Miranda Devine: Hunter Biden . . . and the Coverups - Frontpagemag.com

 

​ by Frontpagemag.com

Australian conservative journalist speaks at Restoration Weekend.

 

In this recent talk, Australian conservative journalist exposes the corrupt dealings surrounding Joe Biden that was kept hidden from the public. She also addresses the exploitation of Hunter Biden and the extent of activist media coverup -- from killing important news stories to censorship. Don’t miss this engaging presentation, held at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2021 Restoration Weekend on Nov. 11th-14th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. A transcript follows.

Transcript:

Miranda Devine:  Thank you so much. It's just such a treat to be here. It's such a wonderful occasion, and of course, my first time at Restoration Weekend, and amazing to follow James O'Keefe. I've come to know Project Veritas and admire them very much because they do a lot of the gonzo journalism, the really uncomfortable, behind-the-scenes uncovering of people's secrets that used to be the province of all journalists and seems now to have been sort of given away. It's too hard, it's too dangerous, and maybe they don't want to uncover secrets. 

 

So I mean, it's interesting that just in the last few months, I know four people in New York and Washington who have been raided by the FBI over their uncovering of Joe Biden corruption. Three of them are lawyers and one of them is a journalist, James O'Keefe. The other three are Rudy Giuliani, who was the first person to tip me off to the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop, or his lawyer, Bob Costello, did last October; and the other two are lawyers associated with Rudy Giuliani: Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. And all four of these people have had no charges laid against them. They've had their front doors either beaten down or they've had the same experience that James just told you about. Simultaneously with the raid were really defamatory and unfair and dishonest leaks to various new organizations, the New York Times, the Guardian. 

 

This is a coordinated strategy whereby someone who is uncovering secrets that somebody in power does not want to be exposed, and the justice department, the Southern District of New York, once the most respected and independent and most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, seems to have been weaponized against people who want to expose Joe Biden's corruption. 

 

So at the New York Post, we know all about the powers that be trying to shut us down and censor us. It was 13 months ago that we published the first of our bombshell stories that came from Hunter Biden's laptop. This story was on the front page October 13, and it was titled, "Biden's secret e-mails." And it detailed an e-mail from one of Hunter's business partners, a Ukrainian businessman, Vadym Pozharsky, thanking him for the meeting with Joe Biden, who was then Vice President, in Washington. Now, this was important because Joe Biden had been telling journalists throughout the campaign that he knew nothing about his son's overseas business dealings. So a, it showed that he was lying, and b, we also know that just months after this meeting in Washington with the Burisma executive, this Ukrainian corrupt energy company that was paying Hunter Biden $83,333 a month to sit on its board, even though he had no expertise, and which, after Joe Biden ceased being Vice President, they cut Hunter Biden's pay in half. So it's pretty obvious it was a quid pro quo. 

 

But months after this meeting in Washington that Joe Biden denied and that we put on the front page, he went to Kiev. He was the Vice President, and he went to Kiev, and he threatened the government there that he would withhold a billion dollars in aid, in U.S. aid to Ukraine, which they desperately needed. He said he was doing it because he wanted them to fire their chief prosecutor, a man called Viktor Shokin. 

 

Now, what you don't know, and what the New York Times and Washington Post and the rest of the media in this country never reported was that Viktor Shokin, at that time, was investigating Hunter Biden's boss at Burisma, the owner of Burisma, an oligarch named Zlochevsky. And a few days before Joe Biden made this threat, Viktor Shokin had moved to seize all of this Burisma owner's property. All his mansions in Kiev, even his Rolls Royce Silver Phantom. All his property was seized. This was a current and serious investigation that was on foot. And yet, the story that you will hear from Joe Biden and from his media allies, is that no, Viktor Shokin was doing nothing about corruption in Ukraine, that he wasn't investigated anybody at Burisma, that he himself was a corrupt prosecutor, and that was why Joe Biden, because Joe Biden cares so much about corruption, had threatened the government. And they made him -- he made the government fire Viktor Shokin.

 

So we published this story, and it was a momentous story in anyone's language. It was news. And yet, none of the rest of the media touched it. And within a couple of hours of the story going live on our website at 5 a.m., Facebook announced that it had stopped our ability to spread it on their website. No one was allowed to share the story on Facebook, and they said that this was because they needed to fact-check it. They were concerned about its accuracy. And to this day, there's been no evidence that Facebook even tried to fact-check it. I know that people who were recipients of various of the e-mails that we had published have never been contacted by Facebook. People like Tony Bobulinski. No one has ever contacted any of the other recipients, which is the first thing you would do if you were fact-checking. So that was a lie. 

 

Next, Twitter decided to pile in, and they locked our account for the next two weeks. They prevented anyone from being able to share the story. And in fact, they even suspended Kayleigh McEnany, who was then President Trump's press secretary, because she tried to share the story. 

 

So that was a useful fig leaf for the rest of the media, for the New York Times, for CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, to ignore our story. They could legitimately say, in their own eyes, that this was fake news, this was a suspect story, because big tech had censored it. And that was something that they clung on to for a few days. 

 

And then the coup de grace came out: It was a letter that John Brennan orchestrated and that he had one of his proxies give to politico, and this letter was signed by 50 former high-flying, important officials in the intelligence and defense communities. People like James Clapper, like Leon Panetta, like Michael Hayden. Fifty of them had used their authority and the prestige of their former offices to declare that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. You've heard that story before. And John Brennan, of course, who's been at the center of every dirty trick against Donald Trump, was instrumental in getting this letter out. 

 

And that letter served to completely kill our story. Nobody would touch it. It was Russian disinformation. Adam Schiff, James Clapper, John Brennan fanned out across the media and they told this story. They said the intelligence community had found that the laptop was Russian disinformation. It was Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin's last-ditch attempt to install their agent, Donald Trump. So of course, everyone bought that. Project Veritas actually was quite helpful in that period because the CNN News meeting that James just told you about, in one of those morning meetings straight after we'd published our story, Zucker and one of his senior executives told their CNN editors not to cover the New York Post story. They said, it's not true. It's old news. We already know this. This is what got Trump impeached. Just ignore it. And they did. 

 

So this was a very successful and coordinated censorship operation. It was effective because it shut down our story, and we know that if that story had been allowed to get to the American people, it would have potentially, from a poll done by Media Research Center, changed the course of the election, because they polled Biden voters and found that 50% of them had never heard of Hunter Biden's laptop. They knew nothing about the corruption it contained. And they knew nothing about the investigations that the Department of Justice had opened up into Hunter Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, Joe's brother, over tax evasion, money laundering and various alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. So they knew nothing about that. 

 

And what the poll found was that if 10% of them would have changed their vote, if they had known, and in battleground states, we know that Joe Biden only won the election by 45,000 votes spread across a number of battleground states. So that small percentage, the 10% of the 50% of Biden voters who didn't know about the laptop and would have changed their vote, could have changed the course of the election. So it was a very effective and successful censorship operation. 

 

But what it did do was it -- in their panic, just three weeks, or less than three weeks before the election, it brought the social media giants out into the open. We could see -- they flexed their muscles. We could see the power that they had, and soon afterward, of course, they kicked President Trump off social media. 

 

And shortly after the Brennan letter was released, Joe Biden had to do a debate with Donald Trump, and he was prepared with that letter, armed with that letter, the Brennan letter, to combat anything that Donald Trump would say -- obviously would bring up about the corruption found on the laptop. And all Joe Biden said was, the intelligence community, these 50 respected members of the intelligence community, have said it's Russian disinformation; it's just you doing favors for your handler in the Kremlin. And then, when Donald Trump brought up all the porn and the crack use, the drug use and the really degenerate material that's on the laptop, Joe Biden just pulled off this masterful Jujitsu move, obviously practiced. He looked down the barrel of the camera, and he said, like many of you at home, my son has an addiction problem. But he's beaten it, and I'm very proud of my son. And that was it. He managed to turn around what should have been a crippling blow into a nothing burger. You can only say that the censorship of the New York Post story amounted to election interference, and you can see from the concerted efforts to censor the story just how dangerous Hunter Biden's laptop was to Joe Biden's election prospects. 

 

Now, I've spent more time than is healthy delving into the innards of Joe -- of Hunter Biden's laptop, and I can tell you, it's dangerous to Joe Biden for two reasons. It is about Joe Biden; it's not really about Hunter Biden. He's just the vessel. First, the book -- the laptop exposes Joe Biden as a liar and a terrible father. I mean, what father would put his drug-addicted son in front of gushing torrents of unaccountable cash? And Hunter Biden even says, in his own memoir, Beautiful Things, that he really wrote to sort of launder some of the most objectionable material in the laptop, came out as a crackhead who'd recovered -- he even says that the money that he was getting from Burisma, $5 million from Burisma for nothing, he even said that that became a temptation for him in terms of falling off the wagon. 

 

But the second important reason why the laptop was so dangerous to Joe Biden is because it shows the extent of his influence-peddling scheme overseas. It began, of course, the way he made money and enriched himself and his family, in Delaware more than four decades ago. But when he became Vice President and Barack Obama appointed him point man for China, Joe Biden then internationalized this influence-peddling scheme and the result is that America's national security has been compromised. 

 

Now, I'll just briefly, because it seems to be a question everyone asks me -- I'll briefly cover the porn and the sort of degenerate aspect of the laptop. And there are lots of photographs of Hunter's erect penis; I can tell you that. He had an obsession with photographing it. He would place M&Ms along it. He would measure it with a ruler and photograph that. He would -- one time flopped it into a plate of pizza from room service at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas and photographed that. So he had this bizarre compulsion to photo-record everything in his life. He would video-record his sex sessions with various women, prostitutes, his brother's widow, with whom he had a sort of torrid affair for some time. He would video-record their sex sessions and upload them to a website called Pornhub, which is a sort of amateur porn site, and he'd give these videos little titles like "Lonely Widow." 

 

So you really have to acknowledge that, because the reason it's important is because this is someone who was not a functional human being. He would spend, in the nine years on that laptop, several of them were spent on benders. He would spend months living in the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, living in a bungalow near where John Belushi died of an overdose. He would have a string of hookers and drug dealers come through that cottage by the pool. He would photograph a lot of it and videotape a lot of it. He learned how to cook crack over the four-burner stove on -- in the bungalow at the chateau, and he would photograph that. He was very proud of his prowess with the crack cooking, and he would have little baggies with these little pieces of crack inside it, and he would weigh them on a little Cheech and Chong scale and take photographs of that. 

 

So this is someone who would either be on benders, or then he would go into very expensive rehabs, and this was just a cycle that he would live in. And I mean, one of these rehabs -- I mean, all these rehabs seem to be a joke. They didn't really do anything for him. They were just sort of pampering time for him. But he -- one rehab that he did in Newburyport in Massachusetts had -- he would -- during the day he would get these intravenous infusions of a drug called ketamine, which is a horse tranquilizer. And it's also a party drug. But he would spend the days getting this drug coursing through his system. It was supposed to somehow stop addiction. And at night he would go back to his lodgings and he would invite over prostitutes and drug dealers and smoke crack all night. So I don't really think his rehab, he took it very seriously. 

 

So the reason it's important, though, to address that before you get to the corruption is because this is not somebody who could hold down a job at McDonald's. This is not a high-powered international businessman who's capable of flying around the world doing billion-dollar deals because of the genius of his entrepreneurship. This is someone who was introduced into the very inner sanctum of not just President Xi Jinping in China, but of Vladimir Putin in Russia. He was also in the inner sanctum of oligarchs across the world from Romania, from Ukraine, from Kazakhstan. And he would fly to Lake Como or Monte Carlo to meet these -- these are playgrounds of the oligarchs. And he would hang out with them. And so that was his bizarre life. One time his business partner, Devon Archer, described themselves as like something out of Jason Bourne, that they saw themselves as living this sort of James Bond lifestyle, meeting what Devon Archer called "the garchs" at Lake Como, the oligarchs. 

 

So this person is the President's must trusted advisor. I mean, currently. He's in and out of the White House. He's in and out of the long weekend White House in Delaware. Biden, just on Wednesday, Joe Biden, the President, he gave a eulogy in Delaware, and he said that he took Hunter's advice before doing a climate deal with China. He said Hunter advised him to use empathy when figuring out how to negotiate these deals with China to -- Joe Biden explained to the congregation what empathy means, putting yourself in another person's shoe, seeing things from their perspective, and that was Hunter Biden told his father. He said, see it from China's perspective. 

 

And of course he did, because Hunter Biden is still a business partner. He's in business with the Chinese government. We have annual reports and board meetings and other papers and documents on the laptop. He holds, still holds, 10% of a Chinese investment fund called BHR, which, among other things, partnered with the Chinese military to buy a Michigan automotive firm which had, basically, secrets. It had -- what's it called, anti-vibration technology, which is used by stealth fighters in the U.S. military. So that was bought and taken to China. BHR, this company that Biden owns 10% of, has shares in Chinese firms which have been sanctioned by the United States for trying to steal American secrets and technology. It also owns shares in a facial recognition firm called Face Plus Plus, which has been used to -- for human rights abuses, basically, let's say, on the Uyghurs. BHR invested, actually, $30 million in 2017 in Face Plus Plus, we see on the laptop, and two years later, that value of that investment had more than doubled. So there should be some nice fat profits coming out of that fund for Hunter Biden when he cashes in his chips, which he'll probably do the day after Joe Biden stops being President. 

 

And of course, this is important because Joe Biden ran as Honest Joe. Integrity was his byword. And he asked people to compare his character to Donald Trump's, and he vowed before the election that nobody in his family would have any business dealings with foreign interests. But as I said, Hunter is in business, still, with the CCP, and Jen Psaki gets asked about it periodically by -- only the New York Post and Fox News, in the press conferences, and she has had since February that Hunter is working very hard to unwind his shareholding in BHR, but he still owns it, and no one cares. There's really no interest to the media. They obsessively pored over every aspect of Donald Trump's business, his children's business, but not interested with Hunter Biden. You know the story. 

 

So what the laptop tells us is that Joe Biden not only knew about what Hunter was up to, but he was intimately involved in his family's influence-peddling operation around the world. He orchestrated it and he benefited from it. For instance, we know that Hunter wanted to be an artist or a writer. That's all on the laptop, all his longings to be a creative person, but he was not allowed to be. He had to be the bag man, the money man, the earner for the golden child, which was his older brother, Beau, who, sadly, has died. But that was Joe's plan, that Beau was going to become president and -- after Joe, of course, and it was going to be this Biden dynasty that was going to rival the Kennedys, that Joe Biden had been -- just admired and had modeled himself on since he was a child. 

 

And so what we had was, Hunter Biden, having to go into business, do something he hated, and basically represent his father. We saw what happened in 2013 when Joe Biden, as Vice President, took Hunter along on Air Force Two to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping. And we know that Joe Biden came away from that meeting with the Chinese president emptyhanded on behalf of America. There were some pressing issues, especially for America's allies in the South China Sea. China was militarizing those islands that were going to be a threat to Taiwan and Japan and Australia and America's allies there, but Joe Biden came away emptyhanded. Also on the subject of intellectual property theft: nothing. But Hunter Biden came away from that meeting a very wealthy man, because he was signed up then to this 10% ownership of, basically, a Chinese company that would, by 2019, have $2.5 billion of funds under management. And during that visit, Joe Biden also secretly met with Hunter's business partner in that operation. So he was instrumental and knowledgeable. He knew what was going on.

 

And to Chinese eyes, Joe Biden arriving with his son on Air Force Two was very normal, because this is the way that business is done. Corruption is done among the elites, the so-called Red Families in China, through their children, their family members, who are called princelings. And so they recognized Hunter for what he was: a princeling. When he walked off Air Force Two with his father, they understood that this was American power come to do business. 

 

And Joe's connections would continue to unlock doors for his son to the inner sanctums of all these oligarchs and Putin and Xi. It got to the stage -- he's still taking drugs. He's still completely out of control. Uncle Jim has dispatched to kind of babysit him. And he -- it's like some sort of -- I don't know -- a sort of a comedy routine. Bungling Jim Biden and his drug addict nephew Hunter are sort of bumbling around in the center of these really gigantic geopolitical deals between Russia and China over energy. They were in the middle of this power struggle between the U.S. and Russia over energy, and somehow, they're in the center of it. They're crucial to it. And they have no idea what's going on. All they care about was money. 

 

And so finally, look, I think you hear from Walter Shaub, who's the Obama ethics czar, a former Obama ethics czar. He's now quite outraged about Hunter Biden's latest grift, which is the -- his artworks where he is -- dubious artistic merit, first-time painter, and he's selling these paintings for as much as $500,000. And the White House's ethical solution to this obvious dilemma is to say, well, we'll just keep secret the people who buy these paintings, which is just -- does not make sense. So Walter Shaub, rightly, is outraged about it. 

 

But I want to know, where was Obama's ethics czar during the Obama administration, during eight years when Joe Biden was monetizing his influence? There was nobody railing against or stopping Joe Biden from doing what he was doing, which he was doing pretty much out in the open. It was pretty obvious when he was taking his son on Air Force Two, flying him all over the place, and his business partners. We had Devon Archer, Hunter's business partner, went to the Oval Office just before he and Hunter were placed on the Burisma board, and he went to the Oval Office and did a selfie with Joe Biden, which was then put up on the Burisma website. And there's e-mails on the laptop from the Vice President's counsel saying, quickly get that down! So they were aware that Joe was dodgy, but they turned a blind eye. 

 

And they didn't care about the story of Café Milano. Now, I told you about the e-mail that the New York Post ran that first day, and we only had the tip of the story at that point. What the story really was, and what I discovered through more documents on the laptop, is that on April 16, 2015, Hunter Biden organized a dinner for his business associates from Russia, from Ukraine and from Kazakhstan in a private room at an Italian restaurant, very well known, in Georgetown called Café Milano, and he invited his father to meet his business partners. And Joe went. And Joe denied it. He just refused to answer questions, and his people said no, no, no, there was nothing, no meeting on that date. He was otherwise engaged. Nothing on his official diary. 

 

But we have RSVPs, we have e-mails in which Hunter invites people and assures them his father will be there. We have the guest list, which Hunter cooked up with his friend Devon Archer. We know who was invited. We know one of the people invited was the Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, who later showed up in a Senate inquiry by Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson as having given $3.5 million to Devon -- into one of Devon Archer's bank accounts that he had founded, in one of the companies he'd founded. So we know there was dirty business going on, and we know that Joe Biden was involved in it, and yet, no one's interested. The receipts are all on the laptop. That's why there was so much trouble exerted, and that's why social media, big tech, came out of the shadows and flexed their muscles and showed just how much power they had, which is probably a good thing in the end. 

 

So I'll just leave you with two thoughts. One is that people are saying that Joe Biden should get a pass because of his cognitive decline. They're saying, well, he doesn't really know what he's doing. He doesn't understand what's going on. Now, I'm one of the first to say that his behavior is bizarre and there's definitely something wrong with him, but whatever's wrong with him was already baked in. I mean, that was clear before the election. It was why they hid him in the basement. But it sort of goes beyond the mere aging process and whatever alleged childhood stutter he had. 

 

But I'm told by foreign officials who have had -- been in these high-level meetings with Joe Biden over the last six months that he has times -- at times he's completely incoherent, like he was at the G20 in June, wandering around just behaving inappropriately; delirious is how he was described to me. But there have been other meetings in which he is completely lucid, where he relies not very heavily on notes, where he is running the agenda, where the people around him, the Tony Blinkens, the Ron Klains, the Jake Sullivans are taking his lead. They are obeying his instructions. They are treating him like the guy in charge. He runs the agenda. So I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the fact that Joe Biden is in charge and that there's a B team around him that allows him to make decisions, and he's always been a man of poor character, he's always been a liar and a fantasist, and he's always had poor judgment. So it should be no surprise that his presidency is so disastrous, and that just is with him running things. 

 

And then lastly, this point is a bit of a horror movie point, and I apologize for it, but Hunter Biden has serious political ambitions. He's discussed it seriously with people who are closest to him. His ex-wife laughed in his face and he was very resentful that she would think it was an idiotic idea. I've spoken to someone to whom -- who's involved in the laptop, but to whom Hunter, off the record, to whom Hunter has confided a lot of his innermost thoughts, and he definitely -- this person thinks that Hunter could become president. Wants to become president, and could. 

 

And I laughed and scoffed, and they said, no, when you think about it, it's a classic redemption story. He's seen the hard times. He understands how politics works. And he always gets what he wants. He's very smart. And he wanted to be an artist, he wanted to be an author; he's now both, and he's now in the White House as the President's advisor. So, stranger things have happened. I just would be aware that that's a possibility in the future. Thank you. I think -- okay.

 

Frontpagemag.com

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/australian-conservative-writer-and-media-frontpagemagcom/

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Biden’s January 6 Anniversary Speech - and His Big Lies - Joseph Klein

 

​ by Joseph Klein

To top it off, Kamala compares the Capitol riot to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

 

Vice President Kamala Harris set the stage yesterday for the Left’s exploitation of the first anniversary of the Capitol riot one year ago with incendiary remarks that outrageously compared the events of January 6, 2021, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and the Islamist terrorist attacks on America’s homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. This morbid comparison dishonors the thousands of lives lost on both of those catastrophic days and is a declaration of war on the millions of Americans who reject her corrupt administration.

When Biden took his turn, the self-proclaimed unifier delivered an angry, divisive January 6 anniversary speech, falsely accusing former President Donald Trump and his supporters of placing “a dagger at the throat of American democracy” by questioning his legitimacy. Evidently, in Biden’s version of the Constitution, the right to protest is reserved for Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but not for Americans.

The only dagger at the throat of democracy is Biden's renewed effort to take over and rig national elections under the false flag of voting rights and manufactured emergency because polls show there is no other conceivable way he could win the 2024 presidential election.

Biden asked: “Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation.”

When rioters were burning their way across the country, Kamala Harris and other future members of the Biden administration were raising bail money so they could go out and burn, loot, and beat more police officers. 

After leftist radicals attempted to destroy a federal courthouse in Portland in July of that year, setting fires and breaching the courthouse doors, then-candidate Biden’s response to these clear acts of insurrection was to blame Trump, not the rioters.

“We have a president who is determined to sow chaos and division,” said Biden. “To make matters worse instead of better.”  

Biden has refused to condemn either Antifa or Black Lives Matter by name. He will not condemn any of the Democrats, including his own vice president, who fundraised for the rioters. And he has met with Black Lives Matter leaders instead of prosecuting them for terrorism.

Kamala and Biden claim that they care about police officers. Where are they on the over 2,000 police officers injured in the summer riots?

Most Americans would agree that political violence is wrong. Yes, prosecute any Capitol rioters who actually engaged in criminal behavior, but what about the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other leftist rioters who so far have mostly escaped any consequences for their political violence across the country in the second half of 2020? Their anarchy resulted in immeasurably more destruction, fatalities, and injuries than occurred on January 6, 2021.

This is not to excuse the criminal behavior of those who entered the Capitol illegally and engaged in destructive acts, but only to highlight the clear double standard in how the Left views the January 6th riot versus the long hot summer of leftist riots in 2020.

Biden added: “We need a president who will bring us together instead of tear us apart, calm instead of inflame, and enforce the law faithfully rather than put his political interests first.”

He is certainly not that president.

Biden's speech is the embodiment of tearing Americans apart, of inflaming tensions, and of putting his political agenda ahead of the law.

In his January 6^th anniversary speech, Biden used Trump and his seventy-four million voters in the 2020 election as foils to divert attention from his own administration’s miserable failures at home and abroad during his first year in office. The COVID-19 pandemic, skyrocketing inflation, surging crime, and illegal immigrants flooding into the country in record numbers are crises still plaguing the country as 2022 begins.

There was no call in Biden’s speech for an end to political violence on the Left as well as on the Right. He made no effort to soothe the American people’s frayed nerves or look forward with a positive agenda to solve the problems his administration has created. Instead, the Divider-in-Chief chose to look backward and hype last year’s Capitol incident as a mortal threat to democracy and the rule of law.

Biden said repeatedly in his speech that he intended to separate the truth about what happened on January 6, 2021 from the “big lies” he claimed were being told by Trump and his supporters. “We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie,” Biden declared. But the President spouted at least three big lies of his own during his speech.

First, Biden falsely accused Trump of trying “to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.” Trump was certainly vocal about challenging the suspicious results of the 2020 election, but he did and said nothing to prevent the transfer of power. Biden assumed office peacefully on January 20, 2021.

Second, Biden claimed that Trump had “rallied the mob to attack.” False. During Trump’s January 6th speech at his peaceful “Save America” rally, Trump said to the attendees: "We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." (Emphasis added) Trump is not responsible for the violent actions of a fringe breakaway group.

Third, Biden exploited the first anniversary of the Capitol riot to promote the Democrats’ power-grab, voting “reform” legislation. He distorted what states are doing to protect the integrity of their election processes, claiming that “new laws are being written not to protect the vote, but to deny it. Not only to suppress the vote but to subvert it.”

Georgia’s new voting law, for example, has been a frequent target of Biden’s verbal attacks. But that law is actually more liberal in allowing no-excuse mail-in voting, as opposed to the more restrictive requirements of New York and Biden’s home state of Delaware where voters must have a valid reason for not voting in person.

Finally, to put things in perspective, it is worth remembering a far more dangerous attack on the Capitol and on members of Congress than the January 6^th riot. On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalist radicals invaded the Capitol and began spraying the place with bullets. They shot five congressmen, injuring at least one seriously. Former President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentences of the Puerto Rican terrorists well before the end of what would have been their full sentences.

Despite their hysterical claims of fearing for their lives at the hands of Trump supporters, no members of Congress were injured on January 6, 2021. The only violent fatality at all that day was that of an unarmed protester, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed at point-blank range by a Capitol police officer.

The January 6^th breach of the Capitol was no Pearl Harbor. It was no 9/11. Such disgusting comparisons are a brazen appeal to raw emotions in a cynical attempt by Democrats, from the President on down, to push their plan to federalize elections for partisan gain and for permanent one-party control.

 

Joseph Klein

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/bidens-divisive-january-6-anniversary-speech-joseph-klein/

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The public isn't buying the Democrats' Jan. 6 'narrative' foofaraw, poll shows - Monica Showalter

 

​ by Monica Showalter

Polls show that voters are more concerned about electoral integrity than the crowd control incident at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Democrats have put on a political extravaganza for the voters around the events of Jan. 6.

They held testimonies from Congress members who were there on the scene.  They trotted out panels of august and famous historians.  They flew in Broadway fixtures, such as Lin Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame, effectively creating an Academy Awards–style show for the TV-watchers, as AT deputy editor Andrea Widburg noted here.  (The irony of Hamilton being an authentic revolutionary insurrectionist was lost on them.)  Ironies, in fact, abounded.  They wheeled out Dick Cheney, a man they viewed until that moment as Satan himself.  They held candlelight ceremonies.  There was a "prayer" ceremony.  They kneeled.  They bowed.  They held a moment of silence.

White House spokesweasel Jen Psaki waxed poetic about all the "historical significance" of the theatrics.  House speaker Nancy Pelosi intoned about the "essential" need to "preserve the narrative," kid you not.  Other speeches, such as that by the sitting vice president of the United States, equated the event to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.  Doddering Joe Biden himself made his most offensive speech, loudly denouncing his predecessor, President Trump, and by implication all who voted for him, as well as states that have enacted electoral integrity measures as a result of his fraudulent election.  The states, he insisted, were the threats to "democracy."  Pay no attention to the Zuckerbucks or that big-bucks ballot-harvesting investigation going on now in Georgia.  Pay no attention to that self-described "well funded cabal" that Time magazine crowed about.

Nope, Democrats simply basked in the self-affirming, self-praising foofaraw, bloviating and puffing, making themselves the greatest sort of heroes in the Democrat pantheon: victims.

Just one problem with it, though: The public isn't buying it.

Jonathan Turley writes that according to a recent CBS News poll:

The majority of the public does not believe that this was an "insurrection" despite the mantra-like repetition of members of Congress and the media. The public saw that terrible day unfold a year ago and saw it for what it was: a protest that became a riot. ...

Not surprisingly, the poll received little comparative coverage on a day when reporters and commentators spoke of "the insurrection" as an undeniable fact. Yet, when CBS asked Americans, they received an answer that likely did not please many. Indeed, CBS did not highlight the answer to the question of whether the day was really a "protest that went too far."  The answer was overwhelming and nonpartisan.  Some 76% believe that this was a protest that went too far.

So quite a few people out there see this fracas as I see it, as a protest that got out of control, based on police ineptitude and congressional leaders' failure to prepare.  The clowns brought the problem on themselves, and now want to memorialize it as their heroism for eternity.

What we see here is that Democrats are pushing a narrative that only 30% of Americans buy, in order to push through changes in election law that people don't want.

Voters in fact don't care about memorializing congressmembers hiding under their desks while weirdos and grandstanders took over the premises for a couple of hours.  What they do care about is election integrity, and it's not just on the Republican side.  Bernie Sanders–supporters, for instance, know that Joe Biden stole the Democrat nomination from their candidate, just as surely as Biden stole the election from Trump.  Some distrust the entire system, too.

That's why we see polls like this, from Jan. 6:

America's faith in the integrity of the election system remains shaken by the events of Jan. 6, with only 20% of the public saying it's very confident about the system, a new ABC/Ipsos poll finds. This is a significant drop from 37% in an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in the days after the insurrection last year.

And this, and this:

But ahead of that vote, nearly 60% of all Americans said they lacked confidence in the honesty of U.S. elections, according to a Gallup poll from earlier that year. 

One year later, two-thirds of all Americans believe U.S. democracy is threatened, according to a CBS News poll. That crisis of trust is bigger than just one party — both Republican and Democratic voters have expressed doubt in the system.

Any surprise about that? The Jan. 6 extravaganza events mainly serve to remind the public that Joe cheated in his election and sits there senile in his presidential chair on a floor of stolen votes.

There's also this Monmouth poll from June:

Most Americans support both easier access to early voting and requiring photo identification to vote, according to the Monmouth ("Mon-muth") University Poll. The public is more divided on expanding vote-by-mail, although a majority would like to see some national voting guidelines established for federal elections. The poll also finds that only one-third of the public believes "audits" of the 2020 election results are legitimate efforts to uncover irregularities. Moreover, one-third of Americans continue to believe Joe Biden won the presidency only due to voter fraud — a steady trend since November that underlines the crystallization of our nation's deep partisan divide. A large majority (71%) of the public feels in-person early voting should generally be made easier. Just 16% say it should be made harder. Opinion is more divided on voting by mail — 50% say this should be made easier and 39% say it should be made harder. At the same time, fully 4 in 5 Americans (80%) support requiring voters to show photo identification in order to cast a ballot. Just 18% oppose this.

And this, from ABC News last October, citing Ballotpedia's Scott Rasmussen:

"Only 26% of voters, one out of four, believe that both of the last two presidential elections were awarded to the proper winner," said Rasmussen to The National Desk's Jan Jeffcoat Wednesday morning. "77% of voters say, yes we need some reform before 2022 in the midterm elections."

Voting reform has become a bipartisan issue, according to Rasmussen.

"Both parties favor election reform; it's just how you define reform," said Rasmussen. "Voters want to make sure that they can count on the results, if they believe the results they want to make sure that everybody has a chance to vote."

Rasmussen says there's broad support from voters for things like making Election Day a national holiday and allowing early voting.

"There are three very, very unpopular provisions in H.R.1," said Rasmussen. 70% of voters reject legislation that would ban states from requiring photo ID before voting. 59% of voters are opposed to prohibiting states from removing people who have died or moved from voter rolls in the months leading up to an election. And 74% of voters say that all ballots should be in by Election Day.

"Among people who actually voted by mail, 73% of them agree with the idea that their ballots should be in by Election Day," said Rasmussen.

And this trend, as reported by the Washington Post last October:

Loudoun County General Registrar Judy Brown doesn't recall seeing many poll watchers during early voting last year — they usually turn up only on Election Day, primarily during presidential elections.

But that's changed.

"This year," she said, "we have had poll watchers here every day, all day long, watching the process of what's going on."

Democrats, in putting on their tears-and-flapdoodle about the Jan. 6 show, are essentially marginalizing themselves with this idiocy.  They are so full of self-righteousness that they can't see that they are out of tune with voters, can't correct course, and respond to public distrust of them by just pushing harder.

In a way, it's stupidity, given that they are so out of step with the wishes of voters.  But obtaining power by cheating now seems to be how they get things done, so it doesn't bother them.  It may work for a while, but these polls show that voters are on to them.  They can't cheat if the margins are big, and polls show that they are big.

Poor stupid fools with their laughable celebrity cavalcade of Jan. 9 gobbledygook.

Image: Screen shot from video posted by Forbes Breaking News via YouTube.

 

Monica Showalter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_public_isnt_buying_the_democrats_jan_6_narrative_foofaraw_poll_shows.html

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Exposing the Lie of Israel Apartheid - Richard Kemp

 

​ by Richard Kemp

"We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States." — Yuri Andropov, Chairman of the Soviet KGB

• The breakdown in Israel-Soviet relations was later compounded by Israel's defensive victories against the Arabs in 1967 and again in 1973. Over this period all hope of Israel becoming a Soviet client had steadily evaporated. Arab armies sponsored, trained and equipped by the USSR had been humiliated, and so had Moscow. Thus the Soviets progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West.

• "We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States." — Yuri Andropov, Chairman of the Soviet KGB, later General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, as reported by General Ion Pacepa, former chief of Romania's intelligence services.

• As well as mobilising the Arabs to the Soviet cause, Andropov and his KGB colleagues needed to appeal to the democratic world. To do so, the Kremlin decided to turn the conflict from one that sought simply to destroy Israel into a struggle for human rights and national liberation from an illegitimate American-sponsored imperialist occupier. They set about transforming the narrative of the conflict from religious jihad — in which Islamic doctrine demands that any land that has ever been under Muslim control must be regained for Islam — to secular nationalism and political self-determination, something far more palatable to Western democracies. This would provide cover for a vicious terrorist war, even garnering widespread support for it.

• To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to Pacepa, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s, as they had also orchestrated so-called national liberation armies in several other parts of the world. He says the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. This document was fundamental to the invention and establishment of an artificial Palestinian nationhood.

• The details of Moscow-sponsored terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere are set out in 25,000 pages of KGB documents copied and then smuggled out of Russia in the early 1990s by senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and now lodged in the UK, at Churchill College, Cambridge.

• The initial charter did not claim the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for "Palestine". In fact, it explicitly repudiated any rights to these lands, falsely recognising them respectively as Jordanian and Egyptian sovereign territories. Instead, the PLO claim was to the rest of Israel. This was amended after the 1967 war when Israel ejected the illegal Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers, and the West Bank and Gaza for the first time were re-branded as Palestinian territory.

• Moscow first took its campaign to brand Israeli Jews as the oppressors of their invented "Palestinian people" to the UN in 1965. Their attempts to categorise Zionism as racism failed at that attempt but succeeded nearly a decade later in the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379.

• Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, admitted in 1977: "The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons."

• The Mitrokhin documents show that both Yasser Arafat, and his successor as PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, now President of the Palestinian Authority, were KGB agents. Both were instrumental in the KGB's disinformation operations as well as its terrorist campaigns.

• For his dealings with Washington, Ceaușescu told Arafat in 1978: "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over."

• Ceaușescu's advice was reinforced by North Vietnamese communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, whom Arafat met several times: "Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand".

• Like his predecessor Arafat, Abbas's consistent rejection of every offer of peace with Israel, while concurrently talking the talk about peace and while sponsoring terrorism, shows the continuing influence of his Soviet masters.

• Meanwhile the Palestinian movement created by Moscow, in the words of American historian David Meir-Levi, is "the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d'être."

• Moscow's campaign was significantly undermined by the 2020 rapprochement between Israel and Arab states. The lesson here is the importance of American political will against authoritarian propaganda, which led to the game-changing Abraham Accords.

The Soviet Union progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West. To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to General Ion Pacepa, former chief of Romania's intelligence services, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s. Pictured: PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat (right) lays a wreath at the Lenin Mausoleum during his 12th visit in Moscow, on August 30, 1977. (Photo by STF/AFP via Getty Images)

Last month the UN General Assembly re-affirmed its implacable hostility to one of its own member states. It voted overwhelmingly — 125-8, with 34 abstentions — to fund an unprecedented permanent Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commission of inquiry (COI) into allegations of war crimes and human rights abuse by Israel. Taxpayers' funds will pay an eyewatering $5.5 million budget in the first year alone, well over twice that of the UNHRC commission investigating the Syrian civil war.

Since its creation in 2006, the council has established 32 inquiries, nine of which — one-third — have focused entirely on Israel. But this latest COI is the first open-ended inquiry it has set up. It has no time-limit and no restriction on its scope. The US voted against the move, saying it "perpetuates a practice of unfairly singling out Israel in the UN". Among the abstainers was Australia, whose representative said, with characteristic plain-speaking: "We oppose anti-Israel bias".

As the US, Australia and others fear, it is inevitable that Israel will be falsely pronounced guilty of the "systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity" that the COI says it will probe.

I understand the COI plans to explicitly brand Israel an "apartheid state". This lie will be taken up across the world, fuelling antisemitic hatred against Jews everywhere. It will contribute to what Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid described this week as an imminent debate "unprecedented in its venom, or in its radioactivity, around the words, 'Israel as an apartheid state'."

The lie of "Israeli apartheid" was dreamt up in Moscow during the Cold War and driven home by a relentless Soviet propaganda campaign until it took hold in the UN and across the Middle East and the West. This included the repeated comparison of Israel with South Africa in the Soviet media and in books such as "Zionism and Apartheid", an official state publication of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.

The sometimes naive, sometimes malign students who will again be holding their poisonous "Israel apartheid week" at universities across the globe this year will be parroting the same Soviet propaganda as their predecessors have done for decades. They, and many other Israel-haters use the apartheid slogan regardless of the reality that under no rational measure can Israel be considered an apartheid state. They do so because its meaning is easily understood, it disgusts people and rallies them to the anti-Israel cause. That is why it was invented by Moscow.

The apartheid smear is just one part of the greatest slur campaign in history, organized over many years against Israel by the Kremlin with the KGB in the lead, utilising the formidable resources of intelligence services of the USSR. It was perhaps the most successful disinformation campaign — of many — in Soviet history. It endures and gains strength even today, more than 50 years after it was first conceived and 30 years after the USSR collapsed.

It is worth understanding how this malevolent project originated and evolved, not only to help defend against the continuing political warfare waged on Israel and Jews, but also as a case study for the ongoing disinformation campaigns against the West by authoritarian states such as Russia, China and Iran. To gain even a superficial insight into this carefully contrived scheme we must take a trip back into history.

When Israel was re-established in 1948, following UN General Assembly Resolution 181, the new state initially pursued a policy of non-alignment. Surrounded by enemies, it needed economic support and arms from either or both the USA and USSR or their allies. Given the socialist political influences in Israel, the Soviet leadership expected the country would turn towards communism and align with the USSR, thus strengthening Soviet power in the Middle East and its wider competition with the West. One of Stalin's main reasons for quickly recognising Israel in 1948 was the intention to use it to undermine British dominion in the Middle East.

Even with significant Soviet covert and overt efforts to lure Israel into its fold, this may have been a vain hope from the beginning. In any case, the pressures of the Cold War in the 1950s, as well as domestic political considerations and concerns over antisemitism inside the Soviet Union, led Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion to align his country with the West, beginning with support for US-led UN intervention in Korea, against the Soviet will.

Israel's participation with the UK and France in the 1956 Suez campaign further alienated the Soviet government, which wrote a letter to Jerusalem (as well as to Paris and London) threatening rocket attacks and promising direct military support to the Egyptian army.

The breakdown in Israel-Soviet relations was later compounded by Israel's defensive victories against the Arabs in 1967 and again in 1973. Over this period, all hope of Israel becoming a Soviet client had steadily evaporated. Arab armies sponsored, trained and equipped by the USSR had been humiliated, and so had Moscow. Thus the Soviets progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West.

The Kremlin understood that conventional attacks against Israel could not succeed, so instead focused on using Arabs as terrorist proxies, directing, training, funding and arming groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and Fatah to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets, including wave after wave of aircraft hijacking.

The Soviets employed the same terrorist tactics elsewhere, including in Europe, using proxies such as Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Factions. The details of Moscow-sponsored terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere are set out in 25,000 pages of KGB documents copied and then smuggled out of Russia in the early 1990s by senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and now lodged in the UK, at Churchill College, Cambridge.

General Ion Pacepa, chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service, played a significant role in Soviet bloc operations directed against Israel and the US. In 1978 he became the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet sphere and, among many secret revelations, provided details of KGB operations against Israel.

Pacepa says the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov (later Brezhnev's successor as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party), told him:

"We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States."

An important element of Moscow's anti-Israel/US campaign in the Middle East was a propaganda war. Andropov told Pacepa:

"Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels' occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the US Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom."

In other words, he knew that the Arabs would be easy tools in the anti-Israel propaganda war and were already playing their part. Their work only needed to be focused, intensified and funded.

To achieve its objectives, the Kremlin devised Operation SIG, a disinformation campaign intended "to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the US". Pacepa reported that by 1978, under Operation SIG, the KGB had sent some 4,000 Soviet bloc "agents of influence" into Islamic countries to help achieve this. They also printed and circulated vast amounts of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, translated into Arabic.

This included the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a fabricated antisemitic text setting out supposedly secret plans of the Jews to rule the world by manipulating the economy, controlling the media and fostering religious conflict. It was written by agents of the Tsarist secret police and subsequently used by the Nazis in their antisemitic propaganda.

As well as mobilising the Arabs to the Soviet cause, Andropov and his KGB colleagues needed to appeal to the democratic world. To do so, the Kremlin decided to turn the conflict from one that sought simply to destroy Israel into a struggle for human rights and national liberation from an illegitimate American-sponsored imperialist occupier. They set about transforming the narrative of the conflict from religious jihad — in which Islamic doctrine demands that any land that has ever been under Muslim control must be regained for Islam — to secular nationalism and political self-determination, something far more palatable to Western democracies. This would provide cover for a vicious terrorist war, even garnering widespread support for it.

To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to Pacepa, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s, as they had also orchestrated so-called national liberation armies in several other parts of the world. He says the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. This document was fundamental to the invention and establishment of an artificial Palestinian nationhood.

The initial charter did not claim the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for "Palestine". In fact, it explicitly repudiated any rights to these lands, falsely recognising them respectively as Jordanian and Egyptian sovereign territories. Instead, the PLO claim was to the rest of Israel. This was amended after the 1967 war, when Israel ejected the illegal Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers, and the West Bank and Gaza for the first time were re-branded as Palestinian territory.

The first mention of a "Palestinian people" to mean Arabs in Palestine appeared in the 1964 charter. Previously, and particularly during the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine 1919-1948, "Palestinians" had been commonly used to describe Jews living in the territory.

Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, admitted in 1977:

"The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons."

This reality has been publicly supported, sometimes inadvertently, in statements by several other Palestinian leaders. Quoted by Alan Hart in his 1984 book, "Arafat: A Political Biography", PLO leader Yasser Arafat himself said:

"The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasir Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."

Moscow first took its campaign to brand Israeli Jews as the oppressors of their invented "Palestinian people" to the UN in 1965. Their attempts to categorise Zionism as racism failed at that attempt but succeeded almost a decade later in the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. Its determination that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" was revoked under US pressure in 1991 but by then had gained great traction and is frequently cited today by anti-Israel campaigners.

The Mitrokhin documents show that both Yasser Arafat, and his successor as PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, now President of the Palestinian Authority, were KGB agents. Both were instrumental in the KGB's disinformation operations as well as its terrorist campaigns.

Moscow, through Egypt, had installed Arafat as leader of the PLO in 1969 and its support kept him there in the face of internal dissent following the PLO's expulsion from Jordan in 1970. According to Pacepa:

"In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American 'imperial-Zionism'... It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, 'imperial-Zionism' was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism...."

Moscow had assigned to Romania the task of supporting the PLO, and Pacepa was Arafat's handler during his KGB career. He provided Arafat with $200,000 of laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. Pacepa also facilitated Arafat's relationship with Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu, a master propagandist who had been given the job of schooling him in hoodwinking the West. For his dealings with Washington, Ceaușescu told Arafat in 1978: "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over."

Ceaușescu's advice was reinforced by North Vietnamese communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, whom Arafat met several times: "Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand". (David Meir-Levi, "History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression")

An internal KGB document among the Mitrokhin archives reported: "Krotov [Mahmoud Abbas's cover-name] is an agent of the KGB." The KGB definition of agents is: those who "consistently, systematically and covertly carry out intelligence assignments, while maintaining secret contact with an official in the agency."

Among other tasks, Abbas was used by the KGB to spread propaganda accusing "Western Imperialism and Zionism" of cooperating with the Nazis. He attended a Moscow university controlled by the KGB in the early 1980s.There, under the supervision of his professor who later became a senior communist politician, Abbas wrote a doctoral dissertation denying the Holocaust and accusing Zionists of assisting Hitler.

Abbas is now entering the 18th year of his four-year elected term of office. Like his predecessor Arafat, his consistent rejection of every offer of peace with Israel, while concurrently talking the talk about peace and sponsoring terrorism, shows the residual influence of his Soviet masters.

The KGB disinformation campaign transformed the image of Israel from regional underdogs, surrounded by powerful enemies, into widely hated colonialist oppressors and occupiers of the downtrodden Palestinian people, a narrative that remains as strong as ever today.

Meanwhile the Palestinian movement created by Moscow, in the words of American historian David Meir-Levi, is "the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d'etre." This remains explicit in Hamas's charter, while somewhat more opaque in the Soviet-influenced utterances of Abbas's Palestinian Authority, especially those directed towards the West.

Moscow's campaign was significantly undermined by the 2020 rapprochement between Israel and several Arab states. The lesson here is the importance of American political will against authoritarian propaganda, which led to the game-changing Abraham Accords. Had this project been vigorously pursued after its initial success, it might have eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet-initiated Palestinian project and perhaps a form of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. It might yet achieve that if the US again musters the resolve to carry it through.

Meanwhile the December UN General Assembly vote and the Human Rights Council's determination to brand Israel a racist, apartheid state prove that the Soviet Cold War narrative remains alive and well. Most Western nations also still slavishly follow the Soviet programme.

Britain, for example, already aligned with Arab states against Israel because of both oil and antisemitism among influential politicians and officials, was more than willing from the start to swallow the Soviet invention of a struggle between Palestinian nationalism and Jewish oppression, hook, line and sinker. Today you will not hear any statement about Israel from any government official or minister that does not echo the KGB's line.

Increasing media-driven erosion of popular support for Israel in the US, and the suppurating divisions it causes, are evidence of the Soviet ghosts' success against their primary target: America.

The chief victims, however, have been Palestinian Arabs, whose lives have been worsened; and Jews in the diaspora who have suffered immeasurable antisemitism based on Soviet-initiated propaganda. The former may not have been intended but would have been of no concern to Moscow; the latter was very much part of the plan.

Israelis of course have paid a great price from KGB-inspired terrorism and propaganda, but have survived and flourished even under such enormous pressure. North Vietnamese General Giap, who once advised Arafat as we have seen, has an explanation for this, as recounted by Dr Eran Lerman, former Israeli deputy national security adviser. According to Giap:

"The Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, 'You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?' I tell them that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them."

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Colonel Richard Kemp is a former British Army Commander. He was also head of the international terrorism team in the U.K. Cabinet Office and is now a writer and speaker on international and military affairs. He is a Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18094/israel-apartheid

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Ted Cruz: If Republicans Take Back the House, Biden Could Be Impeached - Robert Spencer

 

​ by Robert Spencer

If we get some elected officials with spines, watch the fireworks.

 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on Friday’s episode of his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” that there would be “multiple grounds” to impeach Old Joe Biden if the Republicans take back the House in 2022.

“If we take the House,” Cruz said, “if we take the House, which I said is overwhelmingly likely, then I think we will see serious investigations of the Biden administration.” Those investigations could lead to impeachment: “whether it’s justified or not, the Democrats weaponized impeachment. They used it for partisan purposes to go after Trump because they disagreed with him. One of the real disadvantages of doing that is the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

That’s true. The Constitution states that “the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” It is unwise and a sign of the degeneration of our political system into a cesspool of corruption and influence-peddling that the Democrats have weaponized impeachment proceedings against Republican presidents who have not remotely committed treason, bribery, or any other high crimes and misdemeanors. If the Republicans descend to the same level instead of continuing their usual spinelessness and me-tooism, on one level it would be refreshing to see them fight back against the authoritarian Left, but it would also indicate a further erosion of the mutual respect upon which our political system has been based up until recent decades.

Cruz, however, sees grounds to impeach Old Joe that aren’t just partisan vindictiveness. “I think there will be enormous pressure on a Republican House to begin impeachment proceedings,” he observed correctly, adding: “I think there are potentially multiple grounds to consider for impeachment. Probably the most compelling is the utter lawlessness is President Biden to enforce the border. His decision to just defy immigration laws. That’s probably the strongest grounds right now for impeachment but there may be others.”

Cruz has a good point. Leaving the Southern border open for all manner of criminals, including jihad terrorists, can easily be seen as treason, which is generally defined as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no denying the fact that the enemies of the United States are gaining aid and comfort from our essentially nonexistent Southern border, as it gives them easy entrée into the country with little worry that their activities to subvert and ultimately destroy the United States will be impeded.

The same could be said of Biden’s handlers’ policy toward Iran, particularly its willingness to remove sanctions on the Islamic Republic and reenter the Iranian nuclear deal. Obama sent billions in cash to the Iranians while they were chanting “Death to America”; was that not giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Wouldn’t Biden’s friendly and generous posture toward a rogue state that has made no secret of its determination to destroy both the United States and Israel also count as treason? Would the Republicans dare to explore that territory?

Then there’s bribery. Does anyone really think that art connoisseurs have so much respect for the artwork of Hunter Biden that they’re willing to shell out top dollar to own one of his creations? For that matter, does anyone really think that a Ukrainian natural gas company would give a crack-smoking ne’er-do-well with no experience in the industry a highly lucrative position without any regard at all for the fact that his father was at that time the vice president of the United States?

Biden should indeed be investigated, impeached, and removed from office if convicted. However, if any such proceedings were begun in a Republican House in 2023, the establishment media that so avidly reported on the Russian collusion hoax and the Ukrainian phone call hysteria would accuse the leaders of the investigation of base partisanship and do all it could to shut down and/or discredit the investigation before it even got off the ground. And the Republican leadership, if it is as spineless or compromised as it is now, would quietly acquiesce.

If, on the other hand, we get some elected officials with spines by then, sit back and watch the fireworks.

 

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/ted-cruz-if-republicans-take-back-house-biden-robert-spencer/

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