it is] attacking the collective Jew – Israel – rather than the individual Jew as we saw 70 years ago,” Hoenlein said at a press conference in Jerusalem. The fact that it is not politically correct to say “I’m hate Jews” but is seemingly okay to say “I hate Israel” should not be used to cover up the fact that both statements mean the same thing, he added.

… The Founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, now officially designated here as “the Visionary of the State”, envisioned the total disappearance of the Diaspora … In his diaries, which are of high literary value, Herzl did not hide his contempt for the Diaspora Jews. Some passages are positively anti-Semitic … A bill now being debated in the Knesset would overturn the present doctrine of Israel being a “Jewish and democratic state” and replace it with the doctrine that Israel is “the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

A critical look at Zionism as an ideology and as a social-political movement. The IHR director reviews its origins and history, including the little-known story of Zionist collaboration with Third Reich Germany during the 1930s. Citing statements by Jewish and Israeli leaders, Weber notes that the essence of Zionism is its view of Jews as a distinct people or nationality, with interests separate from those of non-Jews. Zionists, he explains, insist that Jews everywhere owe a primary loyalty to Israel and the world Jewish community.

An autographed two-volume set of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf has sold at auction in Los Angeles for $64,850. The books date from 1925 and 1926 and were purchased by an anonymous US buyer, auctioneer Nate Sanders said. Hitler inscribed the cloth-bound volumes, one a first edition and the other a second, to Josef Bauer, an early Nazi party member and SS officer. The Nazi leader offered Bauer his best wishes in the Christmas season.

The surging crisis in Ukraine is a dramatic example of how wars begin. Take arrogance, toxic nationalism, tribalism, moral outrage and profound miscalculation, mix thoroughly, and, voilà!, another great leap forward in the march of human folly … On my last assignment in Crimea, it was clear that most of its people desired reunification with Russia. Equally important, Sevastopol is Russia’s second most important naval base, and its gateway to the Mediterranean … The West and Moscow are trading accusation of meddling in Ukraine. In truth, both are busy stirring the pot, a dangerous game that has brought NATO and Russia to the brink of armed confrontation.

… Yes, Russia has interfered, but it is not Russian interference that has created Ukrainian disunity but rather the haphazard way the country was assembled from parts that were not always mutually compatible. To the flaw at the inception of an independent Ukraine, one must add the baleful effects of the Soviet Communist heritage both Russia and Ukraine have inherited … Some Basics 1. The current territory of the Ukrainian state was assembled, not by Ukrainians themselves but by outsiders, and took its present form following the end of World War II. To think of it as a traditional or primordial whole is absurd … 2. The lumping together of people with strikingly different historical experience and comfortable in different (though closely related) languages, underlies the current divisions.

An unfortunate legacy of the Cold War is the negative attitude some American conservatives yet harbor toward Russia. Conditioned for decades to see Russia and the Soviet Union as synonymous, they still view post-communist Russia as a threat … The world has turned upside down. America, condemning and even attacking other countries to push “democracy” and Jacobinical definitions of human rights, is becoming the leader of the international Left. Russia is reasserting her historic role as leader of the international Right. This is a reversal of historic importance. American foreign policy should be based on America’s interests, not on affinity for any foreign power. But putting America first does not require being hostile to Russia or anyone else. On the contrary: American conservatives should welcome the resurgence of a conservative Russia.

… President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.” Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is “in direct, overt violation of international law.” Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the antithesis of international law … Today, Uncle Sam continues to preen as the globe’s big sheriff on the side of international law even while functioning as the world’s biggest outlaw.

With Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of Russian troops into Crimea, our war hawks are breathing fire. Russophobia is rampant and the op-ed pages are ablaze here. Barack Obama should tune them out, and reflect on how Cold War presidents dealt with far graver clashes with Moscow … What is the U.S. vital interest in Crimea? Zero. From Catherine the Great to Khrushchev, the peninsula belonged to Russia. The people of Crimea are 60 percent ethnic Russians. And should Crimea vote to secede from Ukraine, upon what moral ground would we stand to deny them the right, when we bombed Serbia for 78 days to bring about the secession of Kosovo?

… It would have been a no-brainer that Russia would use military force, if necessary, to counter attempts to use economic enticement and subversive incitement to slide Ukraine into the orbit of the West and eventually NATO … In sum, the Nulands of this world have bit off far more than they can chew; they need to be reined in before they cause even more dangerous harm. Broader issues than Ukraine are at stake. Like it or not, the United States can benefit from a cooperative relationship with Putin’s Russia – the kind of relationship that caused Putin to see merit last summer in pulling Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire on Syria, for example, and in helping address thorny issues with Iran.

Large protest marches calling for intervention in Ukraine took place on Sunday across Russia amid an increasingly strident propaganda campaign by Kremlin-controlled media aimed at boosting support for military action. Thousands of people carrying Russian flags marched through Moscow shouting their solidarity with ethnic Russians in Ukraine and denouncing the new regime in Kiev. Many said they favored deploying the armed forces … The rallies, which also took place in St Petersburg and other Russian cities, come amid an increasingly hysterical propaganda campaign conducted by state media depicting spiraling chaos in Ukraine and brazen Western meddling.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House tomorrow [March 3], President Barack Obama will tell him that his country could face a bleak future — one of international isolation and demographic disaster — if he refuses to endorse a U.S.-drafted framework agreement for peace with the Palestinians. Obama will warn Netanyahu that time is running out for Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy. And the president will make the case that Netanyahu, alone among Israelis, has the strength and political credibility to lead his people away from the precipice.

… Washington’s political class has wholeheartedly and uncritically adopted both the Israel-centric jargon and also Tel Aviv’s skewed perceptions of Middle Eastern realities, producing the unique spectacle of a great global power doing everything possible to placate a tiny client state. Pandering to Israel will be on full display at the AIPAC conference … As has sometimes been noted, Washington had no enemies in the post-colonial Middle East before Israel was founded in 1948. Now it has few friends. Washington’s close embrace with Tel Aviv has been fostered by a mainstream media unwilling to be too critical of Israel’s actions.

… The Jewish denial that Hollywood is controlled by Jews is a great lie which can be attested to by anyone who has ever been associated with the film industry … It is positively insulting for them to deny their influence and power — particularly when they themselves are continually boasting in their own circles about their “overrepresentation” in these fields. And it is absolutely infuriating when this denial reaches the point that non-Jews are attacked by Jewish agitators and Zionist zealots for stating obvious facts and truth.

… The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews … As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day … I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.

American Jews invented Hollywood movies, from “Superman” to “Schindler’s List,” in order to take over the world, according to a program aired on Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV [Lebanon] and translated by MEMRI … The program made special mention of “Schindler’s List” as well as of German-Jewish pioneer filmmaker Carl Laemmle … Laemmle ”worked to keep Hollywood in Jewish hands only,” the narrator went on, adding that “this influence continues to this day.”

According to an Al-Manar [Lebanon] TV report, titled “Jews, Movies, Hollywoodism, and the American Dream” and broadcast on Feb. 10, 2014, Hollywood was a Jewish invention, the goals of which were “to take over the greatest superpower in the world, to control all aspects of its daily life, and to harness it in the service of Jewish goals worldwide.” Four-minute video from the television report, with English subtitles, and text excerpts.

One person’s listing, with his explanations, of the top 15 composers of all time, in “ascending” order: Franz Joseph Haydn, George Frederick Handel, Sergei Rachmaninov, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Gustav Mahler, Giuseppe Verdi, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann, Franz Schubert, Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach.

… At the press conference held at Tasnim News Agency on Sunday, Finkelstein started off by talking about his perspective on Iran … “As I went past the surface and started talking to people, I discovered the strangest thing about Iran, which is ‘Iran is a perfectly normal country’,” he said. There was nothing unusual about Iran, if someone just got off the plane and took a bus to his hotel and started walking around, he said, adding they would discover quickly that Iranians are a bit “more polite” than other places and a “little less aggressive”. He added that the crazy hysteria created about Iran in the West is a total lunacy …

… In the [just published] book [titled Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare], Porter thoroughly debunks the whole narrative of the Iran nuclear dossier as sold to the world by the George W Bush administration, assorted neo-cons and the Israeli Likud … This catalogue of disinformation during the 1970s and 1980s is now mirrored by the disinformation of all these past few years about the Iranian nuclear program. No wonder most Americans – and plenty of Europeans – remain clueless.

The propaganda that continues to flourish for war on Syria shows many Americans fail to understand the problems posed by “U.S. Empire-building,” believing it to be an altruistic force, toppling other governments and starting wars for the good of all mankind. Two recent articles in the New York Times … are typical of the concerted efforts underway to ramp up U.S. military intervention … It’s no secret that the U.S. has a long history of toppling governments that it doesn’t like, even democratically elected ones.

… It is a mistake to assess the success or failure of U.S. foreign policy based on an image of the United States as an omnipotent global savior or policeman. We ought to bear this principle in mind in contemplating policy about problems anywhere on the globe. It certainly should be borne in mind with the Middle East, where there is a still fairly recent history of forceful U.S. action doing more harm than good, and a more distant history of the actions of outside powers in general also doing harm.

… Add to these the operations of an organized propaganda capable, apparently, of doping Americans into belief in any myth, and there is formidable reason why public opinion should be so stupefied and stultified that the nation can be led from war to war in pursuit of ever retreating goals. Yet, despite the general numbness, Americans, surveying the results of half a century of intermeddling, dimly perceive that all is not well.

The sweep of Europe’s history over six thousand years shown through a changing political map of the continent, graphically tracing the many drastic shifts in power to the present day. Runtime: 3:16 mins.
 

A group commissioned by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to promote “a just peace in Israel/Palestine” publishes a study guide that includes depictions of Zionism as a heresy at the root of the Middle East crisis. Meanwhile, a major governing body recommends that the church pull its investments in three corporations linked to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. The two actions, while taking place separately in recent weeks, drew praise from advocates for Palestinians but have combined to roil already-tense relations between Presbyterians and Jews … Among national Jewish groups, the Anti-Defamation League said the study guide may be the “most anti-Semitic document to come out of a mainline American church in recent memory” …

… Western critics focus on Israel because, unlike countries such as North Korea or Iran, Israel has managed to avoid any penalties despite riding roughshod over international norms for decades. Iran, which is only suspected of secretly developing nuclear weapons, has been enduring years of savage sanctions. Israel, which has hidden its large stockpile of nuclear warheads from international scrutiny since the late 1960s, has enjoyed endless diplomatic cover … Israel has not only evaded accountability, it has been handsomely rewarded by the US and Europe for flouting international conventions in its treatment of the Palestinians.

Our uniquely massive support for Israel has cost trillions of dollars and multitudes of lives. It has diminished our moral standing in the world, lessened our domestic freedoms, and exposed us to unnecessary and growing peril. The majority of Americans – as well as our diplomatic and military experts — oppose this unique relationship. Yet, the lobby for Israel continues to foment policies that are disastrous for our nation and tragic for the region … Below are the facts: …

In Barack Obama’s first weeks in office, in a series of executive orders and public statements, the new president and former professor of constitutional law promised to make sweeping changes in the way government operated in a number of specific areas. But has he kept his pledges? Let’s consider four of them: Ending Torture; Closing Guantanamo; Ending unnecessary secrecy; An end to war without limits … Five years into his presidency, it’s clear Obama has failed to keep promises he claimed were at the heart of his approach to governance.

… Although the Soviet empire, including its Warsaw Pact alliance, disbanded beginning in 1989, Republican and Democratic presidents have pursued aggressively anti-Russian policies up to the present … The United States should steer clear of Ukraine. It is none of the U.S. government’s business whether that country is economically closer to Russia or the European Union (EU). The Obama administration should not only forswear direct and covert intervention, it should also shut up. American presidents must learn to mind their own business, even where Russia is concerned.

… Outside influences aren’t the driving force. They aren’t “orchestrated” by the west as American-German freelance journalist William Engdahl suggests. Rather, elements in the west are trying to co-opt and direct a homegrown, and genuine ethno-nationalist, protest. Significantly, opposition candidates favored by the West have no standing with the protesters … Far from bolstering or “orchestrating” the protests, Western support and perceptions of Western support actually undermine them by playing into one of the two effective messages of Kremlin propaganda: that the protests are a Western creation and/or the protesters are neo-Nazis.

It’s time for the United States to surrender on Syria. The embattled government of Bashar al-Assad hasn’t won the war, exactly, but it’s demonstrated that it isn’t going anywhere. The rebels, increasingly dominated by hard-core Islamists and Al Qaeda types, aren’t fit to take over. For Washington, the only way out of the crisis, other than to give up the fight, would be conduct a military operation on the scale of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and not only would that be a regional disaster for the United States, Syria and its neighbors, but it’s also out of the question, politically.

… It is little surprise that the discovery of the diary of Rosenberg, which had been missing since the Nuremberg trials, excited staunch believers in the official Holocaust narrative. In fact, had the Holocaust occurred as generally understood and as relayed through many books, films, and museums, the Rosenberg Diary should have contained a wealth of horrifying discoveries … But the diary contains no such evidence. There is no justification of brutal policies; in fact, there is no mention of an order for extermination. There is no mention of gas chambers. There is no suggestion that Rosenberg was even aware of such policies.

Buchenwald is widely regarded as one of wartime Germany’s most notorious “death camps.” In fact, though, this carefully cultivated image bears little resemblance to reality … The camp deserves another, more objective look.
 

Peeling paint, empty rusting beds and overgrown grounds – these chilling images show the abandoned hospital which counted Adolf Hitler among its patients. Beelitz Heilstatten, a sanitorium outside Berlin, is a 60-building complex which opened in 1902 … It was turned into a military hospital during the First World War and in 1916 a young Adolf Hitler was admitted to a ward while he recovered from a thigh wound he sustained after being shot during the Battle of the Somme.