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Afghanistan has enjoyed little more than a month of peace and U.S. policymakers are proposing to plunge that nation back into civil war … Of course, that is just fine with denizens of the nation’s capital. After all, being a member of the Washington war party means getting to decide that “the price is worth it” and never having to say you are sorry no matter how many people die. You can start multiple wars that kill hundreds of thousands and displace millions of civilians and never pay a professional price. You can advocate bombing, invading, occupying, and ravaging country after country, and you will still be treated as a respected member of the Washington community … Americans should not be surprised that the Taliban, unloved but representing the end of constant war, returned to power.

… The above map breaks down the most innovative countries in each World Bank income group, based on data from WIPO’s Global Innovation Index (GII), which evaluates nations across 80 innovation indicators like research and development (R&D), venture capital, and high-tech production. While wealthier nations continue to lead global innovation, the GII also shows that middle-income countries — particularly in Asia — are making impressive strides … Switzerland, Sweden, and the U.S. are the top three in the high-income group. Considering that Switzerland has the second-highest GDP per capita globally, it is not a surprise leader on this list. Upper middle-income countries are led by China, Malaysia, and Bulgaria. Note that China far surpasses other nations in the upper-middle-income group ranking …

… Yet one senses today that Europe’s role in world history is passing, that the American pivot to China and the Indo-Pacific is both historic and permanent, and that as the past belongs to Europe, the future belongs to Asia. Asia, after all, is home to the world’s most populous nations, China and India; to six of the world’s nine nuclear powers; and to almost all of its major Muslim nations: Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey and Iran, as well as to the world’s largest economies outside the USA: China and Japan … Not only is the center of political gravity shifting from Europe to Asia, European unity seems a thing of the past.

Addressing the UN General Assembly for the first time Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett hinted as possible military action against Iran, accusing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program of crossing “all red lines.” “Iran’s nuclear program has hit a watershed moment. And so has our tolerance,” Bennett said. “Words do not stop centrifuges from spinning.” Bennett cited Iran’s recent move to enrich some uranium at 60 percent as one of the “red lines.” But 60 percent is still below the 90 percent needed for weapons-grade uranium, and Tehran only increased enrichment to such levels in response to an Israeli attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility … If the Israelis really cared about Tehran’s enrichment levels, it would favor a US return to the JCPOA since would limit Iran’s enrichment level to 3.67 percent.

Anniversaries offer opportunities for reflection. The 20th anniversary of 9/11 should elicit second thoughts galore. The rollercoaster of history finds Americans today more than a little confused. To put it mildly, things weren’t supposed to turn out this way. The great crusade launched with considerable fanfare in September 2001 has stalled. That 20 years after 9/11, the Taliban have once more seized power in Kabul must surely rate as one of the preeminent ironies of the past century. Addressing the nation in January 2002, President George W. Bush had promised a different outcome … Our generals were expected to deliver those victories. As the abysmal outcome of the Afghanistan War reminds us, they came up short.

Afghanistan’s US-run government was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium, morphine, and the end-product, heroin. As it did after first seizing power in the mid-1990’s, Taliban, the Islamic anti-drug and anti-communist movement, is shutting down the Afghan drug trade. Billions worth of heroin, opium and morphine that had been flowing into Central Asia, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Southeast Asia will be sharply reduced. Afghanistan’s drug-based economy is now in dire jeopardy. But you would not know this if you follow the biased western press … Western media has focused almost exclusively on the supposed plight of well-off westernized Afghan women in Kabul.

[From the postwar prison writings of Hideki Tojo, Japan’s World War II premier] … During this period [1939-1941], Japan’s peaceful commercial relations were successively obstructed, primarily by the American rupture of commercial relations, and this was a grave threat to the survival of Japan. In particular, the economic blockade by the various powers, led by the United States, inflicted a mortal blow to the survival of Japan … This, together with the outrageous act of economic blockade by means of the freezing of Japanese assets by the United States, Britain, and Holland, was a mortal threat to Japan, whose economic activities depended on foreign trade … From a military point of view, the US-British side openly increased its support of the Chungking [Chinese] forces, thus causing the war to continue.

Russian activists on Thursday removed two plaques memorializing the Stalinist executions of thousands of Polish prisoners of war 80 years ago, following orders from local authorities who claimed there is no evidence of the crimes. Prosecutors in the city of Tver, in an October 2019 order to remove the plaques from the former Soviet secret police building, said their inscriptions were “not based on documented facts.” The Soviet Union in 1990 took responsibility for the 1940 murders of nearly 22,000 Polish officers — including 6,000 in the NKVD secret police building’s basement in Tver northwest of Moscow — in what became known as the Katyn massacre.

… Opened Wednesday (Sept. 15), on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the house [in Columbia, South Carolina] is North America’s first permanent Anne Frank Center, dedicated to studying the legacy of the German-Dutch writer whose famous diary chronicled the two years she spent hiding in a secret annex in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam … Beginning this semester, some 100 sections of “University 101,” a required class for all incoming students, will tour the center. Eventually, all first-year students are expected to tour the center, led by peer guides who have been trained to discuss how society should respond to genocidal ideologies … They eventually plan to train middle- and high-school teachers to lead guided tours for the general public.

For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 [2019] has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center … According to a former high-ranking American intelligence official who spoke to the Jewish Daily Forward in 2002, the FBI concluded in its investigation that the five Israelis arrested “were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ, served as a front.”

The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 has raised many of the usual issues about what actually happened on that day … Friends who were in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center at the time of 9/11 tend to believe that the Saudis were indeed supporting their fellow citizens while in the U.S. but were likely not knowledgeable regarding any terrorist plot. They observed, however, that there was considerable evidence that Israel knew in advance about what was impending, and may have even been instrumental in making sure that it succeeded. The evidence of Israeli involvement is substantial, based on the level of the Jewish state’s espionage operations in the U.S. and also its track record on so-called covert actions simulating terrorist attacks designed to influence political decision making in foreign countries.

A Portland State University professor resigned from his position in a searing open letter Wednesday — blasting the school as a “Social Justice factory” where students are “not being taught to think.” Peter Boghossian, who taught philosophy at PSU for the past decade, accused the university of kowtowing to woke politics. “Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” Boghossian wrote in the public resignation … “It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division,” he wrote.

Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell who emerged as a leading critic of the neoconservatives. In remarks to Mass Peace Action last June, he made some bracing assertions about Israel that I just saw the other day: Israel won’t exist as a state in 20 years because it is delegitimizing itself as an apartheid state.; Israel is a “strategic liability of the first order” for the United States and is “the most likely state in the world to take the United States to Armageddon.”; The U.S. ought to tell Israel now to “change swiftly” or it will cease to fund and protect Israel, but the U.S. will not do so.; The neoconservative agenda in the Middle East was “to set the Levant on fire, to keep Israel’s enemies so at one another

A resolution condemning Israel’s brutal military regime and “apartheid” has been passed by a local branch of America’s second largest teaching union, the American Federation of Teachers. Teachers, staff members and instructors voted to adopt a resolution by AFT Guild Local 1931, which serves colleges and education faculties in San Diego, and a statement in support of Palestine that was approved earlier this month. In a lengthy statement that included denunciation of Israel’s occupation and its practice of apartheid, the union began by saying: “AFT Guild condemns the forced removal of Palestinian residents in West Jerusalem, the bombing of civilian areas in the besieged Gaza Strip, and the continued human rights violations committed by the Israeli government during its 73-year occupation of this land.”

… After 9/11 much of the ecosystem we consider the mainstream news media was on the same sheet of music. They followed, in step, powerful interests in Washington. Editors and corporate sponsors didn’t want to look out of place — it was important for ratings, status, and access to be patriotic, team players … This is a powerful reminder that the country could not have sustained a protracted war there for a generation without the complicity of the press after 9/11 … But while these few independent forums on the left and the right struggled for attention, liberal moderates dominated the networks, top newspapers, and magazines, and were absolutely critical in swaying elite opinion in favor of Bush’s second war … The networks were even more obsequious …

In the wake of a remarkably successful Taliban offensive capped by the takeover of Kabul, the responses of corporate media provided what may have been the most dramatic demonstration ever of its fealty to the Pentagon and military leadership. The media did so by mounting a full-throated political attack on President Joe Biden’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a defense of the military’s desire for an indefinite presence in the country … The patent falsehoods peddled by the Beltway press corps in response to the Biden withdrawal reveals just how tightly they have become linked to the interests of the military and Pentagon. And its flamboyant opposition to a pull-out favored a solid majority of the American public is yet another factor that will accelerate the decline of an already cratering corporate media.

Earlier this month, Germany’s far-right nationalist political party Alternative für Deutschland, or the AfD, posted on Facebook. Widespread support for Sharia law among Muslims in Afghanistan, the group claimed, illustrated the danger … “when masses of Afghans make their way to Germany and Europe.” The post was soon shared by thousands of users and commented on by thousands more. It was one of many posts by AfD-related pages over the past couple of months that railed against immigration or, another popular topic, disparaged COVID-19 restrictions as unnecessary. Despite its modest size in Germany, the AfD has been remarkably successful on Facebook.

After a draft resolution was introduced at the United Nations General Assembly that likened Zionism to racism, the U.S. and Israel walked out of the annual meeting, the Associated Press reported. The provision, which also singled out Israel for criticism, was eventually discarded … The assembly was scheduled on Wednesday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, a controversial gathering that saw disputes over the Middle East and slavery’s legacy, AP reported. Twenty countries made the decision to boycott the commemoration, according to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

On September 21, President Ebrahim Raisi expressed support for diplomatic negotiations to restore full U.S. and Iranian compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal. “We want nothing more than what is rightfully ours. We demand the implementation of international rules,” he said during his debut address to the United Nations. “All parties must stay true to the nuclear deal and the U.N. Resolution in practice.” … Raisi also declared that U.S. power and influence were waning. The “idea of hegemony, but also the project of imposing Westernized identity have failed miserably,” he said. “Today, the U.S. does not get to exit Iraq and Afghanistan but is expelled.” He added, “The world doesn’t care about ‘America First’ or ‘America is Back,’” recalling policy slogans used by President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

… Modern warfare is often harsher for soldiers and civilians alike but is somehow easier for elites … Today, there is no accountability at all. Foreign policy elites with careers unblemished by success live in comfort far from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, and die in their bed … As many have noted, America is itself in need of nation-building and is in no position to lecture others … The Afghanistan failure has a thousand fathers. The hubris, naïve optimism, and overextension that has long been plain to most Americans have yet to be fully grasped by some foreign policy elites. It is these elites, rather than the heroes who served there, who should go cap-in-hand and live the rest of their days as base panders — in shame, and eternal shame.

… The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan plastered across cable news is emblematic of the entire slow-rolling quagmire: a disaster everyone could have predicted and no one prepared for. While partisans are quick to place blame on their least favorite current or recently ousted president, a catastrophic end was baked into this cake from the beginning. When Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), they went far beyond initiating war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. Congress gave near limitless and indefinite authorization for the executive branch to wage war against anyone, anywhere in the world … By the war’s end, it would drain America of $2.2 trillion and rack up a death count of more than 6,200 U.S. military personnel and contractors and 170,000 Afghan people … For bin Laden, it was a tremendous success.

I watched and listened to a lot of broadcast coverage of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and it was appalling: There was zero reflection on Why they hated us … Al Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 attacks because the U.S. was deeply involved as an occupying military force in the Middle East … Americans came up with many lies at the time about Why they hate us … The 911 commission participated in this coverup. They did so because they did not want to face the truth: that brutal U.S. policies in the Middle East of an imperial character and in support of Israel had caused many Muslims to hate us to the point of wanting to hurt us by any means.

… In November, [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, 67, will step down after 16 years in power, ending the tenure of one of Europe’s most consequential leaders in recent memory. Her legacy — tainted for some by Germany’s acceptance of hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees and her policy of fiscal austerity toward the rest of the European Union — is mixed in her home country. But for the German and wider European Jewish establishment, her departure marks the loss of “a reliable partner for the Jewish community,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told JTA …

The remarkable story of how 11 Irish seamen aboard a tiny cargo ship saved the lives of German sailors from certain death during World War II. On Dec. 29, 1943, the crew of the small merchant vessel “Kerlogue” was on its way back to neutral Ireland from neutral Portugal with a cargo of oranges. For ten hours crew members worked to rescue 168 men who had served on a German destroyer and two torpedo boats that had been sunk by the British. Four later died, and the remaining 164 German sailors were incarcerated in Ireland until the end of the war. The German ambassador in Dublin wrote to Kerlogue Captain Donoghue, expressing his government’s gratitude for the crew members’ “exemplary deed, worthy of the great tradition of Irish gallantry and humanity. A “Three Minute Tales” production. Runtime: 9:45 mins.

The Council of Europe’s expert body on racism and intolerance (ECRI) has today published an updated General Policy Recommendation on preventing and combating antisemitism, to help prevent increasing antisemitism and attacks on Jews in many parts of Europe. Ahead of publication, Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić said: “Antisemitic attacks – including in schools, vandalism of synagogues and the spread of antisemitic hatred online – are on the rise.” … ECRI Chair Maria Daniella Marouda said: “ECRI strongly emphasises the role of education, including education about the Holocaust, in promoting tolerance and respect for human rights, and thus also in the struggle against antisemitism.”

Ukraine’s parliament has passed a law stating that “antisemitism and its manifestations are banned” in that country. The law, which passed on Wednesday thanks to a majority of 283 lawmakers out of 450, is unusual in that it also proscribes antisemitic sentiment as illegal. Most countries with laws against antisemitism, such as Germany, France and the Netherlands, criminalize various expressions of antisemitic hatred but not the condition of harboring it. The Law on Prevention and Counteraction to Anti-Semitism in Ukraine defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, expressed as hatred of Jews.” It lists examples of this, including Holocaust denial and “calling for, concealing or justifying the killing or harm of persons of Jewish origin.” … The bill also does not address the growing phenomenon in Ukraine of glorifying Nazi collaborators …

… The above proclamation from Claudius, in response to riots between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria almost two thousand years ago, illustrates the profound lack of mystery in anti-Semitism. For Claudius, peace in the city would be restored if the Jews ceased certain negative behaviours … These basic premises of Jewish financial and political acquisitiveness, cultural intrusion, disregard for political norms, propensity to demographic warfare, and exploitation of being essentially rootless, have been mainstays of ethnic conflict involving Jews for over two millennia, with extraordinarily little variation in themes. Imagine my annoyance and amusement then, on seeing Variety’s recent announcement that we are to be treated to yet another documentary, titled “The Conspiracy,” exploring the putative mystery of anti-Semitism.

… Those who maintain that there is nothing in the character, habits, or disposition of the Jew to provoke antipathy have to bring the charge of fanatical prejudice not only against the Russians or against Christendom, but against mankind … Critics of Judaism are accused of bigotry of race, as well as of bigotry of religion. The accusation comes strangely from those who style themselves the Chosen People, make race a religion, and treat all races except their own as Gentiles and unclean … We have given up the fancy that the Jew is accursed. We must cease to believe that he is sacred.

Iran’s new president slammed U.S. sanctions imposed on his nation as a mechanism of war, using his first U.N address since his swearing-in to forcefully call out Washington’s policies in the region and the growing political schism within America. President Ebrahim Raisi on Tuesday delivered a far more critical and blunt take on American foreign policy than his moderate predecessor … “From the Capitol to Kabul, one clear message was sent to the world: the U.S.’ hegemonic system has no credibility, whether inside or outside the country,” Raisi said … The perseverance of nations, he said, is stronger than the power of superpowers. In a dig at the political slogans used by Trump and his successor President Joe Biden, Raisi said: “Today, the world doesn’t care about “America First” or “America is Back.”

… The American government has steadfastly avoided true accountability on the ‘War on Terror’, from explicitly refusing to count bodies, to half-heartedly committing to transparency, to outright revelling in the killing of innocents. Each year, America and the world mourns those lost in the atrocities of 9/11. Yet 20 years later, we still don’t know how many others should be mourned along with them for the atrocities that followed. More than 363,000 civilians have been killed in the War on Terror, according to an estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. And many times more people have been slain after the battles are over. Cumulatively, the overall civilian death toll could very well exceed one million people, when taking into account indirect deaths from war …

Leaks to the news media from a new book, Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa on the last weeks of the Trump administration are generating a firestorm of controversy, especially regarding the conduct of Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff … Another revelation — that Milley obtained an agreement from other top military commanders affirming that they would not execute orders from the White House unless Milley explicitly confirmed those orders — has not received the attention it deserves … The decision by Milley and his military colleagues to bypass the elected president sets a tremendously unhealthy precedent … We cannot have generals collectively plotting about what orders from their civilian superiors they will or will not obey. Such behavior amounts to a dress rehearsal for a military coup.

… [General Mark] Milley has not denied the stunning revelations in the book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Aside from the almost incredible (but widely welcomed) report that Milley saw fit to warn his Chinese counterpart that he would give him a heads-up if an armed attack on China was coming, there is the equally astonishing revelation that Milley instructed senior Pentagon officials that he had to be involved in any discussions about launching nuclear weapons … If the top military can take steps to avoid implementing a lawful (however horrendous) order and this is allowed to stand as an honorable, praiseworthy precedent, well, this implies that the top military could quite possibly also provoke/ launch nuclear war irrespective of the commander-in-chief.

In recent years, classical music has become one of the key targets of social-justice warriors. And in their rage against classical music, the identitarian elites reveal that their crusade against ‘problematic’ culture is really a crusade against the gains of Western civilisation itself. In the past, opponents of classical music would insist that it was too elitist. Now they insist classical music is too white or racist or colonial … In recent years, it has become increasingly fashionable to frame Western art and culture in general in a deeply negative light. Virtually every great classical composer, poet and writer has found him or herself in the crosshairs. One of the principal targets is the great European composer, Ludwig van Beethoven … Until recently, some supporters of identity politics would claim that Beethoven was actually black.

… Along with much of our society over the past year and a half, however, orchestras have begun to replace the goal of ensuring “equal opportunity” with “equity.” Wracked with guilt over racial exclusion in classical music in the distant past, many are adopting the strategy of redressing old racism with new racism … Equally dangerous — and less discussed — is mounting discrimination in the employment of artistic leaders. This is occurring not just during candidate selection but as early as the job-posting phase … Perhaps the most egregious example yet comes in the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s (BPO) recently announced posting for a “Conductor Diversity Fellow” … The subtext is clear: No whites or Asians need apply.

The Oakland Police Department responded to the city’s 100th homicide of the year Monday morning, with a total of 10 people killed in just the last seven days, according to the city’s police chief. Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong spoke publicly Monday afternoon after a violent weekend, where several were shot and killed in the city. He took a somber tone during the press conference, beginning with 100 seconds of silence to honor the lives lost … Chief Armstrong said gun violence in Oakland is a crisis — and the solution is not just police presence, but help from the community.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are contributing $1.3 million to 11 Jewish groups, eJewish Philanthropy reported, citing a spokesperson for the couple. News of Zuckerberg and Chan’s donations comes as the couple has gradually emphasized its Jewish identity in public in recent years. Privately, Zuckerberg and Chan have also been meeting with rabbis and scholars to discuss Judaism and the Jewish community, according to eJewish Philanthropy … Two of the grantees are national organizations: OneTable, which supports Shabbat dinners hosted by young Jews, and PJ Library, which distributes Jewish children’s books and music for free. But the rest primarily serve local needs in the San Francisco Bay Area.

… Former President George W. Bush’s theme [in his recent Sept. 11 speech] was national unity — and how it has been lost over these past 20 years … Bush did not mention his own contribution to our national divide: his invasion of a country, Iraq, that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us — to disarm it of weapons it did not even have. Which contributed more to the loss of America’s national unity? … Over 20 years, we have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands — Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, soldiers and civilians alike — and driven hundreds of thousands more from their homes and their countries. Are Americans really as oblivious, as Bush suggests, as to why it was that our enemies “hate us with such zeal”?

In historical retrospect, America’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers was breathtakingly disproportionate … The Iraq war is estimated to have cost between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, and the number killed to have been in excess of 400,000. The cost of the Afghan war is estimated at $2.3 trillion … The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that America’s War on Terror has cost over $8 trillion, and resulted in 900,000 deaths. For what? Both wars ended in disastrous and abject failure … Apart from killing Saddam Hussein, the US achieved none of its objectives in Iraq. America’s ignominy resulted from a total misreading of the world at the turn of the century … America is a prisoner of a past that is in rapid retreat.

Chinese hardliners just had their stance justified by the erratic, verging on unhinged, behavior in the United States and by its military … Now, a book by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa claims US General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called General Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army not once but twice. … Milley sought to assure Li that the United States was stable and not going to attack. However, he said, if there were to be an attack, he would alert his counterpart ahead of time. Schizophrenic? … Is it a veiled threat? At the very least you would have to put your forces on alert. Imagine this in reverse. If a Chinese general had called his US counterpart. The US would say that China is out of control … Talk shows would be asking viewers if the US should have launched a pre-emptive strike.

… I am still am not persuaded by the major pillars of the 9/11 Truth movement. But I am willing to offer some nuance as well as an appeal to those who still are … The final theory [that the Bush administration planned the 9/11 attacks] is, for me not just the least plausible, but palpably fatuous in all of its dimensions. For starters, why on earth would you need to set off a controlled explosion if two commercial airliners had already flown into the towers at high speeds? … Jet fuel indeed does not burn hot enough to melt steel. But it didn’t have to. Burning jet fuel creates enough heat to weaken steel to point that it loses around 50% of its strength and can therefore bend. This inflicted more than enough damage to the buildings to make them collapse to the ground of their own accord.

… As a native New Yorker, I was shaken to the core by 9/11 – but hardly surprised, as I had predicted a major attack on the US nine days earlier … The suicide team that attacked New York and Washington made clear its aim was: a., to punish the US for backing Israel’s repression of Palestinians; and b., what they called US “occupation” of Saudi Arabia. Though they were all Muslims, religion was not the motivating factor. As the CIA’s former bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer rightly observed, the Muslim world was furious at the US for what it was doing in their region, not because of America’s values, liberties or religion … I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up.

A new book has claimed that former US president Donald Trump once said in a White House meeting that his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner was more loyal to Israel than to his own country, evoking a common antisemitic trope, according to a Thursday report. Business Insider published what it said was an excerpt from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril.” “‘You know,’ Trump joked in another meeting, mocking his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was raised in a modern Orthodox Jewish family and was working on Middle East peace, ‘Jared’s more loyal to Israel than the United States’,” the book reportedly says … Trump has made similar remarks in the past that evoked the canard that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US or have dual loyalty.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier praised immigrants on Friday for helping build up Germany’s economy and society … Now a 2.7 million-strong Turkish German population, the largest ethnic minority community in the country. “The people who came back then, the so-called `guest workers’: They, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they are now Germany,” Steinmeier said in a speech … “A Germany without them is simply unimaginable.” … The German president said the term “German” has changed due to immigration from Turkey. “Being German today can mean having grandparents from Cologne or Königsberg as well as from Istanbul and Diyarbakir,” he said, referencing German and Turkish cities. He said that German identity now includes “all those who want to live peacefully in this land of law and freedom.”

China’s mouthpiece Global Times has labeled Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros a “global economic terrorist” in a tit for tat exchange playing out in dueling op-eds that underscore the rising temperature in US-China relations. The article, published on September 4 and without citing any evidence, accused the hedge fund manager and philanthropist of providing finance to Hong Kong’s jailed newspaper owner Jimmy Lai to support the city’s anti-Beijing protests in 2019 … Soros, 91, who reportedly has a net worth of $86 billion and bankrolls the philanthropic Open Society Foundations that provides financial support to non-governmental organizations worldwide, has a long-time love-hate relationship with China.

China’s government banned effeminate men on TV and told broadcasters Thursday to promote “revolutionary culture,” broadening a campaign to tighten control over business and society and enforce official morality. President Xi Jinping has called for a “national rejuvenation,” with tighter Communist Party control of business, education, culture and religion. Companies and the public are under increasing pressure to align with its vision for a more powerful China and healthier society … Broadcasters must “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,” the TV regulator said, using an insulting slang term for effeminate men — niang pao, or literally, “girlie guns.”

Most of the actual fighting during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front between the Soviet Union and Germany and her allies. The last stages of the war in the East are vividly described by the German journalist and historian, Jürgen Thorwald. In Defeat in the East, Thorwald traces the military debacle of the Third Reich and shows what happened to the civilian population wherever the Red Army conquered.

The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly newspaper [published in Britain] that was saved from liquidation last year by a consortium led by a former senior adviser to Theresa May, has been exposed as having a quite astonishing record of journalistic failings. Over the past three years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the misnamed and feeble “press regulator” created by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has found the paper to have breached its code of practice on at least 28 occasions. The weekly has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases over the same period.

Nothing upset the Washington Beltway elites more than when in a 2007 presidential debate I pointed out the truth about the 9/11 attacks: they attacked us because we’ve been in the Middle East, sanctioning and bombing the civilian population, for decades. The 9/11 attackers were not motivated to commit suicide terrorism on the Twin Towers and Pentagon because they dislike our freedoms, as then-President Bush claimed. That was a self-serving lie … The Washington foreign policy elites – Republicans and Democrats – are deeply corrupt and act contrary to US national interests … They use fear and lies for their own profit. And they call themselves patriots … So, twenty years on what have we learned from 9/11? Absolutely nothing.

… Today, the Taliban are in control of Afghanistan and providing sanctuary to al-Qaida. What then did our longest war accomplish? … Nor is the America of 2021 the hubristic self-confident country of George W. Bush and the neocons who were going to convert the Middle East into something like our Middle West, and advance from there “with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Our country is a changed place from 2001. Gone are the unity, confidence and resolution … Looking forward, where do we Americans go from here?

U.S. military domination of the Middle East has been disastrous for the Middle East as well as for the United States itself. It’s not just that the strategy hasn’t worked, it has actually made the United States less safe. To begin withdrawing from the region militarily is not only the right decision; it is long overdue … America’s core interests in the region — the ones that could warrant the use of military force — are limited. Protect the United States from attack and facilitate the free flow of global commerce … Neither of these strategic objectives necessitate permanent military bases in the region, let alone U.S. hegemony over the Middle East.

Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increased severity of mental illness, according to the most comprehensive study of its kind. The research, involving 13,000 people in London found that a relatively small increase in exposure to nitrogen dioxide led to a 32% increase in the risk of needing community-based treatment and an 18% increase in the risk of being admitted to hospital. The researchers said the findings were likely to apply to most cities in developed nations, and cutting air pollution could benefit millions of people … Recent research has shown that small increases in air pollution are linked to significant rises in depression and anxiety. It has also linked dirty air to increased suicides and indicated that growing up in polluted places increases the risk of mental disorders.

… Britain maintained strong links with Germany, even as the regime of Hitler took over and became more belligerent. A desire to support these links led to a number of events which, with hindsight, are jarring. These included the swastika flying over White Hart Lane football ground in 1935 and, perhaps most infamously, the England football team giving the Nazi salute in Berlin in 1938 … Professor Julie Gottlieb, an expert in modern history, said: “We often forget how cordial relations were between Britain and Germany; there was an Anglo-German fellowship. “The two countries were trading partners up until 1939” … “The swastika did not have the same shock value then as it does now.”

British “Movietone” newsreel report on the closely watched football (soccer) match between the national teams of England and Germany in Berlin on May 14, 1938. Before the start of the match, both the British and German players stood as their respective national anthems were played. As the German hymn sounded, the English team players gave the “Nazi” salute – a gesture that is now regarded as inappropriate. A crowd estimated at 115,000 filled Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to watch the match, which England won, 6-3. Runtime: 1:12 mins.

The funeral ceremony in London honoring the German ambassador is shown in this April 1936 film report of “British Movietone News.” With high-ranking British officials in attendance, British Grenadier Guards in full dress escort the swastika-draped coffin of German diplomat Leopold von Hoesch, who had died at his post in the English capital. Respectful crowds line the roadside. The coffin is ceremoniously lowered on to a British destroyer for transport to the homeland, as British servicemen play solemn bagpipe music. Runtime: 46 secs.

Two decades after 9/11, the role of Saudi Arabia in the attack remains in dispute despite unrelenting efforts by the US and Saudi governments to neutralise it as a live political issue … Conspiracy theories about 9/11 divert attention away from two areas of Saudi culpability that are beyond dispute. The first is simply that 9/11 was a Saudi-led operation through and through, since Osama bin Laden, from one of the most prominent Saudi families, was the leader of Al-Qaeda and 15 out of the19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. The 9/11 attacks might have happened without Afghanistan, but not without Saudi participation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the presence of U.S. troops in Syria illegal during a Monday meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Moscow, according to the Kremlin. The Russian leader also said that consolidating forces is the only way to “allow the country to get on its feet,” the Kremlin quoted Putin as saying in a statement released Tuesday. There are hundreds of U.S. troops stationed in eastern Syria to aid Kurdish-led fighters in combating the Islamic State militant group and Turkish forces present in the northern part of the country, the Associated Press reported. While speaking to the Syrian leader Monday, Putin said that the U.S. presence in the country was not legal because they lacked permission from the United Nations or the Syrian government to be there.

An Israeli defense contractor on Monday unveiled a remote-controlled armed robot it says can patrol battle zones, track infiltrators and open fire. The unmanned vehicle is the latest addition to the world of drone technology, which is rapidly reshaping the modern battlefield. Proponents say such semi-autonomous machines allow armies to protect their soldiers, while critics fear this marks another dangerous step toward robots making life-or-death decisions. The four-wheel-drive robot presented Monday was developed by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries’ “REX MKII.” It is operated by an electronic tablet and can be equipped with two machine guns, cameras and sensors …

On Oct. 1, China will celebrate its 70-year transformation into an economic superpower — just in time for widespread fears that a trade war with the United States will derail that growth and drag the world economy down with it … Here are four charts that show how China rose to become today’s global economic powerhouse … Some economists have predicted that China’s economy will surpass America’s by about 2030. But when taking into account the different standards of living across countries — also known as adjusting to purchasing power parity — the Chinese economy has been the world’s largest since 2014, according to the World Bank.

… The tech sanctions against China haven’t worked, either. China has found ways to work around the chip boycott imposed by the Trump Administration. It will build more than 900,000 5G base stations this year, doubling its coverage. It already has 70% of all the 5G infrastructure in the world, and it’s gaining on us. That means factories where industrial robots program themselves, smart cities where autonomous vehicles communicate in real-time, automated ports (already up and running), telemedicine, and other Fourth Industrial Revolution wonders … Don’t ask me if we’re beaten. We’re not even fighting.

… Since the late 1970s, the [Chinese Communist] party has slowly permitted a multifaceted and far-reaching revival of religion … This support does come with caveats and restrictions, however, including the demand that religious leaders support the Communist Party … Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Islam and Protestantism – the five officially recognized religions – have staged comebacks, albeit with varying success. There are increasing numbers of local temples, associations, pilgrimages and festivals, and growing numbers of Buddhist, Christian and Taoist clergy … The Communist Party has also stopped criticizing the teachings of Confucius, the famous philosopher and educator of the sixth and fifth centuries.

… US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage. But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position. First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system. Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent … The second reason for concern is that the nationwide effort to reduce racial disparities, however well-intentioned, has had the unfortunate effect of weakening the connection between merit and scholastic admission.

… Relative ignorance of history is nothing new in America. From the start, America’s habits have been those of youth: our people have always been ambitious, restless, and on the move. Waves of immigrants and constant technological revolutions keep the country eternally young. And so, Americans scorn history. But they shouldn’t … If you are a parent, read your child a history book. If you are a student, listen to a history podcast. If you are going for a walk, visit a monument or site of historic interest and learn its story. Don’t be afraid to start small. The Romans called history res gestae or “deeds done.” We might add that history is also a story of deeds undone. The more we Americans study the past, the better we’ll be able to plan our future.

… Take, for instance, the 1922 English entrance examination for the University of Illinois … The 1922 entrance exam seems to expect students to have read and be on familiar speaking terms with any number of works. These include Old Testament stories, a range of Shakespearian plays, English literature, and poetry, as demonstrated in the sample questions below: “Describe the conditions causing Achilles to stop fighting.” “What was Franklin’s plan for the union of the colonies? Discuss his arguments in favor of it.” “What characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are more than mere types? Defend your answer.” “Summarize the chief ideas you gained from reading one of Thackeray’s essays in the English Humorist.” “Point out four distinctly Poesque characteristics marking The Raven.”

… So it was the prospect of a Nazi-shaped world order – and not U.S. security – that shook foreign policy elites in the summer of 1940 to build the intellectual foundations of global U.S. hegemony … Nazi Germany would dominate Europe, the U.S. would have to dominate everywhere else (italics mine). That was the logical conclusion based on the planners’ initial assumptions. That’s when U.S. foreign policy for the next 80 years was born: the U.S. had to wield “unquestionable power”, as stated in the CFR planners “recommendation” to the State Dept. … Roosevelt, only a few days after he was elected for a third term, stated it was the United States that “truly and fundamentally …was a new order” … If American interests were global, so should be American political and military power.

Secretive and unlawful collusion by an American leader with a foreign power that subverts the US political process is not new. The most far-reaching and flagrant case was by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940-41. In the months before the US formally entered the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt did everything he could to get America into the global conflict without actually declaring war. The cooperation with British intelligence by the President and other high-ranking US officials during that period was quite illegal. Such collusion by the nominally neutral US to further the war aims of a foreign government was contrary to both US law and universally accepted international norms.

A diary kept by President John F. Kennedy as a young man travelling in Europe, revealing his fascination with Adolf Hitler, is up for auction. Kennedy, then 28, predicted “Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived”. “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made,” he continued. Kennedy wrote the entry in the summer of 1945 after touring the German dictator’s Bavarian mountain retreat. It is thought by historians to be the only diary every kept by the 35th US president. The original copy will be auctioned for the first time on 26 April in Boston by longtime owner Deirdre Henderson, who worked as a research assistant for Kennedy while he was a US senator with White House ambitions.

Was Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy, really an anti-Semite? David Nasaw, Kennedy’s recent biographer … admitted that Kennedy believed in a Jewish conspiracy to push the United States into an unnecessary war with Germany. And as ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1940, he was in a position — even if he wasn’t a believer in “scientific” anti-Semitism — to do far more damage to European Jews than his stateside contemporaries … Kennedy blamed the Jews for the German problem, and he is reported to have said that the lives of Jews in Central Europe were not really worth all the agitation.

… Our government keeps doing things like this because its foreign policy is so often divorced from the real security and interests of the United States. The government keeps getting away with this because there is no meaningful accountability for costly failure. Until the US scales back its ambitions, narrows the definition of its interests, and assumes a more modest role in the world, our government is likely to make the same error of waging another peripheral war sometime in the future. Our government’s habit of fighting unwinnable wars in distant lands is a function of a meddlesome and arrogant approach to the rest of the world. If we wish to avoid these wars in the future, Americans need to insist on changing that approach and pursuing more realistic goals.

The world is a dangerous place, the upcoming anniversary of 9/11 reminds us. And that is true, though not, paradoxically, so much for the U.S. At least, if Washington didn’t attempt to reign over everyone else. Based on events, the world today should be far safer for America than during most of its history … America’s stint as the celebrated unipower has been less than successful, let alone happy. President Joe Biden has begun to reduce Washington’s global role with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That should be the start of a much larger military retrenchment. The US should remain capable and ready to act in extraordinary and emergency circumstances. But it should firmly set endless peace, not war, as its objective.

… President George W. Bush initiated the conflict on a series of lies about 9/11 and the Taliban role in that attack and what followed. After bringing about regime change, he decided to remake the country into a western style democracy. President Barack Obama subsequently allowed a “surge” which actually increased the militarization of the conflict and made things worse … The United States, by one estimate, has nearly 1100 military bases worldwide while China has only one, in Djibouti. Admittedly this time, the US will have to go about its usual school bully behavior without much in the way of allies. The Europeans will not show up as they are disgusted with American vacillation and inability to anticipate obvious developments, as was the case in Afghanistan.

… However justified the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 may have been as a response to Nine Eleven, the subsequent U.S. bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq certainly was not … One positive consequence of the shock of Nine Eleven has been to encourage many more Americans to question official claims and re-think entrenched assumptions about their government’s arrogant “policeman” role in the world. Many more Americans have come to understand how political leaders of both parties have subordinated American interests, and basic justice and humanity, to Jewish-Zionist interests … Real security for America will require radically different policies based on clear-eyed awareness of authentic American national interests and enlightened concern for the long-term good of the U.S. and the world.

Fake news, false stories that masquerade as real news are not new. In the spring of 1917 some of Britain’s most influential newspapers published a gruesome story that has been called “the master hoax” – and I think we finally have proof about where it came from. Britain was at the time trying to bring China into the war on the Allied side. In February a story appeared in the English-language North China Daily News that claimed the Kaiser’s forces were “extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers” … The Times and the Daily Mail published accounts from anonymous sources who claimed to have visited the Kadaververwertungsanstalt, or corpse-utilisation factory … It was in 1925 that Sir Austen Chamberlain admitted, in a Commons statement, there was “never any foundation” for what he called “this false report”.

… In the spring of 1917, British and Belgian propagandists, in a concerted action with privately owned media, launched an invented story about “Corpse Factories”, where the Germans allegedly boiled down their own soldier dead to lubricants, fertiliser, pig fodder, and soap. The aim was to vilify the Germans, especially among American and Asian countries, which Great Britain wanted to drag into the war on her side. Its efficiency in mobilizing anti-German sentiments made the “Corpse Factory” the “master hoax” of World War I propaganda. Millions world-wide who still believe in its offspring, the World War II “Nazi human soap factory” legend, show its longevity.

A series of extracts will give the record of one of the most revolting lies invented during the First World War, the dissemination of which throughout not only Britain but the world was encouraged and connived at by both the [British] government and the press. It started in 1917, and was not finally disposed of till 1925 … The story had a world-wide circulation and had considerable propaganda value in the East. Not till 1925 did the truth emerge.

Overdose deaths soared to a record 93,000 last year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government reported Wednesday. That estimate far eclipses the high of about 72,000 drug overdose deaths reached the previous year and amounts to a 29% increase. “This is a staggering loss of human life,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University public health researcher who tracks overdose trends … The estimate of over 93,000 overdose deaths translates to an average of more than 250 deaths each day, or roughly 11 every hour. The 21,000 increase is the biggest year-to-year jump since the count rose by 11,000 in 2016.

… Racially and ethnically, we are becoming an ever more diverse nation, which is causing general rejoicing among those who hold it as an article of faith that, “Our diversity is our strength.” But is that cliche true? Where is the scientific, historical or empirical evidence for the proposition that the greater the religious, racial, tribal and ethnic diversity of a nation, the stronger it becomes? To put it mildly, this is not a universally held belief. … The more diverse we have become, it seems, the less united we have become … But if two million migrants from all over the world, the anticipated number in President Joe Biden’s first year, are good for America, why not open the floodgates and bring in still more?

A little more than a year after nationwide protests erupted after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police, the public is deeply divided over how far the nation has progressed in addressing racial inequality – and how much further it needs to go. Opinion on the current national reckoning over the history of slavery and racism in the United States casts these divisions into stark relief: Among U.S. adults overall, 53% say increased attention to that history is a good thing for society, while 26% say it is a bad thing, and another 21% say it is neither good nor bad … Half of all adults say “a lot” more needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their race or ethnicity, while about as many say either that a little (34%) or nothing at all (15%) needs to be done.

… Roger B. Taney, the nation’s first Catholic Supreme Court Justice and a descendant of prominent Catholic slavers from Maryland, infamously declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” while denying the freedom petitions of Dred and Harriet Scott and their two daughters in 1857 … Following the abolition of slavery, the Catholic Church stood as the largest Christian practitioner of segregation. In the United States … the vast majority of Catholic institutions and religious orders of men and women systematically excluded African-descended people, especially U.S.-born Blacks, from admission solely on the basis of race well into the 20th century … [including] segregation in white Catholic parishes, schools, hospitals, convents, seminaries and neighborhoods.

… President George W. Bush boasted in 2004: “Afghanistan has now got a constitution which talks about freedom of religion and talks about women’s rights … Democracy is flourishing.” … The collapse of the Afghan government settled any doubts about whether intellectuals are some of Washington’s biggest con artists. … Any think tank or research institute or Beltway Bandit that was honest about Afghanistan being a quagmire for democracy would have been banned from future contracting. Americans also need to take lessons from the endless lies that Washington told about Afghan democracy. Are U.S. government officials more honest when they talk about American democracy than when they praise sham democracies abroad? Unfortunately, no one is talking of the peril of the “Afghanization” of American democracy.

When the US invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, the cover of Time magazine proclaimed: “The Last Days of the Taliban.” Thus began what became known as “the war on terror,” the neoconservative quest to replace the defunct Soviet Union with Islam as a global threat … The fantasy land in which western liberalism continues to operate in West Asia and the Middle East is still instructive … David Petraeus, the former top US commander in Afghanistan … and every US and British general who served there bears a heavy burden of responsibility for a war the Afghan people themselves could not sustain and did not want. None of them could find it in themselves to take responsibility for this disaster and apologise to the Afghan people … This was a disaster that no less than four US presidents had a hand in making. It’s a truly bipartisan effort.

… Perhaps the most pathetic case was the Obama administration’s attempt to create a secular, democratic rebel faction to fight against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad … The Syria train and equip effort proved to be even more wasteful and ineffectual than most government programs … The United States usually cannot successfully identify and install capable governments in foreign countries … US leaders keep choosing clients who make statements that echo American values. Even in the rare cases when such clients are sincere, they typically have little domestic support and even less ability to organize their faction effectively. The Afghanistan fiasco is just the latest confirmation of that reality.

… So who did it? In my view, the attacks were financed by private citizens in Saudi Arabia and organized from Germany and possibly Spain. All the hijackers came from states nominally allied to the US or its protectorates. Fifteen of the 19 were Saudis. Two came from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and one each from Egypt and Lebanon … Private nationalist groups in Saudi who bitterly opposed foreign domination of their country could very well have financed and organized 9/11. But, of course, Washington could not admit this. That would have brought into question the US occupation of Saudi. What’s also pretty clear is that Israel – at minimum – knew the attack was coming yet failed to warn its American ‘allies.’ Israel was the chief beneficiary of the 9/11 attacks – yet its bumbling Arab foes and bin Laden were blamed for this crime.

… When Obama ran for president in 2007 and 2008, he called Afghanistan the “right” war in contrast to the massive error of Iraq War II … As predicted, Obama’s Afghan “surge” only drove more people into supporting and joining the insurgency. McChrystal’s “insurgent math” explained why: for everyone they killed, they were recruiting 10 more into the ranks of the enemy … The Bush government wrote themselves a writ for a massive campaign to remake another society on the other side of the globe. The Obama government cashed that check and massively expanded the war and the nature of its failure … The ease of the Taliban’s victory over America’s installed puppet government in Afghanistan proves that the whole war was a fool’s errand all along.

… As if the recently concluded war was not enough, however, a kettle of uber-hawks is proposing grand new misadventures in Afghanistan. Why anyone would expect the results to be different than before is mystifying. However, the War Party is never discouraged, chastened, or humbled. It moves ever ahead, concocting new conflicts for the American people to go fight and in which to die … The Afghan war went on far too long. Biden was right to withdraw U.S. forces. He botched the job, but those who originally turned Afghanistan into an endless war are most to blame and have no credibility to complain. Their plans for additional rounds of hostilities should be dismissed with derision.

… Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle [in Afghanistan] or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war … There was little objection within the power structures to these invasions. The congressional vote was 518-1 in favor of empowering President George W. Bush to launch a war, with Rep. Barbara Lee being the lone dissenter. Those of us who spoke out against the idiocy of the looming bloodlust were slandered, denied media platforms and cast into the wilderness, where most of us remain.

Ambassador Charles “Chas” W. Freeman Jr. is a former United States diplomat who served on behalf of the US Foreign Service and State Department in Saudi Arabia, India, Thailand, and China … [He says:] “American and Israeli values diverged long ago. American and Zionist strategic interests are no longer congruent. There is no interest in the United States in a war with Iran, which Israel keeps plumping for. I do not believe that the Biden administration, despite its strong residual identification with Zionism, will allow itself to be dragged into the low-intensity conflict between Israel and Iran. Israel has essentially exhausted its military options. It can do more of the same but more of the same will not bring it peace. Only a reconciliation with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors can do that.”

In November 1938, Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl visited Hollywood to secure an American distribution deal for Olympia, her epic two-part, four-and-a-half hour long documentary record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a dazzling showcase for athletic prowess, cinematic virtuosity, and Nazi pageantry. The trip did not go well … Daily Variety was happy to report that Riefenstahl had “found studio gates locked against her entry.” … Only two major Hollywood players broke the boycott. Disney gave Riefenstahl a tour of his studio and showed her the storyboards to Fantasia … But Disney and Hopper were outliers: to the rest of the town, she was a Nazi pariah … She lived to see Olympia readily available stateside … and recognized, usually begrudgingly, as a masterpiece of world cinema.

… Look up the best female filmmakers of all time. The same names appear on every list: Agnés Varda, Lois Weber, Sofia Coppola, Clair Denis. And Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, is best-known for her 1935 film “Triumph of the Will.” The movie, the single most famous piece of Nazi propaganda, is a populist exaltation of Adolf Hitler; it focuses nearly as much on the Führer’s devotees as on the man himself. Often cited as one of the most artistically innovative films ever made, “Triumph of the Will” has consistently been seen as a staple of the cinematic canon. It has an 87% positive critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes … Riefenstahl’s “Olympia,” her 1938 documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was number 37.

One of the most important films in cinema history has been pulled from YouTube under its hate speech policy. Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” a German propaganda documentary on the 1934 Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg, was removed under a new policy announced Wednesday against “videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory,” a policy that leaves untouched works of the cinema canon that glorify Stalin-era communism. While “Triumph of the Will” very obviously glorifies Nazism and dictator Adolf Hitler, it’s also central to the cinema canon, especially in the fields of documentary movies and propaganda films, and has, in the words of Eric Kohn at IndieWire “major historical value, raising essential questions about the nature of the film medium.”

.. Year after year, US generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy, which was to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that could defend the country without foreign help … The Afghanistan fiasco is not an aberration – some kind of star-crossed one-off which unfolded far away from the mainstream of US foreign policy. To the contrary, Afghanistan is the distilled essence of Imperial Washington’s conceit that the peace of the planet depends upon its self-conferred role as the “indispensable nation” and the overseer of the internal governance and the external relations of the greater part of mankind … “The Soviet Union gave up trying to pacify Afghanistan in 1988; two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. And now, it’s America’s turn.”

… The reason so many well-informed people got it so wrong is that they were comparing the military strength of the two sides. But the Taliban victory was not military so much as political … The political triumph of the Taliban came about because Afghans with power – military commanders, civilian officials, tribal leaders, local warlords – decided that the US had done a deal with the Taliban and they would be wise to follow suit as quickly as possible … The most striking feature of the Taliban seizure of power is that it took place with so little fighting.

B’nai Brith Canada said it wants reassurance from the University of Victoria (UVic) that an upcoming course on anti-Semitism will not become a “forum for anti-Semitic views” because of its professor. UVic originally offered a course for the fall semester about anti-Semitism that would be taught by assistant professor Shamma Boyarin, who has taught religious studies and medieval studies at the university since 2008. Its description claimed that “even the most fundamental aspects of anti-Semitism are controversial,” and said students “will develop the ability to examine both current and historical instances of anti-Semitism with a critical eye.” Boyarin called the former president of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman a “Zionist pig” in a Twitter post in May.

New polling from the 2021 Chicago Council Survey found that 50% of Americans want the U.S. to restrict military aid to Israel. The survey also shows that a majority of Democrats want it restricted. The survey, which was conducted in July, shows that there’s still a sizable partisan split on the issue. 62% of Democrats think Israel should “prohibit its use in military operations against Palestinians.” 32% are opposed to such an idea. With Republicans it’s almost the exact opposite: 32% are in favor of restrictions and 61% oppose them … This polling lines up with other recent studies that show domestic support for Israel is beginning to falter. In March a Gallup poll found that (for the first time ever) a majority of Democrats believe the United States should be exerting pressure on Israel, not Palestine.

A carefully researched and persuasive debunking of the widely-accepted “official” story of the origins of World War II, by one of America’s most astute and influential public affairs commentators. In this masterful and provocative book, Buchanan draws on the work of more than a hundred historians to trace the fateful failures of judgment that consigned millions to decades of subjugation under Soviet Communist tyranny, and ended Europe’s central role in world affairs. This is also an important dissident treatment of the origins and consequences of the First and Second World wars, and a devastating critique of the “cult” image of Winston Churchill. Buchanan concludes with timely warnings about US foreign policy today. With 36 photos, source references, bibliography and index.

On July 9, 2021, one of Canada’s oldest hate organizations quietly folded up its tent and went home. On his weekly podcast, his voice cracking in parts, Jewish Defence League (JDL) head Meir Weinstein made the following, incoherent statement … One could be accused of jumping the gun with talk of demise. After all, the announcement only related to Weinstein. But who could conceivably pick up the mantle of grand wizard of Jewish fascism with Weinstein gone? … The JDL was founded by Meir Kahane in the summer of 1968 as a far-right, Jewish nationalist alternative to mainstream Zionism. At the heart of Kahane’s vision was a theocratic state cleaned of Arabs who could either leave Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories “alive or dead.”

… The mainstream media has finally discovered the Jewish Defense League. And only a decade or two too late … From a period of 1980 to 1985, there were 18 terrorist attacks in the United States committed by Jews. Fifteen of them by members of the Jewish Defense League … What are you talking about?! There have been Jewish terrorist attacks! Should we therefore ask no Jews to please apply for a visa? … As long as the JDL was attacking the “right” victims (real or perceived white racists and anti-Semites), the media turned a blind eye … In July 1984, when the JDL firebombed the warehouse and library of the Holocaust revisionist/denial publishing house the Institute for Historical Review, the silence from the media moved Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian John Toland to pen a letter condemning the blackout …

Did anyone expect the U.S. war in Afghanistan to end cleanly? If so, you bought the lies all along, and the cold water now is hitting sharp … Afghanistan is simply reverting, quickly, to more or less status quo ante September 11, 2001, and everything between then and now, including lost opportunities, will have been wasted … No one in Washington who supported this war was ever called out, with the possible exception of Donald Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney walks free. The generals and diplomats who ran the war have nice think tank or university jobs, if they are not still in government making equally bad decisions. No one has been legally, financially, or professionally disadvantaged by the blood on their hands. Some of the era’s senior leaders — Blinken, Rice, Power, Nuland — are now working in better jobs for Biden.

… A military campaign that was creating far more casualties and greater carnage abroad than terrorism would ever cause America. Especially when the policy was surrounded by lies, with much of official Washington in on the secret but determined to prevent the American people, including those with relatives and friends in uniform, from knowing the truth … The American people were lied to. Continuously. For almost two decades … What accounted for the fateful decision to shift to nation-building? Did the Bush administration imagine that Afghanistan, too, would be a “cakewalk”? … How high did the tsunami of deceptions go? To the Cabinet? The President? Members of the congressional War Party? In short, who lied and who was lied to? … The best way to honor those who have died would be to prevent a repeat of needless and endless wars.

As expected, the blame game on who lost Afghanistan is now in full swing. I think the best answer was given by P. Michael McKinley, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, when he stated in Foreign Affairs magazine that it “is the result of two decades of miscalculations and failed policies pursued by three prior US administrations. Many of the critics speaking out now were architects of those policies. We can still hope that we in the United States do not end up in a poisonous debate about ‘who lost Afghanistan.’ But if we do, let’s acknowledge that it was all of us.” … One would assume that US foreign policy would undergo a full reset after all these embarrassing failures, but don’t count on it. The establishment does not want to accept the limits of US power.

Corporate media coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the country’s US-backed government has offered audiences more mystification than illumination. I looked at editorials in five major US dailies following the Taliban’s retaking of Kabul: the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. The editorial boards of these papers consistently trivialized South Asian lives, erased US responsibility for lethal violence, and made untenable assertions about Washington’s supposedly righteous motives in the war. The editorials evince a callous indifference to the toll of the war on civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the war has also been fought.

“Is it possible to make a film like this without contributing to the Nazi Cinematic Universe?” This line of narration comes early in “The Meaning of Hitler,” a fiery new documentary about the persistent hold Nazism has on our culture … Based on the classic book-length essay by the German journalist Raimund Pretzel (published under his pseudonym of Sebastian Haffner), “The Meaning of Hitler” is a globetrotting excavation into the heart of our society’s fascination with Nazis, antisemitism and fascist ideology … And why do so many people still seem to admire or — worse — unconsciously emulate him? … Why take 90 minutes to warn everyone yet again about Hitler, they wonder, when every mention of him only seems to do more harm than good? Why, indeed.

One of postwar Germany’s most influential writers has been Sebastian Haffner. This successful wordsmith has written half a dozen books on political and historical issues, several of which have been translated into English … But Haffner’s real character came through in an extraordinary article published during the Second World War while he was living as an emigré in Britain. In the August 1942 issue of the reputable London monthly World Review, Haffner called for the mass murder of at least half a million young Germans by the victorious Allies at the end of the war … A comprehensive “re-education” program would also be necessary to make sure that defeated Germany stayed in line permanently.

“Hitler — You knew him — What was he like?” I have been asked that question a thousand times since 1945, and nothing is more difficult to answer … Hitler’s most notable characteristic was ever his simplicity. The most complex of problems resolved itself in his mind into a few basic principles. His actions were geared to ideas and decisions that could be understood by anyone … His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily familiar with the writings of the most diverse authors, and nothing was too complex for his comprehension … The universality of Hitler’s knowledge may surprise or displease those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact: Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century.