RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli researchers: Notes from USSR archivist who defected indicate PA president was working for Soviets in Damascus in 1980s while Putin’s current Mideast envoy was stationed there

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR.

According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983.The documents — obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez — purportedly show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East. was stationed in Damascus.

Bogdanov was caught in a diplomatic tussle earlier this week after trying to broker a summit between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow, who both claimed a willingness to meet while decrying the other for allegedly refusing.

Mitrokhin was a senior KGB archivist who defected to the UK in 1992, and his edited notes on various KGB operations were released in 2014. His handwritten notes remain classified by MI5.

The archivist’s notes on the KGB are considered among the most complete information available on Soviet intelligence operations. He claimed that the KGB recruited the then head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Wadi Haddad, as an agent in the 1970s.

His writings also revealed that Haddad, operating under the code name NATSIONALIST, was given Soviet assistance in funding and arming the PFLP.

The canonical definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah involves a man who murders his parents and then asks for clemency because he is an orphan. An unprecedented degree of chutzpah informs the machinations of radical Muslims, who engineer humanitarian disasters and then demand that the West intervene to save them. In his recent book Mission Failure, Prof. Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University points to the first instance of this tactic: the Kosovo Liberation Army persuaded Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright to make war on the Serbs by provoking them into killing a hundred or two civilians.

Most of Clinton’s cabinet didn’t want to support the KLA, which made its money in narcotics and human trafficking, and they didn’t want to divide the sovereign state of Serbia—a precedent that Russia later used to justify its seizure of the Crimea. Nonetheless the moral blackmail succeeded, and Muslim radicals learned how to push the guilt button of the West.

My review-essay on Mandelbaum’s book appears in the Summer 2016 issue of Claremont Review of Books. Although I find much to disagree with, his reading of the salient events is incisive. His argument intersects with my warning just after the 9/11 attacks that radical Islam intended to horrify the West—not only by committing atrocities against Western civilians, but by causing massive civilian casualties among Muslims.

To a great extent they have succeeded. The fragile conscience of the Germans could not bear the suffering of Syrian refugees streamed towards its border with the connivance of Turkey. As Giulio Meotti reported for the Gatestone Institute, the refugee invasion will radically alter Europe’s demographic balance.

Hamas fought the Gaza War in order to maximize civilian casualties among its own population, and thereby entice the West into forcing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, where short-range rockets could devastate the national airport as well as Tel Aviv. This has not succeeded—yet—because Americans support Israel over the Palestinians by a 4:1 margin. But Palestinian leaders are patient; as the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Daraghmeh wrote (translate by the Times of Israel), the war with Israel “will end only when the world understands it has a duty to intervene and to draw borders and lines, as it did in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Kosovo.”

This macabre pantomime should be transparent, but such is the squeamishness of the West that enlightened opinion shudders at the prospect of more dead Palestinian civilians. The world forgets that the Allies killed 1 million German civilians and between a quarter and half a million Japanese, mostly through aerial bombardments. This sacrifice was justified by the need to destroy wicked governments that killed tens of millions of civilians in Europe and Asia. States have the right to defend themselves against artillery attacks. Israel’s right of self-defense is generally acknowledged, but with the caveat the self-defense should be “proportionate,” that is, ineffective.

Frequently the “proportionality” canard is linked to a demand for Israeli concessions that have nothing to do with the issue at hand. Oxford University theologian Nigel Biggar for example writes in the Summer 2016 issue of the Christian strategy journal Providence: “It was within Israel’s power to take diplomatic, confidence-building initiatives. Uniterally, she could have stopped and reversed the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Since she didn’t do so, her military assaults on Gaza were inapt and therefore disproportionate.” Prof. Biggar forgets that Israel’s unilateral “confidence-building” withdrawal from Gaza put Hamas rockets on its borders. Logic is beside the point. The West is horrified and wants the horror to stop, and that is just what Hamas counts on.

Worse is yet to come. On Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah now has 150,000 rockets, by far the largest such inventory in the world, including many precision-guided missiles which can be programmed for evasive flight paths and are more difficult to shoot down with the Iron Dome air defense system, as I warned two years ago. Many of these are emplaced in civilian homes in the Shi’ite towns of southern Lebanon. To destroy them would entail civilian casualties one or two orders of magnitude greater than the collateral damage in Gaza.

President Obama has just committed his most flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution to date. He purported to commit the United States to a legally binding treaty without first obtaining consent by two thirds of the Senators present, as required under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. Obama is using the United Nations to end run the Senate with regard to the Paris Agreement on climate change negotiated last December.

Last week, Obama submitted an instrument to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, for deposit with the UN, which he claims signifies official “acceptance” of the Paris Agreement by the United States. Obama said he and China’s President Xi Jinping together decided to “commit formally to joining the agreement ahead of schedule.”

Obama was constitutionally entitled to sign the Paris Agreement as an executive act, which he did in April of this year. However, signing the Paris Agreement was only the first step. In order for the Paris Agreement to actually take effect and enter into legal force, at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global emissions need to formally join the Paris Agreement. This requires the further step of member states’ “ratification, acceptance or approval” of the Paris Agreement before their emissions can be counted towards fulfilling the 55 percent of global emissions threshold.

The United States is the second highest emitter of emissions, after China. Together the U.S. and China account for around 40 percent of global emissions. If the United States and China were to formally join the Paris Agreement via ratification, acceptance or approval, the 55 percent threshold target would be well within reach.

China presumably had no problem moving forward to formally join the Paris Agreement. However, in order to do his part so that the UN could declare the Paris Agreement to be in legal force sooner rather than later, Obama had to find a way to justify skipping over the constitutional requirement of U.S. Senate consent and still cause the U.S. to become bound to a treaty. The answer was to pretend that what the UN itself regards as a treaty, to which its parties would be legally bound once it came into force, was not really a treaty after all. It was only an executive agreement, the Obama administration argues, that is within the president’s power to enter into without any congressional involvement.

White House senior adviser Brian Deese offered up this sophistry at a White House press conference, held before Obama’s visit to China for the G-20 summit where he would act on the power he was usurping from the legislative branch. Deese claimed that Obama was using “his authority that has been used in dozens of executive agreements in the past to join and formally deposit our instrument of acceptance, and therefore put our country as a party to the Paris Agreement.” Deese tried to distinguish between “treaties that require advice and consent from the Senate” and “a broad category of executive agreements where the executive can enter into those agreements without that advice and consent.”

Stephen Harper’s career as a Canadian politician spanned three decades, in which he belonged to three right-leaning parties, won three election victories, and served three terms as prime minister. After resigning his federal seat on August 26, he is highly unlikely to return for another stint in politics.

After losing last October’s federal election to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, Harper stepped down as Conservative party leader that night. He remained a backbench MP for ten more months — which surprised some people, but enabled him to exit the stage in a quiet, dignified manner. He participated in 99 votes (coincidentally enough, 99 is the total number of Conservatives currently in Parliament), didn’t interfere with interim Conservative party leader Rona Ambrose’s agenda, and never rose to speak in the House of Commons again.

Naturally, the discussion has now shifted to an analysis of his political legacy.

I’ve known Harper for more than 20 years, long before I worked for him as one of his speechwriters. He’s intelligent, well-read, determined, and an astute political thinker. He’s a great admirer of Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher, among other notable conservative leaders. He holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Calgary, and always worked to secure Canada’s financial health and future economic success.

Alas, his political ambitions came at a time when Canadian conservatives were heading into the political wilderness. The split between the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party of Canada (later the Canadian Alliance) between 1987 and 2003 tore apart the conservative political movement, and gave the Liberals a much easier road to power.

Harper was an influential Reform MP from 1993–1997, but left after his relations with then–Reform leader Preston Manning became strained. While serving as the National Citizens Coalition’s president, Harper watched his old party morph into the Canadian Alliance in 2000.

When the Alliance struggled mightily under the leadership of Stockwell Day, he saw his moment to become a white knight for Canadian conservatism. Harper triumphantly returned to politics, and was elected party leader in 2002. He pushed hard to unite the political Right, and merged the Alliance with Peter MacKay’s Progressive Conservatives in December 2003 to form the Conservative Party of Canada.

Harper was elected the new party’s first leader. Although he lost the 2004 federal election to Paul Martin and the Liberals, it was reduced to a minority government. He would beat them in 2006 to become Canada’s first right-leaning prime minister in 13 years.

The United Nations was founded as a global pact among states, but over the decades in the name of transparency and to further the aim of globalization, it has opened its doors to more than 6,150 non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While governments wring their hands over incitement to terror and dangerous uses of social media, they ignore the alarming focal point within arms’ reach: the United Nations. An examination of U.N. NGOs reveals that the U.N. has handed a global megaphone to groups spreading hatred and inciting terror from the world stage. In short, the so-called representatives of “civil society” aren’t so civil after all.

In theory, the U.N. has processes for accreditation that share a common requirement: respect for the purposes and principles of the organization. In order to qualify for accreditation, NGOs must operate in conformity with, or promote, the U.N Charter. They must affirm “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.”

In practice, NGOs have been welcomed into the world of international diplomacy and have gained access to international media platforms while they are simultaneously betraying the core U.N mission by advocating terror and intolerance.

Most striking for an organization founded on the ashes of the Holocaust, the U.N. has accredited NGOs that play a central role in promoting modern anti-Semitism and encouraging the destruction of the Jewish state.

The benefits of U.N. accreditation for NGOs are tangible and significant: the ability to sponsor speakers, mount exhibits, and screen films in the same U.N. facilities that house an international press corps; the right to speak at U.N. meetings and have their words translated and broadcast via U.N. webcasts worldwide; the capacity to publish written statements and have them disseminated by the U.N.; the opportunity to attend negotiating sessions and to influence the world’s diplomats. U.N. websites even link directly to selected NGO websites, greatly enhancing their traffic and messaging.

Scattered around the U.N. system are a few disclaimers of responsibility for the content of NGO events and websites. But NGO events on U.N. premises are permitted only after detailed applications and approval by U.N. representatives. NGO website links are selectively posted on U.N. sites by U.N. officials. And NGOs are regularly singled out for coveted speaking gigs by U.N. representatives. U.N. selection and approval procedures, from accreditation on, belie claims that U.N. officials and envoys are ignorant of the purposes and content of the NGOs they choose.

In May 2016, many of the world’s major NGOs complained that the accreditation processes were unfair because applications were being thwarted by certain member states for fear of empowering critics of these states. And, indeed, many of the states running the U.N. accreditation processes — such as China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Sudan — inhibit free speech and curtail the freedom of association in their own backyards. At the same time, these nations use their powers on the U.N. NGO Committee to protect themselves in the international arena.