RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyber-criminals-in-the-kremlin-1538685869

Several governments on Thursday made a coordinated release of new information about Russian cyber espionage, including an indictment of seven Russian intelligence agents from the Department of Justice in Washington. Authorities are performing a public service by lifting the veil of secrecy that usually envelops counterintelligence.

The Justice indictment names seven agents in the Kremlin’s intelligence agency, the GRU, for hacking attacks against sports antidoping agencies and Westinghouse Electric Co. As payback for investigations into Russian athletes’ use of banned performance-enhancing drugs, the GRU stole online data about hundreds of other athletes—even sending agents to Rio de Janeiro to hack the computers of antidoping officials at a conference. Then it leaked confidential information to embarrass innocent sportsmen and women.

Meanwhile, the Dutch government says four Russian agents showed up in April intending to hack the wireless network at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague. The plan appears to have been to place sophisticated equipment in a rental car and then park outside the building with the trunk pointed toward the offices to pick up wireless computer transmissions.

The OPCW at the time was investigating the Kremlin’s use of a nerve agent to try to assassinate a Russian double agent in the U.K.—an attack that killed an innocent civilian. The agency also was investigating the use of chemical weapons by Russia’s client regime in Syria.

There’s evidence that the spies would have headed to an OPCW-affiliated lab in Switzerland if the Dutch hadn’t nabbed them. The British government says the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Porton Down military lab also were targets of failed Russian cyberattacks at about the same time.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271500/jeremy-corbyn-calls-arms-embargo-israel-hugh-fitzgerald

The Labour Party — Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party –has called for the U.K to impose a total arms embargo on Israel. This would not be the first time the U.K. has imposed such an embargo on Israel. In the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war, at the time of maximum peril to the Jews of Israel, with the nascent state invaded by the armies of five Arab states, Great Britain also imposed such an embargo. It was not alone. The United States also banned sending arms to the belligerents on either side. The most important weapons deliveries, including airplanes, for the Jews in 1947-49 came from Czechoslovakia.

The British, unlike the Americans, did not impose an arms embargo on both sides in 1948. Instead, they continued to supply arms to Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq. More important, the British armed, trained, and provided officers, to the Arab Legion of Jordan. Under the overall command of General John Bagot Glubb, the Arab Legion was the most effective fighting force on the Arab side, and the only one that could claim a clear victory — at Latrun — over the Jews during the 1948 war. Even before the war was declared by the Arab states, the Arab Legion joined forces with local Arabs, who attacked the four Israeli settlements that made up the Etzzion bloc. The Jewish forces consisted of members of the Hagana militia and kibbutzniks. Of the 129 Haganah fighters and Jewish kibbutzniks who died during the defence of the settlement, Martin Gilbert states that fifteen were murdered on surrendering.

Controversy surrounds the responsibility and role of the Arab Legion in the killing of those who surrendered. The official Israeli version maintains that the kibbutz residents and Haganah soldiers were massacred by local Arabs and the Arab Legion of the Jordanian Army as they were surrendering. The Arab Legion version maintains that the Legion arrived too late to prevent the attack on the kibbutz by men from nearby Arab villages. The surrendering Jewish residents and fighters are said to have been assembled in a courtyard, only to be suddenly fired upon; it is said that many died on the spot, while most of those who managed to flee were hunted down and killed. Israel continues to insist that members of the British-commanded Arab Legion took part in the killing of those who had surrendered.

John Bagot Glubb was one of those old-style British Arabists — some called him a second Lawrence of Arabia — who went native in a big way, even able to converse with the Bedouin in their own dialects. When he was finally discharged by King Hussein in 1956 — Hussein wanted to totally “arabize” the Legion and show other Arabs that he was indeed Jordan’s ruler — Glubb Pasha retired to his home in Great Britain, and wrote a series of books “to dispel Western misconceptions and prejudices about the Arab world and Islam.” Delving deep into the past, he started that series in 1964 with ”The Great Arab Conquests,” a book on seventh-century Arabia where, he wrote, the Bedouins ”established the greatest empire in the world of their day.” A second book, ‘The Lost Centuries,” published in 1966, “traced the destiny of the Moslem empires from the 12th century to the European renaissance in the 15th.” A third book. “The Life and Times of Muhammad” again was an effort to correct cliches he thought had “distorted the image of the founder of Islam and his religion.” Glubb was a great admirer of the Arabs. He adopted two Palestinian Arab children. He also was an apologist for Islam. And the Arab Legion stood for all the military aid that the British lavished on the Arab side in that 1947-1949 conflict.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271504/international-court-justice-sides-mullahs-joseph-klein

During his address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, President Trump rejected the notion of global governance institutions purporting to override national sovereignty. President Trump called out the International Criminal Court, which “has no legitimacy or authority,” he said. The president vowed to “never surrender America’s sovereignty” to such an “unelected, unaccountable” globalist body. The UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, has just rendered a decision against the United States and in favor of Iran that demonstrates why President Trump is so correct. The ICJ judges ruled that some sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on the Iranian regime were inconsistent with the “Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights” between Iran and the United States, which was signed in Tehran in 1955 and entered into force in 1957.

The ICJ disgracefully relied on this treaty to both assert jurisdiction over Iran’s complaint, and to decide at least provisionally in Iran’s favor on the merits. It ordered the immediate removal of U.S. sanctions on certain products for import into Iran, pending the court’s final decision in the case. President Trump must, as he is expected to do, disregard this disgraceful ruling, and any follow-on rulings. The ICJ decision is an affront to the United States’ sovereign right to decide what nations it chooses to do business with and which countries it decides not to do business with, for whatever reasons it chooses including national security.

Following the ICJ ruling, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would cancel the treaty that anachronistically still includes “Amity” and “Consular Rights” in its title. That’s good, but unnecessary. The treaty is already dead as a result of the Iranian Islamist regime’s own gross violations of the treaty itself and of conventional international law principles, capped by the unlawful seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the detention of hostages under inhumane conditions by the regime’s supporters in 1979, which the regime endorsed.

The International Court of Justice’s entire rationale for its decision rests on this dead treaty. “The Court considers that the United States, in accordance with its obligations under the 1955 Treaty,” the ICJ declared unanimously, “must remove, by means of its choosing, any impediments arising from the measures announced on 8 May 2018 to the free exportation to the territory of Iran of goods required for humanitarian needs, such as (i) medicines and medical devices, and (ii) foodstuffs and agricultural commodities, as well as goods and services required for the safety of civil aviation, such as (iii) spare parts, equipment and associated services (including warranty, maintenance, repair services and safety-related inspections) necessary for civil aircraft. To this end, the United States must ensure that licences and necessary authorizations are granted and that payments and other transfers of funds are not subject to any restriction in so far as they relate to the goods and services referred to above.”