Best thing to come out of the government on fusion in decades.
Biden Blames the Jews for His Ukraine Policy
The president and his people try to seal a new Iran deal by hanging their appeasement of Putin on Israel
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was precipitated by assurances from China, Germany, and the United States that each of Russia’s major trading partners either backed his position or had zero interest in getting in his way. President Joe Biden’s invitations to Putin to bite off more chunks of Ukraine made it clear that America was not interested in a fight with the Russian dictator in his own backyard. Surely, the mighty Putin would make quick work of the Ukrainians. After all, he helped put down the Syrian rebellion to preserve Iran’s stake in Syria, and thereby sealed Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with the clerical regime in Tehran. So why make a big fuss, especially since at the same time Putin is intent on breaking Ukraine, he is also brokering the new Iran deal with U.S. negotiators in Vienna?
The problem for Biden is that Putin is not winning his war in anything like the quick and easy fashion that the White House and other world powers apparently expected. Moreover, the prospect of a dictator murdering thousands of Ukrainians in Europe in a prolonged war may be a tougher pill to swallow for so-called Western elites than the same dictator helping to murder half a million Syrians.
Biden’s position has thus become difficult, even with a captive media eager to read from a script in which the president of the United States bravely rallies NATO to do something, while in fact doing as close to nothing as politically possible. Luckily, the White House has a playbook for situations in which the contradictions between appearance and reality threaten to overwhelm the ever-changing storylines about who is responsible for, say, $6 per gallon gas. The playbook, like the Iran deal, is a legacy of the Obama administration, and a variation on an age-old incantation: “Blame the Jews.”
In the case of Ukraine, blaming the Jews might seem like a stretch—the Jewish state is a regional power in a region far from Ukraine. But senior Capitol Hill sources told Tablet that the Biden administration is trying to put Israel in the line of fire by pushing Jerusalem to mediate between Kyiv and Moscow. The point is to position Israel to catch the blame if Putin doesn’t relent, or the stubborn Ukrainians prove unwilling to surrender enough territory to end the war on terms that the Russian president finds acceptable.
Sources explain that the Israelis have reluctantly relayed messages between the two states but don’t want to get further involved, for two reasons: First, with Russian forces on their Syrian border, the Israelis don’t want trouble with Putin; second, they see that the White House is setting them up for failure by forcing them into taking a stand against Putin.
Team Biden’s PR offensive blaming Israel for the failure of two-faced U.S. policy has included Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland’s warnings to Jerusalem not to help hide “dirty money” belonging to Putin-allied oligarchs. Nuland also said that Israel should join the international sanctions regime targeting Russian assets—a regime that notably does not include world powers like China and India, which Nuland failed to mention.
The administration’s misdirection campaign also relied on Biden validators from the foreign policy establishment. Richard Haass and Aaron David Miller tweeted to the effect that if Israel wants to be an American ally, it should stand with America’s values, embodied by its moral stance toward Russia, which includes impoverishing ordinary Russians by crashing the ruble.
The coordinated operation to embroil Israel culminated in a story last week pushed out by the White House’s communications infrastructure inside Israel, whose lead publicist, Axios reporter Barak Ravid, proved his value during the Obama years. The story, which quickly went global, claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Putin’s terms of surrender. A “senior Ukrainian official claimed Bennett initiated the call,” according to an account sourced to an anonymous Ukrainian official and given to Ravid. The source claimed that Bennett “recommended Zelensky take the offer.”
Was the story true? The Ukrainian government said it was false, and moved to correct the record the next day. Zelensky adviser Mikhail Podolyak wrote on Twitter that Israel did not push the Ukrainians to accept the concessions Putin demanded to end the invasion. Zelensky’s adviser tweeted that Bennett, “just as other conditional intermediary countries, does NOT offer Ukraine to agree to any demands of the Russian Federation.” Instead, he wrote, “Israel urges Russia to assess the events more adequately.” He also pointed out that the source could not have been on the call, which was private, and was probably not in Ukraine.
But whether the surrender story is true or not, shouldn’t the Israelis be openly and proudly pro-Zelensky? Ukraine’s president has won the affection of decent—and smart—people the world over, who have festooned their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds with the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag. And he’s Jewish! Why doesn’t Israel join in?
The reality is that Israel has frequently stood up for Ukraine against Russia, and with little to show for it. But the issue in this case is simple: The Russian military is on Israel’s border, kind of like it was on Ukraine’s border before it invaded. The difference is that the Russian-Ukrainian border is a geographical fact. Russia is only on Israel’s border due to a geostrategic power play that Moscow implemented with the acquiescence of the U.S. political faction now trying to drive Israel toward conflict with Putin.
The purpose of the Biden team’s anti-Israel smear campaign is not just to make the Israelis look like they sympathize with a tyrant while offering to hide the blood money of their Russian co-religionists. That part is just ugly propaganda. The strategic purpose of the administration’s campaign is to force Jerusalem into an error that would give Putin reason to move against Israel, and thereby further limit its ability to strike Iran or its allies. As with Obama, Biden’s moves against Israel are keyed to the Iran deal.
Despite some occasional public vows of affection for Israel, Obama’s performative progressives, who staff nearly every important position in the Biden administration, do not see it as an ally. Insofar as Israel jeopardizes the Iran deal, it is a U.S. adversary. Russia, on the other hand, is an important partner in getting the deal across the finish line.
Putin supplied the deterrence that protected the only foreign policy goal that really mattered to Obama. With Putin in Syria, Israel could only go so far.
The hypocrisy, gaslighting, and attempt to blame Israel for Russian depredations started more than a decade ago with the onset of the Syrian war. Putin stood behind Moscow’s Cold War-era ally and its only remaining regional partner, the regime Bashar Assad inherited from his father, Hafez. The Russians armed the Syrian government and represented it in international forums like the United Nations, where they regularly blocked action against Assad. When Obama’s U.N. Ambassadors Susan Rice and Samantha Power complained about the Russians’ immoral support for Assad, their shrill protests appeared designed to underscore American impotence. In fact, it disguised the disturbing reality that Obama was on the Russians’ side.
That’s because by defending Assad, Moscow was also defending the nuclear deal with Assad’s other patron, Iran. Instead of owning up to a policy that put the United States on the side of tyrants in Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran, the Obama team claimed that the fault lay with its regional allies, especially Israel, which was said to be pleading to keep the Russian-backed strongman in power. The idea then, as now, was to make the Israelis take the blame for what was in fact the American position: supporting despotic and anti-American regimes.
Israel’s then-ambassador to the United States Michael Oren repeatedly tried to correct the record. “I must once again state,” Oren wrote in 2011, “that Israel wants the Assad regime to be replaced by a genuine Syrian democracy that eschews terror, turns its back on Iran, and seeks peace with its Israeli neighbor.” But it didn’t matter how many times Jerusalem explained its actual position. Israel’s alliance with the United States prevented it from blaming the Americans, which meant that the Americans were free to act in bad faith and blame Israel.
Even with Moscow supporting Assad’s war on their border, the Israelis stood publicly with Ukraine. Shortly after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Israel voted at the U.N. in defense of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Soon, Russian forces would move toward Israel’s border with its 2015 escalation in Syria, a move celebrated at the time by U.S. officials but in no way welcomed by the Israelis.
In public, Obama’s aides claimed Russia would help rid the world of ISIS and other terror groups, but that’s not why Putin dispatched his forces at the request of Iranian terror commander Qassem Soleimani. The Russians were there to support Iran. And that’s what Obama wanted, too. What was the point, after all, of legalizing Iran’s industrial-scale nuclear program, if the Iranian regime was going to lose its war in Syria? Iran had to win, which meant Putin had to help. The government of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understood that for the first time in half a century, Jerusalem would not have Washington’s support if it wound up in a shooting war with Moscow.
Accordingly, the Israelis worked out a modus vivendi with Putin, a “deconfliction” mechanism by which Israel was permitted in certain circumstances to attack Syrian and Iranian forces, including Hezbollah. But should the Israelis get it into their heads to conduct air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, they’d have hell to pay on their border. Putin supplied the deterrence that protected the only foreign policy goal that really mattered to Obama. With Putin in Syria, Israel could only go so far.
Yet even then, in December 2016, Israel again took Kyiv’s side at the U.N. in a vote on the human rights situation in Crimea.
How did Vice President Biden show his appreciation for Israel’s principled stance against Putin’s war in Europe? Less than a week later, he strong-armed the Ukrainian president to vote for Security Council Resolution 2334, finding that Israel was in occupation of Palestinian land—which according to the resolution included historical Jewish holy sites. The Ukrainians asked to abstain, but Biden said no. Kyiv then asked for a delay. There was a large and influential Jewish community in Ukraine with family ties to Israel. And after all, what would the optics be of turning against Jerusalem just days after the Israelis had stood with Ukraine? That was not good enough for Biden. So the Ukrainians joined the other powers the Obama team had corralled into voting against Israel.
The Biden administration’s moves against Israel over Ukraine are part of a ghoulish puppet show. Yes, the administration will sanction the Russian economy until it bleeds—at the same time that the nuclear deal with Iran gives Russia a cash-rich client eager to buy Russian arms. And why not? From the perspective of the Obama-Biden faction, Russia is hardly the main problem. That distinction is reserved for Israel.
And:
Biden’s priority is appeasing Iran, not helping Ukraine
The guarantees Putin got about the nuclear deal undermine efforts to isolate Russia and show the depth of the administration’s commitment to selling out Israel and its Arab allies.
(March 16, 2022 / JNS) If you listen to Biden administration spokespeople and the talking heads that form their mainstream media cheering section, you may think you know what is its foreign-policy priority: to do anything short of war to aid Ukraine in its brave fight against Russia.
But as news broke this week about the administration’s success in reviving the disastrous 2015 Iran nuclear deal, that assumption is being called into question. If, as appears to be the case, the United States is giving Russia “written guarantees” that nothing in the new, even weaker accord with Tehran will interfere with Russia’s activities in Iran, then it’s clear that not only is Washington signing off on Moscow’s ability to evade sanctions, but clearly signaling that nothing—not even an act of aggression that created a humanitarian disaster—is more important to President Joe Biden and his team then their quest to appease the Islamist regime.
To his credit—and despite an emotional appeal to Congress this week by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—Biden is resisting his pleas for NATO to create a no-fly zone over his country. Nevertheless, he is otherwise acting as if facilitating both military and humanitarian aid to the Ukrainians is the main focus of American policy.
Just as important are his efforts to isolate Russia. The sanctions put on Moscow and those directly connected to President Vladimir Putin are having a devastating impact on the Russian economy. With all commerce, including the sale of oil and natural gas, from the Russian Federation grinding to a halt, it looks as if the United States is serious about bringing the country to its knees unless it concedes defeat in Ukraine and/or gets rid of its authoritarian leader.
For the first time in several years, Americans seem united on an issue. Both the right and the left are alike in their contempt for Putin’s thuggish behavior and their compassion for his Ukrainian victims. This rare consensus is rooted in what The New York Times aptly described as their conviction that their country should still be “a steadfast global defender of freedom and democracy.”
That most Americans care about an injustice happening in a far-off country many of them couldn’t even find on a map is encouraging news. Failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seemed to have bred a new kind of isolationism that has made the country wary of foreign entanglements and drained it of any idealism about the need to stand with free peoples against oppression.
One shouldn’t count on this new spirit of global engagement to last, and it doesn’t extend to any specificity about what exactly most Americans want the president to do to halt the suffering in Ukraine. Still, it does give Biden considerable freedom of action. If nothing else, it also functions as something of a pass from even those most upset about rising gas prices. Although the record levels of inflation predated the war in Ukraine, the cutoff of Russian oil is regarded with some equanimity by many voters who think it a worthwhile price to pay for not continuing with business as usual while Ukrainians are being chased from their homes and slaughtered.
Despite having what amounts to as close to a blank check as any political leader in this deeply divided nation could hope for, Biden is not taking advantage of it. That’s due in part to his own lack of decisiveness with respect to action on Russia and Ukraine. It was Biden’s weakness—amply demonstrated by his disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan—that gave Putin the idea that it was time to follow up on the attacks on Ukraine that he launched in 2014 on former President Barack Obama’s watch. And even after the invasion began, Biden had to be dragged by public opinion into putting the kind of tough sanctions on Russia that might make an impression on Putin.
Yet even now that he appears to be all-in on an effort to punish Putin by a wave of emotion that may or may not be driven as much by a serious understanding of American national security interests, that impression is misleading.
That’s because key members of his administration are singing a very different tune as they work towards a new Iran deal.
Given the administration’s willingness to accept a renewed deal with the same sunset clauses that will guarantee that Iran gets a bomb, rather than indefinitely forestalling that possibility, it seemed inevitable that sooner or later Iran would agree to rejoin the pact. That was made even more certain once the United States began sweetening its offer further to include concessions aimed at easing pressure on Iran for its ongoing activities as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. That involved, among other things, an astonishing offer to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—which is, among other things, the regime’s coordinator of terrorist activity—from the U.S. list of proscribed foreign terrorist organizations.
Despite this surrender to Iran, the deal was put on hold recently by the demands of Russia. Moscow is one of the P5+1 group that is responsible for the nuclear deal, and their assistance was required to get Iran back to the negotiating table—something that was made possible by the fact that Tehran has acted as a Putin ally in the Syrian civil war. But the Russians put a hold on the negotiations when they demanded that the new agreement superseded any of the sanctions that the West has imposed on the Putin government.
If completely isolating Russia from the global economy was Biden’s objective, then that should have been the end of the talks. The point of the nuclear deal is to bring Iran back into the community of nations and get its oil back on the international commodities market. Declaring that the sanctions don’t apply to Iranian interactions with Russia would, along with Putin’s alliance with China, allow him an escape hatch that could make the difference in helping his regime survive, irrespective of the outcome of the fighting in Ukraine.
But Biden and his foreign-policy team, who are led by people who are the veteran Iran appeasers who crafted the original nuclear deal, were not deterred by that prospect. So the news that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has pocketed “written guarantees” from Biden’s Iran envoy Rob Malley makes it obvious that nothing, not even something that might sabotage their efforts to help Ukraine, will stop them from completing their mission to appease Iran.
Moreover, the means of this appeasement should be familiar to those who remember how the original deal was secured. Both then and now, the Iranians were able to extort exorbitant ransoms for freeing Western prisoners that had been taken hostage on bogus charges. The freeing of a British national and the prospect that American hostages will soon be released at the cost of billions of dollars is an appalling prospect for those who understand the way Iran has once again gotten away with criminal behavior.
The craven nature of Biden’s approach was further illustrated by the administration’s lack of a military response to an Iranian missile strike on an American diplomatic compound in Iraq. That some in the administration sought to claim the Iranians’ real target were Israelis rather than Americans makes the disgraceful nature of their posture towards Tehran’s terrorism even more apparent.
When this new Iran deal is rolled out, we can expect that the administration will falsely claim that it solves the nuclear problem while downplaying the way it enriches and empowers the ayatollahs, and gives them a get-out-of-jail-free card for terrorism.
But it also amply demonstrates that the idea that Biden is focused on helping Ukraine is a brazen lie. He’s not just selling out Israel and its Arab allies that are directly threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuke as well all kinds of other malign activities. It also shows that he will betray Zelensky and the Ukrainians so long as it enables his Iran appeasement to continue.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish
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Is US intel cooking the books on Iran?
President Joe Biden is taking a page out of the Obama playbook and circumventing Congress to make a deal he knows would be rejected if it was submitted—as it should be—as a treaty.
And:
No Deal with Iran is Better Than A Bad Deal
by Con Coughlin
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Bucking up De Santis
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Report: Hunter Biden emails show Secret Service provided false info to Congress
The Secret Service has told Congress it doesn't have three years of records related to its protection of Hunter Biden, the then-vice president's son.
However, emails discovered on Hunter's laptop, which has been in government custody for more than two years, show multiple Secret Service communications during the time he "crisscrossed the world from China to Ukraine seeking foreign business on his father's vice presidential watch."
Just the News has reviewed the emails and written a new article about them.
"The Secret Service’s inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to comply with my requests for records relating to Hunter Biden is unacceptable," Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) told Just the News. "We now know that Hunter Biden's laptop contained records that the Secret Service claimed they did not possess and therefore failed to produce to me and Senator Grassley. I can think of only two explanations for their lack of compliance, either the Secret Service is incompetent or it is corrupt."
The emails are from a laptop Hunter reportedly abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in 2019. The shop owner turned over the laptop to the FBI when he says he saw it contained evidence of alleged criminal activities. The FBI never took any public action on the laptop material. Lead Democrats at the time spread a theory that it was probably Russian disinformation.
The emails, which Secret Service failed to turn over to Congress, reportedly:
- Discuss trips such as a visit to Monterrey, Mexico in spring 2011
- Show the Secret Service protected Hunter on that trip between May 15 and May 17, 2011
- Reveal Secret Service communications with Hunter regarding a trip to Haiti and Antarctica
"The Secret Service worked extensively with your committees, and agreed to search parameters provided by your office as to identify communications regarding Mr. Biden's travel," Secret Service Director James M. Murray wrote the senators on Feb. 14. "These search parameters did not yield communications for the years 2010, 2011, or 2013," Murray added.
Read the emails and the full article below:
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This Is How World War III Begins
By Bret Stephens
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The usual date given for the start of World War II is Sept. 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that was just one in a series of events that at the time could have seemed disconnected.
Among them: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Spanish Civil War, which started the same year. Anschluss with Austria and the Sudeten crisis of 1938. The Soviet invasion of Poland weeks after the German one and Germany’s western invasions the following year. Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The point is, World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the world to notice.
Before the invasion, we had the Russian invasions of Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine; the Russian carpet bombing of Aleppo; the use of exotic radioactive and chemical agents against Russian dissidents on British soil; Russian interference in U.S. elections and massive hacks of our computer networks; the murder of Boris Nemtsov and the blatant poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny.
Were any of these sovereignty violations, legal violations, treaty violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity met with a strong, united, punitive response that could have averted the next round of outrages? Did Western responses to other violations of global norms — Syria’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, Beijing’s eradication of Hong Kong’s autonomy, Iran’s war by proxy against its neighbors — give Vladimir Putin pause?
In short, did Putin have any reason to think, before Feb. 24, that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his invasion?
Dig deeper into the moment.
He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Western provocation — like refusing to absolutely rule out eventual NATO membership for Ukraine — the West has mainly spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps. The devastation of Ukraine is the fruit of this appeasement.
The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to an end. The answer isn’t clear. Sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, arms shipments to Ukraine have helped to slow the Russian advance, and Russia’s brutality has unified NATO. This is to the president’s credit
But the administration continues to operate under a series of potentially catastrophic illusions.
Sanctions may devastate Russia in the long term. But the immediate struggle in Ukraine is short term. Insofar as one of the main effects of sanctions has been to send tens of thousands of middle-class Russians into exile, they actually help Putin by weakening a potent base of political opposition. As for the oligarchs, they might have lost their yachts, but they’re not about to pick up their guns.
Arming Ukraine with Javelin and Stinger missiles has wounded and embarrassed the Russian military. Providing Kyiv with MIG-29 fighter jets and other potentially game-changing weapon systems could help turn the tide. Refusing to do so may only prolong Ukraine’s agony.
Frequent suggestions that Putin has already lost the war or that he can’t possibly win when Ukrainians are united in their hatred for him or that he’s looking for an offramp — and that we should be thinking up ingenious ways to provide him with one — may turn out to be right. But they are grossly premature. This war is only in its third week; it took the Nazis longer to conquer Poland. The ability to subdue a restive population is chiefly a function of the pain an occupier is willing to inflict. For a primer on that, look at what Putin did to Grozny in his first year in office.
Refusing to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine may be justified because it exceeds the risks NATO countries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignores history and telegraphs weakness. Americans squared off with Soviet pilots operating under Chinese or North Korean cover in the Korean War without blowing up the world. And our vocal aversion to confrontation is an invitation, not a deterrent, to Russian escalation.
There is now a serious risk that these illusions could collapse very suddenly. There’s little evidence so far that Putin is eager to cut his losses; on the contrary, to do so now — after incurring the economic price of sanctions but without achieving a clear victory — would jeopardize his grip on power.
Bottom line: Expect him to double down. If he uses chemical weapons, as Bashar al-Assad did, or deploys a battlefield nuclear weapon, in keeping with longstanding Russian military doctrine, does he lose more than he gains? The question answers itself. He wins swiftly. He terrifies the West. He consolidates power. He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the ones already inflicted. And his fellow travelers in Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take note.
How does the next world war begin? The same way the last one did.
More on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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