Headlines

Europe has been worrying about economic decline and techno-stagnation for a quarter of a century. The gnawing angst has finally given way to something closer to panic. The biannual gathering of the European elites at the Ambrosetti forum – a mini-Davos on Lake Como, on Chatham House rules – was a succession of grim warnings, punctuated by confessions from battle-weary officials that the half- formed structure of the EU makes it almost impossible to solve any of the problems. The eurozone has scarcely grown for seven quarters, and fiscal austerity has yet to begin. Germany has seen no accumulated growth since 2018. The dawning awareness that next year may be just as bad has finished all remaining illusions … “America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates …,” said Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

Large groups of people in Asian countries believe that the U.S. democracy used to be a good example for others to follow, but isn’t anymore. Some also believe that it has never been a good example. Put together, this means that a majority in six out of nine Asian countries surveyed by Pew Research Center don’t consider the U.S. a beacon of democracy (anymore) … In traditional U.S. allies Japan and South Korea, the most people have changed their mind about U.S. democracy, and the countries ended up ranking quite high in the overall ranking of both negative answer options combined. They came in behind Singapore and Malaysia, however, where unfavorable opinions of U.S. democracy were most widespread

Since its founding in 1977, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has grown to become one of the most important and influential Jewish organizations in the world … The Wiesenthal Center has a long record of reckless propaganda for war. Long before the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it had been pressing for an American attack against the Middle East nation, backing its effort with alarmist “Big Lie” claims about the supposed danger posed by the Baghdad regime.

… In any case, it is now known that Wiesenthal, a born story-teller, rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story — in fact many of the things he claimed to have done were fabrications. This recently came to light with the publication, in June of 2009, of Hunting Evil, by British Author Guy Walters, in which he characterizes Simon Wiesenthal as “a liar — and a bad one at that.” … Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said.” … The Simon Wiesenthal Center is, rather, committed to using the Holocaust to raise money, and using the trauma associated with it to promote the Center’s extremist political perspectives.

Much flapdoodle has been published about the proposed release by Library and Archives Canada of a list prepared by the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes. Supposedly, this document identifies “Nazi war criminals.” In truth, it provides information about persons investigated by the commission but against whom no evidence of wartime criminality was found … As for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, Mr. Deschênes observed (on page 58) that there was “a source of names of individuals alleged to be war criminals … However, it must be stated that the center’s information was long on allegations and generalities, and short on evidence and specifics.”

A furor has erupted in North America over reports that Russia will expand its armed forces of 1.32 million by a new 180,000 men. This will bring Russia close to China’s armed forces of about 2 million active soldiers. The pro-war right in the US and Europe are trumpeting this increase as a prelude to a coming East-West war. ‘The Reds are Coming’ goes the old Cold War chorus. We heard the same canard during WWII when clever British propaganda convinced most people that Hitler’s Germany was determined to conquer the world. In truth, Germany was trying to restore its pre-World War I borders … In WWII, the USSR fielded an astounding 34 million soldiers. The USA deployed 16 million, China at least 14 million. By comparison. today’s numbers of soldiers look puny.

By his own account, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism provided a spiritual fulfillment he couldn’t find in his Yale education or career success. It also amounted to a political conversion … His conversion also put Vance in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that has been little known to the American public … Vance has signaled his alignment with some of what Catholic postliberals advocate. He’s said the next time his allies control the presidency or Congress, “we really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” and said Republicans should seize institutions, including universities ‘to make them work for our people.” He’s advocated for government policies to spur childbearing …

… An interesting question is whether there will ever be enough anti-Zionist rich Democratic donors for Democratic politicians to turn anti-Israel. Back in 2019, I looked up the ethnic roots of the top 50 donors in the 2018 midterm elections … So, the Democrats would have been nuts back then to take a hard line against Israel’s foreign policy because 76% of the money they got from their few dozen biggest donors came from Jews. Not all big Jewish Democratic donors are fervent Zionists, of course, but big donors tend to have the kind of personality that goes along with American Jews being pro-Israel … Here’s a very quick and dirty New York Times article on the biggest donors to the 2024 presidential campaigns, profiling five major donors to each … Once again a lot of the Democrats biggest donors are more or less Jewish.

… The biggest 2018 [election campaign] donor was casino owner Sheldon Adelson, who gave $123 million to Republicans and conservatives … In second place was former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who donated $95 million, virtually all to Democrats this time around … Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile … Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34 percent from gentiles. Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50 donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals. Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from Jewish givers.

… That the Israel lobby, also called Zionist lobby, plays a central role in enabling Israeli and very wealthy Jewish interests in the US and UK to instruct Anglo-American policy in Palestine, if not broader reaches of the region, is now indisputable … Where does AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] get its money? … Its biggest funders included owners of pro sports teams, “heads of private equity firms; real estate titans; a Maryland congressman” … Almost 60% of AIPAC’s money comes from corporate CEOs and other top executives from Fortune 500 companies. The largest single donor to the United Democracy Project is Jan Koum, the multibillionaire former CEO of WhatsApp and a regular Republican funder.

Some Western supporters of Ukraine have been presenting the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian province of Kursk as a great victory that will significantly change the course and outcome of the war. They are deceiving themselves. While legally and morally justified, the attack has failed in all its main objectives, and may indeed turn out to have done serious damage to Ukraine’s position on the battlefield … The Ukrainian attack has not captured any significant Russian population center or transport hub … There is now no prospect that even with Western military supplies, Ukraine can inflict a crushing defeat on Russia and recover its lost territories by force. There is a danger of Ukrainian military collapse, which might lead to pressure in the West for direct intervention …

… Race science is on the rise. The far right has long espoused outright racism and anti-Semitism, especially in the Trump era. But more right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding that bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification. They see race not as a social construction, but as something that can be reduced to genetic facts. Don’t take it from us, they say; just look at the numbers and charts. Race science is hardly a new idea … What’s different now is that race science is moving into the open. Sailer may have once been a fringe oddity as well, but these days his views are broadcast to the millions of people who listen to Kirk and Carlson … The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told Jewish donors on Thursday that U.S. universities would lose accreditation and federal support over what he described as “antisemitic propaganda” if he is elected to the White House. “Colleges will and must end the antisemitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and federal support,” Trump said, speaking remotely to a crowd of more than 1,000 Republican Jewish Coalition donors in Las Vegas. Protests roiled college campuses in spring, with students opposing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and demanding institutions stop doing business with companies backing Israel. Republicans have said the protests show some Democrats are antisemites who support chaos.

New York City Council members passed legislation Thursday aimed at acknowledging, studying and addressing the impact of slavery and racial injustices in New York City, including a bill that mandates the study of reparations. New York City had one of the highest rates of slave ownership in the country during the 1700s, according to the City Council. One of four bills establishes a task force to consider the creation of Freedom Trails in the city. Another would require the installation of signage near Wall and Pearl Streets, to mark the site of New York’s first slave market.

Israeli security forces mischaracterised the events that led up to the fatal shooting of a Turkish-American protester in the West Bank, according to an investigation by the Washington Post. The Israel Defense Forces claimed that their soldiers were targeting the leader of a violent protest when they shot Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old member of the International Solidarity Movement who had come from her native Washington state to Israel to protest against settlements in the West Bank … But a Washington Post report said that protests had subsided before Israeli forces opened fire, indicating that there was no immediate threat to the soldiers and little justification to target Eygi or any other protesters with live fire.

Students and faculty who discriminate against or harass “Zionists” may be violating New York University’s hate speech policies, according to the school’s updated guidelines for the fall semester …NYU … appears to be the first college to take a stance on the term’s use … Many pro-Palestinian protests over the past year loudly condemned “Zionists,” while progressive activists have increasingly targeted “Zionists” in the cultural landscape … Pro-Palestinian activists claim that targeting “Zionists” is not antisemitic because not all Jews identify as Zionists. But many Jewish leaders counter that claim by arguing that support for the existence of a Jewish homeland is normative among contemporary Jews. NYU’s new policy echoes that argument. “For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the standards said.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris not only proved last night that they have no fleshed out foreign policy visions of their own, but that they feel most comfortable pantomiming like they do, using bafflingly cartoonish language about each other, playing so fast and loose with history, facts, and figures so as to make the entire debate over what to do in Ukraine and Gaza absolutely incoherent … Unlike the Trump of 2016 which emphasized that it was not in the best interest of the United States to be sucked into other countries’ wars and conflicts, that we should not be the world’s police, he chose to accuse Kamala of “hating Israel.” … She also pulled the “as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone,” which is a lie … After this debate, the American voter, the American people, should be afraid.

Israel is lobbying members of Congress to press South Africa to drop its legal proceedings in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the war in Gaza, according to an Israeli foreign ministry cable obtained by Axios. South Africa has until Oct. 28 to give the top UN court its arguments for continuing the case against Israel over alleged violations of the Genocide Convention during the war in Gaza. Israeli officials say they want members of Congress to make clear to South Africa that there will be consequences for continuing to pursue the case … Israeli officials said the Israeli foreign ministry started a diplomatic campaign in recent weeks to press South Africa not to push forward with the case at the ICJ. The U.S. congress is a main tool in the effort.

… An even vaster falsehood – that in 1940, Hitler wanted to invade Britain. But he didn’t. He actually admired the British Empire … We know from the diaries of Lord Halifax, the British foreign minister, that Hitler offered terms that did not involve German control of Britain. Churchill refused to allow these terms to be read to the cabinet … And far from wanting to continue the war, in June 1940 Hitler ordered 20 percent of his army to be demobilised, in order to get the German economy going again … Just about everything that people believed about Hitler’s intentions towards Britain in 1940 — and still believe today — was a myth created by Churchill, which he probably came to believe himself.

… While it’s an artistic achievement and grand entertainment, “Darkest Hour” is badly flawed history … “Darkest Hour” reinforces the widespread belief that Churchill’s speeches played a crucial role in sustaining British morale. A scholar who has carefully looked into the matter has found that this view is largely a myth … “Darkest Hour” reinforces the widely held impression, which Churchill himself encouraged, that an honorable or lasting peace with Hitler was simply not possible. But as he himself later acknowledged, that’s simply not true … The British leader’s famous “We shall never surrender” speech was little more than “sublime nonsense,” says British historian John Charmley.

The United States accused Russia on September 4 of attempting to influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election through Kremlin-run media outlets and online platforms that are designed to trick Americans into unwittingly connsuming Russian propaganda, a Justice Department news release said on September 4. The Kremlin has used media outlets such as RT, formerly Russia Today, and online platforms it backs to target U.S. voters with disinformation, the department said. RT, a major focus of the announcement, is seen as a key part of the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts. The department announced the seizure of 32 Internet domains that it said had been used in “Russian government-directed foreign malign-influence campaigns” that FBI Director Christopher Wray said operate at the direction of the Russian government …

If US Vice President Kamala Harris wins the White House, Israel will cease to exist, former president Donald Trump told a gathering of Republican Jews on Thursday. “I will work with you to make sure Israel is with us for thousands of years,” the Republican nominee said in a satellite address to the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual conference in Las Vegas. “You’re not going to have an Israel if she becomes president … Israel will no longer exist.” The warning marked an intensification of Trump’s campaign to lure Jewish voters, as he continued to express frustration that they aren’t flocking to him in larger numbers due to his Mideast policy.

The mayor of London has launched a trial bus route in north London to help Jewish Londoners feel “safe when they travel”. The 310 bus runs every 20 minutes between Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet.It was launched in response to longstanding requests from the Jewish community for a service connecting the neighbourhoods, the mayor’s office said. Sadiq Khan said that creating the route, which operates from 07:00 to 19:00 daily, was one of his re-election pledges. Mr Khan told BBC London: “For 16 years now the Jewish communities in Stamford Hill and Golders Green have been lobbying for a direct link between those two communities.

America has caught a whiff of a changing world. CIA Director William Burns has grudgingly acknowledged that “the United States … is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.” But America’s dogmatic inability to see past its old paradigm has prevented it from understanding that change. The United States has drifted outside the geopolitical current. Russia, China and India insist that multipolarity is not a goal on the distant horizon but a current reality … The U.S. remains capable only of seeing a world divided into two blocs: it sees every nation that accepts its hegemony as one bloc and every nonaligned nation in the multipolar world that refuses to choose between two sides as the other bloc.

Tulsi Gabbard says that the Biden administration placed her on a “secret terror watchlist” after she denounced Kamala Harris as a danger to the nation if she becomes president. In a video presentation shared on her X (Twitter) account, the former US Representative from Hawaii said that the Biden administration targeted her as a “potential domestic terror threat” for “political retaliation.” She says that she became a target after she “spoke out about how dangerous Kamala Harris would be to our nation if she were to be elected as president, and why the American people should be very concerned.” The 43-year-old, who served in the US Congress as a Democrat, is now working with the Donald Trump campaign. Runtime: 14:20 mins.

Tucker Carlson has come under fire for platforming a guest who claimed Winston Churchill “was the villain of Second World War” and that millions of people “ended up dead” in Nazi concentration camps. On Monday, the right wing media personality hosted self-proclaimed historian Darryl Cooper on his podcast show – a man who has been accused of being a “Nazi apologist” for comments which appear sympathetic towards Adolf Hitler. The two-hour conversation was condemned by many on social media, including Liz Cheney – whereas Elon Musk promoted the video to his 196.5 million X followers, calling it “very interesting” and “worth watching.”

The well-entrenched idealization of Churchill is part and parcel of a drastically misleading view of the Second World War that Americans have been fed for decades. One common deceit is to give the impression that Hitler sought war against Britain and France, and that Germany aggressively attacked those two countries … Churchill’s enduringly stellar image is all the more remarkable considering that his views on a range of issues were, by today’s standards, hopelessly backward and politically incorrect … Along with most Britons (and Americans) of his era, he was also an unabashed racist.

… Up until Churchill’s appointment as prime minister both Germany and Britain had stuck to a pledge not to attack targets in each other’s cities where civilians were at risk. Overy dismisses the long-held belief ‘firmly rooted in the British public mind’ that Hitler initiated the trend for indiscriminate bombings. Instead, he says, the decision to take the gloves off was Churchill’s, ‘because of the crisis in the Battle of France, not because of German air raids [over Britain].’ Ethical restraints which had been imposed at the start of the war became slowly eroded as a result of Britain’s decision to initiate ‘unrestricted’ bombing of targets located in Germany’s urban areas.

… Across New York, recently arrived migrants are flooding the criminal justice system — at far higher rates than public officials have acknowledged. Police sources shared with The Post a staggering estimate that as many as 75% of the people they’ve been arresting in Midtown Manhattan in recent months for crimes like assault, robbery and domestic violence are migrants. In parts of Queens, the figure is more than 60%, sources there estimate. On any given day, Big Apple criminal court dockets are packed with asylum seekers who have run afoul of the law. The problem is made much worse by sanctuary city laws that mean New York cops aren’t allowed to work with ICE on cases in which they believe suspects are in the country illegally. Additionally, the NYPD says it is barred from tracking the immigration status of offenders.

Departing Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan clearly had an unpleasant experience at the world’s largest international institution. In an interview published in the Israeli newspaper Maariv on August 20, the disgruntled envoy said that “the UN building should be closed and wiped off from the face of the earth.”… Israel has had a long and troubled history with the United Nations and other UN-linked institutions. According to Israel’s political discourse, the UN is an ‘antisemitic’ organization … Israel’s relationship with the UN is particularly odd because Israel was created by a UN decision, itself a direct outcome of UN political intrigues and western pressure … Israel was admitted as a full UN member on May 11, 1949, while native Palestinians remain stateless.

… She told the BBC the armed threat was the culmination of an increasingly violent campaign of harassment and intimidation that began in 2021, after an illegal settler outpost was established close to her home in the occupied West Bank. The number of these outposts has risen rapidly in recent years, new BBC analysis shows. There are currently at least 196 across the West Bank, and 29 were set up last year – more than in any previous year. The outposts – which can be farms, clusters of houses, or even groups of caravans – often lack defined boundaries and are illegal under both Israeli and international law. But the BBC World Service has seen documents showing that organisations with close ties to the Israeli government have provided money and land used to establish new illegal outposts.

Any hope that Kamala Harris would condition or suspend arms and funding for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza was killed by her speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Thursday … She described what has happened in Gaza over the past 11 months as “devastating”, “desperate” and “heartbreaking”. In the lexicon of pro-war liberal politicians, these words are an empty, meaningless facsimile of empathy.  The words that peace campaigners were looking for were wholly absent: nothing about Israel’s vast catalogue of war crimes – not even a swipe at war-criminal-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu, who, after all, wants Donald Trump back in the White House. Whichever pro-war candidate is victorious in November, the Israeli leader wins.

Fifty-six percent of registered voters favor a policy of “arresting and deporting thousands of illegal immigrants,” according to a poll conducted in August by YouGov. Just 35 percent of voters oppose the repatriation policy, according to the August 25-27 poll of 1,555 adult citizens and voters. When counting only “strongly” opinions, the split was almost two-to-one, at 37 percent to 21 percent. The YouGov results match other polls that show majorities favor large-scale deportations. The rising opposition to migration reflects the gradual shift of Democratic voters from acceptance of migration towards rejection during President Joe Biden’s chaotic mass migration into American communities. That migration has inflated the nation’s population by roughly 10 million people who arrived via legal, illegal, and quasi-legal routes.

A resurfaced clip that has gone viral shows Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’s newly announced running mate, saying that free speech should not always be guaranteed in a democracy. “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Walz said in December 2022 on MSNBC when asked about penalties for spreading election misinformation. Walz’s controversial remark resurfaced amid growing scrutiny over his far-left policy record and its effect on Harris’s Democratic ticket.

… A progressive favorite in Minnesota, where he is now governor, Walz is also heralded for his background as a public school educator. Lesser known is the fact that, while teaching in rural, largely white Midwestern school districts, Walz developed a particular interest in Holocaust and genocide education … How to teach the Holocaust well has occupied Walz for decades. In 1993, while teaching in Nebraska, he was part of an inaugural conference of U.S. educators convened by the soon-to-open U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C … And as governor, he backed a push to mandate teaching about the Holocaust in Minnesota schools … His 27-page thesis, which JTA obtained, is titled “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.”

Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is celebrating a “historic success”, with a big victory for the far-right party in the eastern state of Thuringia. The AfD won almost a third of the vote, nine points ahead of the conservative CDU, and far in front of Germany’s three governing parties. The result gives the far right its first win in a state parliament election since World War Two, although it has little hope of forming a government in Thuringia because other parties are unlikely to work with it. The AfD came a close second in Sunday’s other big state election, in the more populous neighbouring state of Saxony. Results there gave the CDU 31.9% of the vote, just ahead of the AfD, again far ahead of the three parties running the national government – the Social Democrats, Greens and liberal FDP.

Teachers [in Britain] will be taught to challenge “whiteness” in lessons. Guidance has been created for teacher-training courses, to ensure future educators are “anti-racist” and prepared to implement this in the classroom. Teachers will be instructed in how to “disrupt the centrality of whiteness” in schools, according to a best-practice document. The term “whiteness” in critical race theory refers to social attitudes considered normal by white people, and guidance suggests that concepts including “meritocracy”, “objectivity” and “individualism” should be questioned … Documents claim that encouraging “anti-racist” teacher training will help to maintain a diverse teaching workforce, and will help to close the attainment gap between white and non-white pupils.