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America's Foes Discover Its Weakness, by Eric Striker

29-4-2024 < UNZ 8 3018 words
 

American elites are lashing out in a delirious fashion. Our rulers are seeing foreign influence everywhere.

According to Washington, Chinese, Russian and Iranian agents are seeking to meddle in the 2024 election, are harvesting Americans’ data on Tik Tok, and even organizing the anti-Zionist protests that cops from “defund the police” New York to illegal immigrant riddled Texas are ordered to smash on sight without any concern for civil liberties.


Immediately upon his return from a visit to China, Antony Blinken began to spread gossip on CNN accusing Beijing of trying to sway the 2024 election. He has provided no evidence. As of this moment, there are only two plausible presidential candidates. Both are China hawks, and neither of them wants to be in second place in the race to destroy China.


This visit follows Congress’ passing of the Tik Tok ban, which gives Chinese parent company ByteDance a year to either sell their popular social media app to a consortium of Jewish investors or be outlawed. Lawmakers cited concerns that TikTok’s algorithms are designed to foster distrust of Jews and American institutions, as well as another unsubstantiated claim that the Chinese were harvesting American user’s data.


Even if there was any merit to the claim about TikTok’s algorithms, the Supreme Court ruled in 1965’s Lamont v. Postmaster General that propaganda sponsored by foreign governments is legally protected by the First Amendment. On the data front, America is one of the few countries in the world that offers no privacy protections for its citizens. If China wanted Americans’ data, they can purchase it online from a wide range of third-party vendors.


TikTok is planning to fight the ban in federal courts, but legal observers believe they will lose despite having compelling constitutional arguments on their side. Since the beginning of the War on Terror, the Supreme Court has adamantly refused to uphold the rights of Americans when “national security” is cited as a rationale, regardless of the merits.


The US government’s paranoia is being fueled by its global isolation in respects to the Israel-Palestine war in conjunction with growing disapproval at home. At the UN, the United States has used its veto to prevent ceasefires, sanctions and even the symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state, despite the rest of the world being in virtual consensus against it. Washington’s unconditional support for Zionism is not negotiable, albeit unpopular and controversial. Two-thirds of Americans want the government to force Israel to agree to a ceasefire, but this sentiment is being ignored.


On America’s college campuses, Jewish organizations are working in tandem with the feds to use draconian anti-terror laws they helped design to frame students expressing indignation at our government’s role in the wanton mass murder of women and children as foreign-sponsored terrorists.


Since October 7th, State Department officials have been regularly resigning in protest, stating that they have lost their moral credibility when seeking to direct the armies of young pro-American NGO leftists around the world due to their dismay and disillusionment over Washington’s seemingly paradoxical hypocrisy in facilitating the most well-documented genocide in history.


For young, naive people indoctrinated to believe in the Obama human rights doctrine of the American empire, they now realize they were duped. Losing tomorrow’s elites with mass arrests and bipartisan backed police beatdowns at Yale, Columbia, NYU and other Ivy League institutions where the system’s managerial class is trained has sowed the seeds for a future crisis for the regime.


Driving the panicked illiberalism within the liberal order is China, Iran, North Korea and Russia using the Zionist stranglehold over Washington to begin rapidly improving their own reputations at the expense of the US’ diplomatic standing. Global approval ratings for China and Russia are rising throughout the world, thanks in part to their hardline stance against Israel, willingness to legitimize Hamas, and their leadership in advocating for Palestinian state.


Within this context, the timing of Blinken’s visit to China suggests an ulterior motive not articulated in press releases. The Secretary of State, who presents himself in Israel as a Jew rather than as an American, dropped in on Xi Jinping on the same day a delegation of Fatah and Hamas members were in Beijing to begin discussions on creating a united front. Both China and Russia have been working diligently on unifying the Palestinians as a single political entity, which if achieved, could force the creation of a Palestinian state whether America and Israel like it or not. Threats from Blinken and Janet Yellen have so far failed to deter this effort.


The support is not limited to diplomacy. Russia, North Korea and China have been providing military and economic support to the pro-Palestinian resistance, primarily by refusing Treasury Secretary Yellen’s demands that they help isolate Iran and rejecting Blinken’s command that they force Iran, the Houthis and other regional actors to stop battering Israel.


Last November, the CIA declassified intelligence revealing that Russian military advisors were moving to provide Hezbollah training for countering Israel’s air supremacy. Though not a credible source, Ukrainian intelligence continues to hold that Wagner helped train Hamas in special forces tactics and drone warfare for its October 7th incursion. It is now common knowledge that Hamas is being armed with North Korean weapons, but what has generated less commentary is the weapons recently manufactured in Russia and China that the IDF keeps encountering on the battlefield. So far, foreign policy analysts have speculated that these weapons wound up in Gaza via arm’s sales to Iran, but the fact that Russia and China have substantially increased their military cooperation with Tehran since tensions with Israel have increased suggests that applying special pressure to the Zionist regime is not inconsequential blowback, but part of a grand strategy to strike at the true heart of the American empire.


At face value, Russia and China gain nothing in their struggle with Washington over Ukraine and Taiwan by backing the Palestinians and Iranians against Israel. Israel has taken painstaking efforts to be officially neutral in the Russia-Ukraine war, largely due to fears of Russian retaliation through its base in Syria. Historically, Vladimir Putin has sought warm relations with the Jewish community in Moscow and St Petersburg, as well as Benjamin Netanyahu himself. On Beijing, Netanyahu has traditionally sought amicable economic relations, even drawing a rare rebuke from Washington for being too trusting.


In recent years, these ties have been severed. Israel has economically pulled away from China, preferring India for business partnerships instead. Russia seems to have given up on any kind of relationship with Israel, and is now neutralizing Israel’s strategic edge by providing Iran with fifth generation fighters and modern anti-aircraft weapons.


But Israel is not, and does not see itself, as most nation states do. The Israeli government holds that it is the representative of every Jew in the world, all who automatically qualify for Israeli citizenship based solely on having Jewish ancestry, regardless of where they are from or whether they have any ties to the Middle East. Plainly speaking, the governments of America (half of the Biden cabinet is Jewish), Ukraine (which has a Jewish prime minister and president) and Israel should be seen as a single transnational Jewish entity, and there is evidence that foreign countries perceive them as such. If this calculation is true, Russia and China can receive the best individual geopolitical cost-to-benefit by aiding in political, military and economic attacks against the country world Jewry has the most sentimental allegiance to.


There is evidence that policy planners in Moscow and Beijing understand this. Four months before the TikTok ban, the US Envoy for Combating Antisemitism Aaron Keyak expressed fear that the Chinese could use the app to promote anti-Israel sentiment and discredit American institutions by pointing to the role Jews play within them.


Keyak’s fears are not groundless. In recent years, Chinese celebrities, academics, journalists and state officials have started openly discussing Jewish power as the hidden language needed to understand why America and its liberal vassal states behave as they do. One lengthy article in the Chinese language version of news outlet Global Times titled “Do Jews Control The United States? How powerful are they in Western countries?” meticulously details the lopsided Jewish overrepresentation in the media, politics, finance and culture of America, France, Germany and Britain.


There is no taboo on this topic in China like there is in America and Western Europe, where expressing such sentiments leads to ostracism and imprisonment. Following the October 7th assault, the influential former editor-in-chief of the Global Times Hu Xijin wrote on Weibo, “Some of us should not be influenced by public opinion dominated by Jews and Americans.” In another instance, China Central Television (CCT) presented a segment outlining that Jews, 3% of the population, hold most of America’s wealth. A former Chinese ambassador interviewed for the same segment followed up by affirming that in his experience the United States and the West are in the thrall of a “Jewish bloc.”


Reports abound of patriotic Chinese internet users review-bombing American Holocaust movies, often with comments calling them propaganda or referring to Israel as the real Nazis. When a Communist Party official agreed to meet Janet Yellen in hopes of a relationship “thaw” in August 2023, an avalanche of Chinese social media users angrily attacked the official’s cordial comment about speaking to Yellen with posts referring to her as “Shylock” and callbacks to the Jewish Sassoon family that was central to instigating the Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars.


European Union officials have started complaining of anti-Semitism ever since Chinese ambassadors tired of their lectures about the supposed persecution of Uyghurs started responding with images of what they are helping Israel do in Gaza. This has hurt leading figures who regularly accuse China and Russia of genocide, such as the French-Jew Raphael Glucksmann, who is leading the Socialist Party presidential ticket despite provoking massive pushback from voters for refusing to morally condemn Israel’s behavior in Gaza in similar terms.


In Russia’s case, the situation is more complex. Under Putin’s view of civic nationalism, the 1.5 million Russian-Jews in Israel are members of the Russian citizenry and thus a potential fifth column for the Kremlin to tap. 12 years after Putin first outlined this worldview, his belief has been proven to be unfounded.


From the beginning of his presidency to 2014 (the year of Crimea’s annexation), Putin sought to portray himself as an ally of the Jews and cultivated a circle of Jewish billionaires, though this also coincided with an anti-corruption campaign that led to a large number of Jewish oligarchs being imprisoned, dying under mysterious circumstances, or defecting to the West. In retrospect, it is now believed that the former KGB agent’s overtures to the wealthy Jews who ruled Russia during the Yeltsin years was a Machiavellian plan to strip them of their power and restore rule by Siloviki.


It is impossible to know exactly what Putin thinks today, but we do know that Russian-Jews have no love for him or for Russia. A survey conducted in 2022 found that 70% of Russian-speaking Jews in Israel support the Ukraine in the war, even though the Israeli government remains officially neutral.


A separate poll of Russian-speaking Jews who moved to Israel from 1988 to 2017 found that only 2% expressed sympathy for Russia in the Ukraine war, while another 22% stated that they did not care for either Russia or Ukraine. This antipathy is not solely due to Russia’s war with Ukraine, a separate survey of this demographic in 2017 found similarly low levels of warmth for the Motherland.


This dynamic was put on display when forced to choose between America and NATO or Russia, where some of Putin’s closest Jewish allies have betrayed him. In 2022, Moscow’s chief Rabbi and Jewish community leader Pinchas Goldschmidt, who had previously enjoyed close ties to the Kremlin, surprised Putin by declaring his support for Ukraine in the war and emigrating. In 2023, the Russian government classified Rabbi Goldschmidt as an enemy agent. A substantial portion of Jews have left Russia since the start of the conflict. When high ranking government official Anatoly Chubais departed from Russia to Israel after the start of the war, Putin dismissively mocked him as “Moshe Israelivich.”


Washington and Brussels have targeted several Jewish billionaires in Russia with sanctions since the start of the war, most likely out of projection, assuming that they would be able to veto Putin’s military decision or overthrow his government like would happen in a liberal demo-plutocracy. The gamble failed to pay off. The only outcome of these sanctions was to financially weaken Jewish oligarchs in Russia further, leading to the West backpedaling by beginning to lift the sanctions on Jewish billionaires such as Mikhail Friedman and Petr Aven.


Jews left in Moscow and St Petersburg, who are far more liberal and anti-Putin than the typical Russian, have gone deafeningly silent on the war. In an April 2022 interview with the Times of Israel, leaders of the Jewish community that remains inside of Russia and Belarus strongly implied that they support NATO and Ukraine in the war, but are engaging in a “balancing act” due to fears that they will be targeted. On the question of whether Jews should leave Russia, one Israeli expert on the Former Soviet Union recently responded by comparing the country to Germany immediately after Hitler’s ascent to Fuhrerdom, telling them to leave as soon as possible, “What are you waiting for?!”


One could speculate that the Kremlin counter on at least some Jewish support in Ukraine by exaggerating the ideological influence of Swastika tattooed soccer hooligan battalions taking orders from the Jewish civilian government in Kiev. We see Russian figures struggling to keep this narrative alive in the midst of the reality of united global Jewish support for Ukraine. Sergey Lavrov accusing Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being a neo-Nazi, while also accusing Adolf Hitler of being a Jew and concluding that the most fervent Nazis are usually Jewish, is a testament to the weakness of the Jewish-Nazi-NATO discursive contradiction.


But some changes to Russian discourse are more subtle and effective. Last January, Russia’s foreign ministry complained that Germany only acknowledged Jewish victimhood of World War II while ignoring every other ethnic group, particularly Slavic Russians. As in Czechia and Poland, the Russian nationalist narrative on World War II focuses primarily on the suffering of Slavs at the hands of Germany, which directly clashes with the American/NATO fixation on Jews.


Putin’s 25-year evolution from pro-Jewish, pro-Israel liberal reformer applying to join NATO to vocal leader of a nascent anti-American world order has ended up making Russia a key anti-Zionist force in the Middle East, a role it once played in the 1960s and 70s, when the Soviet Union backed Arab nationalism.


This position has been a massive success for Russia. The conflict in Israel has forced the West to redirect weapons transfers to the preferentially treated Zionist state over Ukraine. The need to subsidize and arm Israeli forces has led to a six-month lull in American aid to Ukraine only rectified recently. Some Ukrainians expressed discontent about their American benefactors, asking why the US air force intercepts Iranian missiles heading to Israel but refuses to provide such a service in Ukraine.


In the Pacific, military blogger Jordan Cohen wrote on War On The Rocks that the need to support Israel requires a functional trade of Taiwan.


In other words, China and Russia have gone all in on supporting the anti-Zionist forces in the Middle East as a form of realpolitik.


If we are to be honest, the only foreign policy school that could’ve predicted that the West would drop everything to fight for a tiny nation of no objective strategic value is the “anti-Semitic” one.


The last few weeks of Washington’s activity have been particularly unhinged: expanding FISA surveillance, $95 billion in weapons for Israel and Ukraine, violently suppressing peaceful protests against Israel, a sudden ban on a social media app used by 150 million Americans, and so on.


This does not look like a well thought out plan. Perhaps Xi and Putin have finally discovered Washington’s phobia: not the threat of nuclear war, not dedollarization, but isolating Zionism, and by extension Jewry.


Every strike at this Achilles heel seems to provoke spastic reflexes that could hasten America’s demise if it continues.


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