Vladimir Putin’s Fifth Column in the West

Vladimir Putin’s Fifth Column in the West

Catholic fascist Robert Spencer’s favorite leader, Vladimir Putin.

DOUG SAUNDERS (Globe And Mail)

When Russian President Vladimir Putin uses military force to menace Ukraine’s democracy and seize chunks of its territory, when he uses authoritarian laws to crack down on homosexuals and minorities and imprison dissidents, there are those among us, including a record number of elected politicians, who cheer.

A generation ago, Moscow’s fans and enablers would have all been on the far left. Today, with the exception of a marginal group of leftists motivated by anti-Americanism, Mr. Putin’s cheerleaders are all conservatives – some in the United States and Canada, and a record number who have just come to power in Europe.

Last week’s European Parliament elections saw a record number of Putin-admiring and Putin-emulating parties elected to Brussels. Some of these parties are anti-European Union, some are anti-immigrant, some are outright racist and anti-Semitic. They don’t tend to get along with one another, but one thing that unites them is an outspoken admiration for Mr. Putin.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the suddenly powerful United Kingdom Independence Party,used a magazine interview during the campaign to praise the Russian President, calling him the world leader he most admires. “Compared with the kids who run foreign policy in this country, I’ve more respect for him than our lot,” he said at a public event.

In words widely reported in the Russian media, he added that the EU has “blood on its hands” for supporting the democracy movement in Ukraine. Rather than posing a threat to Europe, Mr. Farage said, Russia has fallen prey to Europe’s “activist, militarist and expansionist foreign policy.”

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front (which sent the lion’s share of French representatives to Brussels) is an even greater admirer. “I think he puts the interests of Russia and the Russian people first, so in this regard, I have the same amount of respect for him as for Ms. Merkel,” Ms. Le Pen said this week, adding that “a lot of things are said about Russia because for years it has been demonized on U.S. orders.” She, like her comrades across Europe, wants to end sanctions against Russia and restore “traditional, friendly” relations.

Geert Wilders, the mop-haired head of the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, has blamed the conflict in eastern Ukraine not on Russia but on “shameless Europhiles with their dreams of empire.” Ukraine’s democracy movement and the pro-European government it elected last week, he said, are run by “National Socialists, Jew-haters and other anti-democrats.” (In fact, extreme-right and anti-Semitic parties attracted about 2 per cent of the vote in the recent Ukrainian election.)

In the minds of such politicians, Europe’s response to Moscow’s incursions hasn’t been slow and mild; it’s been excessive. “We have always been told the European Union stands for peace,” Mr. Wilders said. “Now, we know better – the EU stands for war-mongering.”

These Westerners aren’t backing Mr. Putin out of pure Russophilia. Rather, they admire his embrace of a Christian and mono-ethnic identity for greater Russia, and his aggressive action against what they see as their enemies: European diversity and open borders, and minority groups – especially homosexuals and Muslims. Like them, Mr. Putin embraces the old conspiracy holding that Muslims are secretly plotting to take over Europe, a key plank for these parties.

That’s why North American right-wing anti-immigration activists, generally affiliated with the Republican Party and the right fringe of Canada’s Conservatives, have rushed to back Mr. Putin and the European parties that admire him.

American anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer made a point of appearing on the Russia Today network (shortly after most of its American staff had quit and denounced it as a Kremlin propaganda outlet) to attack the United States and endorse Mr. Putin’s approach toward Muslim minorities. “Barack Obama is somebody who has been embarrassed on the world stage by Vladimir Putin more than once,” Mr. Spencer said.

And Ezra Levant, the right-wing pundit with Canada’s Sun Media,cheered France’s National Front, Britain’s UKIP and the other Putin-backing parties for their European election victories, praising their embrace of Putinist ideas: “The EU’s de facto abolition of borders … has let millions of migrants move from the poorer parts of the EU to the richer ones,” he explained, warning of “mass Islamic immigration that contains large elements refusing to accept Western, liberal values.”

Their victory is, he said, “a rejection of Obamaism, and a return to common sense, national conservatism. You could say it’s a bit of Stephen Harperism.”

To be fair, Mr. Harper has never endorsed such ideas. It is actually a bit of Vladimir Putinism.

Follow Doug Saunders on Twitter: @dougsaunders

When The Right Loved Vladimir Putin

When the right loved Vladimir Putin

Back when Putin was in the news for oppressing LGBT people, many conservatives said he had his virtues

Elias Isquith

Following Russia’s de facto annexation of Crimea this weekend, Republican leaders have begun forcefully criticizing President Obama, blaming his supposed weakness and tendency toward indecision for Putin’s aggressive move while suggesting that Russia’s autocrat wouldn’t have seized Crimea if he were more intimidated by U.S. power.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has long been one of Obama’s most hawkish Republican critics on issues of foreign policy, said on CNN that America has “a weak and indecisive president,” a situation that “invites aggression.” GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, meanwhile, complained on Fox News that Putin was “playing chess” while the U.S., under Obama’s leadership, was merely “playing marbles.”

Yet all this tough talk from Republican circles is obscuring a salient fact: Until recently, conservatives were far more divided when it came to their estimation of Russia’s president. While no high-ranking Republican in his or her right mind would ever praise Russia itself, it wasn’t so long ago that many conservatives — especially those of a more socially reactionary bent — were celebrating Putin for his country’s controversial anti-gay laws, which they described as being interested primarily in saving Christianity and “traditional” values rather than discriminating against LGBT people.

Here are just a few examples of right-wingers cheering on Putin:

The American Conservative’s Pat Buchanan and Rod Dreher

Back in December, the former strategist and speechwriter for Richard Nixon won some attention for a column in which he asks, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” After a lengthy diatribe expounding on all the ways unelected judges and perfidious progressives had forced their radical, secular morals on the rest of the country, Buchanan comes so very close — just a centimeter away, really — from answering his own questions in the affirmative and welcoming Russia’s president into the paleocon fold. “While his stance as a defender of traditional values has drawn the mockery of Western media and cultural elites,” Buchanan writes, “Putin is not wrong in saying that he can speak for much of mankind.”

The American Conservative’s socially conservative blogger Rod Dreher, meanwhile, also had kind words for Putin, writing that the Russian leader “may be a cold-eyed cynic” but was nevertheless “also onto something.” Acknowledging that he’s merely putting forward a “guess” as to Putin’s motivations, Dreher writes, “If Russia is going to have a future, [Putin] must figure, it must be built on organic Russian traditions, which includes Orthodox Christianity.” Dreher went on to guess that Putin “believes that Russia’s rebirth depends on its rediscovery of a life-giving Christianity, which depends on rebuilding a sense of social respect for and trust in the Orthodox Church and its teachings.” Dreher also seems to endorse this reasoning, writing that “Orthodox Christianity is the only coherent basis for rebuilding the Russian nation from the ruins left by Bolshevism.”

The Weekly Standard’s Christopher Caldwell

Writing for the Financial Times in early February, one of the neoconservative magazine’s editors, Christopher Caldwell, reprimanded Putin’s critics in the West for focusing on “a short list of causes beloved of western elites” instead of all the good things Putin’s done. “Certainly Mr Putin’s respect for the democratic process has been fitful at best,” Caldwell grants, but then goes on to argue that those in the West who opposed Putin’s anti-gay laws are hypocrites. As evidence, he cites the fact that some of the most prominent opponents of Putin’s anti-gay law were previously supporters of an anti-blasphemy law that passed in the U.K. in 2006.

In the end, Caldwell implies that Putin’s critics aren’t much better at the whole democracy thing than he is, writing, “Those countries lecturing him about ‘healthy democracy’ … have lately shifted power from legislatures to executives and from voters to bureaucracies. In Europe it has been done through delegations of power to the EU. In the US, it has been done through judicial reversals of democratic election results (including on gay marriage) and congressional abdication (on trade, warfare, healthcare and intelligence gathering).” Caldwell finishes his column by claiming that the distance separating civil rights in the West and Russia “is not quite so obvious as it was 10 years ago.”

Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber and the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer

These two hardcore social conservatives both praised Putin for his anti-gay laws. In a December column for WND.com, Barber wrote that, during the Obama years, Putin has been able to claim for Russia “the mantle of world moral leader” and that Putin’s anti-gay laws were an example of his being able to “out-Christian our once-Christian nation.” He describes the controversial laws as banning “sexual anarchist propaganda.”

Fischer, for his part, was even more effusive in his praise for Putin, calling the Russian a “lion of Christianity” back in October. Putin, according to Fischer, is “the defender of Christian values, the president that’s calling his nation back to embracing its identity as a nation founded on Christian value.” Fischer went on to describe Russia as “more advanced spiritually than the United States.”

Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.

American and Russian Fascists Unite In Theocratic Coitus of Hate

Religious Right Leaders Defend Russia’s Anti-Gay Law    

by Peter Montgomery

As Miranda reported earlier, House Speaker John Boehner’s office stepped in to provide space to the anti-gay Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society for its symposium on what Americans should learn from other countries when it comes to “family policy.” Sen. Mark Kirk, who had originally sponsored the group for a room, withdrew his support last night saying he doesn’t affiliate with groups that discriminate.

The Howard Center’s Allan Carlson, who described himself as a historian by training, saw fascism at work: “The parallel I see here is what happened in Italy, Germany, other lands in the 1920s and 1930s as fascism began to impose its fear-driven grip on debate, on conversation, and on policy-making.”

Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America boasted about having been a speaker at all but one of the World Congress of Families summits – annual events organized by the Howard Center and attended by conservative religious activists from around the world. Crouse acknowledged that “things don’t look so good” to activists watching the advance of same-sex marriage in Europe and the U.S., and public opinion in many countries shifting to “quote LGBT rights.”  But, she said that’s not the whole story, and praised countries that have outlawed gay marriage and other groups of citizens who are “with the help of God” changing the world.

Crouse is particularly excited about what is happening among opponents of marriage equality in France, which she portrays as a “David v. Goliath” battle of plucky pro-family activists fighting the French government and media. She mentioned activists in Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, and Nigeria. She encouraged the small number of attendees to “take heart” and count on the power of truth and faithfulness.

Austin Ruse, the enthusiastically anti-gay head of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, devoted much of his remarks to supporting Russia’s new anti-free-speech and anti-gay propaganda law.  He read from a statement of support from “pro-family groups” defending Russia’s new law. The letter claims that “the Russian law protects the innocence of children and the basic rights of their parents recognized in the international legislation and treaties.”  More from the letter:

With its new law Russia is protecting genuine and universally recognized human rights against artificial and fabricated “values” aggressively imposed in many modern societies….We thus call for respect of the sovereignty of the Russian people and we invite all organizations and people who feel responsible for the protection of the innocence of children and their rights, the natural family and parental rights to stand up for Russia, as well as for Ukraine and Moldova suffering the same pressure due to similar laws.

Ruse, who has been spending time in Russia to prepare for the World Congress of Families 2014 summit, being held in Moscow, said western LGBT rights advocates were guilty of overheated rhetoric and “propaganda” about the status of gays in Russia. He saw gays everywhere in Moscow! They can enjoy themselves “hassle-free” at clubs.  Russians, he said, accept that homosexuality exists, but they believe the political movement to celebrate and regularize it is harmful to children.

Speakers actually seemed envious of Russia in some ways.  Ruse said that with the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, “Christians over there are truly dominant.” In the U.S., though, there is “an increasingly hostile atmosphere toward people with traditional values” and a “vicious totalitarianism that is loose in the land.” And “there’s more trouble coming” with the Employment Non Discrimination Act.  Crouse said American gay-rights activists are “turning into thugs who are destroying freedom of speech, destroying religious liberty.” It’s very “refreshing,” she said, to see that’s not the case in other countries.

Ruse acknowledged that anti-gay violence and thuggery is a problem in Russia. He denounced such violence and said he has urged Russian officials to do more to stop it. But when he was asked whether the conversation about the anti-gay propaganda law and protecting children from gay people might encourage such violence, he said anti-gay violence in Russia has been going on for a long time and didn’t think the new law was to blame. And he said blaming religious conservatives for creating a climate of hate is a tactic of gay-rights groups, a “maneuver to silence people.”

Carlson said he cuts Russia a lot of slack because the country is “trying to put decent moral society back together” after both Communism and some of the “bad things” – like a “libertine approach to sexuality” – that poured into Russia from the west after the fall of Communism.

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-leaders-defend-russia-s-anti-gay-law#sthash.IM0pOZA3.dpuf

Related articles

• Speaker Boehner Brings Hate-Peddlers to Capitol Hill (hrc.org)
• American Supporters of Russia’s Anti-Gay Laws Come to Capitol Hill to Offer Best Practices of Hate (hrc.org)
• Speaker Boehner Welcomes Homophobic Group To Capitol Hill (thinkprogress.org)
• Speaker Boehner Brings Hate-Peddlers to Capitol Hill (yubanet.com)
• Russia’s Vitaly Milonov: Gay Men Deserve To Be Punched And Kicked (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Boehner gives anti-gay group a hand (msnbc.com)
• Boehner Rescues The Hate Groups (joemygod.blogspot.com)

Vladimir Putin a “Lion of Christianity” Says American Christian Rightist, All Whille Persecution of Russian Evangelicals Escalates!

Fischer Praises Putin, Calls Him A ‘Lion of Christianity’

by Miranda Blue

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer began his radio program yesterday by reading a series of quotes from a mystery public figure, asking his listeners to guess “what country do you think this guy is the president of?”

The big surprise is that the quotes – encompassing such topics as European rejection of “Christian values that underlie Western civilization,” the pursuit of policies that “put large families and same-sex partnerships in the same category” and “excesses of political correctness” – are from Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has escalated his crackdown on LGBT people in recent months.

“Who is it?” Fischer asked. “Which president is the lion of Christianity, the defender of Christian values, the president that’s calling his nation back to embracing its identity as a nation founded on Christian values? Those, ladies and gentlemen, are quotes from Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia.”

“The contrast between that president and our president could not possibly be more striking,” Fischer continued. “Just a bizarre day. To ever think we would get to the day that Russia would be more advanced spiritually than the United States. I mean, it’s just staggering to see what is happening to this country.”

Back in August, when Putin signed a ban on gay “propaganda,” Fischer gushed that “this is public policy that we’ve been advocating and here is a nation in the world that is actually putting it into practice.”

Fischer has not yet commented on reports that Putin’s increasing embrace of a theological hard line has also threatened the religious freedom of evangelical Christians.

Related articles

• Bryan Fischer: Russia’s LGBT crackdown makes Putin a ‘lion of Christianity’ (rawstory.com)
• Putin Says Russia Will Develop As Democratic State, Defend Christian Values (eurasiareview.com)
• Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• Right-Wing Media Boss Declares Russian President Putin ‘The Leader Of The Free World’ (IMAGE) (addictinginfo.org)
• What’s in the Russian President’s mind? Video shows the gay adventures of Vladimir Putin (pinknews.co.uk)

Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays

Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays

by Susie Madrak

Vladimir Putin is not your typical head of state. He’s a thug, and Russia is a state run by gangsters. Frank Schaeffer, who (having grown up in the bosom of the Christian right) knows a thing or two about religious hate, writes about Putin’s unholy alliance with the Orthodox Church to persecute gays:

With the disgusting acquiescence of the Russian Orthodox bishops, Vladimir Putin has accomplished what Sarah Palin, Franklin Graham and Michele Bachmann could only dream of doing in America. He’s made it okay to persecute gay people people in Russia. Putin has built his power base of corruption and terror with the help of the religious and conservative elements of his society. He’s become expert at courting the alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church. And here in America conservatives are lining up to defend Putin. For instance, writing in The American Conservative,  in an article called Culture War Goes Global, (August 13, 3013) Patrick J. Buchanan writes:

As Father Regis Scanlon writes in Crisis Magazine, in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated Catholic doctrine that homosexuality is a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” an “objective disorder.” That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral remains Catholic teaching.

Thus, if we seek to build a Good Society by traditional Catholic and Christian standards, why should not homosexual propaganda be treated the same as racist or anti-Semitic propaganda? …. “The adoption of Christianity,” declared Putin, “became a turning point in the fate of our fatherland, made it an inseparable part of the Christian civilization and helped turn it into one of the largest world powers.” Anyone ever heard anything like that from the Post, the Times, or Barack Hussein Obama?

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, took to TV to say that “liberalism will lead to legal collapse and then the Apocalypse.” On another occasion, he called Putin’s rule “a miracle.” When convening the heads and senior members of 15 Orthodox Churches for an unprecedented meeting at the Kremlin in the summer of 2013, Putin praised the moral authority of the church. “It is important that relations between the state and the church are developing at a new level,” Putin said in televised remarks, with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill by his side. “We act as genuine partners and colleagues to solve the most pressing domestic and international tasks, to implement joint initiatives for the benefit of our country and people,” he told the clerics.

Alongside Kirill, those present included Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria, Theophilos III of Jerusalem and Ilia II of Georgia. Also present were the heads of the Bulgarian, Serbian, Polish and Cypriot Orthodox Churches. Together they represented more than 227 million faithful.

To my knowledge not one American Orthodox bishop protested this meeting. I’m reminded of the silence of most of the German churches during the rise of Hitler.As a member of the Orthodox Church, in this case the Greek Orthodox Church, I’m ashamed.

Where are the voices of Orthodox leadership, not only in Russia but here, denouncing this awful man and the terror he’s unleashing against gay men and women? Putin has presided over show-trial prosecutions of political opponents and reformers. He’s used the full weight of his government against artists who mock religion. He’s encouraged the liquidation of crusading journalists who have been beaten and murdered. Putin and his government may have been directly involved in at least one such killing.

Now with the approval of the Russian bishops Putin is inventing a new enemy to distract attention from his fascist takeover of Russia: Russia’s LGBT men and women. As Adam Lee, a writer living in New York City points out in an article published byAlternet, Putin’s “parliament” passed increasingly draconian anti-gay laws. Russian activists have even been arrested for just holding up a signs reading “Gay is normal.”A bill now under consideration would take away children (both adopted and biological) from gay and lesbian parents. With the Russian Church, parliament and Putin saying that LGBT people aren’t fully human, homophobes in Russia are emboldened. The torture and murder of gay people, by gangs of skinheads assaulting gay-rights protestors in public, with the police looking on,is happening. And American evangelical Christians think this is all great. So, apparently judging by their silence, do American Orthodox church leaders.NOW American evangelical and Roman Catholic right-wing haters are climbing aboard the Russian hate parade .

Click back to Adam Lee’s Alternet story to see just how eagerly right-wing Christians are fanning the flames.

Related articles

• Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays (crooksandliars.com)
• Russian Muslim clerics warn of unrest over court ban of Koran (themuslimissue.wordpress.com)
• Humor failure in Russia: Crackdown on ‘Pastafarians’ shows Kremlin-church ties (worldnews.nbcnews.com)

Putin: West Equates “Belief in God with the Belief in Satan

Putin: West Equates “Belief in God with the Belief in Satan”

by Richard Bartholomew

Several months after announcing his divorce, Vladimir Putin turns to the subject of family values:

Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.

The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.

Putin was speaking at Valdai International Discussion Club; according to a blurb, the club “was established in 2004 by the Russian News & Information Agency RIA Novosti and the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. It has become an important cooperation venue for the Russian and foreign intellectual and political elite.”

Putin’s reference to paedophilia appears to relate to the legal status of a Dutch group called Stichting Martijn. According to Dutch News in April:

Last year, a civil court in Assen banned the paedophile lobby group Stichting Martijn with immediate effect, saying what the foundation does and says about sexual contact between adults and children contravenes the accepted norms and values in Dutch society.

The appeal court said texts and photos on the foundation’s website do not break the law.

The group has existed since 1982, and reportedly has about 60 members; an associated political party (the “the Charity, Freedom and Diversity Party”) was registered in 2006 and dissolved in 2010. Of course, Putin’s extrapolation from this case to the general outlook of “Euro-Atlantic countries” is absurd and in bad faith, but it’s part of an old Russian tradition of justifiying authortarianism in moral terms by invoking the decadence of the west. Putin may also have been inspired by an anti-gay group called “Russian Mothers”, which claims that paeodophilia is promoted in Norway; I wrote about this here.

Putin also discussed the place of organised religion in Russia:

Russia – as philosopher Konstantin Leontyev vividly put it – has always evolved in “blossoming complexity” as a state-civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state-civilisation model that has shaped our state polity. It has always sought to flexibly accommodate the ethnic and religious specificity of particular territories, ensuring diversity in unity.

Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and other religions are an integral part of Russia’s identity, its historical heritage and the present-day lives of its citizens.

Leontyev, according to an account by George L. Kline (1), has been described as “the Russian Nietzsche”:

Leontyev was a Russian thinker who, almost two decades before Nietzsche, offered a “Nietzschean” celebration of “the aesthetic” and an equally Nietzschaen critiqie of democratic and egalitatian values, “mass culture”, and ultilitarian and socialist ideas.”

However, unlike Nietzche, he was a Christian, and he called

for a struggle to the death against the “anti-Christ of democracy”

Shades here of the kind of thing that reportedly appears in Patriarch’s Kirill’s book Freedom and Responsibility.

(1) page 197 of Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West, edited by Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, Steven T. Katz, Cambridge University Press, 1985. And there’s a profile of Kline – formerly Milton C. Nahm Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College – here.

Related articles

• Putin: West Equates “Belief in God with the Belief in Satan” (barthsnotes.com)
• Putin’s Unholy Alliance With Orthodox Church To Persecute Gays (crooksandliars.com)
• Vladimir Putin: ‘Europeans are dying out so why would we want gay marriage?’ (pinknews.co.uk)

Communism As Religion

Communism is Religion

Posted by Daniel G. Jennings

One major argument that apologists for religion like to make against proponents of secularism, humanism and religion is to equate all opponents of religion with Communism and the numerous crimes against humanity perpetuated by such monsters as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro. The best argument against these people of faith is a simple one, far from being a humanist or rationalist belief system, Communism was and is a religion.

Like all religions, Communism is irrational, dogmatic and based on faith rather than science. Just like Christianity and Islam, Communism had its Holy Books which were treated as Holy Scripture, namely the writings of Lenin, Mao, Marx and others–all of which were far from scientific. Karl Marx, who was treated by Communists as a genius, was actually a small-time journalist whose writings are a collection of prejudices, generalizations and editorializing. Marx held and promoted some beliefs which were later disproved by science, for example Marx taught that many human characteristics we now know to be inherited through genetics were caused by environmental factors. When scientists in 1930s Russia pointed this fact out, Stalin reacted by throwing the scientists into the gulag just like the Church imprisoned Galileo. Just like fundamentalist Christians who promote creation science, Stalin (himself the recipient of an “education” in a Christian seminary) backed a charlatan named Lysenko who came up with a completely false science of genetics that fit squarely with Communist dogma and then banned the teaching of genetics because it contradicted Communist dogma.

As with Christianity and Islam, Communism attracted followers by promising a pie-in-the-sky heaven to the faithful. The difference being that the Communist heaven would be sometime in the future when all people would be happy and equal under Communism rather than after death. This magical future was conveniently pushed farther and farther into the future so that Communist leaders could “explain” to the average people impoverished by their wonderful system why they hadn’t yet achieved utopia. It might also be pointed out that the Communists never actually said exactly how this utopia would be created–just as Christians and Moslems can present no evidence of life after death.

Like most religions, Communism operated on irrational faith; people in Communist countries had to have absolute faith in the Communist system and its leaders. Thinking for oneself was strictly verboten in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Ho’s Vietnam. Those who questioned Communism and its leaders were treated as heretics by the Communist state.

Far from being an example of the evils that occur when religion is removed in society, Communism is a perfect example of the excesses and horrors that result when religion is allowed to take over a society. The Communist Party acted just like the church had in Medieval Europe.

Just like the Church in Medieval Europe, the Communists tortured and killed those who refused to adopt the official faith. Just like the Church, the Communists promoted the belief that governmental authorities were all-knowing, all-powerful and sanctioned by God, and the idea that refusing to bow to authority was a sin.

Just like the medieval church, the Communist Party promoted the idea of saints, people whose total devotion to the Communist cause was a good and holy thing and entitled them to be worshiped. The difference was that the Communists substituted Communist leaders like Mao and Stalin for the saints. The Communists even revived the bizarre medieval practice of worshiping the dead bodies of the saints; they built massive mausoleums in which they placed the embalmed bodies of their dead leaders and forced their people to worship them.

Just like the Russian Orthodox Church, the Communists also created icons, pictures of Communist leaders whom people were to worship. In North Korea, for example, it is even a crime to destroy a picture of the late dictator Kim Il Sung.

The Communists also revived the horrendous medieval practice of the Inquisition, an official body to hunt down and eliminate heretics, in the form of the purge trials and the various secret-police forces. Hundreds of thousands of people in Communist countries were tortured, brutalized and murdered by such bodies.

Just like the church before them the Communists tried to force their captured enemies to repent their “sins.” After the fall of Saigon, 600,000 Vietnamese were forced into concentration camps called reeducation centers to learn Communist dogma. Just as the “First Holy Roman Emperor,” the religious fanatic Charlemagne, tried to forcibly baptize German pagans captured in his wars, captured American soldiers in the Vietnam and Korean wars were also forced to admit the “truth” of Communism.

As if bringing back the Inquisition wasn’t bad enough, the Communists also revived the witch hunt. Like other people of faith, the Communists blamed the failings of their system–not on their own loony dogma–but on hidden enemies who were secretly sabotaging Communism so as to prevent the Communists from creating a utopia. In 1930s Russia, tens of thousands of innocent people, many of them good Communists, were falsely accused of being foreign agents and “wreckers” who were sabotaging the Stalinist system, and then executed or thrown into the gulag–where many of them died from torture, forced labor and starvation. Those killed in this purge included several of the Red Army’s top generals who were falsely accused of being enemies by Communist courts using information provided by the Nazis (thus leaving Russia unprepared in 1941 when it’s real enemies attacked).

It must also be noted here that it didn’t take the Russian Communists long to revive another old evil of the church: anti-Semitism; by the early 1950s, Stalin was blaming Russia’s problems and his own bad health on the Jews. Just as the Medieval Christians blamed plagues and the black death on Jews secretly poisoning wells, so Stalin blamed his ill health on Jewish doctors who were trying to poison him.

In the 1960s, Mao went Stalin one better. When the Chairman’s brutal attempt to create the Communist heaven on Earth, the “Great Leap Forward,” failed miserably, resulting in the worst famine in human history, Mao blamed–not himself or his faith–but the Chinese people for not having enough faith in Communism (much as Hitler had blamed the German people and not his own incompetence, arrogance and stupidity, for his defeat in World War II). Mao then turned vast numbers of Communist fanatics, known as Red Guards, loose to punish the Chinese people for not showing enough faith in Mao and Communism. Just as the Medieval witch hunters burned little old ladies at the stake for owning cats, Chinese people were beaten up and terrorized for such crimes as owning birdcages or wearing makeup in the so-called Cultural Revolution. Many great treasures of China’s past were destroyed by Communist thugs during the Cultural Revolution (just as the Taliban blew up Buddhist statues in Afghanistan).

The excesses in Soviet Russia and Red China have been repeated in almost every other Communist country. Almost every Communist regime has behaved like a religion that is in a manner completely irrational and paranoid. The major difference between the Communist fanatics and the Christian fanatics of the inquisition was that the Communists had access to modern technology, weaponry and systems of government that enabled them to kill far more people far more quickly. Had the inquisition access to the same technology as the Communists, its body count would have rivaled that of Stalin and Mao.

Far from being an example of what happens when religion, faith and God are removed from society, Communism is a perfect example of what happens when society is turned over to religion. People are deprived of their basic freedoms, science and scholarship are suppressed, and average people are tortured and murdered for not displaying sufficient faith.

It must also be said here that Christianity did little or nothing to stop Communism or the horrible crimes the Communists committed against humanity. Russia was the most religious country in Europe in 1917 yet the Church was unable to stop the Bolshevik takeover. If Christianity is such a powerful force for morality, why couldn’t the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops have simply ordered the Russian people not to follow Lenin and Stalin’s orders? Why weren’t the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church able to appeal to the piety of Joseph Stalin, himself a product of an Orthodox seminary, and get him to recant Communism? Far from protecting Russia’s people from Communism, the Orthodox Church did little but have the Russian people sit and pray to icons for the end of the Communist system.

It was not the Orthodox Church or its leaders that formed the main resistance to Communism in Russia, it was humanists and rationalists who refused to bow to irrational Communist beliefs. For example, the great scientist, Andre Sakarov, and many other Russian intellectuals, refused to go along with the Communist assault on the human mind. Later on, more enlightened and intelligent Soviet leaders, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, undermined Communism by allowing people to question and challenge its basic assumptions. Just like Christian and Islamic dogma, Communist dogma can’t stand up to a close examination based on reason and the scientific method.

It was the secular, democratic, capitalist societies in the United States, Japan and Western Europe–which are based on humanistic and rational values–which ultimately proved to be the undoing of Communism. The irrational, faith-based, Communist system simply couldn’t compete with the rational, secular United States and its allies. By basing their societies on faith rather than on reason, thus being in no position to change or adapt their system to meet future challenges, the Communists thereby sowed the seeds of their own destruction–except, of course, in countries such as Vietnam and China where Communist leaders have quietly abandoned Communism and adopted capitalism in order to preserve their own skins and line their own bank accounts.

Far from being an example of a godless society, Communism is a perfect example of the dangers which religion poses to human freedom and humanity’s future. Those Americans who want to establish an official religion should take a hard look at the history of Communism, for any country that establishes an official religion and a faith based system will end up just like the Communists–in the ash heap of history.

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Russia Plans to Launch Moon Probe in 2015

Russia plans to launch Moon probe in 2015

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Artist’s concept of Luna-Glob mission (NASA)

Back to the Moon Russia will resume a long-dormant quest to explore the Moon by sending an unmanned probe there in 2015; the head of the space agency was quoted as saying.

The craft, called Luna-Glob, or Moon-Globe, will be carried by the first rocket to blast off from a new facility that Russia is building in its far eastern Amur region, says Roskosmos director Vladimir Popovkin, according to the Interfax news agency.

“We will begin our exploration of the Moon from there,” he says of the new space centre that will decrease Russia’s reliance of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the ex-Soviet nation Kazakhstan, which it leases.

Russian space officials have said Luna-Glob would consist of an orbital module and a probe that would land on the Moon and beam back information about samples it takes from the surface.

The Soviet Union got a jump on the United States in the Cold War space race, sending a probe to the Moon in 1959 and putting the first person into space in 1961. But the United States first put a man on the Moon in 1969 and Russia has not done so.

The last successful Soviet launch of an unmanned probe to the Moon was in the 1970s, and Russia has suffered setbacks in its space program in recent years, including bungled satellite launches and the failure of a Mars probe in 2011.

A successful rocket launch on Tuesday put three military satellites in orbit, the Defence Ministry said.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan last month to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($70 billion) on space industry development in 2013-2020, to pursue projects to explore the Moon and Mars, among other things.

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Putin Offers Romney Job Guarding Siberian Dog Shit

Putin Offers Romney Job Guarding Siberian Dog Shit

 

Russian president Vladimir Putin has offered Mitt Romney a job guarding a large pile of Siberian dog excrement.

The Slavic strongman made the offer at a televised press conference in Moscow this morning when reporter asked for his reaction the results of the American election:

“I’m happy to working again with Mr. Obama,” responded Putin. “And I’m even happier not to be working with the dog-killer from Boston.”

Putin is an avid dog lover, and took particular offence to reports that Mitt Romney abused his dog Seamus by tying him to the top of a car on a long-distance road trip. At the press conference he suggested a career move for Romney:

“Seeing as how this Mitt Romney is now unemployed perhaps Russia could offer him a position in Siberia. I hear the residents of Taymyr burn piles of dog shit for fuel. Maybe we could hire him to guard this.”

The crowd of journalists erupted into laughter, and Putin continued to ridicule the failed Republican candidate:

“Seriously, I hear Romney was a private equity man. He has plenty of experience holding his nose while making a dollar.”

“And he’s clearly not allergic to shit, since it constitutes 99% of what comes out of his mouth.”

“I don’t know if it will work though. As soon as he arrives he’ll probably just outsource himself to the Chinese.”

Putin’s last comment left the crowd in stitches, and the entire exchange has become the top video on the Russian version of Youtube.

Romney’s presidential campaign was stridently anti-Russian in tone, labelling Russia as America’s greatest geopolitical foe and lambasting Obama for attempting diplomatic relations with Putin.

 

 

Thanks to:-http://dailycurrant.com/2012/11/08/putin-offers-romney-job-guardian-siberian-dog-shit-pile/

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The Kremlin’s Conspiracy Channel | Are America’s Conspiracy Purveyors The Most “Useful Idiots” of Russian Propaganda?

The Kremlin’s Conspiracy Channel | Are America’s Conspiracy Purveyors The Most “Useful Idiots” of Russian Propaganda?

Russian TV Channel Pushes ‘Patriot’ Conspiracy Theories

By Sonia Scherr

Five years ago, Russia Today made its debut as a news network aimed at enhancing Russia’s image in the West.

Recently, however, the Kremlin-financed television channel has devoted considerable airtime not only to coverage that makes Russia look good, but to coverage that makes the United States look bad. Over the past year and a half, Russia Today has reported with boosterish zeal on conspiracy theories popular in the resurgent “Patriot” movement, whose adherents typically advocate extreme antigovernment doctrines. Its slickly packaged stories suggest that a legitimate debate is under way in the United States about who perpetrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for instance, and about President Obama’s eligibility for high office.

Russia Today’s vision of the U.S. – a Byzantine nation animated by all kinds of dark conspiracies – is beamed out to as many as 200 million people.

It also frequently quotes U.S.extremistsas authorities on world events or interviews them at length without asking anything more than softball questions. One British journalist called Russia Today “a strange propaganda outfit” after appearing on a show in which the host injected Sept. 11 revisionism.Unlike most U.S.-based Patriot radio shows that do the same, the Moscow-headquartered Russia Today has a large global audience tuning in via cable, satellite and the Internet. In North America, Europe and South Africa, some 200 million paying viewers — including a growing number in the United States — have access to the network. Last year, more Washington, D.C.-area viewers told Nielsen Media Research they preferred to watch primetime news on Russia Today than on such other English-language foreign networks as Deutsche Welle (Germany), France 24, Euronews (France), CCTV News (China) and Al Jazeera English (Qatar). On YouTube, Russia Today ranks among the top 10 most-viewed news and political channels of all time. It employs some 2,000 staff worldwide, including about 100 in its recently opened Washington, D.C., office. (That makes its staff larger than Fox News, which reports a worldwide staff of 1,200, and about half the size of that of cable news pioneer CNN.) Russia Today has launched sister networks in Arabic and Spanish in addition to its flagship English broadcasting service.

Though a spokeswoman for Russia Today declined to give the amount of its annual budget, the Russian government has pumped millions into the network since its inception in 2005.

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, deputy director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said the network’s target audience appears to be second- and third-generation members of the Russian diaspora in the United States and abroad, along with foreign investors and international media. “It’s clearly a pro-Russian perspective; that’s the purpose of Russia Today,” she said. “Sometimes, a pro-Russia perspective involves an anti-somebody-else perspective — and we’re the most useful target at certain times.”

Plugging 9/11 Plots
Russia Today’s officials, who have long insisted that they operate without government influence despite multimillion-dollar subsidies, contend that the network is simply presenting a fresh take on the news. (Full disclosure: Intelligence Report Editor Mark Potok appeared on the April 26 edition of Russia Today’s “CrossTalk” program to discuss the rise of militias. The network also aired an interview with a militia leader who criticized the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of militia groups.) In a statement to the Intelligence Report, Russia Today Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan called the network’s editorial policy “open and balanced” and dismissed criticism that the channel gives undue airtime to fringe ideas. “We don’t talk about 9/11 any more than U.S. media discusses who was behind the 1999 explosions in Moscow,” she wrote, referring to a series of deadly apartment bombings that helped spark the Second Chechen War. “Moreover, our own journalists have never claimed or even as much as hinted that the U.S. government may have been behind the tragedy of 9/11.”

That last claim is debatable at best. Russia Today has churned out dozens of stories that focus solely on the perspective of “9/11 truthers” — the small minority that, despite overwhelming evidence, rejects the government’s finding that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were perpetrated by al-Qaeda terrorists flying planes into buildings. Last year, for instance, independent producer Lori Harfenist, whose program “The Resident” is carried regularly on Russia Today, interviewed New Yorkers on the street about whether they thought Sept. 11 was “an inside job.” “Eight years after the attacks on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001, questions still loom as to whether there were more people involved or if the U.S. government had anything to do with it,” she said in her introduction to that program. “Do you think the events were purely terrorist attacks or do you think there were conspiratorial forces behind them?” The following statement appeared on the television screen throughout the segment: “New Yorkers unsure whether 9/11 was terrorist attack or inside job.”

Russia Today has regularly featured 9/11 “truthers,” Obama-bashing “birthers,” conspiracy theorists and white supremacists.

Russia Today also appears to give credence to the Sept. 11 truthers in its news and commentary. For instance, the network reported on Oct. 13, 2009, that a judge would not let New Yorkers vote on whether to launch a new investigation into Sept. 11. “If a government by the people ignores the people, many wonder if here democracy is becoming a hypocrisy,” the reporter concluded. The channel also spoke extensively with Luke Rudkowski, the founder of We Are Change, a group that not only seeks “the truth” behind the Sept. 11 attacks but also frets about a looming “one world order,” a classic Patriot fear. “We go up to members … we shake their hands and we ask them what happens when you meet with the world’s elites and banking media corporations and governments all around the world in secret,” Rudkowski said in the April 13, 2009, interview. The Russia Today host did not challenge Rudkowski’s suggestion of international conspiracies by world elites, a common theme on the U.S. radicalright. On Feb. 11, Russia Today interviewed another We Are Change activist. Manny Badillo claimed that newly released Sept. 11 photos prove that explosives, not planes, brought down the buildings.At the time of the last anniversary of Sept. 11, the channel published a four-part series on its website titled  “911 Reasons why 9/11 was (probably) an inside job.” The articles, by Russia Today commentator Robert Bridge, report uncritically on discredited notions about Sept. 11, including the possibility that a bomb inside the towers contributed to their collapse and that the CIA had advance knowledge of the attack. On March 10, one of Russia Today’s top stories was headlined “Americans continue to fight for 9/11 truth.” That story, about a Pennsylvania gathering of Sept. 11 truthers, reported incorrectly that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) listed Rudkowski’s We Are Change as a hate group along with the Ku Klux Klan. (In fact, this year the SPLC added We Are Change to its Patriot group listing, which is distinct from the hate group listing and includes hard-line antigovernment organizations that engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing.)

Russia Today’s focus on Sept. 11 “truth” hasn’t gone unnoticed. Douglas Murray, a British journalist and conservative political commentator, posted a withering blog item earlier this year about his “CrossTalk” appearance. “You can probably imagine,” he wrote on Feb. 15, “indeed can see, the look of astonishment that I and my fellow guest felt when the presenter declared to us, in the middle of a discussion about a totally different subject, that ‘the people that perpetrated 9/11 were not even fundamentalists at all.'” (The show’s host, Peter Lavelle, told The Moscow Times that show had been a “fiasco” because bad weather had prevented him from lining up guests to argue both sides of the issue under discussion.)

Russia Today editor-in-chief Simonyan told the Intelligence Report that “the last time we talked about it [the Sept. 11 truthers movement] was in March.” On May 20, however, the channel published another article by Bridge on its website that again questioned the 9/11 Commission Report. The article asserted that the official report “has only served to fuel suspicions about that watershed moment that will dominate U.S. foreign and domestic policy for many years to come.”

Simonyan is by no means a seasoned veteran of the practice of objective journalsim. Born in Russia of Armenian parents, Simonyan was only 25 when the Kremlin named her editor-in-chief of the new network five years ago. Washington Post Moscow correspondent Peter Finn, quoted in a September 2008 article on the website Russia Beyond the Headlines, called the network a “breathless cheerleader” for the Kremlin, one which carefully avoided topics deemed too critical of then-President Vladimir Putin. The article continued: “During the [2008] conflict in South Ossetia, one of Russia Today’s foreign journalists resigned, claiming that his reports were being censored to meet the official line. Even longtime Kremlin adviser Vyacheslav Nikonov at first referred to Russia Today as ‘too amateurish.'”

Birthers, Militiamen and Racists
It’s not just conspiracy theories about Sept. 11 that preoccupy Russia Today. The channel has also reported on the false notion that Obama was born outside the United States and therefore is ineligible for the presidency. The channel in March interviewed Dr. Orly Taitz, an émigré from the former Soviet republic of Moldova and a chief proponent of the “birther” movement who gained notoriety in August 2009 by unveiling Obama’s supposed Kenyan birth certificate — a document quickly exposed as a laughable forgery — and also has made a whole raft of other completely unsupported claims. Though the host noted that major American media outlets have refuted birther claims, he did not state that Obama has made public his birth certificate, even when Taitz asserted that “Obama himself owed allegiance to three other nations.” Taitz has made other appearances on Russia Today.

Sometimes Russia Today seems to want to have it two ways. A July 31, 2009, article on its website reported that Hawaii officials had confirmed that Obama was born there. It went on to state, however, that Obama was “being asked a lot of questions,” including the “particularly embarrassing” one about his birthplace. It quoted a correspondent for the far-right website World Net Daily who suggested that, if the birth certificate exists, Obama should display it. The article didn’t mention that White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told World Net Daily that the birth certificate is posted on the Internet.

In addition, a Nov. 25, 2009, Russia Today story reported that James David Manning, the black pastor of a Harlem church, not only sees “pure evil” in Obama — but also contends he’s not a U.S. citizen. The story noted Manning’s views are controversial, but concluded, “Pastor Manning remains undeterred in his rhetoric, despite the criticism of his community.” (Manning is apparently a friend of Taitz, joining her for a tiny 2009 protest in front of Fox News’ offices in New York after Fox’s Bill O’Reilly called Taitz “a nut.”)

Manning isn’t the only fringe figure to whom Russia Today has given exposure. Conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones makes frequent appearances. In a softball interview last year, Jones rehashed a signature Patriot conspiracy theory when he described the United States as a tool of the “New World Order” and asserted that the world is “controlled by the Bilderberg Group.” (The Bilderberg Group is an international, invitation-only group of influential business and government figures that meets privately every year. Many on the American radical right, including a number of anti-Semites, have long seen the Bilderberg group as being behind all kinds of nefarious plots.) “The New World Order,” Jones said in his April 7, 2009, show, “is just a super-rich international mafia of oligarchs that are playing God, who want to abolish and bankrupt nation states so they can set up an international order, where the planet is owned by a private bank.” The host, Anastasia Churkina, did not challenge any of Jones’ claims. In fact, Russia Today has sought Jones’ opinion on topics ranging from Internet security to a Philadelphia school district’s webcam spying scandal to the BP oil spill response. (He sees a federal conspiracy in all these cases.) An April 16 story headlined “Alex Jones reacts to news of potential oil shortages” gives odd weight to the opinion of the self-described truth teller. Consider the story’s opening paragraph: “In a new report, U.S. military officials are warning of a drop in oil production as early as 2012, but Alex Jones says that this may be true, and if so, it is the result of a conspiracy.”

Longtime militia organizer Jim Stachowiak — a controversial figure even in Patriot circles — also is a regular guest on Russia Today. Earlier this year, the Georgia-based radio host appeared on the network to defend Charles Dyer, a prominent associate of the Patriot group Oath Keepers until Dyer was charged with child sex abuse in January. “We’re standing by Dyer,” said Stachowiak, who wore a “Don’t Tread on Me” hat and referred to the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) as the “American Terrorism Force.”

Even white nationalist Jared Taylor has found a platform on Russia Today. On Feb. 8 of this year, when Taylor participated in a “CrossTalk” discussion of whether Obama is a post-racial president, host Lavelle introduced him as an author and editor of American Renaissance journal but made no mention of his blatantly racist views. (In 2005, for instance, Taylor wrote in his journal: “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”) Russia Today was also the only major media outlet to interview Taylor after multiple hotels cancelled his magazine’s biannual conference in February. It did not seek comment from the activists behind the campaign to shut down the conference, which brings together prominent white supremacists and academic racists from the United States and abroad.

But editor-in-chief Simonyan denied the channel is providing a forum for extremists. “We don’t give airtime to public figures who you call extremist any more than CNN and other channels give airtime to people who many in Russia consider extremists,” she said.

Yet Russia Today is clearly serving the interests of those who promote the ideas that animate the burgeoning Patriot movement. The channel gets rave reviews on Patriot websites, including Jones’ Prison Planet Forum. “This is what mainstream news should be like,” one forum poster declared on May 7 — ironically overlooking that his ideal media outlet is heavily subsidized by and very likely beholden to a government. “Russia Today,” he said, “gets many kudos from me.”

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‘Radicalised agnostics’ threatening to derail Middle East war process

The irresponsible actions of a group of radical agnostics are threatening to jeopardise the glorious battle that awaits the holy lands, warned Israel and Iran today.

‘These people are dangerously sensible and naively human in their outlook,’ said Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a joint statement. ‘We have a clear roadmap for war in the region, but the soft-line approach to international politics of these fundamentalist equivocators could prevent millions of martyrs from fulfilling their destiny. The Middle East is like a powder keg that could explode any minute – the last thing we need is some crazed pacifists standing around with fire extinguishers.’

Radical agnostics have hit back at the attack, but insist they don’t want to offend anyone. ‘We’d just prefer it if religious leaders didn’t blow the world to oblivion,’ stated Daniel Olszewski, a spokesman for the group known as The Silent Unsure. ‘We may be in the minority, but we just think that mass human extinction through warfare should be avoided. Agnostics get a lot of stick from both believers and atheists for sitting on the fence, but the one thing we’re sure about is that we’re not quite ready yet to find out if there is an afterlife.’

Using insidious techniques such as writing sensible letters to people in power and offering to grovel if that would help, the group claims that war might be avoided if everyone just thought about things logically for a while. It’s a stance that has earned them some powerful enemies, but there were signs today that it might be beginning to bear fruit with Israel and Iran finding some common ground.

‘It turns out that we and America have a lot more in common than we thought with Iran, Russia and China,’ said Netanyahu. ‘When what you believe in most is under attack from the nagging voice of reason and an underground network of people that discusses things, listens to both sides of the argument and looks for compromise, it’s time to join with your enemies and act. Diplomacy, sanctions, military action – we will do whatever it takes to defeat this threat to international warfare.’

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