Antisemitism, Antizionism, Jihadism and the Reunited Germany. News by Fred Alan Medforth
On the 30th of June, US President Joe Biden, in an ‘off-the-cuff’ remark admitted that Washington is getting help from Afghanistan’s Taliban to ‘end’ the threat of Al-Qaeda.
Biden made this open admission while addressing a Press Conference on Supreme Court’s decision to block his government’s student debt relief program. He made the comments when a reporter asked whether he admitted that any mistake was committed during the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 or not.
The reporter said that a report said that there were failures and mistakes in withdrawal from Afghanistan, and asked whether the president admits to the same. Responding to this, Biden argued that the evidence claimed otherwise and stated that the Taliban is helping the US in its fight against Al-Qaeda.
The White House transcript quoted Biden saying, “No, no. All the evidence is coming back. Do you remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al Qaeda would not be there. I said it wouldn’t be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right.”
With these comments, President Biden directly implied that the Taliban administration in Afghanistan is helping the US to fight against Al Qaeda.
Apparently, this admission of help from the Taliban in ending the terror module of Al-Qaeda is in stark opposition to a UN report that was released last month. The report categorically highlighted that the Taliban has been maintaining “strong and symbiotic” ties with Al-Qaeda.
The UN report also asserted that Al-Qaeda “is rebuilding operational capability” on Afghan soil. Furthermore, the UN report alerted about the rising threat of terrorism in the region. The report stated that both Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate ISKP are growing substantially in numbers and capabilities due to the absence of US or Western forces in the country.
It stated that “the link between the Taliban and both Al-Qaeda and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) remains strong and symbiotic. A range of terrorist groups has greater freedom of manoeuvre under the Taliban de facto authorities. They are making good use of this, and the threat of terrorism is rising in both Afghanistan and the region.”
Joe Biden’s remark claiming that the Taliban is helping them to end the terror infrastructure of Al-Qaeda was quickly used by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to certify itself.
Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs hailed Biden’s remark adding that the Islamic Emirate considers the remarks about “the non-existence of armed groups in Afghanistan as an acknowledgement of reality.”
The Ministry said, “We consider remarks by US President Joe Biden about the non-existence of armed groups in Afghanistan as an acknowledgement of reality. It refutes the recent report by the UN Sanctions Monitoring Team alleging the presence & operation of over twenty armed groups in Afghanistan.”
It is important to note that a recent US State Department report held both Trump and Biden administrations responsible for the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, back in 2021.
The report criticised the handling of the 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan by both the Biden and Trump administrations. It noted that the troop withdrawal had “serious consequences for the viability” and security of the former U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani government in Afghanistan.
Without explicitly mentioning his name, the report also reflected adversely on the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
The report read, “Naming a 7th-floor principal … would have improved coordination across different lines of effort.”
It is important to note here that the seven floor has offices of the State Department including that of Blinken and other senior diplomats have offices.
The great green hoax is about a massive shift away from the industrial revolution and back toward feudalism under the guise of claiming that the world will end unless all that technology, the cheap goods and the middle-class lifestyle that comes with it aren’t reined in by powerful supervisory authorities.
Tracking ‘carbon emissions’ is a key element in this plan. Assign every activity and every individual a carbon footprint,.measure how much ‘carbon’ they emit by going to the store or breathing, and then regulate it.
But who regulates the regulators?
The State Department didn’t keep tabs on the carbon pollution associated with flying hundreds of federal officials to the last two global climate summits, the Government Accountability Office said in a report made public Thursday.
The world is ending! We must ban cars or we will all perish! Also, fly jets to climate summits at a time when most of the personnel in our agencies are working on Zoom anyway!
Failing to do so ran afoul of a 2021 executive order by President Joe Biden that directed agencies to track the greenhouse gas emissions their operations produce, including official air travel, GAO said.
And the only thing that will do is lead to buying carbon credits from special interest donors. Win-win for them, lose-lose for American taxpayers.
But, tellingly, the State Department didn’t even bother tracking the carbon footprint of the planes it was flying to conferences to discuss how flying planes to things is evil.
Carbon footprints are for peasants, not for the philosopher kings ruling over them.
The State Department said in an email that the department is working to counter global climate change “at scale,” an effort that requires “face-to-face diplomacy.”
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry “believes in showing up and doing everything he can to keep 1.5 degrees [Celsius] within reach,” the department added.
The only federal workers who appear to require face-to-face work are climate diplomats.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/carbon-footprints-are-for-peasants/
Castile and León will no longer be the only Spanish region that is governed by a coalition between the center-right People’s Party (PP) and the Vox conservatives. After the PP’s victory in many regions and municipalities, albeit short of an absolute majority, and Vox’s strong progression in the May 28 elections, the Spanish center-right has no choice but to negotiate new coalitions with a party it has been demonizing for years.
With parliamentary elections due to take place at the national level on July 23 and opinion polls showing that the PP is very unlikely to obtain an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies, it could enjoy a comfortable majority together with the party of Santiago Abascal. Given the current electoral reality, forming coalitions with the left or even minority governments with the left’s support to keep the traditional “cordon sanitaire” in place around Vox is the worst of all options for Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP. Hence, after July 23, Spain is likely to be the next Western European country, after Sweden, Finland and Italy, where a right-wing, sovereignist, anti-mass immigration party is in government.
Due to the Spanish system of autonomous communities, i.e., regions with a lot of autonomy to govern themselves, negotiations to form governing coalitions are conducted locally, with some PP leaders having struck deals very fast. Others, like the PP leader of the Extremadura region, find it hard to understand that it is no longer useful or productive to demonize Vox and insult its members and voters to please the mostly left-leaning mainstream media — what has essentially been going on for years in France regarding Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
In mid-June, the Valencia region was among the first where the local PP and Vox struck a deal after years of a coalition government between the left and the far left. With the PP having won 35 percent of the popular vote and Vox 12 percent, together they have an absolute majority in the regional parliament. Their government program clearly bears the imprint of Vox, with the struggle against “gender-based violence” being refocused to intra-familiar violence in general, with planned tax cuts, and the possibility for parents to refuse that their children participate at school in classes provided by external actors. The new government of the Valencia autonomous community also plans to take measures to favor more births instead of more immigration.
In that government, Vox holds the portfolios of justice, interior affairs, culture, and agriculture. The region’s president, who heads the regional government, is the local PP leader while the parliament’s speaker is now a deputy from Vox.
The region’s PP president, Carlos Mazón, has said he is very satisfied with the deal struck with Vox and has promised stable governments for the region, saying in the media: “We don’t like sanitary cordons.”
However, not all within the PP have come to terms so easily with the new political reality created by Vox’s emergence on the party’s right, due to its own shift to the left in the previous decade under former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
At the other end of the PP’s political spectrum is the region of Extremadura, bordering Castile and León to the north. In Extremadura, the local PP leader, María Guardiola, whose list came only second to the socialist party (PSOE) on May 28 but could have an absolute majority with the support of Vox, said right after the regional elections that Vox should support her election by the regional parliament as the region’s president. She added, however, that her red line was that a party like Vox which, according to her, denies there is such a thing as male violence (Vox is against having special laws for violence committed by men against women, which it sees as treating men as criminals, per se, and as discriminating against men), criminalizes migrants by speaking out against illegal immigration and throws LGBT flags in the garbage.
So, with this very left-leaning PP leader in Extremadura, the role of speaker of the regional parliament fell back to the socialists. This was when Guardiola began to understand she was not going to govern at all and will probably have to face a repeat of the elections soon, probably with many PP voters unimpressed by her defense of illegal immigrants and LGBT flags. Although the national PP leader, Núñez Feijóo, said regional sections of the party are free to negotiate their own agreements with whoever they like, he had good reasons to worry, as Guardiola was sowing doubt over what kind of coalition the PP could form after the July 23 national election and whether voting for the PP would mean voting for the right or the left.
“Does anyone vote for the PP because of the LGBT flag?” asked center-right daily newspaper El Mundo’s columnist on June 21. The answer is probably hardly anyone.
Facing growing unease within her party, just seven days after she had lost control of the parliament’s presidency to the socialists because of her inability to negotiate with Vox, Guardiola thus had to call a meeting with the PP leadership in Extremadura to explain her stance in front of unhappy participants.
After that, things have been evolving in a different direction this week, with Guardiola finally understanding that if she is to maintain the “cordon sanitaire” against Vox in Extremadura, she will not get the region’s top job.
So she acknowledged publicly that “respect, dialogue and programmatic agreement” with Vox is “essential” and that both parties, the PP and Vox “have to understand each other and build an alternative.”
Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, sees this as a positive step, leaving the door open to negotiations with the PP. Referring to the current government coalition of the socialists and the far left supported by several regional separatist parties in parliament, Abascal said: “What is important now is Spain, what is important now for us is July 23 and to throw out of the Moncloa Palace those who have become a danger to Spain and have incorporated into the leadership of the state all the enemies of the constitutional order and the unity of Spain.”
On June 27, after a first round of real discussions with Vox, the PP leader in Extremadura said she is convinced both parties will find an agreement and that “Vox is a constitutional party with which (she wants) to strike a deal.”
“We are parties that are different and on many occasions do not share ideas and visions, but I believe that in a moment like this, which is decisive for Spain, it is more important to meet despite the discrepancies,” said Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the Madrid regions’ charismatic PP leader who obtained an absolute majority on May 28, in an interview with El Mundo published on June 25.
Meanwhile, the PP leader in another region, Murcia, is still insisting he does not want to have Vox in his regional government although he is two seats short of a majority in the region’s parliament. In Murcia, the PP obtained 43 percent of the popular vote and Vox 18 percent, and at least two deputies from Vox would have to abstain for him to be voted into office. However, Vox has said that short of an agreement on a governing coalition, they will vote against him, and that, based on their earlier bad experience in supporting a PP government in Murcia from the outside, they will not be satisfied with an agreement on a common program, as they know it will not be executed by the PP once a government is formed.
But contrasting with Guardiola in Extremadura, the PP leaders in Murcia have refrained from demonizing Vox in their political discourse, and negotiations are still going on between the PP and Vox in two other regions: the Balearic Islands and Aragon, where MPs from Vox have been elected speakers of the regional parliaments with support from the PP as part of pre-agreements.
Ahead of the July 23 elections which the Spanish right is almost certain to win, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the PP leader at the national level, has now ended the “cordon sanitaire” surrounding Vox officials, noting that the consequence of such a “cordon sanitaire” is that even when Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE party does not win an election, the PP cannot strike coalition deals with anyone and the election has to be repeated.
This is all the more true that the PP’s previous frequent coalition partner, the centrist party Ciudadanos (Citizens), has now almost completely disappeared from the Spanish political scene and will not take part in the July 23 election. So the “cordon sanitaire” is no longer acceptable in Feijóo’s eyes. “We are not going to receive any lessons on [coalition] pacts,” Feijóo has said, adding: “And certainly not from those who made the (current) ‘Frankenstein’ pact, as the socialists themselves call it, which consists of making a pact with the greatest populism and extremism in Europe, Podemos, which has changed its name and is now called Sumar, alongside the Basque and Catalan independence advocates, who are against maintaining the nation. Such a pact does not exist in any other country in Europe.”
“I received about 50 calls and messages around 10:15 pm. People who had logged into certain social networks used by the rioters, telling me to watch out. When I saw what it was all about, I thought to myself that this kind of thing is not possible in 2023. Le Telegramme
One in seven adults faced food insecurity in the United Kingdom in the year leading up to the middle of 2022, research from the Trussell Trust has found this week.
A survey conducted by the Ipsos polling firm alongside the Trussell Trust, which operates a network of food banks across the UK, has found that 14 per cent of all UK adults faced the threat of going hungry in the 12 months to mid-2022.
The research found that having a paid worker in the household was not determinative in whether people were forced into using food banks to stay afloat, with one in five people who used a Trussel food bank coming from a working household.
The chief executive at the Trussell Trust said: “Being forced to turn to a food bank to feed your family is a horrifying reality for too many people in the UK, but as Hunger in the UK shows, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Millions more people are struggling with hunger. This is not right. Food banks are not the answer when people are going without the essentials in one of the richest economies in the world. We need a social security system which provides protection and the dignity for people to cover their own essentials, such as food and bills.”
The period studied by the Trust came around the time that coronavirus lockdown restrictions were finally being lifted, however, this was also the time at which inflation began to set in.
Last week, Agustin Carstens, the head of the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements, a financial institution often dubbed the central bank of central banks, admitted that the inflationary crisis and the ensuing cost-of-living crisis was a result of government and central bank policies during the lockdowns, namely the spending spree to pay workers to remain home and business shut and the money printing by central banks to pay for the state spending.
“While understandable as the Covid crisis broke out, with the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that the fiscal and monetary policy support was too large, too broad-based and too long-lasting,” the central banker said.
The economic calamity has only continued in Britain, despite promises from former Goldman Sachs banker turned Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was installed last Autumn in Downing Street — against the wishes of Conservative Party voters — on the back of a promise to reign in inflation and debt reduction.
Much like his promises to reduce illegal immigration, Sunak’s government has so far proved incapable or unwilling to take the steps to curb the cost of living crisis, with inflation remaining at 8.7 per cent, over four times the Bank of England’s target rate of 2 per cent. Meanwhile, despite taxes being at a 70-year-high, debt has actually risen to £2,567.2 billion, or in other terms 100.1 per cent of GDP.
Despite the growing evidence of economic hardship and negative societal impacts of lockdowns, the former Health Secretary of Britain, Matt Hancock, who was in charge of the nation’s lockdown before being fired for breaking his own rules, argued this week that lockdown restrictions should have been “more stringent“.
